Two Reading Tips - EPA Climate Change Report And William Barr's History Misleading Congress With A Summary

This post offers an introduction to two articles that I think are worth reading.  One is about an EPA report on economic impacts of Climate Change and how we can reduce them.  The other gives some background on William Barr and how he mischaracterized to Congress an internal Justice Department memo in 1989.

The Climate Change one isn't news to people immersed in the topic, but adds the weight of Trump's EPA giving the warning. And it's something to pass on to skeptics.   The Barr piece is important context ( that I haven't seen elsewhere)  for his summary of the Mueller Report

Part 1:  Climate Change

Even when the fire is raging and police and firefighters issue mandatory evacuation orders, there are people who refuse to leave their homes.   Climate change happens more gradually than raging wildfires, but the devastation is more extensive and the damage will continue to increase if we don't slow things down.   Here's an LA Times article* about a recent EPA report on the future economic impact of climate change and how a carbon pricing scheme could reduce the future impacts by half.

"By the end of the century, the manifold consequences of unchecked climate change will cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars per year, according to a new study by scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency.
Those costs will come in multiple forms, including water shortages, crippled infrastructure and polluted air that shortens lives, according to the study in Monday’s edition of Nature Climate Change. No part of the country will be untouched, the EPA researchers warned.
However, they also found that cutting emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, and proactively adapting to a warming world, would prevent a lot of the damage, reducing the annual economic toll in some sectors by more than half."

This is from the Trump administration's EPA!!!!!  (Do I need more than the exclamation points, each of which represent another outrageous decision by the EPA to loosen standards that help individual companies and compromise the future for the rest of us?)

Who could sit around, unconcerned about climate change?  I ask that question daily.  Here's my current version of the answer:

• people who don't know - they only know what's on the news and the media's 'balanced' coverage which gives the 1% deniers equal time with the 99% of scientists who know that climate change is real, gives them a false sense that it's still up for debate
• people who have a vested interest in not knowing - they have corporations or jobs or investments in those corporations that are maintaining their current lifestyle  (this includes politicians who get significant funding from those oil and coal interests)
• people who don't care - they think that they will be gone before the real impacts hit and they don't have kids or grandkids who will be affected; or they, for whatever reasons, can't concern themselves with the fate of others

I'm convinced that Climate Change is the most serious challenge to human existence (both in terms of surviving, and for those who survive, living in a world with a regular life with access to food, housing,  and safety.)   That's why I belong to Citizens Climate Lobby and why our local chapter was pleased that we got the Anchorage Assembly to pass a resolution endorsing the current Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act.  It's true, the Assembly's resolution, by itself, does little.  But as part of the CCL's webpage of all the other endorsers, it's like a signature on a petition with many, many others.  It's telling legislators who are concerned about the politics of Climate Change, that there are many people and organizations out there that have their backs.

In any case, I'd recommend reading the LA Times article so when you talk to deniers or avoiders you have data to push them closer to understanding why we can't dawdle on this.

*Note:  There are two LA Times articles.  One was a last week in something called LA Times Science Now and it includes a useful chart.  The other is a shortened version in today's regular LA Times.

As if that weren't enough for one post, here's another piece to help people understand William Barr and his history of writing summaries for Congress.


2.  William Barr's Past Summarizing For Congress

Just Security  has an article on a 1989 situation where then Attorney General William Barr misled Congress with a summary of a Justice Department document that, when finally made public, showed Barr's deception. An excerpt:

"Members of Congress asked to see the full legal opinion. Barr refused, but said he would provide an account that “summarizes the principal conclusions.” Sound familiar? In March 2019, when Attorney General Barr was handed Robert Mueller’s final report, he wrote that he would “summarize the principal conclusions” of the special counsel’s report for the public.
When Barr withheld the full OLC opinion in 1989 and said to trust his summary of the principal conclusions, Yale law school professor Harold Koh wrote that Barr’s position was “particularly egregious.” Congress also had no appetite for Barr’s stance, and eventually issued a subpoena to successfully wrench the full OLC opinion out of the Department.
What’s different from that struggle and the current struggle over the Mueller report is that we know how the one in 1989 eventually turned out."

It got Barr off the hook in the short term and he was no longer Attorney General when it was finally made public.  My experience is that people tend to use the same strategies that served them in the past.  If Barr can keep the Mueller Report hidden until after the 2020 election, he'll have done his job.  Compare this good-old-boys-protecting-their-own behavior with the tell-it-like-it-is language of people like Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez!

We need to see the Mueller Report!  

Remember, you're not helpless.  You have power.  You can let your Congressional Rep and your Senators see these documents and let them know how you feel.  No, your one contact (phone, email, or mail) won't change things, but along with thousands of others, it will.  (The links help you connect with your members of Congress.)