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Rethinking The ‘Infrastructure’ Discussion Amid A Blitz Of Hurricanes

Rethinking The ‘Infrastructure’ Discussion Amid A Blitz Of Hurricanes

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

 

The wonky words infrastructure and resilience have circulated widely of late, particularly since Hurricanes Harvey and Irma struck paralyzing, costly blows in two of America’s fastest-growing states.

Resilience is a property traditionally defined as the ability to bounce back. A host of engineers and urban planners have long warned this trait is sorely lacking in America’s brittle infrastructure.

Many such experts say the disasters in the sprawling suburban and petro-industrial landscape around Houston and along the crowded coasts of Florida reinforce the urgent idea that resilient infrastructure is needed more than ever, particularly as human-driven climate change helps drive extreme weather.

The challenge in prompting change — broadening the classic definition of “infrastructure,” and investing in initiatives aimed at adapting to a turbulent planet — is heightened by partisan divisions over climate policy and development.

Of course, there’s also the question of money. The country’s infrastructure is ailing already. A national civil engineering group has surveyed the nation’s bridges, roads, dams, transit systems and more and awarded a string of D or D+ grades since 1998. The same group has estimated that the country will be several trillion dollars short of what’s needed to harden and rebuild and modernize our infrastructure over the next decade.

For fresh or underappreciated ideas, ProPublica reached out to a handful of engineers, economists and policy analysts focused on reducing risk on a fast-changing planet.

Alice Hill, who directed resilience policy for the National Security Council in the Obama administration, said the wider debate over cutting climate-warming emissions may have distracted people from promptly pursuing ways to reduce risks and economic and societal costs from natural disasters.

She and several other experts said a first step is getting past the old definition of resilience as bouncing back from a hit, which presumes a community needs simply to recover.

“I don’t think of resilience in the traditional sense, in cutting how long it takes to turn the lights back on,” said Brian Bledsoe, the director of the Institute for Resilient Infrastructure Systems at the University of Georgia. “Resilience is seizing an opportunity to move into a state of greater adaptability and preparedness — not just going back to the status quo.”

In thinking about improving the country’s infrastructure, and provoking real action, Bledsoe and others say, language matters.

Bledsoe, for instance, is exploring new ways to communicate flood risk in words and maps. His institute is testing replacements for the tired language of 1-in-100 or 1-in-500-year floods. A 100-year flood has a 1 in 4 chance of occurring in the 30-year span of a typical home mortgage, he said, adding that’s the kind of time scale that gets people’s attention.

Visual cues matter, too, he said. On conventional maps, simple lines marking a floodplain boundary often are interpreted as separating safe zones and those at risk, Bledsoe said. But existing models of water flows don’t provide the full range of possible outcomes: “A 50-year rain can produce a 100-year flood if it falls on a watershed that’s already soaked or on snowpack or if it coincides with a storm surge.”

“The bright line on a map is an illusion,” he said, particularly in flat places like Houston, where a slight change in flood waters can result in far more widespread inundation. Risk maps should reflect that uncertainty, and wider threat.

Nicholas Pinter, a University of California, Davis, geoscientist who studies flood risk and water management, said that Florida is well-situated to build more wisely after this disaster because it already has a statewide post-disaster redevelopment plan and requires coastal communities to have their own.

It’s more typical to have short-term recovery plans — for digging out and getting the lights back on, as 20,000 utility workers are scurrying to do right now.

The advantage of having an established protocol for redevelopment, he said, is it trims delays.

“Draw up plans when the skies are blue and pull them off the shelf,” he said of how having rebuilding protocols in place can limit repeating mistakes. “That fast response cuts down on the horrible lag time in which people typically rebuild in place.”

In a warming climate, scientists see increasing potential for epic deluges like the one that swamped Houston and last year’s devastating rains around Baton Rouge, Louisiana. How can the federal government more responsibly manage such environmental threats?

Many people point to the National Flood Insurance Program, which was created to boost financial resilience in flood zones, but has been criticized from just about every political and technical vantage point as too often working to subsidize, instead of mitigate, vulnerability.

As has happened periodically before, pressure is building on Congress to get serious about fixing the program (a reauthorization deadline was just pushed from this month toward the end of the year).

How this debate plays out will have an important impact on infrastructure resilience, said Pinter of the University of California, Davis. If incentives remain skewed in favor of dangerous and sprawling development, he said, that just expands where roads, wires, pipelines and other connecting systems have to be built. “Public infrastructure is there in service of populations,” he said.

He also said the lack of federal guidance has led to deeply uneven enforcement of floodplain building at the state level, with enormous disparities around the country resulting in more resilient states, in essence, subsidizing disaster-prone development in others.

