Government Executive - Authors - Robinson Meyer

‘How Could the CDC Make That Mistake?’

Alexis C. Madrigal and Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic — Thu, 21 May 2020 12:00:00 -0400

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is conflating the results of two different types of coronavirus tests, distorting several important metrics and providing the country with an inaccurate picture of the state of the pandemic. We’ve learned that the CDC is making, at best, a debilitating mistake: combining test results that diagnose current coronavirus infections with test results that measure whether someone has ever had the virus. The upshot is that the government’s disease-fighting agency is overstating the country’s ability to test people who are sick with COVID-19. The agency confirmed to The Atlantic on Wednesday that it is mixing the results of viral and antibody tests, even though the two tests reveal different information and are used for different reasons.

This is not merely a technical error. States have set quantitative guidelines for reopening their economies based on these flawed data points.

Several states—including Pennsylvania, the site of one of the country’s largest outbreaks, as well as Texas, Georgia, and Vermont—are blending the data in the same way. Virginia likewise mixed viral and antibody test results until last week, but it reversed course and the governor apologized for the practice after it was covered by the Richmond Times-Dispatch and The Atlantic. Maine similarly separated its data on Wednesday; Vermont authorities claimed they didn’t even know they were doing this.

The widespread use of the practice means that it remains difficult to know exactly how much the country’s ability to test people who are actively sick with COVID-19 has improved.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Ashish Jha, the K. T. Li Professor of Global Health at Harvard and the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told us when we described what the CDC was doing. “How could the CDC make that mistake? This is a mess.”

Viral tests, taken by nose swab or saliva sample, look for direct evidence of a coronavirus infection. They are considered the gold standard for diagnosing someone with COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus: State governments consider a positive viral test to be the only way to confirm a case of COVID-19. Antibody tests, by contrast, use blood samples to look for biological signals that a person has been exposed to the virus in the past.

A negative test result means something different for each test. If somebody tests negative on a viral test, a doctor can be relatively confident that they are not sick right now; if somebody tests negative on an antibody test, they have probably never been infected with or exposed to the coronavirus. (Or they may have been given a false result—antibody tests are notoriously less accurate on an individual level than viral tests.) The problem is that the CDC is clumping negative results from both tests together in its public reporting.

Mixing the two tests makes it much harder to understand the meaning of positive tests, and it clouds important information about the U.S. response to the pandemic, Jha said. “The viral testing is to understand how many people are getting infected, while antibody testing is like looking in the rearview mirror. The two tests are totally different signals,” he told us. By combining the two types of results, the CDC has made them both “uninterpretable,” he said.

The public-radio station WLRN, in Miami, first reported that the CDC was mixing viral and antibody test results. Pennsylvania’s and Maine’s decisions to mix the two tests have not been previously reported.

Kristen Nordlund, a spokesperson for the CDC, told us that the inclusion of antibody data in Florida is one reason the CDC has reported hundreds of thousands more tests in Florida than the state government has. The agency hopes to separate the viral and antibody test results in the next few weeks, she said in an email.

But until the agency does so, its results will be suspect and difficult to interpret, says William Hanage, an epidemiology professor at Harvard. In addition to misleading the public about the state of affairs, the intermingling “makes the lives of actual epidemiologists tremendously more difficult.”

“Combining a test that is designed to detect current infection with a test that detects infection at some point in the past is just really confusing and muddies the water,” Hanage told us.

The CDC stopped publishing anything resembling a complete database of daily test results on February 29. When it resumed publishing test data last week, a page of its website explaining its new COVID Data Tracker said that only viral tests were included in its figures. “These data represent only viral tests. Antibody tests are not currently captured in these data,” the page said as recently as May 18.

Yesterday, that language was changed. All reference to disaggregating the two different types of tests disappeared. “These data are compiled from a number of sources,” the new version read. The text strongly implied that both types of tests were included in the count, but did not explicitly say so.

The CDC’s data have also become more favorable over the past several days. On Monday, a page on the agency’s website reported that 10.2 million viral tests had been conducted nationwide since the pandemic began, with 15 percent of them—or about 1.5 million—coming back positive. But yesterday, after the CDC changed its terms, it said on the same page that 10.8 million tests of any type had been conducted nationwide. Yet its positive rate had dropped by a percent. On the same day it expanded its terms, the CDC added 630,205 new tests, but it added only 52,429 positive results.

This is what concerns Jha. Because antibody tests are meant to be used on the general population, not just symptomatic people, they will, in most cases, have a lower percent-positive rate than viral tests. So blending viral and antibody tests “will drive down your positive rate in a very dramatic way,” he said.

The absence of clear national guidelines has led to widespread confusion about how testing data should be reported. Pennsylvania reports negative viral and antibody tests in the same metric, a state spokesperson confirmed to us on Wednesday. The state has one of the country’s worst outbreaks, with more than 67,000 positive cases. But it has also slowly improved its testing performance, testing about 8,000 people in a day. Yet right now it is impossible to know how to interpret any of its accumulated results.

Texas, where the rate of new COVID-19 infections has stubbornly refused to fall, is one of the most worrying states (along with Georgia). The Texas Observer first reported last week that the state was lumping its viral and antibody results together. On Tuesday, Governor Greg Abbott denied that the state was blending the results, but the Dallas Observer reports that it is still doing so.

While the number of tests per day has increased in Texas, climbing to more than 20,000, the combined results mean that the testing data are essentially uninterpretable. It is impossible to know the true percentage of positive viral tests in Texas. It is impossible to know how many of the 718,000 negative results were not meant to diagnose a sick person. The state did not return a request for comment, nor has it produced data describing its antibody or viral results separately. (Some states, following guidelines from the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, report antibody-test positives as “probable” COVID-19 cases without including them in their confirmed totals.)

Georgia is in a similar situation. It has also seen its COVID-19 infections plateau amid a surge in testing. Like Texas, it reported more than 20,000 new results on Wednesday, the majority of them negative. But because, according to The Macon Telegraph, it is also blending its viral and antibody results together, its true percent-positive rate is impossible to know. (The governor’s office did not return a request for comment.)

These results damage the public’s ability to understand what is happening in any one state. On a national scale, they call the strength of America’s response to the coronavirus into question. The number of tests conducted nationwide each day has more than doubled in the past month, rising from about 147,000 a month ago to more than 413,000 on Wednesday, according to the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic, which compiles data reported by state and territorial governments. In the past week, the daily number of tests has grown by about 90,000.

At the same time, the portion of tests coming back positive has plummeted, from a seven-day average of 10 percent at the month’s start to 6 percent on Wednesday.

“The numbers have outstripped what I was expecting,” Jha said. “My sense is people are really surprised that we’ve moved as much as we have in such a short time period. I think we all expected a move and we all expected improvement, but the pace and size of that improvement has been a big surprise.”

The intermingling of viral and antibody tests suggests that some of those gains might be illusory. If even a third of the country’s gain in testing has come by expanding antibody tests, not viral tests, then its ability to detect an outbreak is much smaller than it seems. There is no way to ascertain how much of the recent increase in testing is from antibody tests until the most populous states in the country—among them Texas, Georgia, and Pennsylvania—show their residents everything in the data.

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State and Federal Data on COVID-19 Testing Don’t Match Up

Robinson Meyer and Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic — Mon, 18 May 2020 12:00:00 -0400

How many coronavirus tests have been conducted in the United States? For the first time since February, the federal government has an answer. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now say that 10,847,778 coronavirus tests have been conducted nationwide. These tests have found about 1.4 million positive cases.

These figures come from a new CDC website that appeared online last week with little fanfare. It marks an important but much belated development for the nation’s premier public-health agency, which has struggled to manage a pandemic that has killed more than 81,000 Americans and plunged the U.S. economy into a recession. Not since February 29, when the nationwide death toll stood at five, has the CDC published anything close to a comprehensive daily count of tests.

For the past 11 weeks, the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic has been the country’s only reliable source for national testing data. (The tracker compiles the number of tests reported by each U.S. state and territory daily.) While the CDC has provided only occasional and rudimentary tallies of total tests, data from the COVID Tracking Project have been used by Johns Hopkins University, governors and members of Congress, and the White House.

With the new CDC site, the federal government is providing regular testing data again, and for the first time ever, it is doing so on a state-by-state level. But an initial analysis of the CDC’s state-level data finds major discrepancies between what many states are reporting and what the federal government is reporting about them. In Florida, for example, the disparity is enormous. The state government reported on Friday that about 700,000 coronavirus tests have been conducted statewide since the beginning of the outbreak. This count should be authoritative: Governor Ron DeSantis has ordered hospitals and doctors to report their test results to the Florida Department of Health. Yet the CDC reported more than 919,000 tests in the state in that same period. That’s 31 percent more tests than Florida itself seems to think it has conducted. (Because the CDC says it does not update its data on the weekends, we have, throughout this article, compared its figures against the numbers reported by each state on Friday.) When we asked the CDC to explain the discrepancy in Florida, the agency declined to comment on the record.

“If this is what they’re getting, the CDC should pick up the phone and call the state of Florida and say, ‘What’s happening?’” Ashish Jha, the K.T. Li Professor of Global Health at Harvard, told us.

Given the complexity and the multisource nature of the data, some variations should certainly be anticipated. But the inconsistencies we found suggest that Florida is not an outlier. Using the state numbers that match the CDC’s output most closely, in 22 states, the CDC’s reported number of tests diverges from the number reported by the state government by more than 10 percent. In 13 states, it diverges by more than 25 percent. In some cases, the CDC’s tallies are much higher than what states are reporting; in others, much lower.

In New Hampshire, the CDC reports about half as many tests as the state government; in Indiana, it reports about half as many more. California has reported the results of 1,133,906 tests, but the CDC is aware of 924,696. (Some of the largest discrepancies affect some of the country’s most populous states, including not only California but Illinois and Texas.) The state government of New Jersey says that 462,972 specimens have been analyzed. The CDC reports only 409,320. Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, Montana, North Carolina, Tennessee, Massachusetts, and Maryland also report testing figures that differ significantly from those published by the CDC. Curiously enough, the CDC’s state and national totals for cases and deaths match up well with what we’ve gathered from states at the COVID Tracking Project. So do its national testing totals. Only when you dig into the state-level testing data—where discrepancies skew in both directions—do things begin to go awry.

The data sets have one known major difference: Some states report the total number of people tested, while the CDC reports every test, even if a single person is tested more than once. A spokesperson for Indiana’s public health department pointed to this difference to explain the state’s test gap. But our analysis suggests this—or any other methodological factor—does not fully explain the widespread discrepancies. Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, told us that one possible explanation is that the CDC could be overreporting testing totals in some states if it is including antibody-test results, which don’t track real-time infections, and underreporting in other states because of delays in paperwork. But the differences seem to be so widespread that they are unlikely to arise from a single discrepancy in how certain kinds of tests are reported. At their current rate of growth, Florida’s state-reported testing numbers would not match the CDC’s current totals for another two weeks.

“This is more evidence of the dysfunction of the CDC,” Jha said. “There is not supposed to be a lot of daylight between the CDC and the states.” Jha has previously criticized the CDC for being “inexplicably absent” during the coronavirus pandemic.

Some of the mismatch between states and the CDC could be explained by the federal government’s unusual manner of collecting testing data. Generally, disease-surveillance data flow from local public-health departments to state governments, and then on to the federal government. But in April, Vice President Mike Pence asked hospitals to start reporting their COVID-19 testing data directly to the federal government. In an email, a CDC spokesperson confirmed that the new website reflected test data from more sources than just states, saying it came from hospitals, private medical-testing companies, and state and local public-health labs.

The data that Pence requested fed into a piece of software called HHS Protect, which was meant to serve as a clearinghouse of coronavirus data for the Trump administration, according to a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services. HHS Protect was developed by the defense contractor Palantir. The company declined to comment on the record.

It’s unclear exactly when the CDC site first appeared. A CDC spokesperson told us that it went live on May 7, but the first Internet Archive cache of the page is dated May 9. The CDC did not announce the existence of the page in any statement, social-media post, or press conference.

In many of the counts the CDC did provide over the past several months, it missed the large majority of tests. In early May, the CDC reported that only about half a million tests had been conducted in the U.S. But the COVID Tracking Project had tallied the results of more than 7.5 million tests reported by states by then. In late April, the White House used the COVID Tracking Project’s data in a major report on national testing strategy. It cited the data again earlier this week in a press conference.

The CDC should provide the country with a single, trustworthy data source on the state of COVID-19 testing. But the fact that its data are still in such disagreement with the state-reported totals means that the CDC’s latest efforts are not of much use to politicians and the public. For now, the agency that should be a respected source of truth in this crisis is only adding to the national confusion.

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Kushner Firm Built the Coronavirus Website Trump Promised

Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic — Tue, 31 Mar 2020 12:00:00 -0400

On March 13, President Donald Trump promised Americans they would soon be able to access a new website that would ask them about their symptoms and direct them to nearby coronavirus testing sites. He said Google was helping.

That wasn’t true. But in the following days, Oscar Health—a health-insurance company closely connected to Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner—developed a government website with the features the president had described. A team of Oscar engineers, project managers, and executives spent about five days building a stand-alone website at the government’s request, an Oscar spokesperson told The Atlantic. The company even dispatched two employees from New York to meet in person with federal officials in Washington, D.C., the spokesperson said. Then the website was suddenly and mysteriously scrapped.

The site would not have helped many Americans even if it had launched. Today, more than two weeks after the president promised a national network of drive-through test sites, only a handful of such sites have opened, and fewer than 1 million Americans have been tested.

The full extent of Oscar’s work on the project has not been previously reported. The partnership between the administration and the firm suggests that Kushner may have mingled his family’s business interests with his political interests and his role in the administration’s coronavirus response. Kushner’s younger brother Joshua is a co-founder and major investor in Oscar, and Jared Kushner partially owned or controlled Oscar before he joined the White House. The company’s work on the coronavirus website could violate federal ethics laws, several experts said.

For the past several weeks, Kushner has led a “shadow task force” on the coronavirus, separate from Vice President Mike Pence’s official committee, according to The Washington Post. Kushner’s team, composed of federal officials allied with Kushner and outside corporate executives, has met in the headquarters of the Department of Health and Human Services. A senior official at that agency called Oscar to ask for its help on March 13, the day of Trump's press conference, the Oscar spokesperson said.

Kushner’s group has focused on expanding and publicizing coronavirus testing, especially at drive-through locations. Oscar’s website would have asked users if they were experiencing symptoms of COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus, and surveyed them about other risk factors, including their age and preexisting conditions. It also would have listed a limited number of testing locations nationwide, including some of the drive-through sites that Trump promised. It was designed to look like a government-developed product, provided freely by the Department of Health and Human Services to the American public. Oscar posted the source code for the site to Github, where The Atlantic reviewed it.

The site resembled a version of a tool Oscar had already built for its customers in response to the crisis, but it was “adjusted to meet the specifications and requirements set by the federal government,” Jackie Kahn, the Oscar spokesperson, said in an emailed statement. That Oscar had already been working on a coronavirus-testing website when HHS called to ask for help was a coincidence that had nothing to do with Kushner, Kahn suggested. She declined to say whether Oscar had discussed that site with Joshua Kushner or any board members or investors before Trump’s March 13 press conference.

Oscar donated its work freely and never expected to be paid for the project, Kahn said. The company is “not, nor has ever been,” a contractor or subcontractor for the government, she said, which would make it harder for the government to pay Oscar for its work. The work was “all at the direction of HHS,” she said. “The website never saw the light of day,” she added in an interview today.

That may not matter from an ethics perspective. The ad hoc nature of Kushner’s task force has already collided with federal laws. Oscar’s involvement deepens Kushner’s ethics and conflict-of-interest problems.

“It’s not typical. It’s usually not allowed,” Jessica Tillipman, an assistant dean at the George Washington University School of Law and an expert on anti-corruption law, told me.

Oscar’s relationship with the Trump administration could breach federal law in two ways, Tillipman and other experts told me. First, companies are generally not supposed to work for the federal government for free, though some exceptions can be made in a national emergency. “The concern, when you have some free services, is that it makes the government beholden to the company,” Tillipman said.

More important, she said, any Kushner involvement may have violated the “impartiality rule,” which requires federal employees to refrain from making decisions when they even appear to involve a conflict of interest. The rule also prohibits federal employees from making a decision in which close relatives may have a financial stake. Such a situation would seem to apply to Kushner and Oscar. In 2013, Jared and Joshua were the “ultimate controlling persons in Oscar’s holding company,” according to a New York State report. When the elder Kushner joined the White House, he disclosed that he had been on the board of Oscar’s holding company from May 2010 to January 2017. He also said that he had sold his shares in the holding company for somewhere between $1.2 million and $7 million. Joshua still holds a stake in the company. When Jared joined the administration, he sold his shares to either Joshua or a trust controlled by their mother, according to his financial disclosures.

Kushner did not divest all the assets that he owned jointly with his brother when he joined the White House. Earlier this month, he sold his stake in Cadre, a real-estate investment firm that he owned with Joshua. The stake was worth tens of millions of dollars as recently as last year, Kushner said in his disclosures.

There was nothing wrong with Oscar’s arrangement with the government, Kahn argued. “This was the right thing to do, both legally and ethically, and if anyone has any doubt that COVID-19 is an emergency, he’s lost his mind,” she said. “We are enormously proud of our people who put serving the nation ahead of everything during this time of crisis.”

Oscar’s description of its work for the administration has changed over time. Two weeks ago, the company told Business Insider that it had “shared code” with the Department of Health and Human Services, but it did not disclose that it had actually made a website. Last week, Kahn told me in an interview that the company had merely “shrink-wrapped” its code, a piece of jargon that meant it had disconnected the code from its in-house technical platforms so that it could work on other servers. Her statement today admitted that Oscar had gone much further.

When viewed earlier today, the URL coronavirustesting.gov offered an Amazon Web Services error, suggesting that someone with access to the .gov domain had registered the website.

The Department of Health and Human Services declined to produce paperwork authorizing Oscar’s donation of the website work. “Multiple vendors worked on proposals, and we appreciate their work,” an HHS spokeswoman said. “Ultimately, Apple launched the new tool.” But Apple’s COVID-19 tool is a page on Apple.com, not a stand-alone government site like the one Oscar built.

Oscar’s creation more closely resembled the website Trump described on March 13. The site would “determine whether a test is warranted and … facilitate testing at a nearby convenient location,” Trump said, adding that Google had 1,700 engineers working on the project. Google, it was quickly revealed, didn’t have any such plans.

Google’s parent company is a major investor in Oscar. And Oscar, which has roughly 1,500 employees, did build a site like the one Trump described.

The White House declined to comment.

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America’s Coronavirus Testing Still Isn’t Moving Fast Enough

Alexis C. Madrigal and Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic — Tue, 10 Mar 2020 10:26:47 -0400

Nearly two weeks after the new coronavirus was first found to be spreading among Americans, the United States remains dangerously limited in its capacity to test people for the illness, an ongoing investigation from The Atlantic has found.

After surveying of local data from across the country, we can only verify that 4,384 people have been tested for the coronavirus nationwide, as of March 9 at 4 p.m. eastern. These data are as comprehensive a compilation of official statistics as currently possible.

The lack of testing means that it is almost impossible to know how many Americans are infected with the coronavirus and suffering from COVID-19, the disease it causes. While our analysis has tracked state and local announcements that more than 570 people in 36 states are infected, experts say that number is almost certainly too small to reflect the full extent of the disease’s spread in the U.S. Not enough Americans have been tested for officials to know how many people are ill, they say.

When researchers have used statistical and genetic techniques to estimate the true size of the outbreak, they have concluded that thousands of Americans may have already been infected by the beginning of the month. Health officials have attributed 26 deaths to COVID-19 in the United States, as of today.

The sluggish rollout of the tests has become a debilitating weakness in America’s response to the spread of the coronavirus. By this point in its outbreak, South Korea had tested more than 100,000 people for the disease, and it was testing roughly 15,000 people every day. The United Kingdom, where three people have died of COVID-19, has already tested more than 24,900 people.

The Atlantic reached its new estimate through an ongoing collaboration with the data scientist Jeffrey Hammerbacher and a team of volunteers recruited for their experience with data collection, and after consulting data published by all 50 states and the District of Columbia. States vary widely in their reporting standards. All provide positive case reports. But many do not provide negative or pending case reports, which provide crucial context for both the progression of the virus and the government response to it.

Our effort is necessary because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is not regularly providing data on the full scope of American testing. On its website, the federal agency now provides a number (1,707 as of Sunday) that reflects only the number of people tested at the CDC’s laboratory, even though state and private laboratories provide the bulk of testing. (The CDC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

When the CDC has provided data, it has been slow and incomplete.

On Saturday, Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, told reporters that 5,861 specimens—not people—had been tested for the coronavirus by the end of the week. As a rule of thumb, it takes about two specimens to deliver results for a single patient, which would make this equivalent to about 2,900 people tested through Saturday.

Last week, The Atlantic reported that it could only verify that 1,895 people had been tested for the coronavirus as of Friday morning.

Testing capacity still varies enormously across the country. Many states, including some of the country’s most populous, are not reporting how many tests they have conducted overall. Texas, which now has 24 positive cases, has not posted on its website how many people it has tested overall. A spokesman for the state said it had tested 150 people as of last week, but “with private labs coming online now, I don’t think we’re going to have a definitive number for the entire state going forward.” Nevada has not reported any new data at all on its health-department website since March 3.

Massachusetts, which has 41 presumptive cases, has not released its total number of people tested. Neither has Pennsylvania, which has 10 presumptive cases. Last week, a Pennsylvania official told us that the state could test only a dozen or so people a day, suggesting that it has a high rate of positives.

On Friday, California also stopped reporting how many tests it has conducted, switching to releasing only the number of positive cases. The California Department of Public Health told us that the state had tested 778 people as of Saturday, and that the state has 114 positive cases. It now has 15 labs doing tests across the state.

North Carolina, which has two positive cases, and Indiana, which has two, have also never said how many overall tests they have conducted.

LabCorp and Quest, two companies that run routine medical tests for doctors’ offices, have both announced that they can now test samples for COVID-19. The two companies can test a combined 2,500 patients a day, according to a tally assembled by Gottlieb, the former FDA commissioner, and published by the American Enterprise Institute.

Altogether, the country can test a maximum of 7,840 people a day, according to Gottlieb’s preliminary tally. His count is another example of the kinds of data tabulation that a federal agency might usually take responsibility for.

The testing situation is so bad that Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiology professor at Harvard, says that health officials and journalists should stop reporting the number of positive cases in the United States as “new cases.” Instead, he wrote by email, “they should refer to them as ‘newly discovered cases,’ in order to remove the impression that the number of cases reported has any bearing on the actual number.”

