The Trump White House plans to create a committee that aims to contradict the Trump administration’s own repeated conclusions that climate change is harming the planet and poses a national security risk, The Washington Post reports.
The National Security Council initiative would include scientists who deny the scientific consensus on the impact of climate change and will reassess the Trump administration’s intelligence community’s repeated findings that climate change poses a severe risk to the country.
Unlike a formal advisory committee, the group would not be subject to public disclosure rules.
The move comes after Trump was “upset” that his administration issued a dire National Climate Assessment, which the must be published by law, in November, deputy national security adviser Charles Kupperman said according to The Post.
Panel was planned by notorious climate science denier:
The new plan is a revised version of National Security Council senior director William Happer. Happer headed a group called the CO2 Coalition and previously received $170,000 from the Mercer Family Foundation and more than $33,000 from the Charles Koch Institute.
In a 2014 interview with CNBC, Happer said the “demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler,” adding that “carbon dioxide is actually a benefit to the world, and so were the Jews.”
Happer insisted that CO2 was beneficial to the earth repeatedly as a speaker, including at a 2016 policy summit funded by the conservative Heritage Foundation.
“We’re doing our best to try and counter this myth that CO2 is a dangerous pollutant,” he said. “It’s not a pollutant at all. . . . We should be telling the scientific truth, that more CO2 is actually a benefit to the earth.”
Trump wants to contradict military warnings:
“In 2003, the Pentagon commissioned a report to examine how an abrupt change in climate would affect the country’s defense capabilities: Its authors concluded that it ‘should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a U.S. national security concern,’” The Post reported. “Last year, a military-funded study warned sea level rise and other climate impacts could make more than a thousand low-lying islands in the Pacific Ocean ‘uninhabitable’ by midcentury, including an atoll where a missile defense site is located.”
Just last month, Trump’s own national intelligence director warned that “climate hazards” including extreme weather, wildfires, droughts and acidifying oceans are worsening, “threatening infrastructure, health, and water and food security,” The Post added.
“I never thought I would live to see the day in the United States where our own White House is attacking the very science agencies that can help the president understand and manage the climate risks to security of today and tomorrow,” retired Rear Adm. David Titley, a former Oceanographer of the Navy and chief operating officer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations, told The Post. “Such attacks are un-American.”