“Why should California, Wyoming or Utah be paying the price for Houston, Mississippi or Alabama failing to enforce the National Flood Insurance Program? ” he said.

Bledsoe, at the University of Georgia, said there’s no need to wait for big changes in the program to start making progress. He said the National Flood Insurance Program has a longstanding division, the Community Rating System, that could swiftly be expanded, cutting both flood risk and budget-breaking payouts. It’s a voluntary program that reduces flood insurance rates for communities that take additional efforts beyond minimum standards to reduce flood damage to insurable property.

Despite the clear benefits, he said, only one municipality, Roseville, California, has achieved the top level of nine rankings and gotten the biggest insurance savings — 45 percent. Tulsa, Oklahoma, Fort Collins, Colorado, King County, Washington, and Pierce County, Washington, are at the second ranking and get a 40 percent rate cut. Hundreds of other municipalities are at much lower levels of preparedness.

“Boosting participation is low-hanging fruit,” Bledsoe said.

Some see signs that the recent blitz of hurricanes is reshaping strategies in the Trump White House. President Donald Trump’s infrastructure agenda, unveiled on August 15, centered on rescinding Obama-era plans to require consideration of flood risk and climate change in any federal spending for infrastructure or housing and the like. The argument was built around limiting perceived red tape.

After the flooding of Houston less than two weeks later, Trump appointees, including Tom Bossert, the president’s homeland security adviser, said a new plan was being developed to insure federal money would not increase flood risks.

On Monday, as Irma weakened over Georgia, Bossert used a White House briefingto offer more hints of an emerging climate resilience policy, while notably avoiding accepting climate change science: “What President Trump is committed to is making sure that federal dollars aren’t used to rebuild things that will be in harm’s way later or that won’t be hardened against the future predictable floods that we see. And that has to do with engineering analysis and changing conditions along eroding shorelines but also in inland water and flood-control projects.”

Robert R.M. Verchick, a Loyola University law professor who worked on climate change adaptation policy at the Environmental Protection Agency under Obama, said federal leadership is essential.

If Federal Emergency Management Agency flood maps incorporated future climate conditions, that move would send a ripple effect into real estate and insurance markets, forcing people to pay attention, he said. If the federal government required projected climate conditions to be considered when spending on infrastructure in flood-prone areas, construction practices would change, he added, noting the same pressures would drive chemical plants or other industries to have a wider margin of safety.

“None of these things will change without some form of government intervention. That’s because those who make decisions on the front end (buying property, building bridges) do not bear all the costs when things go wrong on the back end,” he wrote in an email. “And on top of that, human beings tend to discount small but important risks when it seems advantageous in the short-run.”

After a terrible storm, he said, most Americans are willing to cheer a government that helps communities recuperate. But people should also embrace the side of government that establishes rules to avoid risk and make us safer. That’s harder, he said, because such edicts can be perceived by some as impinging on personal freedom.

“But viewed correctly, sensible safeguards are part of freedom, not a retreat from it,” he said. “Freedom is having a home you can return to after the storm. Freedom is having a bridge high enough to get you to the hospital across the river. Freedom is not having your house surrounded by contaminated mud because the berm at the neighboring chemical plant failed overnight.”

“Fundamentally, we must abandon the idea that there is a specific standard to which we can control nature and instead understand that we are creating complex and increasingly difficult-to-control systems that are part social, part ecological and part technological. These mean not just redesigning the infrastructure, but redesigning institutions and their knowledge systems.”

After the destruction and disruption from Hurricane Sandy, New York City didn’t just upgrade its power substations and subway entrances, Miller said in a subsequent phone call. The city also rebooted its agencies’ protocols and even job descriptions. “Every time a maintenance crew opens a sewer cover, fixes or installs a pipe, whether new or retrofitting, you’re thinking how to enhance its resilience,” Miller said.

Miller said another key to progress, particularly when federal action is limited or stalled, is cooperation between cities or regions. Heat was not an issue in Oregon historically, Miller said, but it’s becoming one. The light rail system around Portland was designed to work with a few 90-degree days a year, he said. “The last couple of summers have seen 20-plus 90-degree days,” he said, causing copper wires carrying power for the trains to sag and steel rails to expand in ways that have disrupted train schedules. Similar rail systems in the Southwest deal with such heat routinely, said Miller, who has worked in both regions. The more crosstalk, the better the outcome, he said.

“At the broadest level, we need to think about risks and how infrastructure is built to withstand them at a landscape level,” Miller added. “We can longer commit to evaluating the impacts and risks of a single project in isolation against a retrospective, stationary understanding of risk (e.g., the 100-year flood we’ve been hearing so much about.)”

He said that an emerging alternative, “safe-to-fail” design, is more suited to situations where factors contributing to extreme floods or other storm impacts can’t be fully anticipated. “Safe-to-fail infrastructure might allow flooding, but in ways that are designed for,” he said.

