Quote:House Republicans just passed two bills that will make it harder for the Environmental Protection Agency to use scientific research to protect health and the environment. And they’ve done so under the deceptive guise of “transparency.”

Over the past two days, the House has passed the “HONEST Act” and the “EPA Science Advisory Board Reform Act.” On the surface, they seem noble. They use the same language scientists use when advocating for stronger research practices.

But they’re “wolf in sheep’s clothing types of statutes,” says Sarah Lamdan, a law professor who studies environmental information access at CUNY. “What’s really happening is that they’re preventing the EPA from doing its job.”

Quote:Since the election, the science community has been grappling with a bleak question: Would Donald Trump — occasional climate change denier, anti-vaccination flirt, and conspiracy theorist — be the “most anti-science” president we’ve ever had? This week, we got a better sense of what his science policy is going to look like. The series of actions that unfolded reveal an administration, and a Republic-controlled Congress, with little regard for scientific consensus and expertise swinging at President Obama’s environmental legacy. Here’s a recap

Quote:When President Barack Obama took the White House in 2008, his knowledge of science was admittedly limited, but his interest in it wasn’t. Within days of his election, he began selecting the scientists and tech wonks for his science advisory board, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The OSTP was fully staffed within months, and became “the most active in history, starting 34 studies of subjects as varied as advanced manufacturing and cybersecurity,” according to The New York Times. The office also advised Obama on relevant budgets, technological advancements, and policy goals, and organized an annual science fair for youngsters that produced reliably fun, nerdy videos in which, for instance, a student fires a marshmallow cannon inside the State Dining Room of the White House.

Today, nearly three months into Donald Trump’s presidency, OSTP is nearly empty. According to a report last week in The New York Times, the 24-person staff of the chief technology officer “has been virtually deleted,” and scores of career OSTP staffers have departed since Obama skipped town.

Quote:At the EPA, the administration has  ordered that "all contract and grant awards be temporarily suspended, effective immediately," ProPublica writers Andrew Revkin and Jesse Eisinger report, quoting an internal EPA email they obtained. Myron Ebell, the climate change denier who led the Trump team's EPA transition and directs the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, confirmed the suspension, Revkin and Eisenger report.

If you can prevent public agencies from conducting vital functions, "you can say they don't do anything, and justify cutting their funding." That's potentially a massive blow to the agency's core functions, says Patty Lovera, assistant director of the environmental watchdog group Food & Water Watch. "The EPA's not necessarily out there running a bulldozer to clean up a toxic site," she says. Superfund, an EPA program responsible for cleaning up the nation's most contaminated land, is executed through contracts, she said.

The EPA turns to contractors for "tons of water stuff, too"—from monitoring water quality downstream from polluters to helping municipalities update water infrastructure to avoid toxins. "It's one thing to put a pause on new contracts so they can be reviewed, but to reach back and stop existing ones is a whole other can of worms," Lovera said.

Quote:Just before the Rio Earth summit 25 years ago, John Major, in whose cabinet I then served as environment secretary, made a bold prediction: reducing Britain’s carbon emissions in line with recommendations of climate science would not, he said, harm our economy: “Our initial measures ... will bring a worthwhile economic payoff to the country, to business and to ordinary people.”

This was a controversial statement at a time when solar energy, for example, was a costly technology better suited to spacecraft than British rooftops. And indeed the argument can still be heard that reducing greenhouse gas emissions will ruin our economies – even that it will return us to a pre-industrial living standard.

A quarter of a century later, the approach that we took has been richly vindicated. As research published on Monday by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit demonstrates, in that period the average Briton has grown richer faster than citizens of any other G7 nation; at the same time, his or her carbon footprint has fallen faster than in any other G7 nation. While it would be stretching reality to argue that Britain’s economic success has been driven by its climate change policies, no one can seriously argue any more that our climate policies have generated economic harm.

Quote:As President Donald Trump took office in late January, his administration began changing the language on government websites. Changes to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) pages were among the more notable modifications, including the deletion of "science" from the mission statement of the EPA's Office of Science and Technology Policy (OST).

Quote:Had the 2016 presidential election turned out differently, the commission's charter would likely have been renewed. But under President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, members arrived that morning fearing that their efforts to reform the field of forensic science would be cut short. Shortly after 9 a.m., Andrew Goldsmith, a career Justice Department attorney, delivered the bad news: The commission was coming to an end. Follow-up questions from a few commissioners revealed more bad news.

Efforts to improve forensic science and expert testimony, initiated under the previous administration, were now on hold. Kent Rochford, the acting director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the research arm of the Commerce Department, acknowledged that ongoing pilot studies into bite-mark and firearm analyses would not be completed. A representative from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy, Kira Antell, conceded that a project to create guidelines for expert forensic testimony had been paused as well. The message was clear: The era of independent scientific review of forensics is over.

Quote:It is beginning to look like President Donald Trump is willing to govern without any in-house science advisors, a decision which could hinder not only his agenda but also the White House’s ability to respond in times of crisis (see “Will Science Have a Seat at President Trump’s Table?”).
A report last week that the science division of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is now completely unstaffed is only the latest indication that the Trump White House is not concerned that science and technology experts be part of its day-to-day decision-making.

Quote:A majority of Republicans in a new survey think colleges and universities have a negative effect on the U.S. The Pew Research Center poll finds 58 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents think colleges and universities hurt the country. Just 36 percent of Republicans think they have a positive effect.

In contrast, a large majority of Democrats, 72 percent, say colleges and universities have a positive effect on the country. Overall, slightly more than half of the public, 55 percent, thinks colleges and universities help the U.S., according to the survey..

Quote:

• The president courts known anti-vaccine crackpots like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and makes the same kinds of pseudoscience claims about lifesaving immunizations that they do.
  
• RFK Jr. has seized on the attention, holding a press conference in February — with another anti-vaccine sympathizer Robert De Niro — to promote his well debunked theories about vaccine safety.
  
• There was even an anti-vaccine march on Washington.
  
• Meanwhile, vaccine skeptics have been persuading more parents in a number of states to refuse shots for their children.
  
• A July 24 study in JAMA Pediatrics shows that even a 5 percent reduction in vaccine coverage could spark a large measles outbreak.