The country’s first group of scientific advisers announced Thursday that it would make an independent and accelerated review of the last climate science. He will do so in order to influence the abrogation provided for by the Trump administration of the government’s determination in 2009 that greenhouse gas emissions harm human health and the environment.
The decision of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine at the self -financing of the study is a gap of their typical practice to respond to requests from government agencies or the congress to obtain advice. Academies intend to release it publicly in September, in time to inform the decision of the Environmental Protection Agency on the so-called “conclusion of endangerment”, they said in a prepared statement.
“It is essential that the development of federal policies is informed by the best scientific evidence available,” said Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences. “Decades of research and climatic data have given an extended understanding of how greenhouse gases affect the climate. We undertake this new examiner of the latest climate science in order to provide the most recent evaluation to political decision -makers and to the public. ”
Academies are private non -profit institutions which operate under a Congress Charter in 1863, signed by President Abraham Lincoln, ordering them to provide an independent objective analysis and advice to inform public policy decisions.
The Trump administration’s decision to cancel the endangered conclusion, announced last month, would eliminate the legal under -tension of the most important actions that the federal government has taken on climate change – regulation of carbon pollution of motor vehicles and power plants under the Clean Air Act. Since he assumed his role, the administrator of the EPA, Lee Zeldin, clearly indicated that he intended to repeal the climatic rules which were put in place under the Biden administration, but his work will be much easier with the elimination of the conclusion of endangerment.
The EPA based its proposal mainly on a close interpretation of the agency’s legal authority, but the agency also cited uncertainties in science, highlighting a report published on the same day by the Ministry of Energy which was written by a quintet Port of skeptics well known to the general public on climate change. The administration gave a short window of opportunity – 30 days – so that the public responds to his proposal for endangering and reporting the doe on climate science.
The EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comments on the announcement by national academies. Critics of the Trump administration approach applauded the decision of the scientific panel.
“I think that national academies have identified a very fundamental need that is not satisfied, which is the need for independent and disinterested advice from what science tells us,” said Bob Sussman, who was an assistant director of EPA in the Clinton administration and was senior advisor to the agency during the Obama administration.
Earlier Thursday, before the announcement of the National Academies, Sussman published a blog on the website of the Institute of Environmental Law calling for a “Blue-Ribbon review” of science around the conclusion of endangerment. Sussman noted the examination of the state of climate sciences that national academies led in 2001 at the request of the administration of President George W. Bush. Since then, academies have conducted numerous studies on the aspects of climate change, including the development of a “workforce lend to climate”, how to fuel the lasting AI and emerging technologies to eliminate carbon from the atmosphere, for example.
National academies announced in 2023 that they developed a rapid response capacity to solve the many emerging scientific policy problems with which the nation was confronted. The first project on which they worked was an assessment of the state of science around diagnostics for avian flu.
Andrew Dessler, director of the Texas Center for Extreme Weather at Texas A & M University, said the new controversy that the Trump administration had aroused around climate science was an appropriate subject for an accelerated effort of national academies.
“National academies [were] Established exactly to do things like this-to answer questions of scientific importance for the government, “he said.” This is what the DOE should have done from the start, rather than hiring five people who represent a tiny minority of the scientific community and have opinions with whom no one else agrees. »»
Drawing is carrying out an effort to coordinate an response from the scientific community to the DEE report, which would also be subject to EPA. He said he had heard around 70 academics wishing to participate after calling on the Bluesky social media network. He said that work will continue because he seems to have a slightly different objective of the announced examination of national academies, which does not mention the report of the DOE but speaks of focusing on scientific evidence on the misdeeds of greenhouse gas emissions that have emerged since 2009, the year when the conclusion of endangerment was adopted by EPA.
This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.