(With an Arizona State colleague, Mikhail Chester, Miller offered more details in a commentary published last week by The Conversation website, laying out “six rules for rebuilding infrastructure in an era of ‘unprecedented’ weather events.”)

Deborah Brosnan, an environmental and disaster risk consultant, said the challenge in making a shift to integrating changing risks into planning and investments is enormous, even when a community has a devastating shock such as a hurricane or flood or both:

“It requires a radical shift in how we incorporate variability in our planning and regulations,” she said. “This can and will be politically difficult. New regulations like California fire and earthquake codes and Florida’s building codes are typically enacted after an event, and from a reactive ‘make sure this doesn’t happen again’ perspective. The past event creates a ‘standard’ against which to regulate. Regulations and codes require a standard that can be upheld, otherwise decisions can be arbitrary and capricious. For climate change, non-stationarity would involve creating regulations that take account of many different factors and where variability has to be included. Variability (uncertainy) is the big challenge for these kinds of approaches.”

Stephane Hallegatte, the lead economist at the Word Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery, has written or co-written a host of reports on strategies for limiting impacts of climate change and disasters, particularly on the poor. When asked in an email exchange what success would look like, he said the World Bank, in various recent reports, has stressed the importance of managing disaster risks along two tracks: both designing and investing to limit the most frequent hard knocks and then making sure the tools and services are available to help communities recover when a worst-case disaster strikes.

He added: “Facing a problem, people tend to do one thing to manage it, and then forget about it. (‘I face floods; I build a dike; I’m safe.’) We are trying to work against this, by having risk prevention and contingent planning done together.”

Andrew Revkin  is a senior reporter at ProPublica covering climate and related issues.

 

How the Truth Can Get Damaged In A Hurricane, Too

How the Truth Can Get Damaged In A Hurricane, Too

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

 

The disinformation and falsehoods that can accompany breaking news online — involving terror attacks or national elections — have become a familiar plague in recent years. Big weather stories, it now seems clear, are not immune.

On Twitter, Facebook and a handful of other venues, hundreds of thousands of people in recent days have clicked or shared items with headlines warning that Hurricane Irma was poised to become a Category 6 storm (on the five-level Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity) that “could wipe entire cities off the map.”

The fact-checking website Snopes made quick work of debunking that claim. Still, the National Weather Service felt moved to post warnings about fake forecasts.

Meanwhile, Conservative News Today posted a Facebook Live video of a bus being toppled by Irma and a ship in enormous seas said to be carrying “hurricane chasers” heading into Irma. Neither was true. With help from social media, ProPublica tracked the original video of the endangered ship back to January 2013; it was shot in a terrible storm 60 miles or so off the coast of Portugal.

Over the last two weeks, there have also been a host of simplistic proclamations online about the role of human-driven climate change in Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Harvey, both overstating and discounting it. As Irma approaches Florida, the issues with sifting fake and real news become more consequential.

With all that in mind, ProPublica reached out to Jane Lytvynenko, a Toronto-based journalist who’s been covering misinformation and disinformation for BuzzFeed since November and previously covered the media for Canadaland. On Wednesday, Lytvynenko posted what has become a running, and growing, list of Hurricane Irma fakery and disinformation.

 

Here’s a condensed and edited version of our brief chat, followed by some reliable sources of information on Irma and other extreme storms.

Did you move to BuzzFeed specifically to cover mis/disinformation?

I did. We look at online mis/disinformation and how it spreads.

Does the flow of misinformation around weather events or climate change seem different in some ways to that around other breaking news?

In some ways, misinformation around weather is a little different. We see a lot of people share old photos or images seemingly by accident, without malice or a political agenda. During Harvey, many of the hyper-partisan and fake news sites that post false information were quiet during the first couple of days. That’s not the case during terror attacks or political events, for example. In those cases, the spin and misinformation come very quickly and each side tends to settle on a few key messages.

At the same time, what unites misinformation around weather and politics is emotion. If you scroll through fake news headlines, you’ll see that most of them want to inflame a sense of anger or injustice. Sometimes that means trash-talking a politician, other times that means playing on racial tensions. During Harvey, for example, we saw stories about Black Lives Matter blocking emergency crews from entering the city. BLM was actually helping hurricane victims, but the fake news went viral because it inflamed people’s emotions and biases.

Do you feel like you’re whistling in a Category 6 windstorm? In other words, do you feel it’s useful to attempt this?

Sometimes. With individual debunk posts, it’s unlikely that the person spreading misinformation will see me refuting it. At the same time, it’s an opportunity to teach the audience what to look for and how to identify misleading information. People appreciate having one go-to place in times of crisis. It’s good to see people use our posts to actively call out misinformation. That means some people still care about having a grip on reality.

