White House Censors State Department Official’s Congressional Testimony on Climate Change

The Trump administration’s assault on science and its
refusal to take climate change seriously continue with an effort to censor a
government intelligence analyst to prevent his testimony about
climate change from entering into the congressional record.

The White House tried to alter testimony about the perilous effects
of climate change by Rod Schoonover, a senior analyst at the State Department’s
Bureau of Intelligence and Research, delivered this week to the House
Intelligence Committee. The State Department did not modify that testimony per
the White House’s request, but according to The
New York Times, White House officials refused
to approve Schoonover’s testimony for entry into the permanent
Congressional Record. The newspaper called this “a highly unusual move.”

Schoonover wrote
that he had prepared the testimony to “provide clear, objective, and
independent analysis to policymakers to advance U.S. national security
objectives.” The bottom line, he said, is that the “[f]undamental
characteristics of the global climate are moving outside the bounds experienced
in human history and there is uncertainty on how some aspects of the climate
will evolve.”

He added that climate change “will have wide-ranging
implications for U.S. national security over the next 20 years through global
perturbations, increased risk of political instability, heightened tensions
between countries for resources, a growing number of climate-linked humanitarian
crises, emergent geostrategic competitive domains, and adverse effects on
militaries.”

Emails reviewed by the Times showed that the analysis—prepared by an actual scientist and professor in chemistry
and biochemistry—was not in line with the Trump administration’s policy
objectives.

“I have never heard of basic facts being deleted from or
blocked from testimony,” American Enterprise Institute resident scholar Norman Ornstein
told the Times. It’s worth
highlighting that the American Enterprise Institute is a staunchly conservative
think tank.

The Washington Post,
which first reported on the White
House’s attempt to censor Schoonover’s testimony, said the White House’s
Office of Legislative Affairs, Office of Management and Budget, and National
Security Council all took issue with parts of the analyst’s report. Specifically,
the Post said, White House officials
had a problem with the testimony’s citations, which included such radical
agencies as NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

One of the officials who disputed Schoonover’s conclusions
is William Happer, a National Security Council senior director. Happer is an outspoken
climate change denier who once compared warnings about the dangers of
carbon dioxide emissions to “the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler.” As
Splinter’s Sophie Weiner previously pointed out, much of the retired Princeton
professor’s research has been funded by oil companies.

Of course officials like Happer had a problem with the
science. Per the Post:

The document sounds the alarms on several fronts, outlining
two dozen different ways that “climate-linked stresses” could affect human
society. It identifies nine tipping points that could transform the Earth’s
system, including “rapid melting in West Antarctic or Greenland ice masses”
along with “rapid die-offs of many critically important species, such as coral
or insects” and a “massive release of carbon” from methane that is now frozen
in the earth. It warns that since scientists have not been able to calculate
the likelihood of these thresholds being reached, “crossing them is possible
over any future timeframe.”

The prepared testimony also notes that 18 of the past 20 years
have ranked as the warmest on record, according to NASA’s Goddard Institute for
Space Studies, “and the last five years have been the warmest five.”

In an interview
this week with Piers Morgan, after speaking at length with Prince Charles,
Trump likened climate change to a simple matter of the weather. “I believe that
there’s a change in weather and I think it changes both ways,” Trump said. “Don’t
forget it used to be called global warming. That wasn’t working. Then it was
called climate change. Now it’s actually called extreme weather, because with
extreme weather, you can’t miss.”

Earlier, he claimed that the U.S. is “among the cleanest
climates there are, based on all statistics.” As the Post noted, the U.S. is the second-largest emitter of carbon
dioxide, behind China.