Recent Trump administration moves systematically ignore or try to weaken public knowledge of climate change effects - Entrepreneur Generations

Recent actions from the Trump administration systematically ignore or seek to weaken knowledge of the predicted effects of climate change.

Last week the White House Council on Environmental Quality proposed that federal agencies no longer need consider a project's long-term climate impact when assessing how it will affect the environment. The proposal "would change the way the U.S. government evaluates activities ranging from coal mining to gas pipelines and oil drilling by limiting the extent to which agencies can calculate their greenhouse gas emissions," Juliet Eilperin reports for The Washington Post.

In April 2016, the CEQ under President Obama mandated that agencies quantify how much they would contribute to climate change. Under the proposed directive, "agencies conducting reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act only have to calculate an action’s greenhouse gas emissions when 'a sufficiently close causal relationship exists' between a project and greater carbon emissions," Eilperin reports. "It also tells agencies they can opt not to assess a project’s climate impact if they decide it 'would be overly speculative,' and they can put any projected emissions in the context of the local, regional or national carbon output."

Legal experts say the move could hurt the administration in court cases, since some judges have suggested that officials need to better consider how their decisions will affect the climate. According to liberal think tank the Center for American Progress, the Trump administration has lost a dozen court cases over agencies' failure to consider climate issues in NEPA reviews, Eilperin reports.

Meanwhile, the Agriculture Department has broken with longstanding practice by refusing to publicize dozens of peer-reviewed, in-house studies from the USDA Agricultural Research Service that carry warnings about climate change effects.

"The studies range from a groundbreaking discovery that rice loses vitamins in a carbon-rich environment — a potentially serious health concern for the 600 million people world-wide whose diet consists mostly of rice — to a finding that climate change could exacerbate allergy seasons to a warning to farmers about the reduction in quality of grasses important for raising cattle, Helena Evich reports for Politico.

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, who has been skeptical about climate change, has allegedly retaliated against USDA researchers whose findings undermined President Trump's environmental policies. The USDA's planned move of two major scientific and research agencies from Washington D.C. to Kansas City is seen by many as an attempt to force researchers to quit rather than relocate, so they can be replaced with employees more sympathetic to the Republican Party.

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/2ZKkAHW Recent Trump administration moves systematically ignore or try to weaken public knowledge of climate change effects - Entrepreneur Generations

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