The ponderous rollout of tests—and the stringent criteria that the CDC has imposed on them—has hamstrung doctors and injected anxiety into the lives of ordinary Americans. Are their symptoms pneumonia, the flu, or something worse?

“I have no clue if we could have already or could be now spreading this to others,” a 38-year-old woman who lives near Austin, Texas, who asked not to be identified for privacy reasons, told us.

After returning from Western Europe in late January, the woman and her husband came down with a mysterious illness, which sent them in and out of week-long fevers. She and her husband would wake up coughing in the middle of the night, their ribs aching so badly that they needed to vomit. She has tested negative for the flu, twice, and also tested negative for strep. She has been diagnosed with pneumonia.

On her trip, she had frequently been in large, international crowds, where she could easily have been exposed to the coronavirus. But despite having all the symptoms, she has not been tested for it. When she called Austin’s public-health department to ask for guidance, she was told that unless she was hospitalized or had traveled to China, she could not be tested for COVID-19.

“The woman who I talked to said, ‘There aren’t any cases here [in Travis County],’” she told us. “And I said, ‘There hasn’t been any testing, so how do you know?’”

Without a firm answer about whether she has the virus, she has agonized over how to act responsibly. When is she overreacting? When is she being reckless? She and her husband have stayed home since they became ill, but their son and daughter, both younger than 5, attended school until her daughter ran a fever last week.

“There’s no guidelines out there, even at the urgent care today,” she said. She now plans to keep both kids at home for the next two weeks.

But that’s only one of many arenas where there is currently no firm guidance for people who think they may have the virus, but who cannot get tested for it.

“Am I supposed to tell my team [at work]? Am I supposed to tell my kids’ school? Am I supposed to tell everyone I interacted with for the last four weeks?” she asked. “I don’t want to start a crisis, because I don’t know if I actually have this thing.”

Doctors have expressed similar frustration in getting patients tested. “The Georgia Department of Public Health has basically thrown up their hands when it comes to testing patients who do not require hospitalization,” Josh Hargraves, an emergency-room doctor in Georgia, told us. “On Friday we were told, ‘If the patient doesn’t have a travel history and doesn’t need to be admitted to the hospital, don’t bother calling; we’re not going to test.’” By Saturday evening, when Hargraves saw four prospective coronavirus patients, he managed to get one of them tested, but only after filling out onerous and unusual paperwork.

“We’re still restricting usage and asking thoughtful, knowledgeable medical professionals to jump through hoops to get a test they know a patient needs,” Hargraves said.

The outbreak is not at the same stage in every state. If public-health officials can quickly increase testing, it might be possible to have a much more comprehensive view before community transmission worsens.

We know the virus is here and spreading in many places. Restrictive testing policies—especially ones focused on travel outside the United States—clearly don’t make sense anymore. There are sick people in this country whose doctors think they need testing and who still cannot be tested. Every day that this epidemic continues without adequate testing, the country’s ability to slow the outbreak will deteriorate.

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How Trump Boxed the EPA Out of a Major Climate Regulation Rollback

Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 10:35:56 -0500

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—On a drizzly day in January 2018, Jeff Alson, an engineer at the Environmental Protection Agency’s motor-vehicles office, gathered with his colleagues to make a video call to Washington, D.C.

They had made the same call dozens of times before. For nearly a decade, the EPA team had worked closely with another group of engineers in the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA, pronounced nits-uh) to write the federal tailpipe-pollution standards, one of the most consequential climate protections in American history. The two teams had done virtually all the technical research—testing engines in a lab, interviewing scientists and automakers, and overseeing complex economic simulations—underpinning the rules, which have applied to every new car and light truck, including SUVs and vans, sold in the United States since 2012.

Their collaboration was historic. Even as SUVs, crossovers, and pickups have gobbled up the new-car market, the rules have pushed the average fuel economy—the distance a vehicle can travel per gallon of gas—to record highs. They have saved Americans $500 billion at the pump, according to the nonpartisan Consumer Federation of America, and kept hundreds of millions of tons of carbon pollution out of the air. So as the call connected, Alson and the other EPA engineers thought it was time to get back to work. Donald Trump had recently ordered a review of the rules.

Speaking from Washington, James Tamm, the NHTSA fuel-economy chief, greeted the EPA team, then put a spreadsheet on-screen. It showed an analysis of the tailpipe rules’ estimated costs and benefits. Alson had worked on this kind of study so many times that he could recall some of the key numbers “by heart,” he later told me.

Yet as Alson looked closer, he realized that this study was like none he had seen before. For years, both NHTSA and the EPA had found that the tailpipe rules saved lives during car accidents because they reduced the weight—and, with it, the lethality—of the heaviest SUVs. In 2015, an outside panel of experts concurred with them.

But this new study asserted the opposite: The Obama-era rules, it claimed, killed almost 1,000 people a year.

“Oh my God,” Alson said upon seeing the numbers. The other EPA engineers in the room gasped and started to point out other shocking claims on Tamm’s slide. (Their line was muted.) It seemed as if every estimated cost had ballooned, while every estimated benefit had shrunk. Something in the study had gone deeply wrong.

It was the beginning of a fiasco that could soon have global consequences. The Trump administration has since proposed to roll back the tailpipe rules nationwide, a move that, according to one estimate, could add nearly 1 billion tons of carbon pollution to the atmosphere. Officials have justified this sweeping change by claiming that the new rules will save hundreds of lives a year. They are so sure of those benefits that they have decided to call the policy the Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient Vehicles Rule—or SAFE, for short.

SNAFU may be a better moniker. To change a federal rule, the executive branch must do its homework and publish an economic study arguing why the update is necessary. But Trump’s official justification for SAFE is honeycombed with errors. The most dramatic is that NHTSA’s model mixed up supply and demand: The agency calculated that as cars got more expensive, millions more people would drive them, and the number of traffic accidents would increase, my reporting shows. This error—later dubbed the “phantom vehicles” problem—accounted for the majority of incorrect costs in the SAFE study that the Trump administration released in 2018. It is what made SAFE look safe.

Once this and other major mistakes are fixed, all of SAFE’s safety benefits vanish, according to a recent peer-reviewed analysis in Science. If SAFE is adopted into law, American traffic deaths could actually increase, carbon pollution would soar, and global warming would speed up.

In other words, SAFE isn’t actually safe—and the Trump administration based its rollback on flawed math.

Extensive interviews with key participants and a review of emails and documents reveal how this happened: The Trump administration kept the government’s top tailpipe-pollution experts from working on the tailpipe-pollution rule. For two years, rival bureaucrats at NHTSA and overworked Trump political appointees stonewalled the EPA team, blocked it from learning of the rollback, and prevented it from seeing analysis of the new rule. When the EPA engineers finally saw the flawed study and identified some of its worst errors, the same Trump officials ignored them.

This may have been a series of legally fatal blunders. The EPA team identified the phantom-vehicles problem early in the process. Within weeks of SAFE’s publication in August 2018, analyses from outside economists and the Honda Motor Company vindicated the EPA team’s assessment. Those groups found that the SAFE study was a turducken of falsehoods: it cited incorrect data and made calculation errors, on top of bungling the basics of supply and demand. Not since 1999—when NASA engineers accidentally confused metric and imperial units when building and navigating the Mars Climate Orbiter, leading to the spacecraft’s eventual destruction—have federal employees messed up a calculation so publicly, and at such expense and scale. And the EPA team saw it coming.

My reporting directly contradicts what EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler told members of Congress last year. In a June letter to House Republicans, Wheeler said it was “false” that “EPA professional staff were cut out” of the rollback’s development.

In a statement, an EPA spokesman did not directly deny my reporting. “As we’ve stated multiple times before, career and professional staff within EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation were involved in the development of this proposal and continue to be involved in the final stages as we work with NHTSA to finalize this rule,” said Michael Abboud, the agency spokesman. He added that the old rule was “unworkable” and rushed into law at the end of the Obama administration.

A NHTSA spokesman declined to comment because the proposed regulation is under agency review. He referred me to older statements that said the EPA and NHTSA had reviewed “hundreds of thousands of public comments” and undertaken “extensive scientific and economic analyses” in the course of reworking the SAFE rule. A final version of the rule is expected in the next several weeks. But that new version of the SAFE study recognizes that the benefits of the rollback do not exceed its costs, according to a letter from Senator Tom Carper of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, obtained by The Washington Post.

If Carper’s allegation is true, that could doom the proposal in court. In fact, several legal issues could hinder SAFE. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that the Clean Air Act “requires” the EPA to regulate carbon pollution “from new motor vehicles.” But my reporting has found that NHTSA employees—and not EPA staff—actually wrote the first version of the rollback, raising questions about whether the rule is legally valid.

Either way, the SAFE rollback has already caused chaos. Major automakers—some of which once begged Trump to weaken the rules—now despise SAFE, according to reporting in The Wall Street Journal. When Ford, Volkswagen, BMW, and Honda began negotiating a compromise version of the standard with California last year, the Trump administration smacked them with an antitrust investigation. (It dropped the probe last week.) A fifth automaker, Mercedes-Benz, also considered joining the truce with California, The New York Times reported over the summer. (Mercedes did not respond to a request for comment.)

That chaos might have comforted Alson, who retired in 2018, and the other EPA engineers two years ago, as they sat slack-jawed in their conference room in Ann Arbor. Soon after unveiling the analysis, Tamm asked if anyone had questions. No one spoke. The meeting, originally scheduled to last an hour, adjourned after 30 minutes.

“We couldn’t even bring ourselves to try to engage,” Alson told me. “We knew they had cooked the books so bad that there wasn’t any reason to talk about it.”

Republicans will often claim that one federal rule or another meddles with an essential part of the economy. The tailpipe-pollution rules live up to the hype. They govern the place where the auto industry and the oil industry—two massive, planet-spanning businesses that together make up about 11 percent of American GDP—most often meet: the humble car engine.

There’s no way around this. In recent years, nearly one-fifth of the country’s climate-warming carbon pollution has come from cars and light-duty trucks, according to the EPA. It’s inevitable: If you burn gasoline in an internal-combustion engine, you release carbon dioxide; if you want to release less carbon, you must burn less gasoline. Some car regulations—such as those addressing traffic-safety issues—require only that some new technology, such as an airbag or backup camera, simply be affixed to a car’s frame. But any carbon-pollution rule must go to the heart of a motor vehicle: the engine, power train, and air conditioner.

Yet for decades, NHTSA—the traffic-safety arm of the Department of Transportation—set the nation’s fuel-economy rules. It was given that power for “purely political” reasons, says Lee Vinsel, a professor at Virginia Tech who studies American car regulation. “It had nothing to do with expertise.”

Congress first established the fuel-economy standards during the 1970s oil embargo as a “panic mode” policy that would reduce cars’ use of fuel and, by extension, American dependence on foreign oil, Vinsel told me. But lawmakers split on which agency should set the rules.

The EPA, then a young office, had already started measuring fuel efficiency as part of a broader campaign to defend the new Clean Air Act. Yet neither the EPA nor the other agencies in contention, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Commerce, won the support of Representative John Dingell, a powerful New Deal Democrat from Detroit. Although Dingell was an environmental champion who helped write the Endangered Species Act, his Michigan ties meant that he was “rabidly anti-regulation of the automobile,” Vinsel said. If fuel-economy rules had to pass, Dingell wanted to keep an eye on them. And he could do that through the Department of Transportation, whose purse strings he held via his seat on the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce (which he later renamed the Energy and Commerce Committee).

So Congress split the difference. In 1975, it put NHTSA in charge of setting fuel-economy standards, but the EPA in charge of measuring them. From the very beginning, NHTSA needed the EPA’s data to do its job. It was the beginning of a corrosive rivalry between the two agencies.

The messy setup worked at first. Over the next decade, the fuel economy of new cars doubled in the United States. But as global oil production increased and prices fell, the standards began to fester, and fuel economy stopped improving. By 2003, General Motors had even found a loophole in the law: It could sell SUVs so enormous, they fell outside the legal definition of a “light-duty vehicle,” such as the Hummer H2.

Then oil prices soared again, and soon after, Congress moved to close the Hummer-size loophole in the law. But the real change came from the Supreme Court, which ruled in 2007 that the EPA must treat greenhouse gases from cars as it would any other air pollutant. If carbon dioxide is dangerous, then “the Clean Air Act requires the agency to regulate” it, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority.

It was a landmark shift. For the first time, the EPA had the legal power to fight climate change and regulate carbon pollution. The state of California, which retains special powers under the Clean Air Act, could regulate carbon dioxide too.

Soon after Barack Obama took office in 2009, he ordered all three to work together. NHTSA’s fuel-economy standards should mirror, as closely as possible, the carbon-pollution rules passed by the EPA and the California Air Resources Board, he said.

His order still holds. Today, three different entities—the EPA, NHTSA, and the California board—all have some power to regulate the carbon pollution of cars and light trucks in the United States.

What resulted was one of the most effective climate protections in American history. The tailpipe rules, published by the three entities in 2012, required carbon pollution from new cars and light trucks to decrease every year until 2025. In exchange for several concessions, automakers even agreed to accept the rules without a lawsuit. This was virtually unheard of—seemingly every company fights new EPA regulations in court—but it was crucial for the White House. With the tailpipe rules on firm legal footing, the EPA could move to regulate carbon pollution in other parts of the economy.

Most important, the rules worked. Over the past decade, the average fuel efficiency of new passenger cars has improved from about 31 to 39 miles per gallon, a record high. The biggest savings have come from bulky trucks such as the Ford F-150, the best-selling vehicle in the United States. Today, an entry-level F-150 uses two-thirds as much gas as the 2006 model did.

And then automakers began to fight the rule. Though the EPA had published rules out to 2025, the Obama administration told automakers that it would do a “midterm review” before the second phase (applying to cars in model years 2020 to 2025) kicked in. In July 2016, the EPA, NHTSA, and the California Air Resources Board completed the first step of that process, publishing a 1,200-page study that found the rules were still doable. But now car lobbyists began to fuss. The market had changed, and the rules needed to change too, they said.

Trump’s victory that November seemed to seal their success. Two days after the election, automaker lobbyists wrote a jubilant letter to the president-elect, asking him to revise the 2020 to 2025 standards. Then, Obama-appointed officials and EPA staff panicked and rushed ahead with the midterm-review process. The EPA published a final version of the rules a week before Trump’s inauguration. But NHTSA did not follow suit.

The rules’ publication infuriated car companies. And then Trump took office.

On march 15, 2017, Donald Trump made his first visit to Michigan as president. Months earlier, he had won the state by a little more than 10,700 votes. Now, flanked by Scott Pruitt, the new EPA administrator, he announced to about 1,000 autoworkers that the White House would review and roll back the EPA tailpipe rules. “The standards were set far into the future—way, way into the future,” Trump said. “If the standards threatened auto jobs, then commonsense changes could have and should have been made.”

In fact, the EPA and NHTSA had concluded a year earlier that the rules were likely to have only a small effect on jobs. (They may have boosted them.) As Trump made his claim at a former GM plant in Ypsilanti, many of the experts on the issue watched his announcement from their desk, 20 minutes down the road in Ann Arbor. No one from the EPA vehicles team was invited to attend the event, Alson said.

It was a sign of things to come.

A few weeks later, Bill Charmley, the longtime chief of the EPA vehicles team, called Jim Tamm, his NHTSA counterpart, according to documents obtained from a public-records request. The two men talked often. For years, their teams had held video or conference calls “almost every month and sometimes every week,” according to Alson. When deadlines approached, the teams talked “every single day.” And documents show that even in the waning days of the Obama administration, as the EPA moved to finalize the rules through 2025, Charmley and Tamm stayed in regular contact.

But now Tamm seemed uninterested in the two teams ever talking or meeting at all. When a senior EPA engineer emailed Tamm to “follow up” on the call a week later, he struck an almost pleading tone. “I wanted to reach out to you [to] begin thinking about regular EPA and NHTSA coordination meetings,” the engineer wrote. “It is my understanding that we may not be in a position to start meeting, but hopefully the situation does not preclude us from thinking about what the meetings could look like if and when they begin.”

There is no evidence Tamm ever replied to that message. A month later, a different EPA engineer asked again by email if the two teams could meet to discuss the rules, only to be rebuffed again by a NHTSA employee. “We need further discussion on our end,” the NHTSA employee explained.

After years of close contact, the NHTSA team seemed to go dark to the EPA team. For nearly a year, the two teams “did not have a single technical phone call or meeting or email or anything” about the tailpipe rules, Alson said. “I’m an engineer and an introvert … but it felt like The Twilight Zone. Like, what is going on here?”

At the same time, the EPA team received little guidance from its political leaders. President Trump appointed only one person—Mandy Gunasekara, a lawyer and longtime Senate Republican staffer—to oversee the massive EPA Office of Air and Radiation, which includes the Ann Arbor team. President Obama had appointed three people to manage the same office.

“From March until October [2017], it was really just me figuring out the agenda” for the 1,000-person office, which also regulates coal-fired power plants and nuclear waste, Gunasekara told me. (She left the administration in 2019 and now runs Energy45, a pro-Trump advocacy organization.)

The office’s leadership was so understaffed that Gunasekara spent her first months in the agency “just trying to figure out what all was going on,” especially regarding court deadlines, she said.

With no clear path forward, the EPA team continued its work studying vehicle pollution. The lab measured new engines from Ford and Toyota, a time-consuming process that generated benchmarks showing an engine’s power, efficiency, and emissions.

By the summer, the team began holding calls with carmakers and lobbyists to discuss the rules. Documents show that NHTSA was often invited to sit in on those meetings, but Gunasekara told me that its staff was not very involved. “They didn’t have political leadership at all,” she said.

Yet public documents suggest that NHTSA was already doing its own work on the rollback. By July 20, 2017, crucial Excel files later used in the NHTSA cost-benefit study had already been created, according to the names and metadata of the files themselves.

As the fall arrived, President Trump had finally chosen a political leader for NHTSA, and on October 25, the agency held a video call with the EPA. The meeting started warmly, with Heidi King, NHTSA’s new Trump-appointed chief, making little jokes, Alson remembers.

Then Charmley, the EPA vehicles-team chief, began to present the work that his team had done in the previous year. The Ann Arbor lab had benchmarked engines, improved its model, and studied the costs of several new fuel-saving technologies. This presentation would turn out to be the EPA’s only chance to show “in no uncertain terms” that it had done new work that NHTSA had not considered, Alson said.

As Charmley spoke, King started to look frustrated and became almost silent, Alson remembers.

When it was NHTSA’s turn to speak, King and Tamm spent an awkward minute encouraging each other to start. Finally, Tamm began to talk. He broke the news that NHTSA had paid Argonne National Laboratory to study a Toyota Prius and Ford F-150, Alson said. But the EPA had already benchmarked those vehicles and several others. NHTSA had gone out of its way to avoid using the EPA data, seemingly as part of a larger campaign to avoid sharing any information with the EPA at all.

The teams had only a few more meetings that year. Another video call between the teams, in December, ended as fruitlessly as the first had—its most memorable feature was the appearance of Bill Wehrum, a former oil-industry lawyer who Trump had just appointed to lead the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation.

So as 2018 arrived, the EPA team still knew virtually nothing about a rollback that had been announced 10 months earlier. But it still had hope. One more video call was scheduled for January 11, and—promisingly—no political appointees were scheduled to attend it. It would be just the old friends on the EPA and NHTSA career staff. “I remember one of my colleagues saying, ‘I think we’re going to get some numbers,’” Alson said.

They got more numbers than they bargained for. On that video call, the one Alson remembers so vividly, Tamm argued that the rules through 2025 could cost the United States hundreds of billions of dollars.

The engineers were gobsmacked. It takes time and effort to put together a cost-benefit analysis, which uses complex economic models to estimate vehicle prices, public-health outcomes, and the ebb and flow of the entire American private-vehicle fleet. For years, the EPA and NHTSA teams had collaborated when conducting such research.

Not only had the NHTSA team secretly done its own analysis, but it now claimed that the rules—the same exact regulation it had judged in 2016 to bring $88 billion in benefits—imposed $230 billion of costs. Somehow, its calculations had shifted more than $300 billion in value.

Alson felt repulsed by the distorted math. “It was almost like you don’t want to get close to it, don’t want to touch it,” he told me. And when Tamm said that the cost-benefit analysis was nearly finished, and that NHTSA hoped to publish the proposed rollback that spring, he confirmed Alson’s worst fear. The EPA team would have almost no ability to work on the rollback. It had been boxed out.

Until recently, the EPA and NHTSA’s collaboration was seen as one of the most successful in the federal government.

Two nonpartisan watchdogs—the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the U.S. Government Accountability Office—both published reports praising their work. In 2014, Tamm and Charmley shared a finalist spot for the highest award given to members of the federal civil service. “Charmley, Tamm, and their team of about 40 employees at two agencies,” bragged the citation for that award, together “surmounted complex technical issues.”

But outside the public eye, resentments lurked. More people work at the EPA than at NHTSA, and EPA employees are generally thought to have more expertise. The EPA has better facilities: It can test engines in its lab in Ann Arbor, while NHTSA does not have an emissions lab at all. In that light, the public praise for the tailpipe rules may have seemed double-edged: The Government Accountability Office report lauded the EPA’s “original research” but lamented NHTSA’s “resource constraints,” and endorsed the new NHTSA computer model that was programmed “with EPA’s input.”

Soon after Gunasekara started, several NHTSA career employees told her that the EPA had “rolled them in the 2012 rule,” she said. (When she asked EPA employees, “they had a totally different response,” telling her that NHTSA was still annoyed about several technical decisions, she added.)

“It’s a small program at NHTSA, but they are ferociously bitter toward EPA for driving the train on the 2012 Obama standards, and they are determined to get back at them,” Mary Nichols, the chief air regulator for the state of California, told me.

So the new situation was—at the very least—a reversal of sorts for the EPA team.

Immediately after that pivotal January meeting, the EPA team asked NHTSA for a copy of the raw computer code used to generate its cost-benefit study. More than a month later, an engineer sent an email so oddly written and undescriptive that it was auto-sorted into Gunasekara’s spam folder. When she found it, the email didn’t even contain what the EPA had asked for: Instead of sending over raw code, the NHTSA team had sent a compiled program. This meant that EPA staff could not examine the model’s underlying calculations in full.

The model also contained a built-in expiration date: It abruptly stopped working at the end of March 2018. When the EPA emailed NHTSA to ask for a new version of the program, the team received no reply.

In spite of those limitations, the EPA team was able to find several problems in NHTSA’s math. In an April 2018 meeting with White House officials, Charmley explained several of them. NHTSA’s model, he said, appeared to add to American roads millions of vehicles that did not exist. This made it “unusable in current form for policy analysis and for assessing the appropriate level of the [NHTSA] or [EPA] standards,” his presentation said.

