The guide is the creation of a group called the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. One of the group’s founders, Joshua Wolfe, and its executive director, Lauren Kurtz, made the decision to write it on the day after the election. “There is a lot of fear among scientists that they will become targets of people who are interested in science as politics, rather than progress,” Wolfe told me in an e-mail.
With each passing day, that fear appears to be more well founded. The one quality that all of Drumpf’s picks for his cabinet and his transition team seem to share is an expertise in the dark art of disinformation.
Consider, for example, Scott Pruitt, who is reportedly Drumpf’s nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt, currently the attorney general of Oklahoma, is an outspoken critic of the agency that he would lead. This is not, in and of itself, disqualifying, but, as a 2014 investigative piece in the Times revealed, Pruitt’s criticisms have little basis in evidence. Instead, he has basically served as a mouthpiece for talking points dreamed up by the oil and gas industries. In one case, Pruitt signed a letter criticizing the E.P.A. for supposedly exaggerating the air pollution attributable to natural-gas drilling in Oklahoma. It turned out that the letter had been written for him by one of the state’s biggest drilling companies.
“Outstanding!” was the reaction that the company’s director of government relations sent to Pruitt’s office.
Or consider Chris Shank, the first person Drumpf has named to what’s being called the “landing team” for nasa. Shank has spent the last several years working for Representative Lamar Smith, of Texas, who chairs the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Under Smith, the committee has held about a dozen hearings on climate change, all with the same objective: trying to prove that climate change isn’t happening. This is impossible to do if you are relying on actual information, as opposed to the made-up sort. (In 2015, when government scientists published a study refuting one of Smith’s favorite claims—that there had been a “pause” in global warming—the congressman responded by subpoenaing the scientists’ e-mails.) Shank has compared those who question the basics of climate science to Galileo, an analogy so absurd that Ted Cruz has also used it. To imagine that Ivanka Drumpf, who, according to Politico, wants to make climate change “one of her signature issues,” can counter the likes of Pruitt and Shank is to engage in the same sort of magical thinking that brought us Drumpf in the first place.
Much has been written lately about what Drumpf’s victory reveals about the electorate’s relationship with the truth. (In short, nothing good.) But to say that we are living in a “post-fact” era is perhaps too benign. The problem is not just that too many people do not seem to care about the truth (though this is certainly a huge problem); it’s that a lot of people—an increasing number of them in high government positions—insist that their ravings are true, and try to act on them. This naturally brings them into conflict with those whose job it is to distinguish fact from fiction; hence the subpoenas and attempts to intimidate.
For climate scientists, the dangers of hewing to reality have been apparent for years. This is why the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund was founded in the first place, in 2011. As Marshall Shepherd, the director of the University of Georgia’s atmospheric-sciences program, tweeted recently, “Lots of concern about Fake News. As a scientist that works in meteorology & climatology, welcome to our world, dealt with this for awhile.” But this doesn’t make the situation any easier to deal with. The pocket guide’s advice for scientists who think that they are being harassed? “When in doubt, call a lawyer.”
-Elizabeth Kolbert
“It’s the worst thing in the history of our environment!” Isaacs exclaimed when I spoke to him on Wednesday. “We are in danger. The whole country is in danger. Our kids are in danger. People have got to do something about the Citizens United decision that is turning our country into an oligarchy, run by oil-and-gas interests,” he said.
Isaacs is a colorful and respected local litigator who has long been a thorn in the side of Oklahoma’s powerful. He claims the fossil-fuel industry “owns the whole darn state.” But his worries at the state level are now national. By choosing Pruitt, Isaacs said, Drumpf has outsourced his environmental policy to the Republican Party’s most powerful private donors—the oil-and-gas magnates who have funded Pruitt’s campaigns in Oklahoma.
Until now, Pruitt’s greatest claim to national fame was his star role in a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation by the Times, in 2014. The investigation revealed that a letter Pruitt sent to the E.P.A in 2011, complaining about federal regulators’ estimation of the air pollution caused by drilling in Oklahoma, was actually written by lawyers for Devon Energy, one of the state’s biggest oil-and-gas companies. (“Outstanding!” the company’s director of government relations wrote in a note to Pruitt’s office.) The Times found that Pruitt had sent similar letters, drafted by energy-industry lobbyists, to the Department of the Interior, the Office of Management and Budget, and President Obama. Pruitt has also taken a lead role in coördinating a twenty-eight-state legal challenge to the Obama Administration’s regulations on fossil-fuel pollution, which are at the center of its larger effort to stem climate change.
