When: July 27, 2017
Where: Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources
Title: Hearing on three Republican-sponsored bills (including the inaccurately titled “Transparency and Honesty in Energy Regulations Act of 2017”)
What Happened: As they like to do, Republicans on the Committee lectured a climate change expert — in this case, a professor with decades of academic and government experience — about their view that man-made climate change is simply not happening. What should have been a serious examination of how our fossil fuel policies harm our environment quickly turned into an angry dismissal of scientific evidence.
Dr. Drew Shindell, a professor of earth sciences at Duke University who was a climate expert at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies from 1995 to 2014, appeared as the Democratic witness at the hearing. When Rep. Alan Lowenthal (D-Calif.) asked him, “Where is the United States in regard to the rest of the world in trying to prepare for climate change?” Dr. Shindell explained that many of our biggest trading partners — including the United Kingdom, France and India — have committed to phasing out internal combustion engines, meaning that American gas guzzlers, for instance, will soon be noncompetitive on the world market. Not only are our environment and public health at risk, he said, but our economy will suffer if industry leaders fail to acknowledge the realities of global warming and changing economic behavior abroad.
Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), who chairs the Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources, became incensed. As you can see from the video highlights, Gosar began by telling Dr. Shindell that he was “perplexed” by his testimony and proceeded, in his own mind, to trap the professor with a trick question:
Gosar: What record was broken a couple weeks ago in Los Angeles? Do you know?
Shindell: No.
Gosar: It was the hottest temperature recorded at that time. Do you know how long ago [sic] before it broke that record?
Shindell: No.
Gosar: A hundred and thirty-one years. Was there [sic] combustible engines out there in Los Angeles a hundred and thirty-one years ago?
Shindell: We’ve seen. . .
Gosar (cuts him off): The answer is no. No. And, and so my thing is, is to get back to Mr. Thompson [another Republican on the panel], things are cyclical. And when you start looking at the world’s geology, the rocks tell you the story of cyclical events. And to say we understand this more than not is ludicrous. Climate’s always changing, always changing. I mean, when you’re gonna have an elliptical orbit on a one-point-eight percent tip on the atmosphere of the Earth or the pole of the Earth around an elliptical-sized [sic] sun that has solar flares, all of that is contentious. So with that being said, I mean, the science isn’t settled.
This is simply inaccurate, and Rep. Gosar has no reason not to know better. Exhaustively reviewed satellite data has shown that the greatest period of warming in recent history (from 1975 roughly to the present) has coincided with a slight decrease in solar activity. At the same time, we have strong evidence that almost all climatic warming since 1850 has been man-made, largely due to industrialization and greenhouse gas emissions.
Climate change is no longer seriously debated in the scientific community. Indeed, one of the few places on Earth where global warming skepticism still holds any sway is the Republican caucus of the U.S. Congress.
Perhaps, then, it’s no accident that Rep. Gosar has been one of the fossil fuel industry’s greatest champions during his tenure on Natural Resources. The Subcommittee holds hearings with titles like “Assessing Innovative and Alternative Uses of Coal,” and the Subcommittee’s focus is often on weakening environmental regulations.
At no time during the 115th Congress have Natural Resources Committee Republicans held a hearing that acknowledged man-made climate change as a reality, let alone focused on potential solutions.
Researchers are now confident that global warming has led to intense wildfires in California, melted glaciers on Sweden’s highest mountaintops and worsened droughts around the world in ways that put human health at grave risk. We can’t address climate change if elected leaders don’t take it seriously.
The July 2017 hearing was not about taking climate change seriously. It centered on a bill authored by Rep. Evan Jenkins (R-W.V.) that would have outlawed federal consideration of greenhouse gas impacts in policy making.
Don’t take our word for it –the formal parliamentary description is “To prohibit the Secretary of Energy, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Secretary of the Interior, and the Chair of the Council on Environmental Quality from considering the social cost of carbon, the social cost of methane, or the social cost of nitrous oxide, in taking any action.”
Why would Congress need to prohibit consideration of greenhouse gas impacts when it makes policy? Because accurately accounting for those costs would lead to more protective carbon and methane emissions standards, which the fossil fuel industry has resisted for decades.