Dick Swanson / DOCUMERICA / National Archives

It was the EPA’s first warning to the Trump administration that something had gone seriously awry. The next day—four months after the EPA had first asked for the modeling code—NHTSA finally sent the raw code for the analysis.

The EPA team now acted quickly. In June, Charmley told the White House that the EPA had fixed key errors in NHTSA’s math—and that it had significantly changed the results of the NHTSA study. The rollback would actually increase fatalities, killing 17 Americans a year, he said.

But White House and senior EPA officials declined to stop the rollback. Officials knew at the time that two of NHTSA’s models didn’t link up correctly, Gunasekara said, but they did not think it was worth pausing the process. “It’s like, okay, do we delay this for a week, which then becomes a couple of months at the tail end of the regulatory process? Or do we just know it’s not 100 percent and that’s okay?” she said. The Trump team thought the agency’s other concerns were mere “disagreements over assumptions,” she added.

But the next month, the EPA team informed the White House of even more errors in NHTSA’s math. Again, officials declined to stop the rollback. So Charmley asked Andrew Wheeler, the new EPA administrator, for the Ann Arbor office’s name and logo to be removed from the rule-making—an extraordinary request that had never been made before. Wheeler accepted. “It was one of those things like … If that’s what you really want, we’re not going to argue over something like that,” Gunasekara said.

The SAFE rollback was published on August 2, 2018.

In fact, the flaws in the proposal far exceeded the normal scope of technical disagreements. In December 2018, 11 economists—including some whose research was cited by NHTSA in its flawed study—published a scathing assessment of the NHTSA-led analysis in Science. “The 2018 analysis has fundamental flaws and inconsistencies, is at odds with basic economic theory and empirical studies, is misleading, and does not improve estimates of costs and benefits of fuel economy standards,” they wrote.

The errors they and other independent analysts found are staggering in their scale. At one point, the NHTSA team forgot to divide by four. Elsewhere, it used bad data, claiming that, in the future, there will be fewer of certain types of fuel-saving engines than there are on the road already. But these errors pale in comparison to NHTSA’s insertion of millions of “phantom vehicles” onto American roads.

Yet even after these errors came to light, Trump EPA appointees continued to let NHTSA officials dominate the process, my interviews revealed.

In late 2018, officials gathered at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building to discuss the rollback and possible compromises. “In terms of the dynamics of the meeting, Heidi King spoke about three times longer than Bill Wehrum ever did,” Nichols, the California regulator, told me. It was “very obvious” that NHTSA officials would lead the process and that “whatever the EPA had to say was of no interest to them,” she added. And while some EPA career staff attended that meeting, they were not asked by the hosts to speak, she said.

Surveying the rollback process as a whole, Nichols said: “The errors [administration officials] have fallen into are that they don’t know [anything] about how cars work.”

The errors could now cause legal trouble for the SAFE rollback. Under federal law, an agency must publish a detailed and genuine explanation of any proposed rule-making. If it fails to meet that standard, then a court can toss out the new rule, pronouncing it “arbitrary and capricious.” The explanation for SAFE—at least in the proposal—does not appear to be genuine, since it contains fundamental errors that were identified before it was published.

“You didn’t have the A team doing the analysis here… If you shut out the people who know what they’re doing, this is what you get,” Jack Lienke, a law professor at NYU and the regulatory-policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity, told me.

“If the experts—who are actually within the agency issuing this proposal—thought that the assumptions being made were unreasonable, that makes a judge a lot more comfortable saying it is arbitrary and capricious.”

In addition, the Supreme Court’s landmark 2007 ruling gives the EPA—and not NHTSA—the exclusive power to regulate carbon pollution.

The Trump administration has struggled to publish a final version of the SAFE rollback, pushing the deadline back several times. The extra time has only revealed new problems. Last month, Carper, the Democratic senator from Delaware, alleged that a new version of the NHTSA study admits that SAFE will impose $34 billion of costs on the American economy. (NHTSA had once promised $230 billion in net benefits.) The new study also admits that SAFE will cost consumers an extra $1,400 at the pump on average—and that SAFE will not save hundreds of lives a year, as it once claimed, Carper said.

“This would seem to fly in the face of rational rulemaking, which requires the benefits to exceed the costs, not the other way around,” Carper wrote to a White House official, in the letter obtained by The Washington Post.

In a statement, a NHTSA spokesman said SAFE would “ultimately” save lives because it would make new vehicles more affordable, and “new vehicles are safer than ever.”

The Trump administration expects to publish its final version of the tailpipe rule in the coming weeks. No matter what form it takes, it will reverberate worldwide. Other countries both import used cars from the United States and adopt the American tailpipe standards wholesale. Canada implemented the 2012 version of the tailpipe rules nearly verbatim, and has no plans to change them.

After the final version of SAFE is published, it will go to the courts. Its odds of survival are unclear. Historically, regulatory agencies win about 70 percent of their court challenges, Lienke said. Yet under the Trump administration, agencies have lost more than 90 percent of their cases, according to an ongoing tally from the Institute for Policy Integrity.

Many of those losses came in cases like this one, in which agencies published false, misleading, or fundamentally erroneous explanations of their own rules. In June, the Supreme Court held that the Trump administration could not add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, because the Department of Commerce’s internal motivations did not match its publicly stated reasoning.

Agencies must “offer genuine justifications for important decisions, reasons that can be scrutinized by courts and the interested public,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority opinion. “The explanation provided here was more of a distraction.”

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Analysis: NOAA Politicized the Weather Report

Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic — Mon, 09 Sep 2019 10:12:11 -0400

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a powerful U.S. scientific agency, took the unprecedented step Friday of criticizing one of its own meteorologists for publishing an accurate weather forecast.

In doing so, NOAA effectively politicized the weather report, taking the side of President Donald Trump over that of its own professional scientific staff. It did so with a brief statement, published at the end of the work day Friday, that was not signed by Neil Jacobs, NOAA’s acting administrator.

The story began on Sept. 1. As Hurricane Dorian ravaged the Bahamas, President Trump tweeted, “In addition to Florida—South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated.”

But this wasn’t true: Dorian would likely miss Alabama entirely. About 20 minutes later, the National Weather Service’s office in Birmingham rushed to correct the record. “Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian. We repeat, no impacts from Hurricane #Dorian will be felt across Alabama,” it tweeted. “The system will remain too far east.”

What then happened was that Hurricane Dorian did not strike Alabama—and the state certainly wasn’t “hit (much) harder than anticipated.”

But as my colleague David Graham has written, Trump has spent a week bizarrely explaining why he was correct to warn the state’s residents. Thursday he presented a National Hurricane Center map that was obviously doctored with Sharpie to journalists in the Oval Office.

Yet NOAA has now sided with the president. “From Wednesday, August 28, through Monday, September 2, the information provided by NOAA and the National Hurricane Center to President Trump and the wider public demonstrated that tropical-storm-force winds from Hurricane Dorian could impact Alabama,” its statement said. “The Birmingham National Weather Service’s Sunday morning tweet spoke in absolute terms that were inconsistent with probabilities from the best forecast products available at the time.”

This statement is extremely closely written. And NOAA leadership did find a single forecast tool that indicated a small part of southeastern Alabama faced a 5 to 10 percent chance of experiencing 40-mph winds.

Yet this is beside the point, because Alabama never actually experienced those winds. In the course of this week, winds in Alaga—a town in the state’s southeasternmost corner—never exceeded 9 miles an hour, according to the weather-almanac database Dark Sky.

And if NOAA is in a mood to nitpick: President Trump’s statements disagreed far more with “probabilities from the best forecast products available” than the Birmingham office’s did. At no point was Alabama “most likely [to] be hit (much) harder than anticipated.” And this is not even the most egregious example. “They actually gave that a 95 percent chance probability. It turned out that that was not what happened,” Trump said Thursday. The National Weather Service never forecast that Dorian had a 95 percent chance of hitting Alabama.

I have ignored this story for the past few days, figuring that the president’s bizarre behavior should not distract from the U.S. government’s overall skilled preparation and handling of a historically dangerous hurricane. But this statement has turned what has become a routine type of political story (the president has said something misleading!) into one that’s slightly more Soviet—and much more worrying. Americans have gotten used to living in a country where partisanship is unavoidable. But living in a country where a weather report is sometimes partisan and untrustworthy—that’s something new.

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The Air Really Was Cleaner Under Obama

Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic — Wed, 10 Jul 2019 21:00:00 -0400

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of President Donald Trump’s speech on Monday was that it happened at all.

It was billed as a celebration of Trump’s environmental leadership. Three senators and six Cabinet-level leaders—powerful people whose scarcest resource is their time—watched the president speak for close to an hour. During that period, Trump did not announce a new green program, nor did he reverse any of his 83 environmental rollbacks. He alluded to the climate only once, when he criticized the Paris Agreement, and he never actually said the phrase climate change, nor did he acknowledge that Earth is warming.

Axios reported that the White House was previewing Trump’s reelection message, that it sought to portray him “as pragmatic … to appeal to suburban women.” According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll released this past weekend—a poll that found Trump’s approval rating at 44 percent, one of its highest readings ever—the public overwhelmingly disapproves of the president’s climate policy. Sixty-two percent of Americans dislike Trump’s climate record, a worse reading than he earns on immigration, gun violence, or health care.

So Monday, we learned what a slightly greener Trump looks like.

The president, hard up for actual environmental accomplishments, kept rounding back to the EPA’s success in delisting Superfund sites. It’s true that the EPA has finished cleaning up 22 heavily toxic places under Trump, but many of the sites were the subject of a years-long effort that preceded his administration.

Trump then talked up alternative energy. “I’m a big believer in solar energy,” he said. That makes sense as a pitch: Solar energy is overwhelmingly popularamong Americans of all parties. But he is doing very little to help its cause. The solar-power industry has lost roughly 18,000 jobs under the Trump administration, according to its trade group. The group says that most of that hemorrhage is due to the president’s tariffs. (The coal industry has gained 2,000 jobs in the same time.) Trump also didn’t mention wind energy during his speech. It’s just as popular as solar energy, but in April the president alleged it causes cancer. (It doesn’t.)

Most important, Trump brought back a promise from his 2016 campaign. “From day one, my administration has made it a top priority to ensure that America has among the very cleanest air and cleanest water on the planet,” he said. And maybe if administration officials still phrased this as an aspiration, it would be true: Trump wants the U.S. to have the cleanest air! He’s not helping matters much at all, but hey, at least he wants it!

Except Monday the White House went further. “Today we have the cleanest air on record,” said Andrew Wheeler, the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, during the event. “Pollution is on the decline, and our focus is to accelerate its decline, particularly in the most at-risk communities.”

“Under your administration,” he added, addressing Trump, “emissions of all the criteria air pollutants have continued to decline.”

The problem is that neither of those claims is true. Six types of dangerous air pollutants qualify as “criteria” pollutants under the Clean Air Act, and all are toxic in some form to human health. At least three of them—ozone, nitrous oxide, and particulate matter—are more prevalent now than they were in 2016, before Trump took office, according to EPA data released this week.

The number of “unhealthy-air days” across the country is also increasing. An unhealthy-air day is a day when ozone or particulate matter poses a threat to at least some of the population, such as children, the elderly, or people with lung conditions. Particulate matter is one of the deadliest environmental toxins, and it still kills tens of thousands of Americans every year. Across 35 major American cities, there were nearly 14 percent more of these days in 2018 (799) than in 2016 (702), according to the EPA. The record for the fewest-ever number of unhealthy-air days was set in 2014, during the Obama administration, when there were only 598.

And Wheeler’s broader claim that “pollution is on the decline” is also untrue. American emissions of carbon-dioxide pollution surged last year, after several years of decline. Carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere and acidifies the ocean, and it is the most significant driver of climate change.

Neither Trump nor Wheeler is doing anything to help this situation. The EPA is pulling back on its regulation of coal plants, and it’s changing how much it weighs the public-health risks of some toxic air pollution. In addition to rolling back some rules, it has substantially reduced its enforcement and prosecutionof existing ones. It is trying to freeze fuel-economy rules for new cars, which will increase highway pollution. And it is doing almost nothing about climate change. On top of all this, a number of factors in the economy are encouraging more pollution right now: Flights are cheap, gas prices are low, and some recent winters have been cold enough to spike heating-oil use.

Trump’s boast that the United States has “the cleanest water” actually holds slightly more, uh, water. According to the 2018 Yale Environmental Performance Index, the United States is tied with nine other countries at No. 1 for meeting the highest drinking-water standards.

But the same report ranked the United States 31st for sanitation and 39th for wastewater treatment worldwide, and 27th for overall environmental performance. “This ranking puts the United States near the back of the industrialized nations,” the report warns, “behind the United Kingdom (6th), Germany (13th), Italy (16th), Japan (20th), Australia (21st) and Canada (25th).”

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What Spy-Satellite Companies Can Teach NASA About Climate Change

Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic — Thu, 11 Apr 2019 10:06:10 -0400

SAN FRANCISCO—The sky has filled with eyes, and NASA is starting to notice.

Over the last several years, venture-funded start-ups have hurled hundreds of inexpensive satellites into orbit. For-profit companies have used smartphone technology to make compact satellites that look down at Earth and monitor its every oceanic gurgle, erupting volcano, or forest conflagration. Hundreds of these satellites might gaze down at the same time; they are organized in what are called (rather poetically) constellations.

NASA has now taken heed of these new arrangements. Earlier this year, it asked 36 scientists to figure out whether imagery and data from three satellite companies could be put to serious scientific use. On Thursday, the San Francisco-based start-up Planet announced that it is one of the three companies participating in the pilot program.

Among NASA’s goals: Decide whether data from the three satellite companies can be used to create a dashboard of what are called Essential Climate Variables. These core clues to planetary health—which include figures tracking the size of leaves, the health of Arctic permafrost, and the extent of groundwater reservoirs—could function as a kind of early-warning system for environmental upheaval.

This program also reflects a potential shift for NASA. The space agency is already preparing to send a human crew to orbit in a commercial spacecraft later this year. It may soon rely on for-profit companies when collecting scientific data, too.

The announcement is something of a coup for Planet, which operates what it describes as the largest private constellation of Earth-observing satellites ever assembled. Planet’s leaders have long described their company as a boon not just for the financial and defense industries—the usual customers for this kind of data—but for scientists and humanitarians. Now they have the NASA deal to prove it.

But it could raise more difficult questions for researchers. Science is conducted largely as a public good, and researchers can vet each others’ work by checking it against publicly available data. If that basic data is no longer publicly available, it could mean that major Earth-science research relies on proprietary data.

I recently visited Planet’s headquarters in San Francisco. Housed in a nondescript former warehouse in the city’s Soma neighborhood, their office melds the feel of the Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C., with the unfinished, exposed-brick-and-metal aesthetic that the writer Kyle Chayka has called AirSpace. One floor is an open-plan office with rows of sleek monitors and small meeting rooms. The next floor up is a shining clean room where dozens of satellites are manufactured every year.

Planet is now the dominant satellite-imagery start-up in the Bay Area. In 2015, it bought RapidEye, giving it five military-grade satellites. Two years later, it acquired its rival small-satellite manufacturer, Terra Bella, in a deal with Alphabet. Today, roughly 120 Planet satellites float in orbit—most of them about the size of a shoebox—allowing the company to photograph every spot on Earth at least once a day.

Planet can also boast association with a large research community. More than 100 peer-reviewed papers cite Planet data. Researchers have used Planet imagery to monitor Arctic lakes, track ships, and tally the biomass of forests.

Jamon Van Den Hoek, a professor at Oregon State University and one of the 36 scientists currently adjudicating the NASA pilot project, told me that Earth imagery now functions as a crucial data source for scientists. The pixels are the data, he told me.“These aren’t just for reference. These aren’t just for a basemap. These are the data you analyze.” A certain shade of pixel might say whether a forest is thriving or clear-cut, or it might suggest that a once open meadow has been swallowed by a city.

As part of the NASA pilot program, Van Den Hoek has used Planet data to help search for and study Earth’s “missing million” people—refugees and internally displaced people who live in informal camps and settlements in the least-mapped parts of the planet. The project would constitute the first systematic analysis of how these settlements change over time, he said.

Not all of this is new: Scientists have been using pixels as data for the last half century. Since 1972, satellites in the U.S. government’s Landsat program have systematically photographed every speck of land on Earth, every 16 days, without fail. Landsat, now one of the largest and most powerful tranches of Earth-science data, is an invaluable scientific resource. In the 1980s, it revealed the extent and severity of Amazon deforestation; now, it captures the massive changes to the Earth’s surface wrought by climate change. One of the most widely cited satellite data sets, a global survey of forest loss created by the University of Maryland professor Chris Hansen, is powered by Landsat data.

But the program’s future is more uncertain—and its fate is tied to Planet’s. The next Landsat satellite, dubbed Landsat 9, is due to launch late next year. But NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey have considered using a new approach on its successor, Landsat 10. They could replace it with two satellites instead, mimicking an EU program. Or they could try replacing Landsat with a swarm of satellites, creating a publicly owned version of Planet’s constellation.

Some lawmakers have even proposed that the government rely on private-sector data entirely for Landsat 10. Van Den Hoek told me that seemed unlikely, at least for now. “People who hold the pursestrings may want that to happen, but no one at NASA wants that to happen,” he said. Planet, too, supports the Landsat program and doesn’t want to see it change significantly, a spokesperson told me. The company’s satellites revisit the same speck of land more often than Landsat’s does, and its cameras have a higher resolution. But its craft are unable to capture as many types of light.

Planet tries to make as much of its data available to as many researchers as possible, and some universities now have blanket licenses to much of its imagery. The company remains a commercial enterprise (albeit one that has not yet turned a profit), but Joe Mascara, an ecologist who now directs academic partnerships for Planet, told me that the replicability of research was a “core principle we would do our best to meet.” And if Planet explores “future, larger contracts with NASA,” Trevor Hammond, Planet’s vice president of communications, said, it “would go in with its eyes open” about the tension between open science and closed data.

Van Den Hoek emphasized that Landsat and Planet are good at different tasks. Landsat could capture widespread shifts to the land: urbanization, deforestation, the loss of polar ice. Planet excels at more fine-grained tasks. “You can ask questions that you could never ask before,” he said. “Huge portions of sub-Saharan Africa rely on small-scale agriculture for daily subsistence. You can’t measure that with Landsat data.”

NASA is also working with Spire Global, a Bay Area start-up that collects high-quality weather data, and Maxar, a more established player that owns the WorldView spy satellites. Peter Platzer, the chief executive of Spire, told me in an email that NASA plans to spend $100 million on small-satellite projects over the next few years.

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An Upheaval at the Ends of the World

Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic — Wed, 12 Dec 2018 15:48:59 -0500

It was not so long ago—only 108 years, within a great-grandma’s memory—that a person’s eyes first beheld the South Pole. When Roald Amundsen made it to the bottom of the world in 1911, it marked a new chapter in the human story. Our curious, inventive, and adaptable species, born on the sunny savanna, had reached that last spot of remote desolation on our home planet.

Little did we know that less than a century later, the hustle and bustle of our society would alter that ancient landscape forever.

The pristine environments at both poles of the Earth are changing, perhaps irreversibly, according to a new pair of federal studies. On Monday, a new NASA report warned that ancient glaciers in Antarctica are “waking up” and beginning to dump ice into the sea, which could eventually raise sea levels.

The following day, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released its new Arctic Report Card, which finds that the top of the world is also thawing, melting, and breaking down. The Arctic is undergoing a period of “record and near-record warmth unlike any period on record,” the report says.

Emily Osborne, a scientist who leads Arctic research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, repeated this warning while speaking at a major geoscience conference on Tuesday. “The Arctic is experiencing the most unprecedented transition in human history,” she said.

The finding at the bottom of the world is in some ways the most shocking. Antarctica is split into two massive ice sheets, the East and the West. Researchers have long considered the East Antarctic Ice Sheet to be less worrisome: Though it contains enough frozen water to raise global sea levels by 173 feet, it sits at a high enough altitude to withstand the first century or so of warming.

The new finding may complicate that conclusion. Using a new database of global ice movements, NASA scientists found that several glaciers in the East Antarctic Ice Sheet are quickening their march toward the sea. Since 2008, a set of glaciers that feed Vincennes Bay—which is due south of Australia—lost about nine feet of overall height. Their speed has also increased, suggesting that these glaciers are dumping more ice into the ocean than researchers previously expected.

The Vincennes Bay glaciers are important because they block the inland Aurora and Wilkes ice basins from tumbling into the sea. If both basins collapsed, they could raise sea levels by 92 feet. “Taken together, they’re about four Greenlands [worth of sea-level rise],” said Catherine Walker, a glaciologist at NASA, speaking at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union on Monday.

Alex Gardner, another glaciologist at NASA, said that warming oceans—and not just a warming climate overall—seemed to be causing the decline in glacier levels. Some of the fastest-collapsing glaciers in the world—such as the Jakobshavn Glacier in Greenland—are primarily giving way because of warm ocean waters wearing at their icy fronts.

Both researchers said that existing models of sea-level rise may not account for these changes. “We weren’t expecting it because we never knew it was happening,” Walker said. “This isn’t new; it started happening 10 years ago. We just couldn’t see it.”

Not that the other end of the world is doing much better. NOAA’s new Arctic Report Card—an annual analysis, now in its 13th edition—finds that the world’s Far North is going through a tremendous upheaval. The report says that the catastrophic effects of climate change now wreak mayhem in every season of the year.

In the winter, when the Arctic Ocean has historically frozen into an enormous skating rink, sea ice now struggles to form at all. 2018 was the second-worst year on record for sea ice, the report says. The Arctic is now so warm that it hemorrhages ice even at the coldest, darkest time of the year: “During two weeks in February—normally the most important weeks for sea-ice growth in the year—the Bering Sea actually lost an area of ice the size of Idaho,” said Don Perovich, a geophysicist at Dartmouth, on Tuesday.

In the spring, the sea ice vanishes early, allowing algae blooms to envelop the open ocean. One warm-water species of algae produces toxins that trigger a disease called paralytic shellfish poisoning when absorbed by shellfish and then eaten by humans. Toxins in a single animal can kill a person in as little as two hours, according to the Alaska Division of Public Health. There is no antidote.

Cases of paralytic shellfish poisoning have increased sevenfold in Alaska over the past 40 years, the new report finds. Seals, walruses, and whales have also been killed by the disease.

Finally, in the summer, temperatures soar. In August, huge swaths of the Arctic Ocean surface measured 20 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal. Ice nowalmost never makes it through the summer: Less than 1 percent of sea ice in 2018 formed more than four years ago. When scientists began tracking that figure back in the 1980s, one-sixth of all sea ice was at least four years old.

