lamar smith
www.eenews.net
A ranch, an oil field, and a career colored by skepticism
Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), a leading climate skeptic, is leaving Congress after earning between $1.2 million and $3.9 million in oil revenue since the 1980s.
www.eenews.net
LAMAR SMITH: A ranch, an oil field, and a career colored by skepticism
PREMONT, Texas — Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), a leading climate skeptic, is leaving Congress after earning between $1.2 million and $3.9 million in oil revenue since the 1980s.
thehill.com
All eyes on top Democrat to bring science back to science committee
Environmentalists are hoping that Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) will bring science back to the House science committee when she takes over as chair in the next Congress.
Originals
Credit: Thomas Altfather Good/flickr
Peter Dykstra: Etched in stone
Climate denial joins a long list of errant beliefs that are hard – or maybe impossible – to kill.
When I lived in Washington DC in the early 1980's, I'd occasionally stroll down to the Mall to see the then-new Vietnam War Memorial.
Tourists and grieving families would peruse the V-shaped wall to find names of loved ones, or just ponder America's most tragic war.
Another fixture at the Memorial were Vietnam vets, then mostly in their forties and wearing tattered, genuine combat fatigues, pressing the case that some of their buddies were still being held in tiger cages in Hanoi.
When I returned to work in DC in 2010, I was astonished to see many of the same vets still there, now in their seventies but still convinced that buddies were alive and imprisoned nearly a half century later. Not a whiff of evidence had surfaced in the intervening decades to support their beliefs, but they persist.
It's no different than the uniquely American battle over guns, where this country's consistent, tragic mass shooting events can't sway tens of millions of us that there may be a problem. Or the multiple theories about President Obama as a Kenyan-born, madrasa educated closet Muslim/Nazi/Communist. Or the anti-vaccine movement, birthed on a retracted paper published by a thoroughly discredited researcher.
Moral of the story: Rigid beliefs die hard, or not at all.
Over those same decades, there has been a persistent and logical belief that climate denial would be crushed by the weight of science, on-the-ground evidence, and simple common sense. While denial may have withered a bit – its most prominent advocates don't get booked on network TV any more, except for Fox News – it's here to stay.
Echoing a persistently wrong theme, the web publication Business Green ran a year-end op-ed in December declaring 2017 to be "The Year That Climate Denial Died."
I don't think so.
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Editorial
www.latimes.com
Scott Pruitt offers up another gift to polluters. You know, the people he's supposed to monitor
Pruitt's latest proposed rule would limit the sorts of scientific studies the EPA is allowed to use to craft regulations.
thehill.com
Internal emails show EPA working to limit agency's use of science
Environmental Protection Agency political staffers have been working to internally replicate through agency action a bill that would restrict the kind of science that the EPA can use when writing regulations, internal emails show.
undark.org
A remedy for broken science, or an attempt to undercut it?
A report from the National Association of Scholars takes on the reproducibility crisis in science. Not everyone views the group's motives as pure.
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