Have you been fooled? I have, twice that I know of. The first time came in 2015, when I was writing a post hurriedly on the Nepal earthquake and included an embedded YouTube video of a sloshing hotel swimming pool that turned out to be from a previous Mexican quake. The second came August 27, when I joined those retweeting an image of planes submerged on a flooded runway — which of course turned out to be a bootlegged photo visualization of the impacts of sea-level rise from a 2013 Climate Central article. I was quickly rebuked.

I haven’t gotten fooled recently, but that’s because my trust levels are so low. If I read an article on an unfamiliar website, I immediately start checking for clues of it being fake — was the image stolen, was it registered recently, is it only masquerading as a legitimate source? My friends make fun of me for it, but it means I keep the fakes out of my feed.

What drives you to pursue this as a beat?

Misinformation can be dangerous. During a hurricane, misinformation can clog official messages from getting through. Sometimes it sways attitudes and public opinion. If people don’t know who to trust, they’ll put more faith in their own biases and that can be dangerous.

Who do you see, if anyone, as the competition on this beat?

This is a tough question because the field of misinformation is so wide. We’ve seen other mainstream publications start debunk roundups like ours, which is really great. But when it comes to the big projects (like this study we recently published) we’re unique because we dedicate reporters to uncovering online misinformation trends. Some of us do nothing else.

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Failure To Set Cost Of Carbon Hampers Trump’s Effort To Expand Use Of Fossil Fuels

Failure To Set Cost Of Carbon Hampers Trump’s Effort To Expand Use Of Fossil Fuels

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

President Donald Trump’s efforts to boost fossil fuel extraction face a courtroom hurdle of his own making.

His March 28 executive order “promoting energy independence and economic growth” rescinded the Obama administration’s calculation of the “social cost of carbon” — a metric that had been central to the process of crafting and justifying government rules addressing human-driven climate change.

All government regulations are subject to cost/benefit analysis. The “social cost of carbon” was developed in large part to compare long-term costs from coastal flooding and other impacts of emissions of climate-warming carbon dioxide with upfront costs to the economy from curbing the burning of fossil fuels, the main source of such emissions.

The value at the end of the Obama presidency was set at roughly $40 for each ton of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas emitted by human activities, or equivalent amounts of other gases such as methane. At that price, the benefits of Obama’s proposals to reduce emissions outweighed the economic costs.

The Trump order required a new calculation and ordered agencies to use procedures issued by the Office of Management and Budget in 2003 to craft relevant regulations.

A protracted delay in the Trump administration coming up with its own carbon-cost estimate could empower environmentalists pursuing legal challenges to mining, drilling or pipeline projects, said Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law.

In an email on Tuesday, he pointed to two recent court decisions. On Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, must consider the impact of greenhouse gas emissions that will result from construction of three new interstate pipelines in the Southeast. The Sierra Club, other environmental groups and some affected landowners had challenged the commission’s environmental review of the project.  

“In the ruling, the judges held that FERC ‘must either quantify and consider the project’s downstream carbon emissions or explain in more detail why it cannot do so,'” Revesz said, adding: “The court further explained that FERC should either use the social cost of carbon to monetize the climate effects associated with those emissions or explain why it chooses not to do so.”

Just last week, another federal court decision blocked a proposed coal mine expansion in Montana in part over the government’s failure to assess the environmental impact of burning additional coal. (Nearly all of the coal from that mine has been exported to Asia or Europe of late, according to court documents).

In that ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Donald W. Molloy of Montana pointed to the government’s failure to use the existing calculations for the social costs of carbon, arguing that government officials “could, and should, have tied its greenhouse gas emissions calculation to the effects of those emissions.” The decision, Judge Molloy wrote, was arbitrary and capricious because officials quantified the benefits of expanded mining “while failing to account for the costs, even though a tool was available to do so.”

The lawsuit about the Montana coal mine was filed in 2015, but expansion of western coal mining and exports has been a signature aspect of the Trump agenda. Similar mining plans have eventually gotten court approval, but only after officials submitted estimates of the environmental and climate impacts.

“These rulings show how President Trump’s executive order withdrawing support for the social cost of carbon is misguided and shortsighted,” said Revesz. “As these recent rulings show, agencies will lose legal challenges when they don’t appropriately consider climate change impacts. Rather than speeding the process of infrastructure and energy development, the Trump administration has risked slowing it down.”

Given the pace of appointments at relevant agencies, the work of revising the cost of carbon calculation is likely to drag on. So far, the Trump administration has been slow to embrace science advice — with no presidential adviser yet named and many relevant positions at the Office of Science and Technology Policy cut or empty.