Animal life is cratering in response to these year-round changes. Caribou and reindeer herds have lost more than half their animals since the 1980s, said Howard Epstein, a professor at the University of Virginia. About 4.7 million caribou and reindeer roamed the tundra a few decades ago. Only 2.1 million do so today.

Meanwhile, micro-plastics—tiny shards of plastic from bottle caps, fishing gear, and the filters of cigarette butts—are pouring into the region. “The Arctic Ocean has a higher concentration of micro-plastics than any other global basin in the world,” said Karen Frey, a professor at Clark University. “All roads in the global ocean-circulation system lead to the Arctic.”

All these dire federal scientific reports might seem like they would prompt a federal governmental response. Tim Gallaudet, the interim administrator of NOAA and a retired rear admiral in the U.S. Navy, was on hand to provide it. He hailed President Donald Trump’s signing of the Save Our Seas Act, a law to combat micro-plastic pollution that Congress passed unanimously in October. He also hailed the White House’s support for NOAA Arctic research.

But he did not endorse any attempt to fight climate change. “The data is the data. Changes are occurring,” he said. “What we need to do is adapt to those changes—and we can adapt as a country effectively by better understanding and improving our predictions.”

Asked whether he or any other senior NOAA official had talked to the president about climate change, he admitted he had not, and did not acknowledge any other efforts. “No,” he said. “I personally have not briefed the president on climate change.”

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Hurricane Michael’s Remarkable, Terrifying Run

Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic — Fri, 12 Oct 2018 14:29:56 -0400

Just a few days ago, Hurricane Michael was forecast to strike the Florida Panhandle as a relatively weak hurricane—a dangerous storm, to be sure, but nothing especially historic.

Instead, Michael will be remembered as one of the most damaging and powerful storms ever to wallop the continental United States.

After coming ashore Wednesday afternoon as a powerful Category 4 hurricane, Michael slashed a path of near-total destruction across the Florida Panhandle and into southeastern Georgia. The storm’s freakishly low pressure and sustained, brutally strong winds—which peaked at 155 miles per hour—flattened neighborhoods, snapped trees in half, and left hundreds of thousands without power. At least six people lost their lives to the storm, according to officials.

Scenes of near-cataclysm are trickling out from across Florida’s Gulf Coast. In the beachfront town of Mexico Beach, Florida, roads now provide the only interruption to piles of rubble that used to be city blocks. At Tyndall Air Force Base, also on the shore, the storm tore the roofs off military hangars and then pushed around the heavy warplanes resting inside as if they were children’s toys.

Even inland, the winds—which blew as fast as those inside a tornado—collapsed churches and gas stations, knocked 18-wheelers on their sides, and stripped dense woodland entirely of its greenery, leaving behind only clusters of huddled, naked trunks.

“Students in tropical-meteorology classes are going to be talking about this storm for 20 years,” says Colin Zarzycki, a tropical-cyclone scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

From the moment it made landfall, Michael became one of the four strongest hurricanes in history to hit the continental United States, according to the weather historian Phil Klotzbach. Michael’s blinding wind speeds are outmatched only by the three Category 5 storms ever to strike the U.S. mainland: Hurricane Andrew in 1992, Hurricane Camille in 1969, and the Labor Day Storm of 1935. (While Hurricane Katrina achieved Category 5 strength in the Gulf of Mexico, it made landfall in Louisiana as a Category 3 storm.)

In fact, Hurricane Michael’s landfalling barometric pressure of 919 millibars was lower than Andrew’s reading of 922 millibars, making Michael the third-strongest U.S. hurricane on record as ranked by pressure. Michael is also the strongest hurricane ever to make landfall this late in the season.

This staggering intensity let Michael break other records. It remained an intact, fast-moving hurricane many hours after coming ashore. When its eye crossed the Florida-Georgia state line just after 6 p.m., it still unleashed Category 3 winds of 120 miles per hour, and it became the strongest hurricane to strike Georgia directly in a dozen decades.

A number of factors let Michael stay so strong even as it penetrated more than 50 miles inland, Zarzycki told me. “The area where Michael made landfall, over the Florida Panhandle, tends to be a swampy, smooth region. It’s fairly moist, fairly flat, and it doesn’t disrupt the storm core,” he said.

Michael was also moving fast—much faster, for instance, than Hurricane Florence, which dawdled over the Carolina coast for days—so “even though it was decaying rapidly, it could get pretty far,” he added. It also benefited from even, high-atmospheric winds that let the storm continue to pull energy into its core and up through its eye.

“It takes considerable time for the hurricane to expel its energy as it interacts with land,” said Dennis Feltgen, a meteorologist with the National Hurricane Center, in an email.

Though Michael had lost its hurricane-force winds, it remained a tropical storm more than 24 hours after making landfall. Feltgen said that was not unusual for an intense hurricane: “Combined with the fact that Michael has been moving quickly, increasing its forward speed to more than 20 miles per hour, it’s been able to trek across a lot of real estate.”

Zarzycki agreed that Michael’s long-term survival as a tropical system was not the storm’s most notable trait. Instead, meteorologists will recall its shockingly fast intensification, he said. Starting around midday Tuesday and continuing until the moment of landfall, the storm grew in intensity, ballooning from a Category 2 storm into a near-Category 5.

That meteorologists were even aware of this strengthening 12 hours before landfall was a testament to the Air Force Hurricane Hunters, the reserve pilots who fly over storms and drop weather balloons and other scientific gear through its layers. “I remember sitting in my office on Tuesday afternoon and looking at Michael,” Zarzycki told me. “And if you were to just look at a satellite image, the average hurricane forecaster would have said, this is a pretty serious hurricane. But it wasn’t until we saw the numbers from people flying through the storm that we realized how much it had intensified.”

Not until 5 a.m. Eastern time on Wednesday did Hurricane Michael start to look like a potentially catastrophic, Category 4 storm on satellite imagery. “That’s when it had a clearly defined eye, and when it presented as a textbook tropical cyclone,” Zarzycki said.

Soon afterward, the director of the National Weather Service declared that Michael posed a “WORST CASE SCENARIO for the Florida Panhandle.”

That surprising rapid intensification, right up until the moment of landfall, is what made the storm so catastrophic. “If you had offset that intensification in 24 hours in either direction, Hurricane Michael wouldn’t have had the landfall impact that it did,” Zarzycki told me.

And it points to an ongoing challenge for hurricane forecasters and researchers. Over the past three decades, the National Hurricane Center has gotten substantially better at predicting hurricane tracks—and, indeed, as early as Saturday, its meteorologists correctly foretold that Michael would make landfall in the Florida Panhandle midweek. But they have not made nearly the same amount of headway forecasting hurricane strength, and that hasn’t improved since 1990. Even on Monday, “the best guess as a forecast was that [Michael] would probably strengthen into a hurricane—but we’re talking Cat 1 winds of 85 miles per hour, let’s say,” Zarzycki said.

“What most meteorologists will remember about Michael is that it was a very well forecast storm, from a track standpoint—but it had really unfortunate timing in its rapid strengthening,” he said. “We have not solved tropical-cyclone intensity forecasting.”

Michael is, in that view, the inverse of Hurricane Irma last year. Forecast to come ashore as a potentially devastating Category 5 storm, Hurricane Irma made landfall in Florida as a weaker Category 4 storm. It also slackened quickly after landfall and was not nearly as catastrophic as feared. (Irma was far more devastating in the U.S. Virgin Islands and other countries in the Caribbean.)

Forecasting hurricane strength is one of the biggest challenges that hurricane scientists face—especially because climate change is likely to make rapid intensification a far more common occurrence. Otherwise, there will be more tropical cyclones as shocking as Michael, a storm that seemed modest, unremarkable, and almost innocuous—until suddenly it wasn’t.

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The Sudden, Shocking Growth of Hurricane Michael

Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic — Thu, 11 Oct 2018 09:51:10 -0400

The already bad 2018 hurricane season has gotten even worse.

On Wednesday afternoon, Hurricane Michael became the second major storm to make landfall this year. Michael is an incredibly dangerous, history-making storm, bringing catastrophic high winds and deadly storm surge to Florida’s Panhandle. It ranks among the most ferocious land-falling hurricanes in American history.

“THIS IS A WORST CASE SCENARIO for the Florida Panhandle!” said Louis Uccellini, the director of the National Weather Service, in a statement. Officials urged local residents who have not already evacuated to stay inside or find shelter on high ground.

Michael, which will churn across the Southeast over the next several days, has already broken records. As a powerful Category 4 storm on the Saffir-Simpson wind scale, Michael is the strongest hurricane ever recorded making landfall on Florida’s Panhandle. It is also the strongest October hurricane ever known to come ashore in the continental United States, according to the historian Philip Klotzbach.

And by one important measure, Michael is the third strongest storm ever to come ashore in the continental United States. Only the Labor Day Storm, in 1935, and Hurricane Camille, in 1969, had a lower barometric pressure than this storm.

This intensity could spell potential disaster for Florida’s Panhandle. On Wednesday morning, Air Force Hurricane Hunters measured sustained, minute-long winds of 150 miles per hour near Michael’s eye. Winds that strong are capable of snapping trees in half, sending telephone poles flying through the air, and tearing the roof off of well-built homes. Such powerful gales often leave the area “uninhabitable for weeks or months,” according to the National Hurricane Center.

Michael’s winds are also unusually dangerous because they extend far out from the eye of the storm. The National Weather Service warns that more than 160,000 Floridians could experience sustained wind gusts in excess of 130 miles per hour on Wednesday. The storm will then bring hurricane-force winds to southwestern Georgia and southeastern Alabama.

But winds will not be Michael’s most life-threatening quality. More than 150 miles of Florida’s coastline will be temporarily swallowed by the ocean, as storm surge between nine and 14 feet swamps the shore. Nine feet of storm surge—in other words, the minimum forecast for this storm—is enough to turn cars into floating battering rams and cover one-story buildings.

What sticks out about Hurricane Michael’s development is that it got very strong very quickly. If you don’t live in Florida, and you feel like you only started hearing about Michael right before it made landfall, that’s because … you did. Unlike Hurricane Florence, which idled across the Atlantic Ocean as a powerful storm for days, Michael spun through the stages of hurricane formation relatively quickly. It became a tropical storm on Sunday afternoon. Only on Tuesday did it intensify into a major hurricane, with winds above 111 miles per hour.

President Donald Trump was correct when, speaking from the Oval Office on Wednesday, he said the storm “grew into a monster.” Meteorologists have their own name for this worrying phenomenon: “rapid intensification.”

How did Michael grow so strong, so fast? It got lucky. To borrow the president’s analogy, you can think of a hurricane as an enormous monster that feeds off oceanic energy (that is, warm ocean water) and converts it into atmospheric energy (that is, howling winds and terrible storm surge). This beast can grow to be very powerful, but it’s also scared by the slightest disturbance: Smaller local storms, or blustery winds in the high atmosphere, can weaken a hurricane or limit its growth.

Essentially, everything went right for the monster that became Hurricane Michael. As it neared the Florida Panhandle, it found waters that were verywarm: almost 4 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. At the same time, it entered a patch of air that was relatively calm and windless. With lots of watery energy to devour, and few breezes to disturb its feast, Michael could quickly swell into a colossus.

Essentially, everything went right for the monster that became Hurricane Michael. As it neared the Florida Panhandle, it found waters that were very warm: almost 4 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. At the same time, it entered a patch of air that was relatively calm and windless. With lots of watery energy to devour, and few breezes to disturb its feast, Michael could quickly swell into a colossus.

Meteorologists have lately seen a number of storms that acted like this. Last year, Hurricane Harvey rapidly intensified in the hours before it made landfall near Houston. As the climate warms, more hurricanes are projected to undergo a similar process. Kerry Emanuel, a professor of meteorology at MIT, has worried that climate-addled rapid intensification will make hurricanes increasingly difficult to predict. This would present a major problem, as the National Hurricane Center has struggled to improve its forecasts of hurricane intensity over the past three decades. While the government’s forecasts of hurricane storm track—that is, where a storm is going—have significantly improved since 1990, its forecasts of hurricane strength have not improved much at all in that time.

Even this week, the National Hurricane Center did not predict that Michael would make landfall as a major hurricane until late on Monday morning, roughly 48 hours before the storm came ashore. Its track forecast came much earlier: It predicted that some kind of tropical storm would make landfall in the Panhandle on Saturday afternoon.

Scientists won’t formally know whether climate change played a role in Michael’s rapid intensification for several months. But local weather experts have already said Michael is exactly what they would expect to see in a climate-changed world. John Morales, the chief meteorologist for Miami’s NBC station, joked on Twitter that Florida was now “#RecordsRUs” because of climate change.

Global warming’s effect on hurricanes is “like changing the speed limit on a highway,” he said. “The highest possible wind-speed that can be attained in a tropical cyclone is increasing thanks to a change in the thermodynamics.”

Yet rapid intensification may not even be the most important way that Hurricane Michael presages our coming, climate-changed future. To understand the coming future, look to the storm’s social landscape: The storm has made landfall in one of Florida’s poorest regions. In fact, every Florida county currently in a state of emergency has a higher poverty rate than Florida overall. Many residents of those counties live in mobile homes, which are not built to sustain hurricane-force winds.

It is, of course, a matter of chance where a hurricane strikes, and Hurricane Michael did not seek out the state’s most underserved area. But that is the point. It is always difficult—and expensive—for even well-off families to recover from a destructive storm. Yet most families are not prepared for them: More than 60 percent of Americans don’t have enough savings to react to a $1,000 emergency. Without both federal generosity and an unusually successful recovery, some of Hurricane Michael’s survivors will spend years recovering financially from an underserved, random act of weather.

In the world of the 21st century, many different random acts of weather will become more frequent and more destructive. When looking at the aftermath of Hurricane Michael, we should see not only a stand-alone disaster, but the shape of the coming storm.

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Brett Kavanaugh Could Extend Trump's Environmental Legacy by Decades

Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic — Tue, 09 Oct 2018 16:00:36 -0400

The law is magic, and perhaps nowhere is this more obvious than in environmental law. Through the consent of the people and the government’s monopoly on violence, the mere words of American environmental law have reshaped matter, exerted mastery over nature, and granted an incredible gift—extra years of healthy life—to unknown and unknowing souls. In the past half century, these laws have doused the fires of the Cuyahoga, vanished the smogs of the San Fernando Valley, and prevented lead from destroying the brains of New York’s children. Individual statutes are no less miraculous: By the government’s own accounting, the 1990 Clean Air Act has prevented 160,000 American adults from dying before their time.

On Saturday, the United States received a new arbiter of those laws, as the Senate confirmed Judge Brett Kavanaugh as the 114th justice of the Supreme Court. His appointment will likely rank as President Donald Trump’s most effective, longest-lasting, and most profound contribution to environmental law—which is no small feat, as the president has spent most of his time in office trying to dismantle the entire edifice.

Any justice Trump chose to take over from Justice Anthony Kennedy—or any justice who disturbed the court’s center-right lean—would wield tremendous power over the EPA and its companion agencies. On environmental questions, as on much else, Kennedy held the swing vote: The Court only ruled on one environmental case during Kennedy’s three-decade tenure, in which he did not vote in the majority. Earlier this decade, when Obama-era EPA lawyers wrote new rules about water pollution, they borrowed ideas directly from Kennedy’s jurisprudence, for they knew they would eventually have to win him over in argument.

Kavanaugh, a veteran of Republican party politics, will not prove as persuadable, and the Court’s swing vote now likely belongs to Chief Justice John Roberts. But Kavanaugh will also enter the Court as a formidable voice on environmental law: Alone among recent justices, he ruled on dozens of cases involving the environment as a federal judge on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. He favors an extremely strict reading of the laws that empower the EPA. Since these laws—including the Clean Air Act—were not written with climate change in mind, it’s possible he believes the agency has almost no ability to fight climate change without further action from Congress.

That said, he accepts that some version of climate change is real. “The earth is warming. Humans are contributing,” he told a federal courtroom two years ago. And he has historically shown some respect for environmental litigants, even if he almost never rules for them. As Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard, told me in July: “He’s not like a [Justice] Scalia—or, to some extent, a [Justice] Alito—where you read their opinions and find there’s an antipathy, a hostility, to environmental law.”

It’s unclear whether this respect will continue. Every environmental nonprofit that regularly argues cases in front of the Court—including Earthjustice, the Sierra Club, and the Center for Biological Diversity—openly opposed Kavanaugh’s nomination. During his testimony to the Senate, Kavanaugh decried the sexual-assault allegation against him as “a calculated and orchestrated political hit” ginned up with “millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.” Does he consider the country’s environmental nonprofits to rank among those groups? If so, how will he handle clients whom they represent?

In a Wall Street Journal editorial in which he explained but did not apologize for his behavior, Kavanaugh offered no real answers. “I have ruled ... sometimes for environmentalists and sometimes for coal miners,” he said. “I do not decide cases based on personal or policy preferences.”

Donald Trump has spent considerable time in office attacking the edifice of environmental law. His administration has frozen climate-change rules, dismissed high-ranking science advisers, and moved to ban the EPA from using medical and public-health research when crafting new environmental protections. Yet many of these rules can be replaced or repealed themselves. Long after Trump has left the White House, Kavanaugh will remain on the Court. He will be Trump’s longest-lasting contribution to American environmental policy.

That contribution will begin soon. Ann Carlson, a professor of environmental law at UCLA, worries about a case that the Court will likely hear in the next few years: whether the Trump administration can revoke California’s ability to set its own car-pollution rules.

“Trump has been open in his disdain for California and Governor Jerry Brown, and Governor Brown has been open in his anger about the U.S withdrawal from the Paris Agreement,” she told me in an email last month. “If Kavanaugh were to provide the fifth vote to allow the Trump Administration to revoke the waiver, it’s hard not to wonder if his vote would be motivated in part by helping the President carry out his vengeance against California.”

“Even if an openly partisan judge like Kavanaugh was not motivated by a desire to give the President victories, I worry that the perception may be that he is,” she added. “The public’s view of the Court’s independence is already somewhat precarious given the number of 5-4 votes in highly charged cases, split along ideological lines.”

She later became one of more than 2,400 law professors who opposed Kavanaugh’s nomination in an editorial in The New York Times. “He did not display the impartiality and judicial temperament requisite to sit on the highest court of our land,” they wrote. Yet that’s where he now sits.

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A Setback for Trump's Plan to Slash Public Lands

Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic — Tue, 02 Oct 2018 10:22:16 -0400

If environmentalists defeat President Donald Trump’s order to strike conservation protections from more than 2 million acres of public land, they will likely have a minor legal ruling issued last week to thank.

On Tuesday, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., handed a procedural victory to the coalition of indigenous nations, outdoor-activity companies, and environmental groups suing the U.S. government over the cuts to two expanses of wilderness in Utah.

The decision sets the stage for the acrimonious legal battle to come, about whether President Trump can shrink Bears Ears National Monument by 85 percent and cut Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument nearly in half. His cuts rank among the largest ever made to any national monument. Both monuments, located in southern Utah, were created by Democratic presidents.

Judge Tanya Chutkan’s ruling last week gave the environmentalists two key advantages in that fight. First, she ordered that the president’s legal opponents must receive advance notice of any plans to break new ground at the site. She also denied the government’s bid to transfer the case to a federal court in Utah, a jurisdiction that might have been more favorable to the president’s case.

The victories, though procedural, may ultimately prove crucial in the case. The groundbreaking decision is particularly key: It ensures that advocates will learn of any prospecting or oil-drilling activities before they occur. Heidi McIntosh, an attorney at the environmental group Earthjustice and a lead counsel in the case, told me that litigants could now ask the court to issue an injunction to stop environmentally destructive activities before they occur. Under normal circumstances, the Bureau of Land Management would not need to notify the public (or environmental groups) before approving some types of exploratory oil drilling or uranium mining.

“If there’s a need to ask a court for a preliminary injunction, we’ll have that information,” McIntosh said. “Otherwise, those activities could proceed and damage lands that may be in the monument, and we’d never know about it.”

Environmental groups could also hypothetically protest such disturbances if they learn of them in advance. McIntosh said she did not know of any plans to do so.

Judge Chutkan’s decision to keep the case in Washington may turn out to be equally important. That’s because every federal court in the United States has a different set of precedents that constrain and inform how its judges approach legal problems. (The U.S. Supreme Court is so powerful in part because its decisions alone constrain every other jurisdiction.) In D.C., courts have a particular expertise in reining in the power of the president. “Not surprisingly, the District of Utah does not,” McIntosh said. Keeping the trial in D.C. means that environmentalists can draw upon that far larger body of precedent.

Switching jurisdictions might have also undermined tribal claims in the case. The land called Bears Ears is sacred to six different indigenous nations. And though Bears Ears National Monument is located entirely within Utah’s borders, the same is not true of all six of those nations, as some have reservations located only in Arizona or New Mexico. Indigenous nations may therefore have lacked standing to sue Trump in Utah; they have a better case in Washington.

The Department of Justice is representing the government in the case. It declined to comment on an ongoing lawsuit.

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Scientists Hate the EPA’s ‘Strengthening Science’ Rule

Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic — Tue, 17 Jul 2018 19:00:00 -0400

Oops.

A few months ago, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed a new policy that it claimed would “strengthen transparency” in the science it uses to craft regulation. To support its case, the agency alluded to a few major research institutions—namely, three of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals and two bipartisan reports on science and policy.

“The proposal is consistent,” bragged an EPA statement, “with data access requirements for major scientific journals like Science, Nature, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences as well as recommendations from the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Science for Policy Project and the Administrative Conference of the United States’ Science in the Administrative Process Project.”

It was not, actually. Within a week, the editors in chief of those three “major scientific journals” clarified that the proposed rule had nothing to do with their policies. And a lead author of the two bipartisan reports rejected the rule as well, saying that her colleagues “would laugh and hoot” at its ideas.

“They don’t adopt any of the recommendations of any of the sources they cite,” says that author, Wendy Wagner, a law professor at the University of Texas. “I’m not sure why they cited them.”

The seven-page proposed rule—one of Scott Pruitt’s most ambitious initiatives from his last months at the EPA—uses the language of “scientific transparency” to prohibit the agency from consulting a wide swath of peer-reviewed scientific research. If adopted, the policy would essentially bar the EPA from consulting most large-scale medical studies when creating rules about air pollution, toxic chemicals, and water contaminants. The proposal could also force the agency to revoke decades of clean-air protections.

The proposal may not, on its face, seem particularly far-reaching. It requires that scientific studies that support “pivotal regulatory science” publish their underlying data, models, and assumptions. Some scientific studies—in ecology, for instance—already meet this requirement.

But scientific and medical institutions have rejected the proposal en masse, because it would paralyze most medical researchers. These scientists cannot publish a study’s supporting material for public consumption without invading their patients’ privacy, as its data may encompass the identifying details and full medical history of hundreds of people. Often, subjects will only agree to participate in a medical study after being promised their data will be kept private.

