Johnson’s legacy: Attack climate denial, restore respect for science
Advocates for girls and women to pursue STEM training and careers
WASHINGTON – When Dallas congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson took charge of the House science committee after the 2018 midterms, she left no doubt a new sheriff was in town.
Another Texan, an ardent climate denier, had chaired the panel for six years, using his power to harass scientists and slow momentum for demands to curb greenhouse emissions.
Johnson devoted her first hearing to spotlighting the overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is real, dangerous, and driven by human activity.
“We deal with science on the Science Space and Technology Committee – and facts,” Johnson said this month in Scotland at a major United Nations conference on climate. “We live with climate change. We talk about it, we’ve studied it . ... Inaction is really not an option.”
After three decades in Congress, Johnson’s career is at a pinnacle as she announced her retirement this weekend.
At 85, turning 86 in December, she’s the second oldest member of the House and the longest-serving Texan. Like other Democrats eyeing the exits, she’s familiar with the long history of midterm elections, when a president’s party almost always suffers huge losses.
So, Johnson is going out on top as the most powerful Texan in the House, and the state’s only committee chair, a role she took on halfway into the Trump presidency.
She quickly emerged as a leading critic.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and former President Donald Trump cut
U.S. support for the World Health Organization, Johnson hit hard with the moral authority of the first nurse elected to Congress.
“The United States cannot afford assaults on science and facts at any time, least of all during this pandemic,” she said.
As she noted, by the time she became chairwoman, “I had been in Congress 26 years, only six of them in the majority. So you know I had to work across party lines to get things done. And as much as we trash the names of some of the Republicans, they were some of the same ones that helped me be successful.”
Johnson was elected in 1992 and immediately joined the science panel. She’d been living near Texas Instruments, where Jack Kilby had developed the first integrated circuit, and she coveted the assignment. Many lawmakers do not.
“Everybody picks committees (where) they think they can raise money easily,” Johnson told Politico in early 2019, at the outset of her tenure as chair. “You can’t expect scientists to have as much money as an oil person. But they probably have more to offer in terms of the future.”
After 18 years on the science panel, Johnson became the top Democrat after the 2010 elections.
For the next six years, spanning Obama’s second term and the first half of the Trump era, science chairman Lamar Smith of San Antonio and Johnson tangled as he turned a typically low-key panel focused on NASA and research into a laboratory for ideological warfare.
Smith used the perch to harass climate scientists and cut funding for projects that lacked a clear “national interest” justification. Johnson accused him of “politicizing” science by cutting funds for renewable energy, biology, environmental and climate change research.
In 2015, during a monthslong probe of National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration researchers, she accused Smith of indulging in a “fishing expedition” and an “ideological crusade” aimed at kicking up enough doubt to block political consensus to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
“The only thing you accused NOAA of doing is engaging in climate science – i.e., doing their jobs,” she asserted in a terse letter to Smith ahead of international climate talks.
On election night 2018, when Democrats won control of the House, Johnson vowed to “restore the credibility of the science committee” after six years of antagonism to scientists who dared speak out on climate change or conduct research that, inevitably, offered further evidence to support the scientific consensus on the growing crisis.
“It’s nonsense for us to sit here and ignore that it’s happening and waste our time without having any plan for what we should be doing to save our planet and the lives and the money it takes to clean up after disasters,” she told Science Insider.
When Trump announced in June 2017 that the United States would pull out of the Paris Climate Accord, there was little Johnson could do but complain. As chair two years 18 months later, she had a bully pulpit.
“It is not an exaggeration to say that climate change is one of the greatest challenges confronting our nation,” she said when she unveiled a bill to undo Trump’s disavowal of the Paris deal, and prod the federal government to curb pollution.
In and out of the majority, Johnson has been a leading advocate for science, technology, engineering, and math education, and for encouraging girls and women to pursue STEM training and careers.
Women account for more than half of medical students, she noted, “but we need to make an impact across the board, especially in engineering and math. We cannot afford to sacrifice 50% of our brain power.”