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babylonsister

(171,081 posts) Mon Jan 27, 2020, 09:01 AM Jan 2020

New Emails Reveal that the Trump Administration Manipulated Wildfire Science to Promote Logging

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2020/01/new-emails-reveal-that-the-trump-administration-manipulated-wildfire-science-to-promote-logging/

January 26, 2020
New Emails Reveal that the Trump Administration Manipulated Wildfire Science to Promote Logging
The director of the US Geological Survey asked scientists to “gin up” emissions figures for him.
Emily Holden
Jimmy Tobias
This piece was originally published in the Guardian and appears here as part of our Climate Desk Partnership.

Political appointees at the Interior Department have sought to play up climate pollution from California wildfires while downplaying emissions from fossil fuels as a way of promoting more logging in the nation’s forests, internal emails obtained by the Guardian reveal.

The messaging plan was crafted in support of Donald Trump’s pro-industry arguments for harvesting more timber in California, which he says would thin forests and prevent fires—a point experts refute.

The emails show officials seeking to estimate the carbon emissions from devastating 2018 fires in California so they could compare them to the carbon footprint of the state’s electricity sector and then publish statements encouraging cutting down trees.

The records offer a look behind the scenes at how Trump and his appointees have tried to craft a narrative that forest protection efforts are responsible for wildfires, including in California, even as science shows fires are becoming more intense largely because of climate change.

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“The Trump administration and the interior department are pushing mystical theories that are false in order to justify gutting public land protections to advance their pro-industry and lobbyist dominated agenda.”