The EPA rule creates a catch-22 for these researchers. If they disclose the identity of their research subjects, then they could face criminal penalties under federal medical privacy laws. But if they respect the privacy of their subjects, then their final study cannot be used by the EPA.

If this seems strange, it is: The proposal would forbid the EPA, whose mission is to “protect human health,” from consulting scientific research into humans.

On Tuesday, the EPA will hold the first public hearing about the proposal. It will serve as a test of sorts for whether EPA policy can command public attention after the departure of its infamous leader. The proposal has failed to capture the mainstream attention (or the press coverage) that met even minor Pruitt scandals, such as his pursuit of Ritz-Carlton lotion or his illegal purchase of a $43,000 soundproof phone booth.

For this reason, dozens of scientific and medical leaders argue that proposed rule doesn’t seem to be about scientific transparency at all.

“If the EPA wanted to engage in a good-faith discussion in how to improve transparency, that’s certainly something they could be doing. But this doesn’t seem to be that,” Jeremy Berg, the editor in chief of Science and a computational biologist at the University of Pittsburgh, told me.

Berg issued a statement decrying the proposal, which was co-authored by the editors of five other major scientific journals: Nature, Cell, PLOSOne, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Recall that the EPA had once claimed that Nature, Science, and PNAS inspired its policy in the first place. Berg said, in so many words, that this was bullshit.

“What concerns me and what concerns the other editors is that the proposed rule is much more rigid than our policies,” Berg said. “Based on our experience, that could could have some very negative impacts in preventing the use of high-quality science.”

“We’re interested in making things as transparent as possible,” he added. “But we understand there are circumstances where this isn’t possible, and we think there’s a lot of scientific values in those papers.”

It’s also possible to craft transparency rules that allow for these exceptional circumstances, Berg said. For instance: While some human-subject studies can’t release their data publicly, researchers can still make their data available confidentially to other academics, who can then check and replicate their findings. Science and Nature’s policies both allow for this possibility. The EPA proposal does not.

On Monday, 69 professional and public-health organizations—including the American Lung Association, the American Heart Association, the American Medical Association, and the American Psychological Association—also denounced the proposal.

“We strongly oppose EPA’s efforts to restrict the use of the best available science in its policymaking and encourage EPA to withdraw its proposal,” said a statement from the coalition. “If EPA excludes studies because the data cannot be made public, people may be exposed to real harm.”

The group included representatives of the natural sciences who have historically avoided politics, including the American Geophysical Union and the Geological Society of America. Chris McEntee, the chief executive of the American Geophysical Union, wrote that the proposal was a “a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing policy that would undermine how the agency uses science in decision-making.”

Harvard has also opposed the policy, as has the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities. Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of Harvard, wrote in a June letter to Pruitt that the proposal “is fundamentally flawed” and that it “would significantly limit the EPA’s ability to consider the best available scientific findings.”

“[It] risks not just erosion of public trust in the EPA’s important work, but also progress on improving the health and wellbeing of our communities and our nation,” she added.

As I wrote in April, the proposal is believed to target one study in particular: the Harvard “Six Cities” report, which in 1993 found that Americans living in more air-polluted cities died faster than Americans living in less polluted cities. The study used confidential medical information, but its data has been shared with other research teams and replicated several times.

Particulate matter, the specific type of air pollution identified by the study, has since been found to cause type-2 diabetes, and it has been associated with elevated rates of lung cancer, heart attacks, asthma attacks, emergency-room visits, and hospital admissions. But because the Six Cities study cannot publish its data publicly, some Republican activists and lobbyists have attacked it as “secret science” and argued that particulate matter does not harm human health.

“If you have data that’s really important for public health, then you ought to be willing to share it,” Steven Milloy, a policy adviser at the Heartland Institute and a longtime advocate of “anti-secret-science” policies, told me in April.

He added the Six Cites study was “the granddaddy of all this stuff” and the “biggest science fraud that has gone on in this country’s history.” Milloy also rejects the mainstream scientific consensus that greenhouse-gas emissions are warming Earth’s climate.

“To call such science ‘secret’ is to misrepresent the scientific process,” Faust wrote in her letter. “Harvard has shared significant information and cooperated entirely in a full independent reanalysis of the data by the Health Effects Institute (HEI), which confirmed the validity of the findings... Beyond the HEI reanalysis, the findings of Six Cities have been replicated numerous times in many independent studies.”

It’s true that mainstream public-health researchers have concluded that particulate matter is intensely dangerous to public health. But many of their studies are based on confidential medical information as well. If the policy is adopted, the Trump administration could try to repeal or weaken policies restricting the amount of particulate matter in the air.

A peer-reviewed EPA report has found that the agency’s particulate-matter rules have prevented roughly 200,000 early deaths since 1990. But even at their current levels, the EPA’s rules are not strong enough to prevent type-2 diabetes, according to a recent study.

An EPA spokeswoman did not respond directly when asked about the wide number of scientific and medical agencies who have opposed the proposal.

“The EPA is committed to public participation and transparency in the rulemaking process,” said Molly Block, an agency spokeswoman, in an email. “This proposed regulation is intended to strengthen the transparency of EPA regulatory science. EPA will consider all submitted comments—both those given orally at the hearing and those submitted in writing to the docket—as it moves forward in the rulemaking process.”

“The public comment period for the rule closes on August 16, 2018,” she added.

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Brett Kavanaugh Would Likely Keep the EPA on a Short Leash

Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic — Wed, 11 Jul 2018 10:03:16 -0400

It probably isn’t surprising that Judge Brett Kavanaugh—a longtime member of the conservative movement whom President Trump nominated to the Supreme Court on Monday—has written about climate change.

What might be surprising is that he says it’s real.

“The earth is warming. Humans are contributing,” he told a federal courtroom two years ago, during a hearing about a major Obama climate policy. “There is a moral imperative. There is a huge policy imperative. The pope’s involved.”

He’s even inscribed this view in his judicial opinions. “The task of dealing with global warming is urgent and important at the national and international level,” he wrote in 2013.

Yet this is not necessarily good news for liberals. Kavanaugh has sometimes sympathized with the need for environmental protection. But because he considers global warming to be charged with a “huge policy imperative,” he’s skeptical that the EPA (or the executive branch) should be fighting it alone. And as a future justice, he’s likely to block the agency from doing so.

It is a portentous moment for U.S. environmental law. President Obama spent much of his last term trying to deploy the Environmental Protection Agency—and one of its animating laws, the Clean Air Act—against the threat of climate change. The Trump administration has devoted its energy to undoing this work, and environmental groups are trying to block him.

These two approaches were already likely to produce a clash at the Supreme Court in the next few years. But last month, the court’s great swing vote on environmental issues—Justice Anthony Kennedy—announced his resignation. Kennedy famously determined the direction of the nine-member court—joining its four liberals on some cases, its four conservatives on others—but he shaped few parts of American law as completely as he shaped the environment. Since joining the court in 1988, Kennedy voted in the majority in every environmental case in front of the court except one, according to Richard Lazarus, a Harvard Law professor who has argued more than a dozen cases in front of the justices.

His resignation throws the court’s right-leaning consensus into disarray. With Kennedy gone, conservative groups will likely sue the federal government, trying to exact new law from an emboldened conservative majority. Before the next presidential election, the Supreme Court could rule on the EPA’s authority to fight climate change, the geographical scope of the Clean Water Act, and even the constitutionality of the Endangered Species Act.

On these issues, Chief Justice John Roberts will function as the Court’s ideological center. Roberts has occasionally acted as a swing vote on some high-profile cases. It seemed likely that Trump would nominate another judge like Neil Gorsuch, a Federalist Society–minted conservative who was skeptical of regulatory agencies but who had rarely written about them.

Instead, he picked Brett Kavanaugh.

Since 2006, Kavanaugh has served on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the federal appellate court that hears most EPA cases. During this time, Kavanaugh has been randomly assigned to hear dozens of EPA cases, meaning he has described his thinking about the environment across hundreds of pages of opinions.

“We probably have more of a record for Kavanaugh for environmental law than we do for anyone else in recent memory,” Lazarus told me. “Roberts came from the D.C. Circuit, Scalia came from the D.C. Circuit, Ginsburg did, Thomas did—but none of them had the same number of EPA cases that Kavanaugh’s had.”

He has not been a friend of the agency, though he often appears sympathetic to it. Kavanaugh has emerged as a courteous jurist who is intensely skeptical of whether the EPA can legally regulate new environmental threats, experts told me.

“He’s a kinder, gentler version of Antonin Scalia. I think his judicial philosophy is almost identical, but he’s more polite, and more able to make nice noises about the underlying policies,” said Ann Carlson, a professor of environmental law at UCLA.

“He’s a tough grader when it comes to a regulatory agency,” said Jonathan Adler, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University whose scholarship led to a major challenge to the Affordable Care Act. “He’s not looking for reasons to strike things down, and he’s not looking for broad Constitutional arguments to constrain agencies. But he clearly believes agencies have to dot their i’s and cross their t’s.”

Kavanaugh is particularly skeptical of new EPA programs. Like Scalia, he argues that the agency should only issue a new rule if Congress granted them explicit, precise rules to do so in a piece of legislation, like the Clean Air Act or the Clean Water Act.

During the Obama administration, Kavanaugh heard three major cases about the EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act. In every case, he opposed the agency’s position.

“Why did he rule against the EPA in all three cases?” Lazarus asked. “He’s not like a Scalia—or, to some extent, an Alito—where you read their opinions and find there’s an antipathy, a hostility, to environmental law. Scalia is sometimes even sarcastic in his tone.”

“You never see this in Brett Kavanaugh,” he continued. “He is a really decent person, with enormous integrity, and there’s just not that kind of bent with him. But he is a conservative judge and a stickler for the notion of separation of powers. If he’s going to find an agency has sweeping regulatory authority, with significant economic or social implications, he’s going to want to find that Congress really intended it. He’s going to want to see specific language in the statute that says Congress really meant to give that authority away.”

“That is, in the abstract, a perfectly fair and neutral principle. But it does tend, in environmental law, to lead to one answer, which is: No.”

This isn’t necessarily because Kavanaugh loathes the cause of environmental protection, Lazarus told me. Instead, it’s because Congress hasn’t passed a major environmental law since it revamped the Clean Air Act in 1990. “When the EPA is trying to come up with a way of addressing a problem with some really creative and pragmatic solution, it has to use legal language that is 28 years old, in some cases almost 40 years old,” he said.

One of these three Clean Air Act cases provides a good example. It concerned the EPA’s ability to regulate “cross-state air pollution,” that is, pollution from coal-fired power plants in one state that blows downwind into another.

Judge Kavanaugh found that the agency couldn’t regulate that activity under the Clean Air Act. The case was appealed to the Supreme Court—and the justices disagreed. Both Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy joined the liberals in favor of the EPA, affirming the rule. “They were more willing to read into that [Clean Air Act] language some pragmatic authority for the EPA” than Kavanaugh was, said Lazarus.

In the two other major Clean Air Act cases, the Supreme Court eventually took the same side as Kavanaugh. “He somewhat already appears to be listened to [by the justices] on these issues,” Adler said.

Outside of those major cases, Kavanaugh has often but not always ruled against the agency. In 2013, he voted with the EPA, ruling that the agency was legally permitted to revoke a permit for mountaintop-removal mining. A year later, when a different legal question was argued in the same case, he voted against the agency.

If there is one bright spot for liberals, it’s that Kavanaugh may be just as skeptical of the Trump administration’s recent attempts at deregulation. “If he faces some Scott Pruitt–era rule that was kind of done quick and dirty, I don’t think the administration should expect him to rubber-stamp it,” Adler said. “He doesn’t grade federal agencies on a curve.”

“If you look at his jurisprudence on the D.C. circuit, I think he will be a stickler on procedural compliance,” agreed Lazarus.

One of those “big problems” where he may be more skeptical is climate change. In a September 2016 hearing, Kavanaugh seemed skeptical of the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, an EPA rule that aimed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from the power sector. It seemed clear that he considered that rule to go beyond the scope of the agency’s authority.

“It’s very clear he’s going to be significantly more conservative than Justice Kennedy, and his nomination does not bode well for climate-change regulation under the Clean Air Act,” said Carlson. “When Gorsuch was nominated, there wasn’t very much in his record. With Kavanaugh, the record’s really clear.”

“I think he would have decided against Massachusetts v. EPA,” she said, referring to the landmark 2007 Supreme Court case that found the EPA could regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. “Everything points to the direction of a very narrow construction of the Clean Air Act, and that will seriously limit the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases in a way that makes a meaningful difference.”

A recent report found that Trump administration EPA rollbacks would cause the United States to miss its goals under the Paris Agreement on climate change, emitting hundreds of thousands more tons of carbon dioxide by 2025 than it once pledged.

Carlson also wondered if Kavanaugh’s stated belief in climate change carried an ulterior motive. According to a 1984 Supreme Court ruling, the judiciary branch must show some amount of deference to decisions made by agencies like the EPA. But the courts are allowed to discard that deference if the decision concerns a “major question” of political significance.

“I think he’s supporting his own judicial philosophy by saying that climate change is real and a big problem,” Carlson told me. “He’s saying, It’s a major question. Congress you should step up and act. This is not the place for EPA to be engaged in major policymaking.”

Adler, the conservative law professor, agreed that Kavanaugh might strike down future climate rules from the EPA.“I get that the environmental community looks at him and says, he’s going to get in the way of aggressive climate regulation unless Congress does something. And he might.”

“But if climate change is a problem, and it is; and if we should be doing something about it, which we should; then barring some massive technological breakthrough, unless and until Congress steps up to the plate, we’re kind of screwed,” he said.

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Did Scott Pruitt Remake the EPA?

Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic — Fri, 06 Jul 2018 11:00:00 -0400

In the end, Scott Pruitt attributed it all to the Almighty.

“I believe you are serving as President today because of God’s providence,” he wrote in an obsequious letter to President Trump this week. “I believe that same providence brought me into your service. I pray as I have served you that I have blessed you and enabled you to effectively lead the American people.”

On Thursday, in the same letter, Pruitt stepped down as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

President Trump announced the news in a tweet. He also announced that Andrew Wheeler, currently the EPA’s second-in-command, will take over as the agency’s acting administrator next week.

Regardless of his righteousness, Pruitt blessed Trump by resigning. Over the last six months, Pruitt has attracted endless headlines to the Trump administration. Almost none have been good—and nearly all of them have focused on his misuse of public resources. “A good week for Pruitt,” sighed the editors of the conservative National Review last month, “sees only one report of behavior that is bizarre or venal.”

It’s unclear which (if any) of these countless scandals led to Pruitt’s resignation. (Perhaps it was this week’s report that he instructed aides to keep a public and a private schedule, with sensitive meetings stricken from the former.) But for companies or nonprofits who actually deal with the EPA, Pruitt’s jubilee of grift—while impressive—was always something of a sideshow.

Since taking office last year, Pruitt has waged a campaign to remake key tenets of U.S. environmental law. He began rolling back key Obama-era climate programs, including the landmark Clean Power Plan, which aimed to restrict greenhouse-gas emissions from the electricity sector. He proposed freezing fuel-economy rules for cars and light trucks, and he suspended an Obama-era rule to define the EPA’s jurisdiction over small streams and rivers.

Recently, Pruitt’s scope has widened. In April, he proposed a new policy that would block the EPA from citing most medical research when crafting clean air or water regulations.

But how successful was Pruitt? It depends on who you ask.

Trump, at least, seems publicly pleased with how Pruitt had done. “Scott has done an outstanding job, and I will always be thankful to him for this,” Trump tweeted Thursday. “I have no doubt that Andy will continue on with our great and lasting EPA agenda.”

“There will be no noticeable shift from the Pruitt agenda to the Wheeler agenda because it’s really the Trump agenda,” said Myron Ebell, who led Trump’s EPA transition team, in an email. The agency would still focus on “undoing the Obama regulatory onslaught,” including “repealing the so-called Clean Power Plan,” he added. Ebell has long rejected the mainstream scientific consensus that human industrial emissions are warming the planet.

There’s no doubt that Trump and Pruitt have already altered the EPA. More than 700 agency employees, including 200 scientists, resigned from the agency during 2017 alone, according to The New York Times. The agency is referring record-low numbers of environmental crime to the Department of Justice. And its science-advisory board was also shuffled to include more industry-friendly researchers.

Trump’s proposed rollbacks of climate policy have encouraged higher carbon emissions. The United States is not on track to meet its Obama-era commitments under the Paris Agreement, according to a report last week from the Rhodium Group, an energy-research firm. Trump’s policies are “already deferring investments that might otherwise have led us to a better pathway,” an author of that report told me.

Clearly there have been near-term consequences of Pruitt’s EPA. But outside experts told me that they were less sure that his legal work would result in long-term policy change. Sure, they said, Pruitt has generated lots of news stories by canceling Obama-era climate programs—but he has actually done this too quickly, with too little bureaucratic process, to secure their permanent scuttling.

“I don’t think there is a big Pruitt legacy,” said Jonathan Adler, a law professor at Case-Western Reserve University whose scholarship anchored one of the major Supreme Court challenges to the Affordable Care Act. “[Pruitt] started the process of trying to roll back what the Obama administration did. But they tried to do a lot of it in a quick and dirty way, and it’s not clear that works. Courts want to see that you’ve done the work.”

Even a more conservative federal judiciary would not rubber-stamp many of Pruitt’s proposed news rules, Adler told me. As such, he said, Pruitt’s successor would need to take a more process-based approach to rolling back Obama rules. “The question is whether or not Wheeler takes a more slow and deliberate pace,” he said. “That is the way you achieve lasting policy change, short of legislation.”

Some environmental advocates agreed. “The first year of Mr. Pruitt’s tenure was marked by reckless abandon seeking to reverse everything that the Obama EPA had done,” said John Walke, the director of the federal clean air, climate, and energy program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “He faced defeat after defeat in court because of his deep mistrust for career staff who could have guided him.”

Most of these defeats have concerned small rule changes. Pruitt’s large-scale rollbacks of Obama-era policy have yet to be finalized by the EPA. “Those proposals have not been finalized. And the second crucial step, inevitable lawsuits and judicial review, has not yet been initiated, much less completed,” Walke said.

He told me that Pruitt’s hasty legal work was unlikely to survive judicial review or a future administration, but that whether the Trump administration will make its mark on environmental policy was a more “open question.”

“Pruitt’s successors will undoubtedly continue most if not all of the rollbacks initiated by Mr. Pruitt, because that’s in line with the president’s harmful agenda for the EPA,” Walke said. But he wondered if Wheeler would stop implementing some Pruitt-led rules that he deemed “especially venal or motivated by an extreme ideology.”

Some of Wheeler’s former coworkers speculated along similar lines to Axios.They argued that Wheeler might leave a few more Obama-era rules in place, such as one that forbade tractor-trailer manufacturers from skirting pollution rules by placing an old diesel engine in a new truck body. The trucking industry largely supports the rule, but one Tennessee-based truck dealership reportedly lobbied Pruitt to reverse it.

There’s no doubt that Pruitt has overseen one of the most environmentally skeptical EPAs in history. His only competitor is Anne Gorsuch Burford, who served as President Reagan’s first EPA administrator in the early 1980s. Public and Congressional scorn eventually forced her out of office, too.

And though she downsized the agency, her legal legacy was a Supreme Court ruling that ultimately increased the EPA’s power. (Though that case may soon be reversed by her son, Neil, who sits on the Supreme Court.)

Perhaps Pruitt’s legacy will resemble hers. Certainly his political story already does. “Scott Pruitt shot himself in the foot so many times its like he had a vendetta against the hapless appendage,” Walke told me. “At the end of the day, Administrator Pruitt brought himself down through his own missteps and misdeeds.”

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Scott Pruitt’s New Rule Could Completely Transform the EPA

Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic — Wed, 25 Apr 2018 15:40:20 -0400

In one sweeping move, the Trump administration may soon not only destabilize the last three decades of clean air and water rules, but also completely overhaul how the Environmental Protection Agency uses science in its work. If EPA administrator Scott Pruitt’s recently-proposed rule gets enacted, it will spark a revolution in environmental regulation. But the question is—will it stand up in court?

Pruitt proposed the regulation on Tuesday, describing it as an effort to increase transparency. It would require the EPA to publish all the underlying scientific data used to support studies which guide clean-air and clean-water rules. It would forbid the use of studies that do not meet this standard, even if they have been peer-reviewed or replicated elsewhere.

Crucially, the proposed rule does not carve out an exemption for medical data, which is tightly regulated by federal law. As such, it could immediately disqualify many historic or long-running studies—especially those documenting the dangers of pesticides or air pollution—as the researchers who ran those studies never secured their subjects’ permission to openly reveal their medical data. Under federal law, scientists can face criminal penalties if they publish confidential medical information about someone without first securing their permission.

Both environmental groups and anti-regulation activists said the rule would utterly transform the EPA’s mission in ways that would outlast this administration. The proposal “may be the most consequential decision made by EPA since the election of Donald Trump,” said Joseph Bast, the director of the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank that rejects the mainstream scientific consensus about climate change, in a statement.

“The science that we use is going to be transparent, it’s going to be reproducible,” Pruitt said after signing the proposal. “It’s going to be able to be analyzed by those in the marketplace, and those that watch what we do can make informed decisions about whether we’ve drawn the proper conclusions or not.”

“This is not a policy. This is not a memo. This is a proposed rule,” he added, implying that future administrations will not be able to reverse the measure once it is finalized. Before it becomes a rule though, it’s likely to become a lawsuit—numerous environmental groups have already promised to fight the rule in court. And the way its written, many say, makes it unlikely to stand up to such scrutiny.

To support the measure, the EPA cites a large, nonpartisan literature of recommendations about science in government. An agency statement bragged that the rule “is consistent with” two bipartisan reports in particular: one from the Administrative Conference of the United States, and one from the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Wendy Wagner, a law professor at the University of Texas, knows both of those reports well. In fact, she wrote them. Wagner was the sole author of the Administrative Conference report, and she served on the seven-author panel that produced the Bipartisan Policy Center’s recommendations.

She said the proposed rule had nothing to do with her and her colleagues’ work.

“I really don’t know what the problem is that they think they’re fixing,” she said, adding that many of her co-authors “would laugh and hoot” at some of the scientific ideas expressed in the rule.

“They don’t adopt any of our recommendations, and they go in a direction that’s completely opposite, completely different,” she told me after reading the rule. “They don’t adopt any of the recommendations of any of the sources they cite. I’m not sure why they cited them.”

Other legal scholars were unsparing in their criticism of the rule. “There’s so many different issues with it that it’s hard to know where to begin,” said Sean Hecht, a professor of environmental law and policy at UCLA. “Reading the rule, it doesn’t look like a proposal that has been strongly vetted by career lawyers.”