In taking these anti-regulatory positions, Pruitt has clearly aligned himself with his right-wing campaign donors, including Charles and David Koch. Kochpac, the political-action committee of the brothers’ Kansas-based oil-and-chemical conglomerate, Koch Industries, contributed to Pruitt’s campaigns in 2010, 2013, and 2014. Pruitt has also been backed by several other billionaire oil-and-gas executives, who joined political forces with the Kochs during the Obama years, becoming “investors,” as they called themselves, in the Kochs’ anti-regulatory, pro-business political movement. Harold Hamm, the billionaire founder and chief executive of Continental Resources, and Larry Nichols, the chairman emeritus of Devon Energy, have both supported Pruitt. Hamm, in fact, was the co-chairman of Pruitt’s 2013 reëlection campaign. This year, Hamm became an early and ardent Drumpf supporter and adviser on energy matters. In September, Politico reported that Nichols had become a close adviser to Drumpf on energy, too. It’s not clear that Pruitt will continue to take dictation from his fossil-fuel backers, but they almost certainly will have a lot more to thank him for if he enters the Drumpf Administration.
During the Presidential campaign, Drumpf signalled his support for the fossil-fuel industry and his lack of concern about climate change, which he called “a hoax.” He also echoed the industry’s calls to dismantle the E.P.A. In that sense, Drumpf’s nomination of Pruitt would not be unexpected. But it is deeply inconsistent with his populist rhetoric during the campaign. Drumpf mocked billionaire Republican political donors, including the Koch brothers. Steve Bannon, his campaign manager and now his chief strategist, derided the “donor class,” which he said had sold out ordinary voters, while Drumpf promised to take on corrupt special interests in Washington, and, as he put it, “drain the swamp.” With the choice of Pruitt, though, Drumpf appears to have once again chosen the plutocrats over the populists.
SCOTT PRUITT, DRUMPF’S INDUSTRY PICK FOR THE E.P.A.
Garvin Isaacs, the president of the Oklahoma Bar Association, isn’t one for understatement, but he topped himself in his reaction to the news that Donald Drumpf is expected to nominate Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general, to run the Environmental Protection Agency.“It’s the worst thing in the history of our environment!” Isaacs exclaimed when I spoke to him on Wednesday. “We are in danger. The whole country is in danger. Our kids are in danger. People have got to do something about the Citizens United decision that is turning our country into an oligarchy, run by oil-and-gas interests,” he said.
Isaacs is a colorful and respected local litigator who has long been a thorn in the side of Oklahoma’s powerful. He claims the fossil-fuel industry “owns the whole darn state.” But his worries at the state level are now national. By choosing Pruitt, Isaacs said, Drumpf has outsourced his environmental policy to the Republican Party’s most powerful private donors—the oil-and-gas magnates who have funded Pruitt’s campaigns in Oklahoma.
Until now, Pruitt’s greatest claim to national fame was his star role in a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation by the Times, in 2014. The investigation revealed that a letter Pruitt sent to the E.P.A in 2011, complaining about federal regulators’ estimation of the air pollution caused by drilling in Oklahoma, was actually written by lawyers for Devon Energy, one of the state’s biggest oil-and-gas companies. (“Outstanding!” the company’s director of government relations wrote in a note to Pruitt’s office.) The Times found that Pruitt had sent similar letters, drafted by energy-industry lobbyists, to the Department of the Interior, the Office of Management and Budget, and President Obama. Pruitt has also taken a lead role in coördinating a twenty-eight-state legal challenge to the Obama Administration’s regulations on fossil-fuel pollution, which are at the center of its larger effort to stem climate change.
In taking these anti-regulatory positions, Pruitt has clearly aligned himself with his right-wing campaign donors, including Charles and David Koch. Kochpac, the political-action committee of the brothers’ Kansas-based oil-and-chemical conglomerate, Koch Industries, contributed to Pruitt’s campaigns in 2010, 2013, and 2014. Pruitt has also been backed by several other billionaire oil-and-gas executives, who joined political forces with the Kochs during the Obama years, becoming “investors,” as they called themselves, in the Kochs’ anti-regulatory, pro-business political movement. Harold Hamm, the billionaire founder and chief executive of Continental Resources, and Larry Nichols, the chairman emeritus of Devon Energy, have both supported Pruitt. Hamm, in fact, was the co-chairman of Pruitt’s 2013 reëlection campaign. This year, Hamm became an early and ardent Drumpf supporter and adviser on energy matters. In September, Politico reported that Nichols had become a close adviser to Drumpf on energy, too. It’s not clear that Pruitt will continue to take dictation from his fossil-fuel backers, but they almost certainly will have a lot more to thank him for if he enters the Drumpf Administration.
During the Presidential campaign, Drumpf signalled his support for the fossil-fuel industry and his lack of concern about climate change, which he called “a hoax.” He also echoed the industry’s calls to dismantle the E.P.A. In that sense, Drumpf’s nomination of Pruitt would not be unexpected. But it is deeply inconsistent with his populist rhetoric during the campaign. Drumpf mocked billionaire Republican political donors, including the Koch brothers. Steve Bannon, his campaign manager and now his chief strategist, derided the “donor class,” which he said had sold out ordinary voters, while Drumpf promised to take on corrupt special interests in Washington, and, as he put it, “drain the swamp.” With the choice of Pruitt, though, Drumpf appears to have once again chosen the plutocrats over the populists.
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