BY HANK REICHMAN

President Donald Trump has said many, many moronic things, but his tweet this weekend about the raging wildfires in California must be one of his dumbest.  “California wildfires are being magnified & made so much worse by the bad environmental laws which aren’t allowing massive amount of readily available water to be properly utilized,” he wrote. “It is being diverted into the Pacific Ocean.”

This is beyond stupid.  Firefighters haven’t been complaining about a lack of water, especially water “diverted” to the Pacific.  “The idea that there isn’t enough water is the craziest thing in the world,” said Peter Gleick, president emeritus of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security in Oakland. “There’s absolutely no shortage.”  As Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik pointed out, “Major reservoirs are near the worst fire zones; the Carr fire is near Lake Shasta and Whiskeytown Lake and the Mendocino Complex fire is near Clear Lake.  All are at or near their historical levels.”

Trump, of course, is less concerned with fire than he is with agribusiness profits. It’s big growers in California’s Central Valley, Hiltzik reminds readers, who have been “exercised about a plan announced last month by the California State Water Resources Control Board to step up water flows into the San Joaquin River, which eventually empties into the Pacific. The board is taking that step because so much water has been pumped into the valley at the expense of the river ecosystem that the state’s salmon fishery has been all but destroyed.”  Last month Republican congressman Jeff Denham hosted Trump Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, whose agency has obligingly attacked state water policies.  Denham has introduced federal legislation to override that decision.

And let’s not forget that California, with its allegedly “bad environmental laws,” isn’t the only place plagued by wildfire this summer.  Such fires have devastated Greece, driving people, not water, into the sea and leaving 91 dead.  More than fifty fires are devastating the countryside in Sweden.  And despite all that nice, fresh, cool water that Trump thinks Californians are dumping into the Pacific, ocean temperatures off the San Diego coast are the warmest in 102 years of measurements.  The problem is clearly not environmental laws, but climate change, which the idiot in the White House has repeatedly referred to as a “con job,” a “myth” and a “hoax.”

Far from a myth, climate change is a crisis about which “a proper state of panic is long overdue.”  “There is little doubt that climate change is behind the drying and warming conditions that underlie these more widespread and ferocious wildfires,” says leading climate scientist Michael Mann, a professor at Pennsylvania State University and a member of the AAUP’s Committee A.  “Without acting on the major underlying cause of these more widespread and intense wildfires–human caused climate change–we can expect them to only get worse.”

But, of course, Mann is an expert.  His opinion is informed by decades of study and research and by the consensus of the scientific community.  And that’s the point here.  One of Trumpism’s essential features is its belligerent rejection of expertise and its celebration of ignorance and bluster, especially the ignorant bluster of the idiot-in-chief.  Everyone is entitled to an opinion, of course, but all opinions are not equal.  This is why, as I and others have argued, academic freedom, unlike the broader intellectual freedom ensured by the “free marketplace of ideas,” is not unlimited.  As Jacob Levy has put it, academic freedom “is the professional ethic of a purposive community.”  Or, as Joan Scott has written, “Free speech makes no distinction about quality; academic freedom does.”

But, sadly, the administration’s war on expert opinion is not limited to Trump’s infantile twitterings.  Today the AAUP joined with the Union of Concerned Scientists and a broad variety of public health, science, conservation, and higher education organizations in signing a letter to Andrew Wheeler, Acting Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, urging him “to rescind the policy directive issued by former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt on October 31, 2017, which barred scientists who conduct EPA-funded research from serving on EPA federal advisory committees.”  The letter states,

By barring scientists who receive EPA research funding, the Directive disproportionately and predictably excludes highly qualified academic scientists—who rely on such funding to conduct research in the public interest—while favoring individuals who work for regulated industries. Far from advancing the agency’s mission, it undermines the agency’s ability to access the best scientific and technical expertise, damages the integrity of the scientific process at EPA, and undermines the agency’s ability to protect public health and the environment.

Here is the full text of the letter:

Dear Acting Administrator Wheeler, Acting Deputy Administrator Darwin, Principal Deputy Assistant Administrator Orme-Zavaleta, and Deputy Assistant Administrator Yamada:

The above-listed public-health, science, conservation, and higher-education organizations urge you to rescind the policy directive issued by former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt on October 31, 2017, which barred scientists who conduct EPA-funded research from serving on EPA federal advisory committees. The Pruitt Directive is a thinly-veiled attempt to skew the membership of EPA’s non-partisan and independent scientific advisory boards. By barring scientists who receive EPA research funding, the Directive disproportionately and predictably excludes highly qualified academic scientists—who rely on such funding to conduct research in the public interest—while favoring individuals who work for regulated industries. Far from advancing the agency’s mission, it undermines the agency’s ability to access the best scientific and technical expertise, damages the integrity of the scientific process at EPA, and undermines the agency’s ability to protect public health and the environment. Because the Pruitt Directive was adopted by the stroke of a pen, without any formal process, Acting Administrator Wheeler
can rescind it immediately.

Acting Administrator Wheeler stated in a recent address to staff that he is “ready to listen” and intends to “seek the facts” before reaching conclusions, but the Directive undermines those goals. By excluding leading scientists from service on EPA advisory committees without any legitimate basis, the Directive damages staff morale and isolates EPA from the scientific community. It also exposes the agency to costly litigation. Not only is the Directive itself currently the subject of several lawsuits, but any rules that EPA subsequently issues with input from an advisory committee that has a skewed membership will be legally vulnerable as well. This creates legal risk and uncertainty and wastes resources that should be directed to achieving the mission of the agency. Acting Administrator Wheeler should abandon this misguided policy and refocus on protecting the environment and ensuring that every American has access to clean air and water.