“To anyone who’s looked at a lot of EPA rules, this rulemaking is extraordinary in the lack of reference to any legal authority,” he said.

Betsy Southerland, a former director in the EPA’s Office of Water and a 30-year veteran of the agency, told me that the rule did not legally seem like a rule at all. At one point, the agency asks the public to comment on which Congressional laws give it the greatest authority to issue the rule. “That’s a stunner,” she said.

“The proposed rule is very sloppily drafted, to be sure,” said Wagner. “It’s very hard to know what they’re talking about, why they’re doing it, how they’re doing it, why and where they see it applying —it’s very mysterious. As a legal matter, that’s not going to help.”

The new rule also appears to invent entirely new terms in environmental law. One phrase—“pivotal regulatory science”—frequently appears throughout the proposed rule. The term seems to be completely novel: It does not appear anywhere else in the laws, rules, or court decisions that govern the EPA, Hecht said. According to Google, that exact phrase hasn’t even appeared on the internet before.

“It’s relatively rare for an agency to make up a term out of whole cloth and try to insert it into the law,” said Hecht.

Wagner said she was “very, very confused” by that and other phrases in the law. Even though the rule is explicitly about “research data,” the rule does not define that term, she said.

She worried that the rule was drafted ambiguously on purpose. “A sinister answer is that the ambiguity gives litigants more points to hold the agency up in court. Every single term is an attachment point,” she said, meaning that a company suing the EPA can seize on the new phrase and attempt to get a court to define it.

Other aspects of the rule “seem to me to be efforts to allow rich stakeholders to ‘data bomb’ the agency,” she said. They seemed designed to force the agency to surrender old data, she said, so that the fossil-fuel and chemical industry can run endless studies reanalyzing it, tweaking their models each time until they get the answers they want.

Just about everyone involved in the rule-making process agrees that the rule targets a specific and foundational piece of environmental science: the “Six Cities” study, from the Harvard School of Public Health. First published in 1993, the study found that Americans living in more air-polluted cities died earlier than Americans living in cleaner ones.

The killer was a specific type of air pollution: fine particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns, which scientists call PM₂.₅. Subsequent studies of human anatomy and biochemistry have backed up this finding: PM₂.₅ appears to be so tiny that it can seep through the lungs and enter the bloodstream, where it weakens and inflames heart tissue, injures organ walls, and damages cell structures.

PM₂.₅, in other words, appears to be exceedingly deadly. This makes it exceedingly expensive.

Every time the EPA adopts a new air or water rule, it must run a cost-benefit analysis, proving that the new rule’s benefits to the public exceed its costs. Each time an American dies earlier than they otherwise would have, the EPA says their death costs the U.S. economy about $9.2 million. Since PM₂.₅ kills hundreds of thousands of Americans every year, the costs of all these early deaths can quickly become overwhelming. The EPA has justified many air-pollution rules—including the Clean Power Plan, President Obama’s landmark climate-change rule for the power sector—on the basis of the high cost of PM₂.₅.

But it all comes back to the Six Cities study, say anti-regulation activists. While conducting the research in the 1970s and 1980s, Harvard scientists drew on hundreds of confidential medical records. These scientists say they cannot now release the underlying data to the public because doing so—even on an anonymized basis—would reveal the identity of individual patients.

But Harvard has turned over its data to third-parties and industry groups multiple times in the past. Each time, those scientists have reanalyzed the data and largely validated the results of the Six Cities study.

This isn’t enough for Steven Milloy, a policy adviser at the Heartland Institute and a former coal executive. “If you have data that’s really important for public health, then you ought to be willing to share it,” he told me. “PM is the granddaddy of all this stuff. It’s where the secret science came from.”

He argues that the EPA must release the data from the Six Cities study, even though that data is controlled by Harvard University. Milloy has long fought for the HONEST Act, a law by Lamar Smith, a Republican congressman of Texas, that closely resembles the new rule.

“It’s the biggest science fraud that has gone on in this country’s history,” he said of the Six Cities study and the larger effort to regulate PM₂.₅.

He contests that PM₂.₅ is not toxic at all. “I have challenged EPA for years and they have never produced a body,” he said. “They’ve never been able to do that, not in China, not in India, not in the United States, not anywhere. China, for the last few years, has had these huge episodes of PM₂.₅. No one’s died.”

The World Health Organization has found that ambient outdoor air pollution, including PM₂.₅, killed 23 million people in China in 2012.

Milloy said that the new rule was “actually better than what I thought was coming.”

“If it’s actually implemented, it’s going to be revolutionary for EPA science and regulatory science, period,” he said. The new rule would force the agency to reshape rules on radiation, drinking water, pesticides, and air-quality issues, because much of the evidence supporting those rules is drawn from medical research using confidential patient data.

But first the rule must stand up in court. It’s unclear how it will fare. On the one hand, the rule is inexactly written and disinterested in citing legal authority.

The rule also directly contradicts a 2002 ruling from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. “We agree with EPA that requiring agencies to obtain and publicize the data underlying all studies on which they rely ‘would be impractical and unnecessary,’” the court decided in that case.

But the federal judiciary is being remade by the Trump administration. President Trump appointed 12 new appellate court judges in 2017, a record for a president’s first year in office. These new, more conservative judges might find themselves more amenable to anti-regulatory arguments than their predecessors would have been.

It’s possible that the rule, in any form, could outlast the EPA chief who signed it. Pruitt now faces the worst crisis of his 20-year political career: To describe him as scandal-plagued would be an understatement. He has set off a scandal pandemic. This weekend, The New York Times revealed that Pruitt personally met with a top energy lobbyist last year, even as Pruitt rented a $50-a-night condo from the lobbyist’s wife. This follows revelations into alleged ethics lapses over staff pay, luxurious travel arrangements, and grift among his subordinates.

There are at least 10 different federal investigations into Pruitt’s ethics scandals, including ones led by the White House and the Republican-led House Oversight Committee. Pruitt will testify before two House committees on Thursday.

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Scott Pruitt Bypassed the White House to Give Big Raises to Favorite Aides

Robinson Meyer and Elaina Plott, The Atlantic — Tue, 03 Apr 2018 07:28:14 -0400

In early March, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt approached the White House with a request: He wanted substantial pay raises for two of his closest aides.

The aides, Sarah Greenwalt and Millan Hupp, were part of the small group of staffers who had traveled with Pruitt to Washington from Oklahoma, where he had served as attorney general. Greenwalt, a 30-year-old who had worked as Pruitt’s general counsel in Oklahoma, was now his senior counsel at the EPA. Hupp, 26, was working on his political team before she moved to D.C. to become the agency’s scheduling director.

Pruitt asked that Greenwalt’s salary be raised from $107,435 to $164,200; Hupp’s, from $86,460 to $114,590. Because both women were political appointees, he needed the White House to sign-off on their new pay.

According to a source with direct knowledge of the meeting, held in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, staffers from the Presidential Personnel Office dismissed Pruitt’s application. The White House, the source said, declined to approve the raises.

So Pruitt found another way.

A provision of the Safe Drinking Water Act allows the EPA administrator to hire up to 30 people into the agency, without White House or congressional approval. The provision, meant to help expedite the hiring of experts and allow for more flexible staffing, became law in 1996. In past administrations, it has been used to hire specialists into custom-made roles in especially stressed offices, according to Bob Perciasepe, a former acting EPA administrator.

After the White House rejected their request, Pruitt’s team studied the particulars of the Safe Drinking Water provision, according to the source with direct knowledge of these events. By reappointing Greenwalt and Hupp under this authority, they learned, Pruitt could exercise total control over their contracts and grant the raises on his own.

Pruitt ordered it done. Though Hupp and Greenwalt’s duties did not change, the agency began processing them for raises of $28,130 and $56,765, respectively, compared with their 2017 salaries. Less than two weeks after Pruitt had approached the White House, according to time-stamped Human Resources documents shared with The Atlantic, the paperwork was finished.

Word of the raises quickly began to circulate through the agency. The episode infuriated some staffers; to some political aides, it was evidence of Pruitt’s disregard for the White House’s warnings to cabinet officials that they avoid even the appearance of impropriety. It also underscored the administrator’s tendency to play favorites among his staff, according to two sources with direct knowledge of agency dynamics. Hupp, in particular, is making more than her Obama-era predecessor, a five-year veteran of the agency who did not break six figures until the final year of the administration, according to public records. (While Greenwalt has no obvious peer in the Obama administration, the EPA’s general counsel had an annual salary of $155,500 in 2016.)

Said one EPA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the press: “This whole thing has completely gutted any morale I had left to put up with this place.”

Neither the White House nor the EPA replied to requests for comment.

Other Trouble

The unusual hiring scheme comes amid new questions about Pruitt’s ethics as administrator. The EPA chief rented a Capitol Hill apartment partly owned by the wife of a top energy lobbyist, paying just $50 per night for the space, according to an ABC News report last week. Pruitt also faces questions over his use of taxpayer money to make regular first- and business-class flights during his first year in office.

Now, in the wake of Greenwalt and Hupp’s salary boosts, government watchdogs are deepening their probe of Pruitt’s use of the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Last May, Senate Democrats pressed the agency for answers about Pruitt’s embrace of the provision. That month, for example, Pruitt used the law to hire Nancy Beck, a long-time lobbyist for the chemical industry, as the deputy head of the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention. Historically, that role has been filled by a career civil servant or a political appointee.

Because she was hired administratively, and not appointed by the White House, Beck did not have to sign President Trump’s ethics pledge, which mandates that Trump officials cannot work on an issue on which they had lobbied in the previous two years. Senators Tom Carper and Sheldon Whitehouse, top Democrats on the Environment and Public Works Committee, sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office requesting a probe into Beck’s hiring. They were concerned, chiefly, that Pruitt was using the Safe Drinking Water hiring authority as a way for new employees to evade the ethics pledge.

“[The Safe Drinking Water Act] can be a legitimate way to bring on skilled experts the EPA needs to protect Americans’ health and safety, but Administrator Pruitt seems more interested in using it to skirt ethics requirements, like the president’s order banning hires from working on matters involving former employers or clients,” Whitehouse said in a statement provided to The Atlantic.

While Carper and Whitehouse began submitting inquiries as early as last spring, it wasn’t until March that the agency’s own inspector general began seriously questioning many of the EPA’s top political appointees about potential abuse of the hiring authority.

Now, staffers are waiting to see how officials will address the raises.

“It’s a complete coincidence that Pruitt went behind the White House’s back and used this in the most unethical way possible, just as the [inspector general] starts asking questions,” said one EPA staffer. “Now they just have to connect the dots.”

It’s not as though Pruitt is the first EPA administrator to lean on the Safe Drinking Water Act hiring authority. EPA veterans of both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations said they were well-acquainted with the provision. But of the half-dozen former top EPA staffers interviewed for this article, not one could comprehend using it as a means of increasing salaries—especially following a rejection from the White House.

“I can’t imagine that being done in the regime in which I served,” said Stan Meiburg, a former acting deputy administrator of the EPA in the Obama administration. “It would have been very controversial. The accusation that would have been pinned on the administrator was that they were trying to give a private benefit using public funds.”

Meiburg, who spent his career at the EPA after joining as career staff in 1977, said that “ADs”—the internal term for employees hired under the Safe Drinking Water Act—were considered a precious commodity inside the agency.

“The number of ADs were monitored very closely by the chief of staff,” he said. “To get one was a big deal. To get one was not an easy task.”

Christine Todd Whitman, the first EPA administrator under President George W. Bush, said she couldn’t remember ever reclassifying a political appointee as an AD. “I don’t even remember it being brought up as a potential or something to think about,” she said.

As Meiburg noted, even appearing to convert a political appointee to an AD simply to give a salary raise could prove politically damaging. But other officials said the deeper effects would be felt inside the agency, where a transparent show of favoritism could inflame interoffice tensions and decrease morale. And in an office where staffers already jockey for favor among Pruitt’s “posse,” according to a source who works closely with the EPA, such a backlash is likely.

“It’s already such a toxic work environment,” the source said, requesting anonymity to speak candidly. “It’s hard to see how it could get any worse.”

Over the last several days, as press reports have zeroed in on Pruitt’s living arrangements, this is the scandal that has seized the agency from the inside. If Pruitt was on thin ice with the White House before, the acceleration of the inquiry into his payroll practices may shatter it.

“We were once the president’s favorite,” said the EPA official. “Now we’re the problem child.”

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As Trump Bragged About His Wine, It Was Sold at Shenandoah National Park

Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic — Wed, 22 Nov 2017 15:22:19 -0500

In September, Bill Snape and his family took the 90-minute drive from their home near Washington, D.C., to the grounds of Shenandoah National Park. It was a trip they had made many times before, but this time Snape was taking it to check out a rumor. He had heard that something unusual was on sale at Skyland Lodge, a hotel on the park’s premises.

At the gift shop of the lodge, Snape found what he was looking for: multiple cases of Trump wine, produced at the Trump family’s nearby winery.

“At first, it just annoyed me. And then I thought, what is the law?” he told me on Wednesday. Snape is a senior counsel at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental advocacy organization.

Snape worries that the sale poses a major conflict of interest and may even violate the Constitution’s emoluments clause. “Emoluments means advantage. You cannot use your public office for your personal advantage,” he said.

The company behind Skyland Lodge has now confirmed that it sold Trump wine at Shenandoah National Park this year. This week, Snape and the Center for Biological Diversity filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act to learn how Trump wine came to be sold at Shenandoah in the first place.

The sale gets at a wrinkle in how the federal parks system operates: While Trump wine was on sale at Shenandoah National Park, the National Park Service wasn’t actually the organization that was selling it. Delaware North, a company based in Buffalo, New York, operates the hotels and gift shops on the grounds of Shenandoah, including Skyland Lodge. It also manages attractions in Yosemite National Park and Grand Canyon National Park.

“At Shenandoah National Park we offer wines from several different Virginia vintners,” said Glen White, a spokesman for Delaware North.

Up until September, he continued, the company had been offering wines from Trump Winery, as well as Kluge Estate (the name of the vineyard before Trump bought it) “because they are locally produced.” (Snape said Trump wine was on sale until at least October.)

“This was only at Shenandoah, where it is a local product, and not at any other parks,” White said. “The National Park Service did not request or require us to carry it.”

Jeremy Barnum, a spokesman for the National Park Service, also told me that Delaware North had been selling Kluge Estate wine for years. He said the park service “does not specify what brands of these products should be sold” by concessioners like Delaware North.

Delaware North is one of more than 500 companies with a contract to sell goods or services within a national park. The National Park Service says that concessioners across the country employ more than 25,000 people, who are not federal employees, and generate more than $1 billion in receipts.

But the wine was definitely still on sale at Shenandoah at the time that Donald Trump promoted it during a presidential press conference. After his statement on the white-supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, Trump told reporters: “I own actually one of the largest wineries in the United States—it’s in Charlottesville.”

The winery itself says this is not true: Donald Trump turned ownership of the property over to his son, Eric, in 2011. Town & Country magazine also disputesthat Trump’s winery is one of the largest in the country.

Snape says that even if a concessioner sold the wine—and not the park service—it still doesn’t pass muster.

“It’s like a Rubik’s Cube, it looks bad from every angle,” he told me. “Why is the concessioner behaving that way—is the concessioner looking for special favors? And why is the park service allowing it to be sold?”

“Whatever you want to say about George Bush or Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton, we weren’t eating Jimmy Carter peanuts, or buying George Bush oil, or using Bill Clinton condoms,” he said. “Where is the line between the public duty and his personal profit seeking?”

Trump family investments and the National Park Service do not only overlap at Shenandoah National Park. The observation deck of Trump’s new hotel in Washington—the Trump International, on Pennsylvania Avenue, just a few blocks from the White House—is operated and overseen by park-service rangers.

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What's Happening With the Relief Effort in Puerto Rico?

Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic — Wed, 04 Oct 2017 15:46:02 -0400

What is happening in Puerto Rico?

Since the storm made landfall on September 20, Hurricane Maria has wreaked havoc on the island, causing a level of widespread destruction and disorganization paralleled by few storms in American history. Almost two weeks after the storm abated, most of the island’s residents still lack access to electricity and clean water.

From a meteorological standpoint, Maria was nearly a worst-case scenario for the territory: The center of a huge, nearly Category 5 hurricane made a direct hit on Puerto Rico, lashing the island with wind and rain for longer than 30 hours. “It was as if a 50- to 60-mile-wide tornado raged across Puerto Rico, like a buzz saw,” Jeff Weber, a meteorologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, has told Vox.

Maria has many elements of a “catastrophic event,” and not just a disaster, says Tricia Wachtendorf, a professor of sociology at the University of Delaware who studies disaster relief.

Catastrophic events are rarer than disasters, and they tend to wipe out infrastructure over a large swath of land. “Most, if not all, of the built environment is destroyed” in a catastrophe, Wachtendorf told me.

“It’s very difficult to navigate the impact zone—to know which roads are open, and to know what to detour around. It’s extremely difficult to pre-position supplies, because if you have any supplies pre-positioned they might have been destroyed. You have [local] officials that are unable to take their usual roles on,” she said.

This renders Maria a different class of disaster than Hurricanes Irma and Harvey, both of which left much of the nearby infrastructure standing. In both storms, supplies that were positioned inland or in Atlanta were still available after the storms had passed.

But were the bad effects of Hurricane Maria made worse by a slow federal response? Democrats and other critics have implicated President Donald Trump’s dawdling response to the hurricane—he did not hold a Situation Room meeting on the disaster until six days after landfall—in the low quality of the relief effort. The president’s tendency to take criticisms of the effort personally has not seemed to help either.

Are these criticisms fair? And how should we even understand the Puerto Rico disaster? To help get a handle on the storm, I put together a timeline of the major events in Puerto Rico before and after Hurricane Maria made landfall. It follows below, and I’ll keep it updated in the days to come.

I’ll say straight-out: There are few obvious gaps in the federal response in the timeline. But it does make it clear that the speed and scale of the initial Maria relief effort pales next to other recent campaigns.

After a magnitude-7 earthquake struck Haiti in 2010, President Obama ordered a massive military and civilian response. As The Washington Post describes: Eight thousand troops were bound for the island within two days; 22,000 troops and 33 ships had arrived within two weeks. And five days after the quake struck, former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton joined Obama at the White House to announce the Haiti Fund, a multimillion-dollar philanthropic appeal for the foreign country.

By comparison, only about 7,200 military personnel have made it to Puerto Rico two weeks after landfall.

And while the five living former presidents added Hurricane Maria to One America Appeal, their preexisting campaign for hurricane-relief donations, five days after landfall, they have not visited the White House or gone on television. President Trump tweeted about One America Appeal once, on the day that Hurricane Irma made landfall, but that was well before Hurricane Maria formed.

This speed did not ensure Haiti had a successful recovery, and today the earthquake-relief effort is considered a failure. But the precedent suggests that the U.S. military might have responded with greater speed than it did to Maria. Unlike Haiti, Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory; unlike an earthquake, a hurricane is predictable. The National Weather Service first warned that Maria could strike the island as a “dangerous major hurricane” more than three weeks ago.

Likewise, the first public call to mobilize the USNS Comfort, the only U.S. Navy hospital ship on the East Coast, came from Hillary Clinton on Sunday, September 24, four days after landfall.

The Comfort was not deployed until Tuesday, September 26, six days after landfall; did not leave port until Thursday, September 28, more than a week after landfall; and did not reach Puerto Rico until Tuesday, October 3, 11 days after Maria hit the island. A Pentagon official has told The Washington Post that the Navy considered sending the Comfort before the storm but decided Puerto Rican ports could not immediately handle a ship that large.

Below is a timeline of the events of Hurricane Maria and its aftermath.

Wednesday, September 6

The eye of Hurricane Irma, then a powerful Category 5 storm, skirts north of San Juan. Puerto Rico experiences a deluge and 100-mile-per-hour gusts, but it avoids the worst of the storm’s effects.

Irma kills four people. It cuts off power to about two-thirds of the island’s electricity customers, and about 34 percent of its population loses access to clean water.

Wednesday, September 13—Seven days before landfall

A trough of low pressure, moving west to east, develops in the tropical Atlantic. The National Hurricane Center believes it will strengthen in the days to come, as there’s plenty of ocean heat for the cyclone to suck up, and little wind to tear it apart.

Saturday, September 16—Four days before landfall

The trough is still in the open ocean, several hundred miles east of the Carribbean’s Windward Islands. But it has begun to form convective bands around its center, and its central pressure has continued to fall.

The National Hurricane Center anticipates that it will become some kind of tropical storm. Starting this season, the NHC is allowed to issue forecasts for tropical cyclones even if they haven’t yet formed by allotting them a number and warning of a “potential tropical cyclone.”

At 11 a.m., the center dubs the storm “Potential Tropical Cyclone 15” and issues its first forecast discussion.

By 5 p.m., the trough has strengthened into a tropical storm, with estimated 50-mile-per-hour winds.

The National Weather Service names it Tropical Storm Maria. John Cangialosi, the hurricane specialist on duty, warns that “Maria could also affect the British and U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico by midweek as a dangerous major hurricane.”

Sunday, September 17—Three days before landfall

The National Hurricane Center continues to watch Maria, issuing forecasts throughout the day. In the afternoon, an Air Force hurricane hunter flies into the storm and records 75-mile-per-hour wind speeds.

At 5 p.m., the National Weather Service announces that the storm is now a hurricane. Maria is “likely to affect” Puerto Rico as a “dangerous major hurricane,” warns the center. In official graphics, it suggests that the storm will make landfall near midday on Wednesday, September 20.

Monday, September 18—Two days before landfall

At 5 a.m., the National Weather Service issues the first hurricane watch for Puerto Rico. It slightly bumps up the time of the storm’s landfall, predicting a Wednesday morning arrival in Puerto Rico. The storm’s maximum wind speed is 90 miles per hour.

Over the course of the day, Hurricane Maria undergoes some of the quickest rapid intensification ever measured.

At 5 p.m., the National Weather Service issues a hurricane warning for the entirety of Puerto Rico. “Maria is developing the dreaded pinhole eye,” writes Jack Beven, a senior hurricane specialist at the NWS. Pinhole eyes are smaller and more robust than usual hurricane eyes, and they suggest that the storm is quickly strengthening. Beven again warns the storm is “an extremely dangerous major hurricane,” and adds, “it is possible that the hurricane could reach Category 5 status.”

At 8 p.m., an Air Force hurricane-hunter plane flies through Maria, recording maximum wind speeds of 160 miles per hour—meaning the hurricane has attained Category 5 strength. An hour later, Maria makes landfall in Dominica, a small island nation of more than 70,000 people. The prime minister describes “mind-boggling” destruction before the communications cut out.