That fight has led us to where we are today. In contrast to our allies like Germany, where renewable energy is widely supported and greenhouse gas emissions are dropping steadily, the U.S. continues to subsidize fossil fuel production through tax giveaways and relatively weak emissions standards.
Despite their often-stated belief that carbon emissions don’t really matter to our climate, Republicans sometimes feel the need to claim their policies are reducing emissions anyway. Earlier this year, the Trump administration was caught claiming that reductions in carbon emissions in 2016, the last year of President Obama’s tenure, were actually reductions in the first year of the Trump administration. (The fact-checking website Politifact, in a moment of generosity, called it “a stretch.”)
Do we need more emissions because they’re good for the economy? Or do emissions not matter? Or should we try to reduce emissions just because? Republicans on the Natural Resources Committee (and elsewhere in Washington) can’t seem to decide. The rest of us are living with the very real consequences of their inaction.
Holding a climate denial hearing that particular week was particularly ironic, considering the climate change news that was breaking at the time.
On July 18 the journal Earth System Dynamics published a report led by James Hansen, the NASA scientist known for blowing the whistle on fossil fuel emissions and climate change in the late 1980s, that calculated the potential costs to young people of carbon removal from the atmosphere at $535 trillion. (That’s trillion with a t, for cost-conscious Republican lawmakers.) The study suggested that this scenario, which involves a future with very expensive atmospheric carbon extraction technology, can be avoided if we implement better agricultural and forestry practices and draw down our emissions as soon as possible — exactly the kinds of policies Republicans on the Committee refuse to discuss.
On July 24, the news broke that wildfires, logging and expanding palm oil plantations in Asia had wiped an amount of forest the size of Nebraska off the world map in 2015 alone. As one article noted, “The loss is part of a continuing trend of deforestation that could have devastating implications for the climate. . . . Deforestation accounts for more than 10 percent of the global carbon dioxide emissions driving climate change.” The interactions between logging, wildfires and climate change are — to put it bluntly — not a topic Republicans on the Committee have shown any interest in examining.
Also on July 24, Senate Democrats called for an investigation of the apparently politically motivated reassignment of roughly 50 senior career officials at the Interior Department. As the Washington Post reported:
[T]he senators note that one of the reassigned Senior Executive Service officials — Joel Clement, the department’s top climate change official — has alleged he was punished for his work on the issue. Clement, who was reassigned to the department’s Office of Natural Resources Revenue, which collects royalty payments from oil, gas and mining firms, wrote an op-ed in The Post last week saying “I believe I was retaliated against for speaking out publicly about the dangers that climate change poses to Alaska Native communities.”
On July 27, the same day the hearing was held, National Geographic reported on a new analysis suggesting that global warming will have much stronger negative impacts on water quality than previously thought. One primary consequence of global warming is heavier rain and precipitation events — not unlike the hurricanes we’ve seen this summer — and a resulting increase in nitrogen runoff, especially from agricultural and fossil fuel operations. As National Geographic noted, after rainstorms spread nitrogen in the environment,
Toxic algal blooms can develop, as well as harmful low-oxygen dead zones known as hypoxia, which can cause negative impacts on human health, aquatic ecosystems, and the economy. Notable dead zones include those in the Gulf of Mexico, the Chesapeake Bay, and around Florida.
Democrats on the Natural Resources Committee were busy the week of the climate denial hearing.
On July 25, Ranking Member Grijalva and Vice Ranking Member Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) sent a letter with 63 House Democratic colleagues urging President Trump and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke not to open marine monuments to offshore oil drilling, as the administration was threatening to do.
On July 26, Ranking Member Grijalva highlighted Republicans’ insistence that killing more sea lions — not removing environmentally destructive dams — was the only way to increase salmon populations along the Snake and Columbia rivers. As Grijalva said at the time, “Conducting some farcical sea lion hunt while the salmon try to jump a hundred-foot-tall concrete barrier to reach their natural habitat is not my idea of sound environmental policy.”
On July 27, in addition to raising the alarm about the misguided premise of the Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee hearing, Grijalva called for an investigation of Secretary Zinke’s threats against Alaska senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan over Murkowksi’s opposition to the Republican bill repealing the Affordable Care Act. That investigation ultimately had to shut down because the senators refused to answer investigators’ questions.
Here is a climate change explainer that should be required reading for our Republican friends and anyone else who might be curious.
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