We’ve seen this obsession on numerous (pun intended) occasions since his inauguration. He enlisted members of his administration to lie about the size of his inauguration crowds. We saw him use numbers last April as a reason to initially refuse the Grand Princess to dock on American shores, explaining,
I like the numbers where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship.
Instead of 25 million tests, let’s say we did 10 million tests. We’d look like we were doing much better because we’d have far fewer cases. You understand that.
Yes, we absolutely understand that. It’s nuts. It’s like saying that if women used fewer home pregnancy tests, they’d have fewer children.
These are all well-known examples of Trump’s efforts to cook the books. What’s less well-known (at least to me) is just how pervasive his numbers game has been. A recent study by Huffpost Highline details the Trump administration’s deliberate disappearance, distortion, and destruction of data in every corner of the U.S. government, including climate change. It’s a long read, fleshed out with hyperlinks, that covers the pandemic, climate change, vulnerable populations, pollution, science, food, conservation, and the census. I strongly recommend it. Here are some startling highlights as they relate to climate change.
METHANE EMISSIONS
Although it dissipates faster than carbon dioxide, during its first 20 years in the atmosphere methane is at least 86 times as damaging as CO2. The EPA estimates that the oil and gas industry is responsible for about 30% of methane emissions. Indeed, methane is the primary component of natural gas. The Obama administration sought data from these industries to determine how to reduce methane emissions, initially focusing on new and modified facilities, and later on existing ones. According to Huffpost Highline:
Two days after Donald Trump was elected president, Barack Obama's Environmental Protection Agency began the process of gathering wide-ranging data from about 15,000 owners and operators of oil and natural gas facilities. Earlier that year, the EPA had introduced regulations on methane emissions at new or modified oil and gas operations. This data was intended to provide the basis for regulating emissions at existing operations, which produce far more methane.
Enter Scott Pruitt, Trump’s new EPA administrator and the former Oklahoma attorney general, who in March 2017 withdrew Obama’s request for data. As a result
A 2018 study found that the EPA may underestimate the industry's methane emissions by as much as 60 percent. Trump’s EPA has launched its own programs to collect information from the industry, but companies are not required to participate, and if they do, they only need to report successful efforts to reduce methane emissions.
FUEL ECONOMY AND EMISSIONS STANDARDS
Obama’s EPA and Department of Transportation jointly embarked on a plan to cut emissions from new cars and light trucks in half by 2025. Per Huffpost Highline:
The EPA described the program as “the most significant federal action ever taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve fuel economy.”
In 2018, Trump’s EPA rolled back the fuel standards, reducing efficiency from 54 MPG to 37 MPG, claiming that its statistics demonstrated the new rule would prevent nearly 12,700 deaths in car accidents. Per Huffpost Highline:
The calculations were chock-full of errors that skewed the outcome to Trump's benefit. A group of prominent economists described the analysis as being "at odds with basic economic theory and empirical studies." Together with DOT officials, Trump appointees at the EPA had blocked the agency's engineers from contributing to the study, The Atlantic later reported. When EPA staffers warned the White House about problems with the analysis, their criticisms were ignored.
The purported economic benefits were also manufactured:
Rather than the massive benefit claimed in the draft, the final version projects that Trump's rollback could actually cost the economy as much as $22 billion, as compared to the Obama-era standards…. The Union of Concerned Scientists said…the new analysis added $27 billion in savings under the Trump rule by inflating the "cost of congestion"—an estimate of traffic's negative economic impact—under the Obama standards.
CLIMATE CHANGE MODELS
According to The New York Times, in 2019, Trump’s Director of the U.S. Geological Survey ordered its staff to use climate models that project data only until 2040, rather than through 2100, as had been normally agreed. This seemingly innocuous date change is critically important, because the most adverse effects of climate change are not expected to be felt until after 2050. Thus, scientists fear the new models will give an overly optimistic projection of climate change. Moreover, as Huffpost Highline notes:
Decision-makers such as resource managers, infrastructure and city planners, emergency response professionals, elected officials, farmers and the public rely on USGS, the sole science agency for the Department of the Interior, to produce information that provides the scientific foundation for planning around environmental threats to lives and livelihoods.
COST BENEFIT ANALYSIS
The U.S. measures the environmental, economic, and public health damages associated with emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, something called the “social cost of carbon.” When Obama left office, his administration had calculated that cost at $40 per metric ton of carbon emitted. But soon after Trump took office, Huffpost Highline says he signed
an executive order that scrapped the Obama-era calculation, putting the economic harm of emitting climate-warming carbon dioxide far lower, at between $1 and $7 per ton. A July report by the Government Accountability Office determined that Trump’s calculations of the social cost of carbon are about seven times lower than previous federal estimates. And while Obama-era estimates placed future climate damages at $82 per ton of carbon by 2050, Trump’s calculation put it at just $11, the report found.
Why the huge discrepancy? Because the lower number allows the Trump administration to argue that the costs of reducing emissions outweighs the benefits to coastal ecosystems, private property, the food supply, and public health, and that therefore, the rollback of environmental regulations and standards is justified. It’s cooking the data to give the patina of “science” to administrative regulatory decisions that prioritize economic interests above all others.
As the Huffpost piece chronicles, scientific data has been distorted, disappeared, and destroyed all across the governmental landscape. In the case of climate data, peer-reviewed data has been either eliminated or discredited and politicized data has been substituted in its stead. This cooked data is the secret ingredient in the sausage-making approval process for pipelines, drilling operations, power plants, and transportation systems like highways and airports. It is the secret sauce that allows the Trump administration to ignore environmental and climate threats when deciding where federal dollars in subsidies and investments will be directed and where they will be withheld. This is the policy legacy of science denial. As Huffpost Highline concludes
When more than a dozen federal agencies published a sobering 1,600-page report in November 2018 that warned of the dire threat of global climate change…Trump flatly denied the science: “I don’t believe it,” he told reporters.
Huffpost puts it bluntly and without sex appeal:
The meticulous assembly of numbers is one of the government’s most overlooked functions, but it’s also one of the most vital. Federal statistics inform the administration about what problems have arisen, who is in distress, and where resources need to go. Citizens aggregate themselves in public data—forcing the state to heed them when individually they might be muted or ignored, and holding officials accountable if their needs aren’t met. By gutting the collection of federal statistics, the Trump administration is burning away the government’s capacity to regulate. By attacking numeracy, it is attacking democracy.
And, of course, by attacking climate science in particular, the administration is attacking every living creature on the planet. But so long as this president is in charge of the numbers, the rest of us are forced to eat his toxic statistical soup. And I ask myself, “What’s that smell?” Is it the smell of numbers cooking, statistics burning, or is it the smell of the climate fire we are failing so miserably to extinguish? I think it’s all of the above.
Keep it real! And wear your damn mask!
Marilyn
From today's paper: "The Trump administration has also appointed Jason Richwine — pushed out of a conservative think tank for writing that Mexican and other Latino immigrants have lower IQs than white people — to the National Institute of Standards and Technology". Now where would you get the idea that he would cook the numbers?
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