Posted on 01/09/2018 1:04:56 PM PST by nickcarraway
Anne Idsal, a 34-year-old Baylor graduate whose family has long worked in GOP politics, said she’s unsure of the extent that humans impact climate change.
When the Trump administration announced the appointment of Anne Idsal as the new regional EPA administrator, Adrian Shelley, the director of Public Citizen Texas, had just one thought: Who? “That name meant nothing to me,” said Shelley, who has worked on environmental issues in Texas for the past six years.
Idsal is something of an unknown quantity for many, though she comes from a well-connected Texas political family with ties to the Republican guard and has worked at a high level in state government for years. Her mother, Katharine Armstrong, served on the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission under George W. Bush; her grandmother, Anne Armstrong, was an ambassador to the United Kingdom during the Ford administration. The Armstrong Ranch, where former vice president Dick Cheney blasted Harry Whittington with a shotgun during a dove hunt in 2006, is hallowed ground for Republican politicians. Idsal, 34, graduated from Baylor Law School in 2010, joined the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) as assistant general counsel that year and later worked as the chief clerk for George P. Bush at the General Land Office.
Idsal is taking the reins of EPA Region 6, which includes Texas, four other states and 66 tribal nations, as the agency undergoes internal turmoil. In a push to “put America first,” EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has begun implementing President Trump’s deregulatory agenda, rolling back Obama-era environmental protections, opening up federal lands for drilling and downgrading consequences for polluters. On climate change, Pruitt has claimed there is a “debate” that’s “far from settled,” echoing Trump, who once tweeted that climate change is a Chinese hoax.
The administration’s zeal for attacking science has left many rank-and-file staff at the EPA disillusioned and demoralized, and they’re leaving the agency in droves. According to an investigation by the New York Times and ProPublica, more than 700 employees — of whom 200 are scientists — have left the agency in the first nine months of Trump’s presidency.
In an interview with the Observer on her second day on the job, Idsal mostly echoed Pruitt’s positions. On climate change, she said that there is “still a lot of ongoing science” and that the “climate has been changing since the dawn of time, well before humans ever inhabited the Earth.”
“I think it’s possible that humans have some type of impact on climate change,” she said. “I just don’t know the extent of that.”
Asked if such positions may further demoralize staff in the office, Idsal said “the morale in Region 6 is strong” and that “if there are any morale issues,” it’ll be handled “in a very positive way quickly.”
“Folks here have a smile on their faces,” she said.
Anne Idsal, EPA Region 6 administrator LINKEDIN At TCEQ, Idsal said there was a focus on bringing polluting entities into compliance instead of taking “punitive actions for punitive action’s sake,” an approach she hopes to bring to her new job. “I want to find a way to [say] ‘yes’ in every possible situation where we’ve got the legal justification to do so,” she said. “But recognizing that we sometimes have to enforce because that is your only avenue.”
For environmentalists looking to work with Idsal, such statements don’t bode well. A report from the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project found that in the first six months under Trump, the EPA collected 60 percent less in fines compared to the same time period in the three previous administrations. Luke Metzger, executive director of Environment Texas, said it was “alarming” that in 2017 Idsal doesn’t believe climate change is human-caused. “She acknowledges not having a technical background, making it even more important that she listen to the scientists and let them do their jobs,” he said.
Perhaps she can believe in the easter bunny and the tooth fairy too
Stopped reading right there. Utter commie BS.
The question involves bigger factors than what science as we know it can possibly scrutinize. We do have excellent reason to believe that other factors can greatly drown out anthropogenic factors.
Its when there is a blind trust in the "scientific community" that things go south. A few hours with the available non-processed and non-"normalized" datasets is all that is needed to determine there is insufficient data to support the hypothesis that humans are affecting a change in mean global temps.
attacking “what passes for” science
The author is a lying sack o' dogturds.
The earlier line of scientific thought that acknowledged the power of chaos (the butterfly that causes the tornado) was much saner. We really can’t know. Other than doing obviously bad things to the earth (like polluting it so much that we’re obviously wallowing in it to our own ill health) we can’t predict.
She seems and looks like an idiot. If you are still on the fence with this scam, then we dont need this twit.
She should have broke into song:
I believe that for every drop of rain that falls..
A flower grows.
One can finger the scam as a scam without deeming the question to be soluble by human methods.
Maybe Trump had her say that to weed them out.
Is he that dastardly?
I believe for every breath we take
Up springs a rose....
It couldn’t be worse than warmism as we have it now.
I thought her response to the query put forth by the Texas Observer reporter was fairly mild and sane:
On climate change, she said that there is “still a lot of ongoing science” and that the “climate has been changing since the dawn of time, well before humans ever inhabited the Earth.”
“I think it’s possible that humans have some type of impact on climate change,” she said. “I just don’t know the extent of that.”
I think it is possible that I could change the pH of the ocean by spitting into it, I just don't know the extent of the change (e.g., would the change be the number 1 preceded by a gazillion zeroes and a decimal place, or would the number of zeroes be a googleplex cubed ... or some similar number - approaching zero. I just don't know the extent of this possibility).
It seemed like a fair PC reply - without smacking the reporter on the side of the head and telling them to stop asking stupid questions.
Don’t drink the Kool-Aid!
“I think it’s possible that humans have some type of impact on climate change,” she said. “I just don’t know the extent of that.”
Sounds reasonable to me.
Why is Trump hiring a George P. Bush “Republican”?
Minimally if at all and locally, not worldwide. Example: LA smog is not found in NYC, Brussels or Brisbane. Beijing pollution is not found in Dusseldorf, Greensboro or Murmansk.
LA smog is weather
Measurable change in the average temperature over 100 years is climate change.
Determining the operative force producing a change to be man will be difficult. We have no human reason for the desertification of North Africa. We have no manmade causation for the desertification of Uzbekistan and kazakhstan that once had very large human cities and populations.
What we have is liars, cheaters and swindlers and great unwashed masses of ignorant and gullible people
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