In June, Jim Laity, a career Office of Management and Budget employee who runs the environmental branch of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, signaled that work to revise the carbon calculation was under way. During an online presentation at a public workshop on the social cost of carbon at the National Academy of Sciences, he said relevant agencies were “actively working on thinking about the guidance, ” according to Greenwire. Asked what has changed since then, a spokesman for OMB, Jacob A. Wood, said in an email on Wednesday that the Trump administration “is still considering how to implement” the portion of the executive order on the social cost of carbon. “As of right now, there is no other update,” he wrote.

There’s plenty of advice the Trump administration can draw on to make a new estimate, ranging from a January report on ways to improve carbon-cost calculations from the independent National Academy of Sciences to a call to scrap the social cost of carbon altogether, made by the Institute for Energy Research, an industry-backed Washington policy group that strongly influenced the Trump campaign and presidential transition process.

Laity’s presentation in June did hint at a much lower cost of carbon to come, noting the significance of Trump’s reference to the 2003 Office of Management and Budget guidance for writing regulations. (Here’s the webinar recording.) “[I]t says pretty unequivocally that the main focus … should be costs and benefits that accrue to citizens and residents of the United States,” Laity said. “After that it says if a regulation does have significant impacts outside the United States that are important to consider in the regulation for some reason then they should be clearly segregated out and they should be reported separately.”

Under the previous administration’s process, he said, “That wasn’t what we were doing.”

The Obama-era cost of carbon included costs of impacts outside the U.S. — with more than $30 of that $40 a ton coming from projected climate change impacts abroad, according to several economists who have studied the process.

As OMB proceeds with its review, it will have plenty of input from groups affiliated with industry, including the Institute for Energy Research. In an email on Wednesday, Robert P. Murphy, a senior economist for the group, said: “We appreciate that agencies are in an awkward position right now, but our view is that the correct decision is to avoid using such a dubious concept as the ‘social cost of carbon’ in its present form.”

He said the calculations mask enormous value judgements, arguing that the resulting dollar value has little to do with science and much to do with an administration’s view of the world. “Even if we agreed on a particular computer simulation of the monetary damages accruing from climate change over the next few centuries, the calculation of the ‘social cost of carbon’ would vary widely, depending on our choice of parameters that have nothing to do with climate science,” he said.

In that, Murphy’s sentiments reflect those of some analysts whose views on climate are at odds with the Trump administration. David Roberts, now writing on climate and energy at Vox, wrote a much-cited column for Grist a few years ago dissecting economic calculations used to determine how much it is worth today to limit climate-related harms generations in the future. He warned, “They are social and ethical disputes being waged under cover of math, as though they are nothing but technical matters to be determined by ‘experts.'”

There’s really no legally defensible stance for having no social cost of carbon, said Michael Greenstone, a University of Chicago economist who in 2009 co-led the Obama administration working group that updated federal carbon-cost calculations. That group was disbanded under Trump’s March order.

In a phone interview on Wednesday, Greenstone said, “There are several elements that go into the social cost of carbon about which we’re uncertain. But it’s specious to imply that the best response to that uncertainty is to do nothing.”

Interviews earlier this year with a range of economists and policy analysts suggested that the Trump administration would end up setting a very low cost of carbon, perhaps $5 a ton, but not reject the metric entirely. This would be consistent with an influential federal appeals court ruling late in 2007, which found that the administration of George W. Bush improperly ignored costs from global warming in setting gas-mileage standards for sport utility vehicles and small trucks.

“[W]hile the record shows that there is a range of values, the value of carbon emissions reduction is certainly not zero,” the ruling said.

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Trump’s Defense Secretary Cites Climate Change as National Security Challenge

Trump’s Defense Secretary Cites Climate Change as National Security Challenge

Our story on March 13 concerning Secretary of Defense James Mattis’ views on the relationship between climate change and national security was based on excerpts from unpublished written exchanges between Mattis and several Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee following his Jan. 12 confirmation hearing. ProPublica has now obtained more comprehensive sets of these “Questions for the Record” and his answers.

While the exchanges mainly focus on climate change, fossil fuel and renewable energy and related security issues, which was the initial reporting focus, they include discussions of Mattis’ views on issues ranging from Iran’s nuclear weapons program to ISIS, Guantanamo and LGBT issues in the military. The merged documents are posted on DocumentCloud. Explore and let us know what excites, irks or confuses you, and share this package with others. Post comments or get in touch via suggestions@propublica.org.

Secretary of Defense James Mattis has asserted that climate change is real, and a threat to American interests abroad and the Pentagon’s assets everywhere, a position that appears at odds with the views of the president who appointed him and many in the administration in which he serves.

In unpublished written testimony provided to the Senate Armed Services Committee after his confirmation hearing in January, Mattis said it was incumbent on the U.S. military to consider how changes like open-water routes in the thawing Arctic and drought in global trouble spots can pose challenges for troops and defense planners. He also stressed this is a real-time issue, not some distant what-if.