Tuesday, September 19—One day before landfall

Hurricane Maria fluctuates between Category 4 and Category 5 intensity.

“It now appears likely that Maria will be at Category 5 intensity when it moves over the U. S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico,” warns Richard Pasch, a senior hurricane specialist with the National Weather Service. “Preparations to protect life and property should be rushed to completion.”

On the eve of landfall, between 60,000 and 80,000 customers who lost power during Irma have still not regained service, according to Bloomberg and Reuters.

The Puerto Rican government opens 500 schools and other buildings as shelters. The New York Times reports that 2,756 people relocate to a shelter. Locals tell the paper that they expect the central government will lose contact with residents for three days after landfall.

President Donald Trump posts his first tweets about the storm. “Puerto Rico being hit hard by new monster Hurricane. Be careful, our hearts are with you—will be there to help!” he says.

In a press release, the Pentagon outlines how it’s preparing for the storm. About 500 National Guard members are being called up in Puerto Rico, and 820 will be stationed in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The Air National Guard will keep two Black Hawk helicopters and three C-130 transport planes in the area to assist with immediate response.

Wednesday, September 20—Landfall

Hurricane Maria makes landfall just south of Yabucoa Harbor in Puerto Rico at 6:15 a.m.

The National Weather Service observes maximum sustained winds of 155 miles per hour, making Maria the first Category 4 cyclone to hit the island since 1932. The storm is almost Category 5, defined as any tropical storm with winds 157 miles per hour or higher.

Parts of Puerto Rico see 30 inches of rain in one day, equal to the amount that Houston received over three days during Hurricane Harvey. The winds cause “tornado-like” damage over a swath of the island. They’re strong enough to destroy the National Weather Service’s observing sensors in the territory, forcing meteorologists to measure the storm entirely by satellite.

The storm knocks out power to the entire island. Much of the island’s population, including swaths of San Juan, cannot access clean water without electrical power. Local officials warn that some towns see 80 to 90 percent of their structures destroyed.

Thursday, September 21—One day after landfall

In the morning, rain from the storm continues to deluge Puerto Rico, and the National Weather Service warns of “catastrophic” flooding in the territory’s mountainous interior. Informal estimates put the storm’s death toll on the island at 10.

Ricardo Ramos, the chief executive of Puerto Rico’s public power utility, tells CNN that its entire electrical infrastructure has been “destroyed.”

President Trump tells reporters that Puerto Rico is “obliterated,” after meeting with the president of Ukraine at the United Nations in New York. He says rebuilding will begin “with great gusto.”

“Their electrical grid is destroyed,” Trump says, according to The New York Times.“It wasn’t in good shape to start off with. But their electrical grid is totally destroyed. And so many other things.”

President Trump issues a state of emergency for Puerto Rico. He calls local officials on the island and pledges to help, The Washington Post reports. That night, he travels to his golf club in New Jersey for the weekend.

Friday, September 22—Two days after landfall

Puerto Rican officials warn that restoring power to the island could take six to eight months.

The airport in San Juan reopens to military traffic, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

President Trump meets with a handful of Cabinet officials to discuss his new entry ban, which restricts citizens of eight countries from entering the United States. At the meeting, he speaks briefly about Puerto Rico with acting Homeland Security secretary Elaine Duke, according to The Washington Post.

In the evening, President Trump holds a political rally in Alabama to promote Luther Strange, a candidate in the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The president says that NFL owners should fire players who protest on the field, which dominates headlines that weekend. He does not mention Puerto Rico during this speech. He returns to New Jersey that night.

Saturday, September 23—Three days after landfall

The main port in San Juan reopens. “1.6 million gallons of water, 23,000 cots, [and] dozens of generators” arrive on 11 ships, according to the Associated Press.

In news reports, it becomes clear that the island’s entire communications infrastructure has been knocked out. Eighty-five percent of the island’s 1,600 cell towers don’t work, and neither do the vast majority of internet and telephone lines, the AP reports.

The Puerto Rican government warns that Guajataca Dam, in the territory’s northwest, could fail at any moment after getting walloped by the storm. It begins evacuating the 70,000 people who live nearby. The 90-year-old dam had not been inspected since 2013.

Sunday, September 24—Four days after landfall

Vice President Mike Pence talks on the phone with Jenniffer González-Colón, Puerto Rico’s non-voting representative in the House of Representatives. It is the only reported communication between a Puerto Rican leader and the president or vice president during the weekend.

In a tweet, Hillary Clinton calls on the president and Defense Secretary James Mattis to send the U.S. Navy, including the hospital ship USNS Comfort, to Puerto Rico immediately. “These are American citizens,” she says.

Monday, September 25—Five days after landfall

The first Trump administration officials visit Puerto Rico to survey the damage. They include Brock Long, the administrator of the Federal Emergency-Management Agency, and Tom Bossert, a homeland-security adviser. They return to Washington that night.

“We need to prevent a humanitarian crisis occurring in America. Puerto Rico is part of the United States. We need to take swift action,” Puerto Rican governor Ricardo Rosselló tells CNN.

The Pentagon issues its first written update entirely about the effort in Puerto Rico. It says 2,600 Department of Defense employees are in the territory or the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Eight members of the House of Representatives write to President Trump, asking him to waive the Jones Act for ports in Puerto Rico for one year. The Jones Act is a 1920 law that requires ships carrying goods between U.S. ports to fly the American flag, which means they must abide by U.S. laws. It also requires these ships to be built in the United States and owned and operated by American citizens. The government temporarily waived the Jones Act with little fanfare for ports along the Gulf Coast after Hurricanes Harvey and Irma struck.

At 8:45 p.m., the president tweets about Puerto Rico for the first time since the storm made landfall. The Washington Post reports that he had just come from dinner with conservative leaders in Congress.

“Texas & Florida are doing great but Puerto Rico, which was already suffering from broken infrastructure & massive debt, is in deep trouble,” he says in a series of posts. “It’s [sic] old electrical grid, which was in terrible shape, was devastated. Much of the Island was destroyed, with billions of dollars owed to Wall Street and the banks which, sadly, must be dealt with. Food, water and medical are top priorities—and doing well.”

Tuesday, September 26—Six days after landfall

Forty-four percent of Puerto Rico’s population, or 1.53 million people, lack access to drinking water, the Pentagon says. Power remains out across most of the island.

Fifteen percent of the island’s 69 hospitals are open. Eight airports and eight seaports are open across Puerto Rico, though some are only operating during the day.

Trump holds his first coordinating meeting in the Situation Room about the response in Puerto Rico, according to a Washington Post report. He talks to Governor Rosselló again, and talks to Congresswoman González-Colón for the first time.

“There will be a humanitarian crisis. There will be a massive exodus to the United States,” says Roselló. He implores Congress to pass an immediate bill offering help commensurate to the scale of the disaster.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers inspects the Guajataca Dam and finds that it is intact but will need reinforcement.

The Florida senators—Marco Rubio, a Republican, and Bill Nelson, a Democrat—write to Trump urging “additional federal assistance” for Puerto Rico. “This is a life-threatening situation,” they write, warning of “millions without power, communications, and water.”

Adam Smith, the ranking Democratic member on the House Armed Services Committee, says that the Pentagon must establish a “coordinated military effort” led by a three-star general. The Department of Defense has taken similar steps after Hurricane Katrina and after Typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines in 2013.

The U.S. Navy announces the deployment of the USNS Comfort, a hospital ship based in Norfolk, Virginia, to Puerto Rico. FEMA warns that the Comfort must take on emergency staff, and that it may take another week for the ship to be ready to leave port.

The Pentagon also announces it’s tasking nine additional cargo aircraft with Puerto Rican relief, and seven additional cargo planes with disaster response in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Wednesday, September 27—Seven days after landfall

The Puerto Rican government announces that 16 people have lost their lives in the storm. It does not update the official death toll for another six days.

At the White House, President Trump is asked if he is planning to waive the Jones Act for Puerto Rico. “We’re thinking about that,” he tells reporters. “But we have a lot of shippers and a lot of people that work in the shipping industry that don’t want the Jones Act lifted, and we have a lot of ships out there right now.”

The Port of Mayagüez reopens for daylight operations, says the Pentagon.

Thursday, September 28—Eight days after landfall

The death toll from Hurricane Maria is likely far higher than what has been declared, report the Miami Herald and the Center for Investigative Journalism. Omaya Sosa Pascual, a reporter with the center, contacts the few functioning hospitals and morgues and finds dozens more fatalities than the widely reported figure of 16.

Seventy percent of Puerto Rico’s hospitals are not functioning, the Herald also reports. Official death tolls do not account for patients who have already died from not receiving dialysis or oxygen.

President Trump waives the Jones Act for 10 days, allowing ships not flying the U.S. flag to access the island’s ports.

More than 10,000 shipping containers full of food and supplies lay stranded in the Port of San Juan, reports CNN. They can’t be shipped to the island’s interior due to a lack of fuel, labor, and working roads. Governor Roselló says that only about 20 percent of Puerto Rico’s truckers have been able to work.

Speaking at the White House, acting DHS secretary Elaine Duke tells reporters she is “very satisfied” with the Puerto Rico response.

“I know it is really a good news story in terms of our ability to reach people and the limited number of deaths that have taken place in such a devastating hurricane,” she says.

The Department of Defense charges Jeffrey Buchanan, a three-star general with the U.S. Army, with leading the U.S. military’s response in Puerto Rico. He arrives on the island the same day. The military estimates 160 million meals will be needed over the next 30 days.

“It didn’t require a three-star general eight days ago,” says Bossert, Trump’s homeland-security adviser, explaining why no military leader had been appointed before.

The USNS Comfort departs its base in Norfolk, Virginia. CNN reports that the hospital ship is expected to arrive “in the middle of next week.”

Friday, September 29—Nine days after landfall

FEMA offers a different assessment of the island’s 69 hospitals: “One is fully operational, 55 are partially operational, five are closed, and the status of eight is as yet unknown,” it says in a statement.

The Department of Defense also says it’s operating 10 regional supply-distribution centers across the territory, which supply “food, water, and other commodities.”

Carmen Yulín Cruz, the mayor of San Juan, responds to acting DHS secretary Duke saying the response is a “good news story.”

“Well maybe from where she's standing, it’s a good news story,” Cruz tells CNN. “When you're drinking from a creek, it's not a good news story. When you don't have food for a baby, it’s not a good news story. When you have to pull people down from buildings—I’m sorry, that really upsets me and frustrates me.”

She adds that Duke’s comments were not in line with the support the White House has otherwise offered. At a press conference later that day, Cruz tells reporters: “We are dying here. If we don’t get the food and the water into the people’s hands, we are going to see something close to a genocide.”

Saturday, September 30—10 days after landfall

Fifty-five percent of Puerto Rico, or about 1.87 million people, don’t have clean drinking water, the Pentagon says. This is an increase from numbers provided earlier in the week, meaning that either 300,000 people lost clean water through the week or initial estimates were off.

The Pentagon also says that about half of grocery and big-box stores have re-opened across the territory, as have about 851 gas stations.

President Trump grabs onto Mayor Cruz’s criticism from the day before. He tweets about the politics of Puerto Rico more than half a dozen times, criticizing her and accusing the press of attacking first responders and the military.

“The Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump,” he writes. “Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort. 10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.”

Sunday, October 1—11 days after landfall

More than a thousand service members arrive on the island, boosting its number of Pentagon personnel from 4,600 to about 6,400, the Department of Defense says.

About 8,800 people are in refugee shelters, says Governor Roselló in a news conference. He also tells reporters that 36 percent of Puerto Ricans have regained cell service.

The federal government will boost the number of regional supply-distribution centers from 11 to “25 or more,” he also says.

President Trump continues tweeting about the success of the recovery effort. “We have done a great job with the almost impossible situation in Puerto Rico. Outside of the Fake News or politically motivated ingrates, people are now starting to recognize the amazing work that has been done by FEMA and our great Military,” he says in two posts.

He also seems to imply that all buildings across the island have now been “inspected for safety,” a claim repeated by no other federal agency.

Monday, October 2—12 days after landfall

Hector Pesquera, Puerto Rico’s secretary of public safety, admits to the Center for Investigative Journalism that death tolls are likely much higher than official estimates.

“I believe there are more dead, but I don’t have reports telling me, [for example], eight died in Mayagüez because they lacked oxygen, that four died in San Pablo because they did not receive dialysis,” he says.

The Defense Department reports that 7,200 military personnel are working on the island. But the Pentagon revises down its estimate of reopened gas stations, saying “more than 759” of 1,120 are selling gas again. It does not provide a reason for the change. It also reports that about 65 percent of grocery and big-box stores are open.

About 12 percent of cell towers on the island are operational again, says the Federal Communications Commission. Puerto Rican officials estimate that only about 40 percent of residents have any kind of internet or cell service.

Tuesday, October 3—13 days after landfall

President Trump visits Puerto Rico for the first time since Maria made landfall. During the visit, he tosses relief supplies, including paper towels and toilet paper, into a crowd of onlookers.

“I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you’ve thrown our budget a little out of whack,” he says at a news conference with the territory’s leaders. “That’s fine. We saved a lot of lives.”

He also compares Maria favorably to Hurricane Katrina. “Every death is a horror, but if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina, and you look at the tremendous hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died, and you look at what happened here and what is your death count? Sixteen people, versus in the thousands,” he says. “You can be very proud.” The comment is factually incorrect in several ways, as my colleague David Graham notes.

After his visit, Governor Roselló issues the first update to the island’s official death toll in six days. Hurricane Maria killed 34 people in Puerto Rico, he says.

At 10 a.m., the USNS Comfort arrives in Puerto Rico. The Defense Department reports that 9,000 military personnel are now on the island.

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How the National Weather Service Prepares for the Worst

Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic — Tue, 12 Sep 2017 13:25:10 -0400

COLLEGE PARK, Md.—“I woke up Friday night with a dream that it had missed the peninsula,” said Bill Lapenta, the director of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction.

We sat looking at a screen that showed Hurricane Irma’s long journey across the Atlantic Ocean. Another monitor showed a live satellite feed of the cyclone, the hurricane a splotch of rainbow data, its eye coming closer and closer to the Florida mainland. Across the room, Jim Cantore shouted through the television that Irma was about to make landfall.

Lapenta had been thinking about Hurricane Irma for days. No element of the storm’s forecast, he told me Sunday, was more important than its projected last-minute turn in the Florida Strait. For more than a week, meteorologists had insisted that the storm would travel west along the Cuban shore before suddenly shifting north toward the Florida peninsula. If it failed to pivot, it would sail harmlessly into the Gulf of Mexico. Six million people had been evacuated on the basis of this alleged turn. Florida had declared a state of emergency, and the governor called up the national guard.

It was as assured as anything ever is in hurricane prediction—but it was not certain. If the turn materialized, it would do so less than a day before landfall. So Lapenta, who oversees the National Hurricane Center as well as eight other environmental offices within the National Weather Service, dreamt a nightmare of a turn-less Irma. He checked the official forecast again on his phone.

“It probably would’ve been good for the public impacts, though somewhere in the panhandle might have gotten slammed,” he told me, of his dream. “But for us ... it would have been a huge miss.”

It wasn’t a miss. On Saturday evening, Irma verified the NWS’s forecast, gliding north through the Florida Strait and tearing into the state’s southwest. It hit a state that—at least from the weather service’s perspective—was as well prepared as it could be for the storm.

For the National Weather Service, Irma’s landfall represented an important validation not just of its new long-term hurricane-prediction tools, but of its entire shift of strategy four years ago. Instead of issuing forecasts and warnings, the agency now considers part of its job to be helping local and state governments prepare for incoming disasters

“History is being made today, I have no doubt,” said Louis Uccellini, the director of the National Weather Service, in an exclusive interview on Sunday. He told me that new technology—including new satellites and modeling tools—as well as a revamped institutional philosophy amounted to a complete change in how the agency prepares for hurricanes.

The agency’s leadership was eager to show off that philosophy on Sunday, as its forecasters rushed to describe and predict the storm’s finale. They call their new strategy “Weather-Ready Nation,” and it emerged as an idea from a few of the most traumatic days in American weather history.

On April 3 and 4, 1974, while Uccellini was still studying meteorology at the University of Wisconsin, an extraordinary outbreak of tornadoes struck the American Midwest. More than 140 tornadoes rolled across 13 different states on those two days, causing the equivalent of $3.9 billion in damage in today’s dollars. More than a dozen tornadoes might have spun across the plains simultaneously.

At the time, the Weather Service saw its role as rather limited. “Watches and warnings worked completely differently than they do now,” said Uccellini. Local offices published forecasts every morning and strayed little from their designated role. The service issued a tornado watch only after a whirlwind had touched down.

Across the two-day “super outbreak,” more than 315 people died.

It was the largest rash of tornadoes ever recorded—until the super outbreak of April 2011. On April 27 and 28, 2011, 362 tornadoes touched down across the central and southeastern United States. Four of them were rare EF5s, enough to tear houses from their foundations and level entire towns.

This time, the National Weather Service was ready. It issued a nationwide “convective outlook” the morning of April 27, giving the day its highest-ever tornado-danger level for the first time ever. Ninety-five percent of its tornado watches preceded an actual tornado. Tornado warnings—alerting residents to an imminent twister—were issued, on average, 24 minutes before a tornado swept through an area.

It was a remarkably accurate set of forecasts. It represented the triumph of a long series of changes—like installing nationwide Doppler radar and requiring all NWS employees to have bachelor’s degrees—that the service implemented during the 1990s and 2000s.

“And yet the same number of people died,” said Uccellini. For all the agency’s forewarning, the super outbreak of 2011 killed more than 320 people. Earlier warnings, more precise forecasts, and faster communication tools did not keep the contemporary outbreak from killing more people than its 1974 predecessor. What happened?

Agency leadership fell into a series of meetings with politicians, emergency planners, and social scientists to figure it out. “The expression in that meeting was ‘You’ve got to go the last mile with your forecasts,’” Uccellini said. “We needed—with a sense of urgency—to move beyond forecast warnings and connect with decision makers.”

After months of meetings (which Uccellini led), the agency settled on a new guiding philosophy in late 2011: “Building a Weather-Ready Nation.” Instead of merely publicizing changes to the weather and hoping people noticed, it would take responsibility for getting sound science to officials. It embraced resilience and responsiveness as worthwhile goals, and it recruited “Weather-Ready Ambassadors” to communicate the dangers of impending natural disasters. (One of the ambassadors is Nextdoor, a social-networking app for neighborhoods that was used by Hurricane Harvey rescuers. Another is The Weather Channel.)

The National Weather Service now regularly lends its meteorologists to other government agencies in advance of a major disaster. NWS meteorologists rode out Hurricane Irma at the offices of the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency-Management Agency. Florida’s state government and numerous counties also asked for—and received—an agency meteorologist to watch the storm with them.

“We don’t invite ourselves in; we get invited in. We interact through email and social media generally. And then, last weekend, when we were talking about this storm taking a hard right turn into Florida, we started embedding and connecting on a much more urgent basis,” Uccellini told me.

In the eyes of agency leadership, this early planning allowed Florida to declare a state of emergency almost a week before Irma’s landfall. The state could then begin to evacuate its population, which is a mosaic of vulnerable groups: Florida has more tourists, more older people, more non-English speakers, and more people living near the coast than most other parts of the United States.

The 2011 super outbreak of tornadoes also changed how the National Weather Service talks about the weather. It no longer says just that there is a risk of a dangerous tornado; now, it deploys specific and evocative language: “A tornado is forming here, and it will be strong enough to flatten a house,” for instance. That focus on clear language and easy-to-understand instructions helped the service’s Key West forecast office warn locals as Irma loomed:

***EVERYONE IN THE FLORIDA KEYS***

***IT IS TIME TO HUNKER DOWN***

***THE WORST WINDS ARE YET TO COME***#Irma #FLkeys #flwx pic.twitter.com/lmHTcRv68l
— NWS Key West (@NWSKeyWest) September 10, 2017

Many of these new informal relationships between the National Weather Service and state and local governments were codified in the Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Act, which President Trump signed in April.

A new philosophy was not the only first for the weather service. Irma brought unusual prominence to the NOAA Center for Weather and Climate Prediction, a four-story building near the University of Maryland that looks like a ship’s sail stiffened with wind. The structure is home to four of the agency’s nine environmental-prediction centers, including the teams that forecast ocean weather, develop new weather models, and advise local forecasters nationwide.

Since last week, it also houses an altogether more informal office.

Normally, the National Hurricane Center, or the NHC, operates out of a glorified bunker in Miami—its hardened steel headquarters can withstand Category 5 winds and more than a dozen feet of storm surge. But with early forecasts asserting that Irma would batter the city, the weather service prepared for the possibility that the hurricane center could be cut off from the world. So the agency relocated two Miami-based forecasters, as well as meteorologists from Kansas and Hawaii, to College Park.

They took up residence in a cubicle pod in the middle of the floor. “Quiet please: NHC NORTH,” read a whiteboard next to their makeshift office.

Twelve screens showed loops of Irma, data readouts, the results of model runs. Around those were arrayed the accoutrements of an office that had been working, nonstop, for days. A giant bottle of chewable vitamin C sat by one screen; cardboard palettes of Cup Noodles were stacked by the printer. A central table had clementines, hand sanitizer, an empty bear-shaped jar of animal crackers, and a well-raided box of Maryland’s great delicacy, Berger’s cookies.

“Every year we practice backing up the NHC and hope we never have to do it,” said Kathryn Gilbert, the deputy director of the agency’s Weather Prediction Center. Irma gave them no choice. To help the deluged agency, “NHC North” took over some of the minor storms so the Miami team could focus entirely on Irma. While they were at it, the Maryland forecasters also ran backup on Irma.

For the forecasters pulled together to staff NHC North, the improvised office was like a family reunion. Greg Carbin, normally the chief forecaster for the Weather Prediction Center, wrote a forecast discussion—a public memo describing Irma’s track and strength—one evening. (Fellow professional-meteorologist friends texted him to ask why.) Another meteorologist, who flew in from Honolulu and specializes in Pacific storms, produced the official forecast for Hurricane Jose. (For the next few days at least, it would do a loop-de-loop in the Atlantic high seas, he said.) Another group of three forecasters mirrored the official Irma forecast, so they could take over if the Miami office suddenly went down.

Lapenta described watching the data come in on Saturday night. Despite spending 30 years as a weather modeler at NASA, he still marveled at the accuracy of the forecast. “I’m sitting there watching, and it’s like, when’s it gonna turn? When’s it gonna turn? And then late last night, it came to a stop, and I watched it start drifting north,” he said. He gestured to the screen showing Irma’s track. “How did they know that?” he said. “How did these things do it?”

