In the first installment of Watchdog, we looked at a few of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s many scandals and formal investigations — including his meeting with the chairman of oil giant Halliburton and a Montana land developer that’s been referred to the Department of Justice. Those wheels are still turning, and the “Ryan Zinke Departure Watch” has been in effect for some time now. Ranking Member Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.), in an op-ed in last Friday’s USA Today, called for him to resign in light of his ethical and policy failures and the damage he’s done to career staff morale.
House Democrats aren’t the only ones counting Zinke’s days left in office. Multiple outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, have run features on his likely successor, Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt. The Times accurately describes Bernhardt as “a walking conflict of interest,” but that’s a story for another Watchdog.
Zinke supporters and public relations staff think they can weather the storm, and they often push back on his parade of bad headlines. (Politico’s Nov. 2 “Vise tightens around Zinke” was a particular scorcher.) But they’ve shown less concern about the secretary’s major policy blunders, especially on climate change. This was on dramatic display recently when he blamed the California wildfires — not for the first time — on “radical environmental groups” and, as CNN noted, “declined to name names” when asked which groups he was talking about.
When the person charged with managing America’s public lands ignores climate change and blames worsening natural disasters on hippies, there’s something seriously wrong. There’s something doubly wrong when, as the Washington Post noted on Nov. 20, that same person received more contributions from Halliburton in 2014 than any other House or Senate candidate in either party.
Welcome to chapter two of Watchdog.
Secretary Zinke’s story on climate change — what’s happening, what’s causing it, what we should do about it — has gone back and forth over the years, but what matters most is his record as Secretary of the Interior, and that record is not good.
He’s weakened the Bureau of Land Management’s standards for methane emissions by fossil fuel drillers on federal lands.
He’s proposed leasing more public land for drilling than any of his predecessors, calling it necessary for “energy dominance” — a phrase that continues to mean “we do whatever oil and coal companies want.”
He canceled a review of coal’s environmental impacts almost as soon as he took office.
His five-year plan for offshore oil drilling is an industry wish list so extreme that a Democratic candidate won a seat in Congress this year in a conservative district by opposing it.
His answer to coal’s horrible environmental record is to repeat the phrase “clean coal” in hopes that it magically reduces its environmental impacts. (It doesn’t.)
He’s so desperate to help fossil fuel companies that he proposed using military bases as export hubs for private companies to ship overseas. This didn’t go over well.
None of these is a blind spot in an otherwise solid record. When it comes to climate change, it’s all a blind spot. And when it comes to this year’s wildfires, that blind spot has gotten Secretary Zinke in big trouble.
Back in mid-August, when the California wildfires were starting to grab daily headlines, he decided his answer was to blame the whole thing on “radical groups” and insist that climate change had nothing to do with it.
“America is better than letting these radical groups control the dialogue about climate change,” Zinke said in an interview with local TV news station KCRA. “Extreme environmentalists have shut down public access. They talk about habitat, and yet they are willing to burn it up.”
He went even further on Breitbart Radio — a far-right, pro-Trump outlet that almost never pushes back on administration claims — and claimed the country is being held hostage by “environmental terrorist groups.” We don’t want to link to that one. You can find it if you’re curious. It happened Aug. 11, 2018.
So what’s his solution to forest fires? Cutting down a lot more trees — the same “alternative” the logging industry has pushed for years. As The Intercept reported in late August, the fact that Ryan Zinke and major timber companies have the same idea is no coincidence. Forgive the slightly lengthy quote; you’ll see why it’s necessary in a moment.
Finding ways to prop up Montana’s struggling timber industry was a frequent activity of Zinke’s during his tenure as the state’s U.S. representative. Now, as interior secretary, Zinke is in charge of overseeing 65 million acres of forests and woodlands managed by the Bureau of Land Management. From his elevated platform, Zinke is pushing the same timber-friendly policies that he did in Congress.
In 2015, Zinke co-sponsored legislation that would have gutted environmental protections for forests located on public lands. That bill failed, but it laid the groundwork for similarly severe provisions in the House version of the 2018 farm bill, which is being debated now by members of Congress.
Using some of the same language from Zinke’s bill, the House farm bill would eliminate many of the environmental reviews currently required under the National Environmental Policy Act for timber harvested on public land. “This is an industry wish list,” Paul Spitler, director of wilderness policy for the Wilderness Society, said of the House farm bill. “The changes are sweeping. It is a dramatic rollback of environmental rules.”
The Interior Department did not respond for a request for comment.
The thing is, Zinke really does seem to believe that anyone who disagrees with this deregulatory agenda is a wild-eyed extremist. As HuffPost reported on Aug. 12, the day after Zinke made his “environmental terrorist groups” statement, he didn’t handle himself well when a community member in Steamboat Springs, Colo., asked him about climate change’s role in wildfires:
The confrontation occurred Friday in Steamboat Springs at the Freedom Conference, which features “leading conservative thought and policy leaders.”