“Climate change is impacting stability in areas of the world where our troops are operating today,” Mattis said in written answers to questions posed after the public hearing by Democratic members of the committee. “It is appropriate for the Combatant Commands to incorporate drivers of instability that impact the security environment in their areas into their planning.”

Mattis has long espoused the position that the armed forces, for a host of reasons, need to cut dependence on fossil fuels and explore renewable energy where it makes sense. He had also, as commander of the U.S. Joint Forces Command in 2010, signed off on the Joint Operating Environment, which lists climate change as one of the security threats the military expected to confront over the next 25 years.

But Mattis’ written statements to the Senate committee are the first direct signal of his determination to recognize climate change as a member of the Trump administration charged with leading the country’s armed forces.

These remarks and others in the replies to senators could be a fresh indication of divisions or uncertainty within President Donald Trump’s administration over how to balance the president’s desire to keep campaign pledges to kill Obama-era climate policies with the need to engage constructively with allies for whom climate has become a vital security issue.

Mattis’ statements on climate change, for instance, recognize the same body of science that Scott Pruitt, the new Environmental Protection Agency administrator, seems dead-set on rejecting. In a CNBC interview last Thursday, Pruitt rejected established science pointing to carbon dioxide as the main driver of recent global warming.

Mattis’ position also would appear to clash with some Trump administration budget plans, which, according to documents leaked recently to The Washington Post, include big cuts for the Commerce Department’s oceanic and atmospheric research — much of it focused on tracking and understanding climate change.

Even setting aside warming driven by accumulating carbon dioxide, it’s clear to a host of experts, including Dr. Will Happer, a Princeton physicist interviewed by Trump in January as a potential science adviser, that better monitoring and analysis of extreme conditions like drought is vital.

Mattis’ statements could hearten world leaders who have urged the Trump administration to remain engaged on addressing global warming. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is scheduled to meet Trump on Friday.

Security questions related to rising seas and changing weather patterns in global trouble spots like the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa are one reason that global warming has become a focus in international diplomatic forums. On March 10, the United Nations Security Council was warned of imminent risk of famine in Yemen, Somalia and South Sudan.

As well, at a Munich meeting on international security issues last month, attended by Mattis and Vice President Mike Pence, European officials pushed back on demands that they spend more on defense, saying their investments in boosting resilience to climate hazards in poor regions of the world are as valuable to maintaining security as strong military forces.

“[Y]ou need the European Union, because when you invest in development, when you invest in the fight against climate change, you also invest in our own security,” Federica Mogherini, the European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, said in a panel discussion.

Concerns about the implications of global warming for national security have built within the Pentagon and national security circles for decades, including under both Bush administrations.

In September, acting on the basis of a National Intelligence Council report he commissioned, President Obama ordered more than a dozen federal agencies and offices, including the Defense Department, “to ensure that climate change-related impacts are fully considered in the development of national security doctrine, policies, and plans.”

A related “action plan” was issued on Dec. 23, requiring those agencies to create a Climate and National Security Working Group within 60 days, and for relevant agencies to create “implementation plans” in that same period.

There’s no sign that any of this has been done.

Whether the inaction is a function of the widespread gaps in political appointments at relevant agencies, institutional inertia or a policy directive from the Trump White House remains unclear.

Queries to press offices at the White House and half a dozen of the involved agencies — including the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Defense, Department of Energy and Commerce Department — have not been answered. A State Department spokeswoman directed questions to the National Security Council and the White House, writing:

“We refer you to the NSC for any additional information on the climate working group.”

Mattis’ statements were submitted through a common practice at confirmation hearings in which senators pose “questions for the record” seeking more detail on a nominee’s stance on some issue.

The questions and answers spanned an array of issues, but five Democratic senators on the committee asked about climate change, according to a government official briefed in detail on the resulting 58-page document with the answers. The senators were Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the ranking member, Tim Kaine of Virginia, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

Excerpts from Mattis’ written comments to the committee were in material provided to ProPublica by someone involved with coordinating efforts on climate change preparedness across more than a dozen government agencies, including the Defense Department. Senate staff confirmed their authenticity.

Dustin Walker, communications director for the Senate Armed Services Committee, said responses to individual senators’ follow-up questions are theirs to publish or not.

Here are two of the climate questions from Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, with Mattis’ replies:

Shaheen: “I understand that while you were commander of U.S. Joint Forces Command you signed off on a document called the Joint Operating Environment, which listed climate change as one of the security threats the military will face in the next quarter-century. Do you believe climate change is a security threat?”

Mattis: “Climate change can be a driver of instability and the Department of Defense must pay attention to potential adverse impacts generated by this phenomenon.”

