White House panel on climate change includes a denialist
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is preparing to establish a panel to examine how climate change affects national security, to include a White House adviser whose views are sharply at odds with the established scientific consensus that humancaused global warming poses a threat to the nation’s economy, health and security.
According to a White House memo dated Feb. 14, Trump’s staff members have drafted an executive order to create a 12-member Presidential Committee on Climate Security that will advise Trump about “how a changing climate could affect the security of the United States.” The memo was first reported by The Washington Post.
The panel would include William Happer, a Princeton physicist who serves as Trump’s deputy assistant for emerging technologies. Happer has gained notoriety in the scientific community for his statements that carbon dioxide — the greenhouse gas that scientists say is trapping heat and warming the planet — is beneficial to humanity.
The efforts to establish the panel come in the wake of multiple new comprehensive reports concluding that the warming planet poses clear and specific risks to national security.
“We welcome a rigorous independent panel with credible climate and security experts to study the security implications of climate change — but this is not that,” said Francesco Femia, a founder of The Center for Climate and Security, a research organization that focuses on national security effects of climate change. “The proposed committee is supposed to provide a so-called ‘adversarial review’ of already rigorous reports from science agencies, intelligence agencies and the Defense Department.”
He asserted that Happer’s role meant the panel would “neither be independent or rigorous.”
In 2015, Happer was called to testify before a Senate committee after environmental group Greenpeace revealed that he agreed to write a scientific paper at the request of an unnamed oil and gas company in the Middle East.
In his email exchanges with Greenpeace, Happer wrote, “More CO2 will benefit the world. The only way to limit CO2 would be to stop using fossil fuels, which I think would be a profoundly immoral and irrational policy.”
Happer suggested to the purported funders that he not be paid directly. “My activities to push back against climate extremism are a labor of love,” he wrote.
The White House memo notes that multiple scientific and defense reports have recently concluded that climate change poses a significant threat to national security, but it casts doubt on those reports, saying, “these scientific and national security judgments have not undergone a rigorous independent and adversarial peer review to examine the certainties and uncertainties of climate science, as well as implications for national security.”