President Trump’s former climate adviser says the new ad hoc White House effort to investigate climate change could be headed for the scrap heap before it even gets started.
George David Banks, Trump’s former energy and environment adviser, said in an interview with the Washington Examiner that the investigative panel the administration is setting up to address the science behind climate change looks a lot like a retooled version of an idea he helped to vet during his time at the White House National Security Council. That earlier effort ultimately failed.
The first version was a “red team/blue team” effort, which involved pitting a group of climate skeptic scientists against another group of climate scientists. Banks called the new effort “red team/blue team 2.0” and suggested that the fate of the first version is a warning for the White House’s current efforts.
Before the 1.0 version got off the ground, former White House chief of staff John Kelly and his allies killed it off, viewing it as a distraction and an impediment to the Trump deregulation agenda.
The team goal, left unfulfilled, was to form a basis for overturning the Environmental Protection Agency’s “endangerment finding,” which is the agency’s formal scientific assessment that climate change is a threat to public health and that, therefore, the greenhouse gases that cause it must be regulated.
The EPA finding is the basis for all climate regulation proposed by the agency and accordingly has been a big target for climate change skeptics such as the Heartland Institute and others that have made it their job to confront climate science.
But the White House found that the odds of undoing the EPA finding were, and still are, “very slim,” said Banks. Undoing the finding would lead to a protracted legal battle over the EPA’s role in regulating greenhouse gas pollution. It would take years, and most likely would be unsuccessful, he explained, so officials voted the exercise down, in favor of other means of reducing regulatory burdens.
The new White House effort, described last month in leaked documents from the National Security Council, would set up a special panel of outside climate scientists to assess the national security threat posed by climate change. The panel’s findings could provide an alternative to other government reports that have concluded that climate change is a threat to the economy, complicating Trump’s deregulatory agenda.
The envisioned outside group would be led by physicist and climate skeptic William Happer, whose potential appointment has generated criticism of the panel idea from Democrats and others.
Further reporting has indicated that the panel is meant to challenge the scientific consensus that the climate is changing because of human activity. However, the White House has not formally confirmed that.
“The Trump administration continues to ensure that national security decisions are fully informed and based on the most accurate and relevant information available,” a National Security Council spokesman said in a statement to the Washington Examiner when asked about the scope of the proposed panel.
Reports of the Happer climate committee have resulted in fevered reactions by Democrats and environmental critics of the administration.
Banks suggested that the panel is not as close to being implemented as feared. He said that the documents could have been leaked by detractors within the White House that want to see it crash and burn.
The panel would still need a wider array of input from the policy agencies, such as the EPA, the Commerce Department, NASA, and others.
“My guess is that the domestic policy agencies haven’t really been involved in it,” Banks said. “To me, it doesn’t seem like it’s been vetted a tremendous amount across the administration.”