Shaheen: “General Mattis, how should the military prepare to address this threat?”

Mattis: “As I noted above, climate change is a challenge that requires a broader, whole-of government response. If confirmed, I will ensure that the Department of Defense plays its appropriate role within such a response by addressing national security aspects.”

In a reply to another question, Mattis said:

“I agree that the effects of a changing climate — such as increased maritime access to the Arctic, rising sea levels, desertification, among others — impact our security situation. I will ensure that the department continues to be prepared to conduct operations today and in the future, and that we are prepared to address the effects of a changing climate on our threat assessments, resources, and readiness.”

Here’s some recommended reading for those seeking more depth:

“Here’s How US Allies Are Trying to Convince Trump To Take Climate Change Seriously”

UN Dispatch, Feb. 22, 2017, by John Light

“Mattis on Military Energy Strategy”

New America, Jan. 13, 2017, by Sharon Burke

“Climate and Security Advisory Group: Briefing Book for a New Administration”

The Center for Climate and Security, Nov. 14, 2017

(The Center for Climate and Security also has a helpful chronology of U.S. defense and intelligence output on these intertwined issues.)

“A New Climate for Peace: Taking Action on Climate and Fragility Risks”

A 2015 report commissioned by the foreign ministers of the Group of Seven

“The National Security Case for Funding the EPA”

The Hill (opinion), March 11, 2017, by Sherri Goodman (a deputy undersecretary of defense from 1993 to 2001)

Also, I ran a discussion on the subject at the Washington offices of the Hoover Institution last month with retired Navy Admiral Gary Roughead, who was chief of naval operations from 2007 to 2011; Alice Hill, who directed work on the intersection of climate and national security policy at the National Security Council during the Obama administration; and David Slayton, a retired Navy officer who is now at Hoover tracking Arctic security and energy policy. Watch the video.

Trump’s Hot Air On Global Warming Is Far From The Greatest Threat

Trump’s Hot Air On Global Warming Is Far From The Greatest Threat

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

President-elect Donald J. Trump has long pledged to undertake a profound policy shift on climate change from the low-carbon course President Obama made a cornerstone of his eight years in the White House.

“This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop,” Trump tweeted a year ago.

In recent weeks, Trump doubled down, nominating champions of fossil fuels to several cabinet positions and peppering his transition team with longtime opponents of environmental regulations.

Both the rhetoric and the actions have provoked despair among many who fear a Trump presidency will tip the planet toward an overheated future, upending recent national and international efforts to stem emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from burning coal, oil and natural gas.

But will a President Trump noticeably affect the globe’s climate in ways that, say, a President Hillary Clinton would not have?

In recent weeks, a variety of consultants tracking climate and energy policy have used models to help address that question. ProPublica asked Andrew P. Jones at Climate Interactive, a nonprofit hub for such analysis, to run one such comparison.

The chosen scenario assumes Trump’s actions could result in the United States only achieving half of its pledged reduction through 2030 under the Paris Agreement on climate change, the worldwide but voluntary pact aiming to avoid dangerous global warming that entered into force on Nov. 4.

In this scenario the difference — call it the Trump effect — comes to 11 billion tons of additional carbon dioxide emitted between 2016 and 2030. That number is huge — it’s the equivalent of more than five years’ worth of emissions from all American power plants, for instance.

But it’s almost vanishingly small in global context. Here’s why. Even if all signatories to the Paris pact met their commitments, the global total of CO2 emissions through 2030 would be 580 billion tons, with the United States accounting for 65 billion of those tons. The Trump difference could take American emissions to 76 billion tons, with that 11-billion-ton difference increasing cumulative global emissions by less than 2 percent.

This calculation assumes Trump’s effect is not as damaging as his rhetoric might suggest. Is that realistic? In interviews, more than half a dozen environmental economists and climate policy experts said yes.

They said this less because they see Trump moderating his stances and more because many of the targets set by Obama, and built on in Clinton campaign pledges, were based on shifts in energy use that are largely being driven by market forces or longstanding environmental laws that are relatively immune to the influence of any particular occupant of the White House.

These include polluting industries moving overseas, increasing industrial energy efficiency, a sustained shift away from coal to abundant, cleaner natural gas and wind, and a host of climate-friendly policies pursued by individual cities or states.

For instance, while Wyoming is among the 27 states fighting President Obama’s Clean Power Plan in court, the coal-rich state looks set to meet the emissions benchmarks in those power-plant rules, largely because of a giant wind farm poised to be built in, yes, Carbon County, and newly approved transmission lines to send electricity to states in the power-hungry Southwest.