Local protester Sallie Holmes stood up during a speech by Zinke, calling out: “Why won’t you acknowledge that climate change is causing and accelerating wildfires, even in Routt County?” Steamboat Springs is located in Routt County in western Colorado, where officials have been battling fires.
Holmes, 27, was immediately escorted out by security as the crowd booed. Zinke angrily shouted: “You know what? You haven’t served and you don’t understand what energy is. I’d like to see your child have to fight for energy.”
Holmes added as she was being led out the door: “Our community is suffering because you will not acknowledge climate change.”
As the reporter noted, with gracious understatement, “Interior Department officials did not immediately return phone calls to clarify what Zinke meant by ‘served’ or why that was a prerequisite for Holmes’ comments.”
The takeaway: Zinke’s program of just cutting down trees to make industry friends happy won’t even prevent forest fires.
That brings us to the recently released federal climate assessment, which could not have been clearer about the risks we face. Just a few quotes suffice to make the point:
“The assumption that current and future climate conditions will resemble the recent past is no longer valid.”
“The warming trend observed over the past century can only be explained by the effects that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, have had on the climate.”
“Future risks from climate change depend primarily on decisions made today.”
“Climate-related risks will continue to grow without additional action.”
“Impacts within and across regions will not be distributed equally. People who are already vulnerable, including lower-income and other marginalized communities, have lower capacity to prepare for and cope with extreme weather and climate-related events and are expected to experience greater impacts.”
“Seas are warming, rising, and becoming more acidic, and marine species are moving to new locations toward cooler waters. Flooding is becoming more frequent along the U.S. coastline. Growing seasons are lengthening, and wildfires are increasing. These and many other changes are clear signs of a warming world.”
“Warmer and drier conditions have contributed to an increase in large forest fires in the western United States and Interior Alaska over the past several decades.”
This congressionally mandated report was produced thanks to collaboration by more than a dozen federal agencies, each with its own scientific expertise. It is exhaustively supported, thoroughly documented, and rigorously careful in its conclusions. It is exactly what science in the public interest is supposed to look like. The fact that its conclusions are alarming makes it all the more important that we take it seriously.
Ryan Zinke’s response to this report was to dismiss the findings, question the scientists’ ability to understand the data, and reassure everyone there’s nothing to see here. As The Hill recently reported:
Zinke accused the authors — about 300 scientists from 13 agencies, like the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and outside the government — of using only worst-case scenarios in the report, which concluded, among other things, that climate change could cost the United States economy billions of dollars annually by 2100.
That would be awfully convenient for him and his industry friends if it were true. It’s not even close to true, as one of the study’s authors pointed out.
Zinke likes to brag about his own scientific credentials, frequently calling himself “a geologist” based on his bachelor’s degree in geology. As CNN has noted, he’s never worked in a formal scientific capacity a day in his life, and his constant flattery of himself has not gone unnoticed in the scientific community:
Several geologists who CNN has spoken with have flagged his comments as disingenuous, saying that someone with a 34-year-old degree who never worked in the field is not considered a geologist.
“He seems not to be familiar with modern geologic knowledge,” said Seth Stein, a professor at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. “In particular, geologists now know that the climate is warming rapidly because of human activities. This is causing many serious problems including rising sea level, which is a major threat to coastal communities.”
In addition, Zinke’s numerous rollbacks of environmental protections, wavering stance on climate change, and allegations by career staff that he suppressed certain reports have at least one Democratic member of Congress asking whether he should be using his college degree as a credibility booster.
When it comes to Secretary Zinke, it’s “credibility boosters” all the way down. Actual credibility? We’re still waiting.
Ranking Member Grijalva has continuously called out the Trump administration’s climate denial and the damage it’s caused. Most recently, Grijalva decried Trump’s efforts to bury the dire climate change findings from his own administration in the Fourth Annual Climate Assessment by releasing it the day after Thanksgiving, instead of next month as expected.
As incoming Chair of the Natural Resources Committee, Grijalva has pledged to examine how the Trump administration has frozen out public input on environmental decision-making through the National Environmental Policy Act; the scope of climate change impacts on Puerto Rico and the nation’s territories and overseas jurisdictions; climate change’s disproportionate impacts on communities of color, and how stronger environmental justice policies can prevent those disparate impacts; and the critical role federal lands and waters must play in combating climate change and mitigating its impacts.
Additionally, Grijalva joined Democratic Committee leaders, whose committees have jurisdiction over climate change, to announce that their committees will hold a series of hearings over a two-day period early next year to assess the effects of climate change and the need for action.
The Trump administration isn’t known for demanding excellence from its top officials. It’s very possible Secretary Zinke will try to hang onto his job — from all available evidence, his overtures to outside employers like Fox News have been ignored.
That doesn’t mean we’re going to let his scandals disappear down the memory hole. Join us next time when we look back on more of his ethical failings and serious questions about how he uses his official time. Is he helping taxpayers, or is he helping his industry buddies? We’ll be back soon.
