Climate governance on the guillotine

Trump's DOE report “is almost a user’s guide on how to lie with figures.”

You guys: I’ve turned on paid subscriptions. I know. It’s a big step, and one that directly affects the tens of you—tens, I say!—who currently subscribe. The new rhythm will be a substantial post early in the week, followed by a short free post on Fridays. If you’ve been following along and like where CHAMP is heading, please consider helping keep the new twice-a-week rhythm going strong. If not, no worries. But if you have the means and like what you read, hop on in. On to the inaugural paid post! (Sorry in advance for the length; I got all kinds of fired up about this one.)

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You may well have seen headlines about the Trump administration’s attempt to erase the Endangerment Finding—the 2009 ruling that greenhouse gases endanger public health. That ruling is the spine of U.S. climate law, and gutting it would unravel emissions limits for cars, power plants, and oil and gas. It would also, in plain English, redefine CO2—aka the overwhelmingly most important form of air pollution in the world—as a not-pollutant.

Reuters: US reversal on key climate finding spells uncertainty for business

To justify the move, Trump’s Department of Energy cooked up a glossy new report called A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate.

(This is a side note, but stand by for a near-future post about the multitude of ways the term greenhouse gas emissions is both a scientific misnomer and a messaging catastrophe. Greenhouse makes the proverbial average person think of gardening, gas of liquid fuel, and emissions of silent farts. So why do we insist on using terms that cut the balls off our point before we’re done making it? Sorry. I get pretty easily pissed off about this stuff. Don’t even get me started on natural gas, that fossil-methane makeover that makes a gas well sound like a spa day.)

Care to wager if “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate” is underpinned by good science? Before you slap down cash, here’s a hint:

Carbon Brief: Factcheck: Trump’s climate report includes more than 100 false or misleading claims

The Carbon Brief piece is a thorough and visually oriented and well-sourced callout of the bullshit embedded throughout. From the intro:

Compiled in just two months by five “independent” researchers hand-selected by the climate-sceptic US secretary of energy Chris Wright, the document has sparked fierce criticism from climate scientists, who have pointed to factual errors, misrepresentation of research, messy citations and the cherry-picking of data.

Breathtaking, isn’t it? The report aimed at undoing the EPA finding that underpins virtually all its ability to regulate climate was written by randos hand-picked by the CEO of a fracking company who now runs the Department of Energy.

Meanwhile, over at the EPA, the thinking appears to be, hey guys, why wait around for the DOE to assassinate our authority when we can just do it ourselves?

Bloomberg News: EPA Unveils Plan to Kill US Power to Regulate Greenhouse Gases

In a dark alley, EPA steps into the moonlight, brim pulled low, and pulls from its sheath a knife engraved with the words Kill the Greenhouse Gas Emissions Regulations that I Myself Wrote and Am in Charge of. Except now it’s a longsword, because that’s way too much to get on a knife…

For all the suspense embedded in the Bloomberg headline, let’s pick one to focus on that’s working hard to be objective but ultimately not doing as well as it thinks:

AP: Scientists give harsh grades to Trump administration work aimed at undoing a key climate finding

But to get us started, let’s take a peek at the DOE report itself.

A critical review of the Critical Review

Spoiler: it’s not a review in any recognizably valuable sense. And it’s critical not in the scientific sense but rather in the older-sister-being-critical-of-your-wardrobe-choices sense. Ocean acidification is spontaneously rebranded as ocean neutralization. That’s not science—that’s marketing. Ocean life is dissolving in acidic carbon-soaked water, and DOE’s answer is to change the name tag.

And seriously: “neutralization”? Let’s call this out for what it really is: a gag-reflex rewrite. At Global Ocean Health (my home base), accounting for and addressing the effects of ocean acidification was our launchpad. We know what it means: CO₂ dissolves into seawater, shedding acid that chips away at calcium-carbonate skeletons—from pteropods to corals and oysters—with catastrophic effects up and down the ocean food chain.

Here’s what the numbers say: global surface ocean pH has dropped enough since 1985 that acidity has increased by about 15% since then—and roughly 40% since pre-industrial levels.