The Trump administration will put a fox in every henhouse, from the Goldman Sachs execs who’ll run the treasury to the working conditions repeat offender who’ll run the Department of Labor to the public school abolitionist who’ll run the Department of Education, but when it comes to climate and energy, the Trump administration is pulling out all the stops.
The EPA will be run by an unabashed climate change denier, while the Department of Energy transition team is being led by Thomas Pyle, a Koch coal lobbyist.
Pyle and his gang have sent the Department of Energy a memo demanding the names of government contractors and employees involved in climate negotiations, clean energy initiatives, portending a political purge of DoE employees who favor an evidence-based approach to climate, rather than a hydrocarbonist ideological approach.
This played out for more than a decade in Canada, under Stephen Harper’s Petro-Tory regime, and it was fucking ugly. Canada has the world’s dirtiest oil, but its carbon crimes are only a fraction of America’s, and the damage that hydrocarbonism could do in America over the next four years is frankly terrifying.
“This feels like the first draft of an eventual political enemies list,” said a Department of Energy employee, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisal by the Trump transition team, told Reuters. “When Donald Trump said he wanted to drain the swamp it apparently was just to make room for witch hunts and it’s starting here at the DOE and our 17 national labs.”But what is different this time, Yale University environmental historian Paul Sabin told the Washington Post, is Trump’s request for so many specific names in an era when people are easily tracked down in “a systematic way.”
Trump team’s ‘intrusive’ memo alarms DOE climate scientists
[Rowena Lindsay/Christian Science Monitor]
(Image: Gage Skidmore, CC-BY-SA)