US president Donald Trump will honour his campaign pledge to pull the US out of the Paris climate agreement and defund UN climate programmes, a former adviser to the new administration has said. Myron Ebell served as head of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) transition team from early September until 19 January, when he helped to draft an advisory action plan on how to implement Trump’s campaign promises. At a press briefing held by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) and the Foreign Press Association (FPA) in London today, Ebell outlined Trump’s “very clear” promises on energy and the environment that he is convinced the new president will honour. —Argus Media News, 30 January 2017
A video of the full press conference with Myron Ebell organised by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) and the Foreign Press Association (FPA) is available here. —GWPF TV, 30 January 2017
President Trump’s fossil fuel policy U-turn will benefit developing nations and the fuel poor. That’s according to Myron Ebell, former Head of President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Transition Team, who told ELN he expected the President to follow through on his promise to pull out of the Paris Agreement. Speaking at a press conference earlier today, he said: “I think that this is a very hopeful sign for the world. Not only is the US changing direction but I think it offers hope for a brighter future for people all around the world particularly those in developing countries who do not have access to modern energy or have very limited access to modern energy.” –Jonny Bairstow, Energy News Live, 30 January 2017
United Nations climate chief Patricia Espinosa has warned US President Donald Trump not to pull out of the Paris climate accord. “Ultimately, this is about the competitiveness of the United States,” Espinosa, a former foreign minister who heads the Bonn-based UN Climate Change Secretariat, told dpa in an interview. “We do not know what he will do – all we know so far is that his stance differs from that of the Obama administration,” Espinosa said. —Deutsche Press Agentur, 28 January 2017
The president also must believe that scientific evidence is useful in setting government policy. But AAAS CEO Rush Holt is worried that the new Trump administration doesn’t subscribe to that condition. And scientists are partly to blame for what he sees as the growing devaluation of evidence by U.S. policymakers, Holt suggested this past Saturday in remarks at the winter meeting of the American Physical Society in Washington, D.C. “How did we get to this point?” says Holt, a physicist who served 16 years in Congress before taking the top job at AAAS (which publishes ScienceInsider) in 2015. “Too often, we scientists have presented the evidence in a way that was condescending and hierarchical. We might say, ‘Let me try to explain this to you. Maybe even you can understand this.’ And that is not very effective. So we are partly to blame.” –Jeffrey Mervis, Science Mag, 30 January 2017
