3 House GQP (Who Have Received $550,000 In Oil/Gas/Coal Money) Attacking National Academies Of Sciences

Soon after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released a plan to revoke its legal authority to regulate climate pollutants last summer, the nation’s most respected scientific organization fast-tracked a review of the latest evidence on whether greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare. Now Republican leaders of the House science committee—who have received generous campaign donations from the fossil-fuel industry—are questioning the “formation, funding and expedited timeline” of the expert committee that reviewed the evidence of climate pollution’s harms for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. The Trump administration said its proposed repeal was justified because the EPA had “unreasonably” analyzed the scientific record in making its 2009 endangerment finding, the legal basis for regulating emissions from vehicles and other climate-pollution sources under the Clean Air Act. Developments since then, the administration claimed, “cast significant doubt on the reliability of the findings.”

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The report aligns with conclusions from preeminent climate assessments that greenhouse gases are warming the Earth’s surface and changing the climate; that human activity and resulting climate change are harming health and welfare; and that unabated emissions will further alter the climate in ways that could trigger dangerous tipping points. Yet leaders of the GOP-run House Committee on Science, Space and Technology are casting doubt on the credibility of the nation’s premier science organization and its report. Over the past week, SST committee leaders sent two letters “raising serious concerns regarding independence and objectivity” to Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences, which funded and oversaw the consensus report. The letters also demanded reams of documents and correspondence with the institution’s donors to investigate “potential conflicts of interest.”

The academy panel was made up of people with a lot of background and expertise in evaluating climate science, drawn from industry as well as academics, said physicist Drew Shindell, a Duke University earth science professor and climate expert who contributed to the consensus report. “There was no disagreement about the overall conclusions,” said Shindell, who also worked on IPCC and NCA reports. Those much larger reports had far more authors who also agreed on the overall findings, he said, “because the science is very well established.”

The three Republican leaders of the SST committee who are questioning the objectivity of the National Academies have collectively received nearly $550,000 in donations from the oil and gas industry, campaign finance records show. After the Trump administration finalized its decision to repeal the groundbreaking tool to regulate climate pollution in February, SST committee Chair Brian Babin, R-Texas, called the move “a long-overdue step toward restoring the proper limits of federal regulatory authority.”

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24042026/gop-leaders-claim-national-academies-conflicts-of-interest/