These are not merely abstract issues for our organizations and our millions of members and supporters. Because EPA’s scientific advisory committees play a critical role in the development of rules and standards to protect public health and the environment, the Directive’s weakening of these committees, and disruption of their work, poses a danger to the health of children, families, communities, and the environment. For example, the Directive has resulted in the dismissal of several leading air pollution scientists from the committee charged with supporting the development of new protections against deadly particle pollution. These vital protections were already overdue, and now may be further delayed, weakened, or undermined as a consequence of the Directive.

The Pruitt Directive is part of a troubling pattern of attacks on the scientific process during Administrator Pruitt’s time leading the EPA. Administrator Pruitt questioned the science of human-caused climate change and suggested that climate change is good because “humans have most flourished during . . . warming trends[.]” Under Pruitt, EPA also proposed to prohibit consideration of scientific studies that rely on confidential health data—a move that would weaken public health protection by excluding many foundational public health studies from consideration in the development of standards. To repair the damage done to the scientific process during Pruitt’s tenure, Acting Administrator Wheeler should restore the agency’s commitment to using the best science to inform its decisions. Promptly repealing the Pruitt Directive, and thereby reinstating the eligibility of top scientific researchers to serve on EPA
federal advisory committees, would represent a good start in a larger effort to right the ship at
EPA.

The Pruitt Directive has been strongly criticized by Republicans and Democrats alike. Christine Todd Whitman, former EPA Administrator under George W. Bush, said, “[t]here was nothing in my experience at the Agency that would have made me think we needed to enact this sort of makeover.”  A legal brief submitted by former leaders of EPA from both parties, who served in the agency under the Reagan, Clinton, and Obama Administrations, explains that the Directive “tries to solve a problem that does not exist” and “undermines EPA’s ability to base its decisions on the best available science while serving no countervailing purpose.”

The Directive is currently the subject of three active lawsuits, pending in U.S. district courts in Washington, D.C., New York, and Massachusetts. The states of Washington, California, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Oregon, as well as the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, have filed briefs in support of the challengers. They explain that the Directive “has significant, negative impacts on EPA’s ability to carry out its core mission, to the detriment of states, regulated entities, and the American people” and that it also harms public state university systems, which depend on EPA’s grant funding to conduct cutting-edge research on public health and the environment.

The longer the Pruitt Directive remains in place, the greater the damage it will do to the integrity of the scientific process. Unless it is rescinded, more top scientists will be removed from EPA’s advisory panels, more scientific research will be disrupted, and the scientific credibility of EPA will sink lower. We urge you to abandon this harmful policy and rededicate the agency to its core mission of using the best science to protect public health and the environment.

We would welcome the opportunity to discuss our concerns with the Pruitt Directive in person with you and your staff.

Signed,

Union of Concerned Scientists
Physicians for Social Responsibility
National Hispanic Medical Association
International Society for Children’s Health and the Environment
Natural Resources Defense Council
American Public Health Association
United Farm Workers
Farmworker Association of Florida
International Society for Environmental Epidemiology
Clean Air Task Force
Earthjustice
Breast Cancer Prevention Partners
Alaska Community Action on Toxics
American Association of University Professors
Buffalo River Watershed Alliance
Center for Biological Diversity
Center for Food Safety
Endocrine Society
Environmental Defense Fund
Environmental Protection Network
Sierra Club
Federation of American Scientists

UPDATE: Minutes after posting this, I went on Twitter and encountered this response to a tweet by Hiltzik promoting his article: “Last week I relocated my family because of the out-of-control laws of California. Trump’s tweet was completely accurate unlike your article that was completely inaccurate. Every winter and spring we watch all the rain much of the rain water from the mountains wash into the ocean.”  To which Hiltzik replied, “So you live in the mountains and watch the water go into the ocean? Doesn’t sound . . . plausible”  Apparently, the “out-of-control” law is the law of gravity.  You can’t make this stuff up!

SECOND UPDATE (August 8): Trump’s Commerce Secretary, the astonishingly corrupt Wilbur Ross, today followed up on his boss’s stupidity by ordering the National Marine Fisheries Service and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which fall under Ross’s jurisdiction, to “facilitate access to the water needed to fight the ongoing wildfires affecting the State of California.” The order adds, “Consistent with the emergency consultation provisions under the Endangered Species Aact, Federal agencies may use any water as necessary to protect life and property in the affected areas,” which means they can override protections of fish habitats.

“Secretary Ross’s directive is nothing more than a smokescreen designed to weaken these protections that NMFS’s scientists determined are necessary to keep these native fish from going extinct,” Kate Poole of the Natural Resources Defense Council said after the statement was issued. “It’s almost like the extinction of these creatures is their real goal, so that they no longer have to leave any water in rivers, but can divert it all to corporate agribusiness.”

Once again Michael Hiltzik has the story at the Los Angeles Times: http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-wildfires-20180808-story.html.  “At this point, water supply hasn’t affected any of our operations,” Mike Mohler, deputy director of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, told Hiltzik. The key factors in the intensity and spread of the fires are, as before, “hot and dry weather conditions.”