The atmosphere at the National Weather Service on Sunday was collegial, serious—and just a tiny bit thrilling. Many of the technologies used to predict Irma only became operational in the last few years, but it’s the logistics of getting these ever-more-accurate forecasts to the people that the NWS says make the biggest difference.

“Ten years ago, I don’t think in any way shape or form that [we could have predicted] that this would come up, stop on a dime, and move up the coast,” Lapenta said. But “all this technology doesn’t mean anything if you can’t convey it to people who need to make decisions.”

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Hurricane Irma: 'We've Never Seen a Storm This Strong'

Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic — Sun, 10 Sep 2017 12:14:00 -0400

This story was updated at 12:14 p.m.

Take it from the hurricane historian: There has never been a tropical cyclone quite like Irma.

“You’ve had storms this strong,” said Phil Klotzbach, a meteorologist at Colorado State University who specializes in the history of Atlantic tropical cyclones. “But the thing that sets [Irma] apart is she stayed strong for a really long time—and she’s still incredibly strong.”

Klotzbach said two things stood out to him about Irma as historically notable: its longevity and its point of origin.

As of Saturday evening, Irma has been a hurricane for 10 days, becoming the longest-lived Atlantic hurricane since Ike in 2008. It has stayed remarkably powerful over that time: When it makes landfall on Sunday, it will likely rank among the 10 lowest-pressure cyclones ever to encounter the continental United States.

But Irma had a strange origin: It became a category-five storm in a part of the world that usually does not produce huge hurricanes. When major hurricanes have struck the continental United States in the past, they have always incubated in the much warmer waters of the Gulf of Mexico or the Caribbean. That’s where Katrina grew in 2005, for instance.

Irma, on the other hand, expanded to its massive size in the tropical Atlantic, east of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. “To get something east of the islands—at least from the historical record, it hasn’t happened before,” said Klotzbach. “When people in the [Leeward] Islands were saying, ‘We’ve never seen a storm this strong,’ that’s true. They haven’t.”

Now that record-breaking cyclone comes in for its horrific finale. On Sunday morning, Irma made landfall in Florida as a category-four hurricane. It is the most ferocious storm seen in the Sunshine State since Hurricane Andrew cut east-to-west across the peninsula a quarter-century ago.

The storm’s strength has fluctuated over the past 24 hours, but officials warned that it remains extremely dangerous. On Sunday, it weakened to a category-three storm before intensifying again as it approached the Florida Keys. Forecasters expect the storm to “restrengthen a little more” over the coming hours.

The National Weather Service warned that Irma would remain an “extremely dangerous” major hurricane and bring “life-threatening wind and storm surge.” The agency has brought nearly the entire coastline of Florida—including Jacksonville, Daytona Beach, Miami, Tampa Bay, and the beaches south of Tallahassee—into its hurricane warning.

Officials described the storm as a threat to life and property with little modern precedent. “It’s not clear that this is a survivable situation for anybody who’s still there in the Keys,” said Edward Rappaport, the acting director of the National Hurricane Center, on Saturday.

“The storm is here,” said Rick Scott, the governor of Florida, in a press conference on Saturday, as tropical-storm-force winds began to batter Miami. He spoke of 15-foot storm surge, enough to submerge a one-story house. “Do not think the storm is over when the wind slows down,” he said. “The storm surge will rush in and it could kill you.”

“This is a storm of absolutely historic destructive potential. I ask everyone in the storm’s path to be vigilant and to heed all recommendations from government officials and law enforcement,” said President Donald Trump on Saturday.

“Irma has me sick to my stomach,” said Eric Blake, a scientist with the National Hurricane Center, on his personal Twitter account on Thursday evening. “This hurricane is as serious as any I have seen. No hype, just the hard facts. Take every lifesaving precaution you can.”

“I have little doubt Irma will go down as one of the most infamous in Atlantic hurricane history,” he added.

As of Saturday evening, Irma’s death toll stands at 25. The storm leaves a path of devastation across the Caribbean. On Saturday, it slammed into Cuba, becoming the first category-five hurricane to strike the island’s north end since the 1920s. The Cuban government reported 23-foot waves and sustained winds above 120 miles per hour.

In the final days of last week, the storm wrecked havoc across a series of small islands. Some of the first reports were received from the British and American Virgin islands on Saturday, after the storm made landfall on Wednesday. Videos showed devastated houses and vast expanses of flattened forest.

The storm also struck St. Martin, a tiny island of 74,000 people, popular with European tourists. Daniel Gibbs, the president of the French territory of the island of Saint Martin, estimated that 95 percent of his country had been obliterated.

“There are shipwrecks everywhere, destroyed houses everywhere, torn-off roofs everywhere,” he told Radio Caraïbes International, as translated by The New York Times. “It’s just unbelievable. It’s indescribable.”

Witnesses described similar scenes on the island’s Dutch half. “It’s like someone with a lawn mower from the sky has gone over the island,” said Mairlou Rohan, a European tourist visiting Sint Maarten, part of the Netherlands.

Officials also described outright devastation on the tiny island of Barbuda, which the storm directly hit earlier in the week. The prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda said the vast majority of that island’s housing had been destroyed. “Barbuda right now is literally a rubble,” he said. Some of the first overhead footage showed the island to be almost completely defoliated.

And though Puerto Rico was spared a direct encounter with Irma’s massive center, about 60 percent of its households were left without power on Friday. 50,000 people are without water on the island, according to the government.

The storm turned northward overnight, passing over the Straits of Florida and into the Florida Keys. After tearing through the keys, it will make landfall near Cape Coral and skirt “near or over” the Florida peninsula.

By Sunday morning, hurricane conditions set in across much of South Florida. “People in Southwest Florida need to realize this is not a Hurricane Charlie,” said Klotzbach. Hurricane Charlie made landfall as a category-four storm in 2004, killing 15 people and causing $16 billion in damages. “Charlie was bad but it was small. The winds are going to be similar, but they’ll be over a much wider area. And there will be a lot more rain, a lot more storm surge,” he said.

If Irma’s path ticks a bit further to the west, then the aggravated storm-surge effects in Tampa Bay could be catastrophic. In 2010, Tampa officials and FEMA practiced preparation for “Hurricane Phoenix,” a fictitious category-five storm that would directly strike the city. In the scenario, a tropical cyclone approached the city from the south, trapping water in Tampa Bay and deluging the region with up to 30 feet of storm surge.

For context, a maximum of eight feet of storm surge was observed during Hurricane Sandy’s catastrophic flooding of Brooklyn and lower Manhattan.

And as Eric Holthaus writes at Rolling Stone, research from the past few years has suggested that the storm-surge estimates used in the “Hurricane Phoenix” exercise were perhaps six feet too conservative.

No matter how it makes landfall, Irma’s effects will be felt across the state. As of Saturday evening, the National Weather Service said tropical-storm force windswere all but assured for most of Florida and southern Georgia. Dangerous and sustained hurricane-force winds, defined as any sustained blast faster than 75 miles per hour, were virtually certain for the state’s west coast.

Floridians fled in Irma’s path. More than 7 million people were asked by authorities to leave their homes, the largest evacuation in state history. Yet there are some signs that evacuation orders will be ignored—or simply haven’t reached some Floridians yet. The Miami Herald has found mobile-home parks where half of the residents are planning on riding out the storm. Thousands of people are also too poor to be able to afford the high gas costs of evacuating.

The storm’s last-minute westward shift also confounded preparation efforts. Irma was due to pass near Naples, which has not been directly hit by a major hurricane since it was a small town in 1921. A research model estimated it could receive more than 10 feet of storm surge. USA Today reports that it remains unclear whether some of Naples’ official shelters could withstand category-four winds.

Some Miami residents who had fled to the state’s west coast now wound up racing to return home, according to reports from Chris Hayes, an MSNBC anchor.

No matter what future devastation Irma may cause, the global hurricane records Irma has broken are already remarkable. It is the first storm ever observed, in any ocean, to sustain winds of 185 miles per hour for longer than 24 hours. (They whipped around its eye wall at that speed for 37 straight hours.) And Irma helped make Thursday the most energetic day for hurricanes on record in the Atlantic. Two other cyclones, Jose and Katia, are also churning through the Atlantic basin.

Irma’s effects can already be felt far from Florida. Hotels in Atlanta were sold out of space. And a team of meteorologists—including experts from Florida and the continental United States, and two from Hawaii—have flown into the Washington, D.C., area to staff an emergency backup National Hurricane Center. If the proper center in Miami loses contact with the world during the storm, an emergency meteorology team in College Park, Maryland, will leap into action—forecasting a storm that has marooned their colleagues to the south.

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Did Climate Change Intensify Hurricane Harvey?

Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic — Mon, 28 Aug 2017 09:31:06 -0400

Every so often, the worst-case scenario comes to pass.

As of Sunday afternoon, the remnants of Hurricane Harvey seem likely to exceed the worst forecasts that preceded the storm. The entire Houston metropolitan region is flooding: Interstates are under feet of water, local authorities have asked boat owners to join rescue efforts, and most of the streams and rivers near the city are in flood stage.

Some models suggest that the storm will linger over the area until Wednesday night, dumping 50 inches of water in total on Houston and the surrounding area.

“Local rainfall amounts of 50 inches would exceed any previous Texas rainfall record. The breadth and intensity of this rainfall are beyond anything experienced before,” said a statement from the National Weather Service. “Catastrophic flooding is now underway and expected to continue for several days. ” (In years of weather reporting, I have never seen a statement this blunt and ominous.)

This means that thousands of people—and perhaps tens of thousands of people—are facing a terrifying and all-too-real struggle to survive right now. In an age when the climate is changing rapidly, a natural question to ask is: What role did human-caused global warming play in strengthening this storm?

Climate scientists, who specialize in thinking about the Earth system as a whole, are often reticent to link any one weather event to global climate change. But they say that aspects of the case of Hurricane Harvey—and the recent history of tropical cyclones worldwide—suggest global warming is making a bad situation worse.

It may not be obvious why global warming has anything to do with hurricane strength. Climate change is caused by the release of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. These gases prevent some of the sun’s rays from bouncing back into space, trapping heat in the planetary system and raising air temperatures all over the world.

As the world warms, evaporation speeds up. So on avg there's more water vapour for a storm to sweep up & dump now, compared to 70 years ago. https://t.co/M4R9OFFZt9
— Katharine Hayhoe (@KHayhoe) August 24, 2017

This warmer air causes evaporation to happen faster, which can lead to more moisture in the atmosphere. But that phenomenon alone does not explain climate change’s effects on Harvey.

Storms like Harvey are helped by one of the consequences of climate change: As the air warms, some of that heat is absorbed by the ocean, which in turn raises the temperature of the sea’s upper layers.

Harvey benefitted from unusually toasty waters in the Gulf of Mexico. As the storm roared toward Houston last week, sea-surface waters near Texas rose to between 2.7 and 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit above average . These waters were some of the hottest spots of ocean surface in the world . The tropical storm, feeding off this unusual warmth, was able to progress from a tropical depression to a category-four hurricane in roughly 48 hours.

“This is the main fuel for the storm,” says Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research. “Although these storms occur naturally, the storm is apt to be more intense, maybe a bit bigger, longer-lasting, and with much heavier rainfalls [because of that ocean heat].”

This also suggests an explanation for one of Harvey’s strangest and scariest behaviors. The storm intensified up until the moment of landfall, achieving category-four strength hours before it slammed into the Texas coast. This is not only rare for tropical cyclones in the western Gulf of Mexico: It may be unique. In the past 30 years of records, no storms west of Florida have intensified in the last 12 hours before landfall .

Why do storms normally weaken—and why didn’t Harvey? As mentioned above, hurricanes feed and grow on warm ocean surface waters. But as they grow, their strong winds often pick up seawater, churning the oceans and moving the warmest waters deep below the surface. The same winds also bring newer, colder water closer to the atmosphere, which usually serves to drain energy and weaken the storm.

That didn’t happen with Harvey. The hurricane churned up water 100 or even 200 meters below the surface, said Trenberth, but this water was still warm—meaning that the storm could keep growing and strengthening. “Harvey was not in a good position to intensify the way it did, because it was so close to land. It’s amazing it was able to do that,” he told me.

All of this said, a storm like Harvey could have happened even if there was no climate change. Planning experts have long fretted over the possibility of a major hurricane striking Houston. Harvey is also a powerful hurricane forming in one of the most hurricane-friendly regions of the world at the peak of hurricane season. Storms similar to it would form in any climate.

But Trenberth says that the extra heat could make the storm more costly and more powerful, overpowering and eventually breaking local drainage systems.

“The human contribution can be up to 30 percent or so up to the total rainfall coming out of the storm,” he said. “It may have been a strong storm, and it may have caused a lot of problems anyway—but [human-caused climate change] amplifies the damage considerably.”

More generally, it’s still unclear what effect climate change is having on hurricane formation across the greater Atlantic Ocean. A draft version of a major U.S. government review of climate science due out later this year says there is “medium confidence” that human activities “have contributed to the observed upward trend in North Atlantic hurricane activity since the 1970s.”

Houston has been ground zero for super-damaging storms lately. It has seen four 100-year flooding events since the spring of 2015, according to the meteorologist Eric Holthaus . The city also sees more than 156 percent more heavy downpours than it did in the 1950s. Meanwhile, only one-sixth of its residents have federal flood insurance, though that program has struggled to adjust to the increased flooding risk associated with climate change.

Yet even compared to recent storms, Harvey is unprecedented—just the kind of weird weather that scientists expect to see more of as the planet warms. Harvey has already dumped more water on Harris County than Tropical Storm Allison, the area’s previous worst-ever flooding disaster in 2001, though it has only lasted half the time of that earlier storm.

And it will keep raining. As of Sunday afternoon, Buffalo Bayou, a major river near downtown Houston, is one foot above flood stage. It is projected to rise as much as another 12 feet .

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What Kind of Monuments Does President Trump Value?

Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic — Fri, 18 Aug 2017 10:14:11 -0400

On Thursday morning, President Donald Trump announced his unequivocal support for preserving statues of Confederate generals and leaders, moving a step past his previous statements that the fate of the statues should be left to cities and states.

In full, his tweets read: “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. You can't change history, but you can learn from it. Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson—who's next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish! Also the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns, and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!”

Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. You.....
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 17, 2017

It was not the first time he had spoken about monuments—national or otherwise. In April, Trump ordered the Department of the Interior to review whether every national monument created since 1996 should be eliminated or shrunk from its current size. His order put protections for tens of millions of acres of public land in doubt.

These are not the same type of monuments, of course. The Confederate monuments that Trump describes are stone or bronze depictions of leaders who took up arms against the United States. They are scattered across the entire country but concentrated in the Southeast. (There are also assorted plaques.)

The national monuments of Trump’s April executive order, meanwhile, are areas of federally owned land set aside for their natural beauty or cultural significance. They are somewhat akin to national parks, except that a president can unilaterally designate a national monument under the Antiquities Act of 1906. A national park can only be created by an act of Congress.

Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. You.....
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 17, 2017

One of the sites most likely to be downsized is Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah, which was created by the Obama administration in December of last year . It encompasses more than 2,000 square miles of wilderness—desert, shrub, canyon, and peak—including two enormous buttes that give the area its name.

Since the late 1990s, some Republicans, especially in the West, have argued that national monuments created by the Clinton and Obama administrations were too large and exceeded the Antiquities Act’s authority. Bears Ears came under particular attack.

“The Antiquities Act does not give the federal government unlimited power to lock up millions of acres of land and water, and it’s time that we ended this abusive practice,” said Trump as he signed the order.

He promised to “return control [of the land] to the people, the people of all of the states, the people of the United States.”

Another group of people responded very differently to the Bears Ears announcement. Five indigenous nations lobbied the U.S. government to preserve the land, saying it holds historical, cultural, and sacred significance to their people.

“[The designation of Bears Ears] actually brought tears to my face,” said Eric Descheenie, a member of the Navajo nation and an Arizona state legislator. “It’s so hard to even try to add up what this really means. At the end of the day, there’s only a certain place in this entire world, on Earth, where we as indigenous peoples belong.”

The Antiquities Act was written more than a century ago in part to prevent “pothunting,” the theft of indigenous artifacts from unprotected sites on public land. Bears Ears, which contains dozens of uninhabited Native cultural and archaeological sites, had been the target of considerable pothunting.

In 2009, federal agents raided the nearby town of Blanding, Utah, arresting 17 suspects and seizing thousands of allegedly stolen artifacts . Locals say that the raid was too broad and that it led to tragic consequences . Many also believe that pothunting is a way of life.

But the huge number of artifacts the raid recovered shocked Native nations into action. Indigenous leaders felt that some kind of lasting federal protection must be extended to the Bears Ears area, and they worked with Utah’s congressional delegation for years to try to secure protection.

Half a decade later, when the tribes felt that avenue had failed, they asked the Obama administration to extend protection to the area. It granted their request. Supporters of Bears Ears describe the park as the first national monument created in collaboration with indigenous nations.

...the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 17, 2017

What is beautiful about the statues? As my colleagues Yoni Appelbaum and Adam Serwer have written, they represent traitorous leaders of a military campaign as cruel and brutal as it was grounded in violent racism.

Far from being hand-crafted by artists, many of the Confederate monuments put up between 1895 and 1915 were mass-produced by firms in the North. Other monuments were installed later.

This statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and an early member of the Ku Klux Klan, was installed in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1998. It sits on private land, though it is visible to drivers on Interstate 65, giving it a different legal status than the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia. ( Brent Moore / Flickr)

The national monuments currently under review by the Trump administration are scattered across the West. They include two vast oceanic preserves in the central Pacific. They also include the Río Grande del Norte National Monument in New Mexico, designated in 2013:

Bob Wick/BLM

Also on the list is Ironwood Forest National Monument, a 129,000-acre preserve in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona:

Bob Wick/BLM

And the Carrizo Plain National Monument in California, which bursts into wildflower-covered “superbloom” every spring:

Bob Wick/BLM

Though experts believe most of these monuments will likely survive review, the Secretary of the Interior’s discretion to change their boundaries may be quite broad . And there is no legal link between the two kinds of monuments: Many people may feel one way about President Trump’s views on Confederate statutes and another way about the alleged abuse of the Antiquities Act.

But the excitement with which the president defends one kind of monument, while undermining another, does raise the question: What kind of history does the president value? What does it look like when history is destroyed? And what kinds of beauty and culture can be truly lost—what treasures of the United States can, once removed, never by human hands be comparably replaced?

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Can the U.S. Government Seize an Anti-Trump Website's Visitor Logs?

Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic — Tue, 15 Aug 2017 15:55:12 -0400

Suppose you were to click on this link: This one, right here.

It will take you to the website of Disrupt J20, which organized some of the “direct action” protests on the day of President Donald Trump’s inauguration in Washington, D.C. The site contains general information about civil disobedience and political protests, and it advertises several Washington-specific events.

Some of the protests on Inauguration Day turned violent, and the U.S. government has since charged more than 200 people with felony rioting or destruction of property in connection to events on January 20. It alleges that some of the suspects were connected to the Disrupt J20 effort.

Yet if you clicked that link above—even if you were nowhere near Washington on Inauguration Day—the government is now allegedly interested in you.

The U.S. Department of Justice is attempting to seize the visitor logs and IP addresses of anyone who has visited DisruptJ20.org, as well as any email addresses, user logs, and photos collected by the website, according to DreamHost, a Los Angeles–based web host and domain-name registrar.

This data encompasses more than 1.3 million IP addresses, as well as the email addresses and photos of thousands of people, the company said. DreamHost is not politically connected to DisruptJ20, but it provided paid web-hosting services for the group.

DreamHost has so far refused to comply with the government’s search warrant, arguing that it constitutes “investigatory overreach and a clear abuse of government authority.”

“That information could be used to identify any individuals who used this site to exercise and express political speech protected under the Constitution’s First Amendment. That should be enough to set alarm bells off in anyone’s mind,” said a blog post published to the company’s website on Monday.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia did not respond before publication. A spokesman for the U.S. Department of Justice declined to comment.

Digital-privacy and civil-rights advocates were quick to criticize the scope of the government’s warrant. But experts in computer crime law said it wasn’t immediately obvious that the warrant was illegal.

“The Department of Justice isn’t just seeking communications by the defendants in its case. It’s seeking the records of every single contact with the site—the IP address and other details of every American opposed enough to Trump to visit the site and explore political activism,” wrote Ken White, a criminal-defense lawyer and former assistant U.S. attorney.

He continued:

The government has made no effort whatsoever to limit the warrant to actual evidence of any particular crime. If you visited the site, if you left a message, they want to know who and where you are—whether or not you did anything but watch TV on inauguration day. This is chilling, particularly when it comes from an administration that has expressed so much overt hostility to protesters, so relentlessly conflated all protesters with those who break the law, and so deliberately framed America as being at war with the administration’s domestic enemies.

“No plausible explanation exists for a search warrant of this breadth, other than to cast a digital dragnet as broadly as possible,” said Mark Rumold, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a blog post. The EFF is assisting DreamHost in its opposition to the warrant.

“The Fourth Amendment was designed to prohibit fishing expeditions like this. Those concerns are especially relevant here, where [the Department of Justice] is investigating a website that served as a hub for the planning and exercise of First Amendment–protected activities,” he said.

In an email, Rumold added that the government had successfully seized visitor logs for other websites in the past. “But I’ve never seen anything on this scale, where we’re talking about millions of users and there’s no attempt whatsoever to narrow the scope (either by date, time, or user),” he told me.

“I don’t think there are precedents one way or another on this,” Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University, told me.

“It’s not obvious to me whether the warrant is problematic,” he elaborated in an article at The Washington Post. The government’s search warrant instructs DreamHost to turn over all its records about DisruptJ20.org. As Kerr understands it, DreamHost wants the government to only legally be able to ask for certain records about the website. He continues:

There’s an interesting and unresolved issue presented here: What’s the correct level of particularity for a website? Courts have allowed the government to get a suspect’s entire email account, which the government can then search through for evidence. But is the collective set of records concerning a website itself so extensive that it goes beyond what the Fourth Amendment allows? In the physical world, the government can search only one apartment in an apartment building with a single warrant; it can’t search the entire apartment building. Are the collective records of a website more like an apartment building or a single apartment? I don’t know of any caselaw on this.

A hearing in D.C. Superior Court is scheduled for Friday.

President Trump has addressed the January 20 protests directly at least twice. Two days after they occurred, he belittled them and the Women’s March, on January 21, in a tweet: “Watched protests yesterday but was under the impression that we just had an election!” he said. “Why didn’t these people vote? Celebs hurt cause badly.”

Two hours later, he tweeted an addendum: “Peaceful protests are a hallmark of our democracy. Even if I don’t always agree, I recognize the rights of people to express their views.”

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