It’s notable that while Trump’s choice for secretary of energy, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, is a climate change contrarian, he’s credited by clean-energy champions with overseeing an enormous expansion of wind energy in his state. “Texas is a huge wind state, the biggest by far, and Rick Perry put in these transmission lines and made it wind friendly and that’s why they have such cheap electricity and no problems with reliability — none,” said Hal Harvey, a longtime climate and energy analyst who has advised past Clinton and Bush administrations and run a clean-energy foundation.

For many, this all hardly justifies a sigh of relief.

Indeed, many environmentalists reject the idea that any encouraging trends toward better energy choices are happening on their own. Many coal-fired power plants, they note, were stopped from being built only by lawsuits and political pressure brought by activist opponents, said Kierán Suckling, the founder of the Center for Biological Diversity, which uses the courts to limit harm to public lands and ecosystems.

“Industry and Republicans certainly don’t believe in a secular trend. Instead they have poured enormous resources into trying to amend or repeal old laws, pass new industry-friendly laws, strike down and influence Obama’s policies, and prevent activists from enforcing laws and policies,” Suckling said.

With Republicans controlling the White House and Congress, environmental groups are, in effect, “lawyering up,” vowing to counter any “drill baby drill” efforts with a “sue baby sue” response.

In the end, as global carbon-dioxide tallies reflect, such courtroom sparring, while important, is unlikely to have a game-changing impact on climate trajectories.

Much the same thing can be said of the lasting impact of American presidents. For nearly three decades, White House occupants have pledged to move the needle on climate change one way or the other, without terribly dramatic results.

In the scorching summer of 1988, when global warming first hit headlines in a significant way, presidential candidate George H.W. Bush used a Michigan speech to pledge meaningful action curbing heat-trapping greenhouse gases, saying, “Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the greenhouse effect forget about the White House effect.”

Despite a host of actions since that summer, including President George H.W. Bush signing the foundational climate treaty in Rio in 1992, you’d be hard-pressed to find evidence of such an effect in emission rates.

Globally, the “great acceleration” in emissions (that’s a scientific description) has largely tracked the growth in human numbers and resource appetites — particularly a seemingly insatiable appetite for energy, more than 80 percent of which still comes from fossil fuels despite sustained efforts to spread efficiency and renewable choices.

William Nordhaus, a Yale economist long focused on climate change policy, calls the global situation a high-stakes “climate casino.” He just published a working paper concluding that all policies so far have amounted to “minimal” steps that have had equally minimal effects.

Nearly three decades after that “White House effect” pledge, after eight years of sustained efforts by President Obama, including building a critical 2014 partnership with China, Nordhaus finds “there has been no major improvement in emissions trends as of the latest data.”

In the end, the main value of the climate calculations spurred by Trump’s election could be in refocusing attention on the true scope of the challenge, which some researchers have described as “super wicked” given how hard it has been, using conventional political, legal or diplomatic tools, to balance human energy needs and the climate system’s limits.

The Paris Agreement itself was far more a diplomatic achievement than a climatic one. Its 2030 pledges leave unresolved how to cut emissions of carbon dioxide essentially to zero in the second half of the century in a world heading toward 9 billion or more people seeking decent lives.

That plunge in emissions is necessary because unlike most other pollutants, carbon dioxide from fuel burning stays in circulation for centuries, building in the atmosphere like unpaid credit-card debt.

The real risk for climate change in a Trump presidency, according to close to a dozen experts interviewed for this story, lies less in impacts on specific policies like Obama’s Clean Power Plan and more in the realm of shifts in America’s position in international affairs.

Even if he doesn’t formally pull out of the climate treaty process, Trump could, for example, cancel payments pledged by the United States to a Green Climate Fund set up in 2010 to help the poorest developing countries build resilience to climate hazards and develop clean-energy systems.

President Obama has already paid in $500 million of the $3 billion commitment, with another $200 million potentially paid before he leaves office next month. Environmentalists last week pressed in an open letter for the full amount to be paid before Trump takes office.

“If the U.S. walks from its commitment, I would think it would be difficult for the other OECD countries to sustain donations, and if those donations are not sustained, developing countries will focus on growth as opposed to low carbon growth,” said Henry Lee, a Harvard scholar working in and studying climate policy for decades.

But in international affairs, Trump and his proposed secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, the Exxon chairman, will confront a world of intertwined interests in which climate change has moved from being an inconvenient environmental side issue in the early 1990s to a keystone focal point now, said Andrew Light, a George Mason University professor focused on climate policy.

Light, who served on Obama administration negotiating teams in the run-up to the Paris accord, said such intertwined interests will be thrust upon the Trump administration starting this spring and summer in venues like the annual Group of 7 and Group of 20 meetings of the globe’s most powerful countries.

“Those groups have committed to action using very strong climate and energy language,” he said. “The way we got so many leaders to come to Paris and make this happen and ended up getting an even more ambitious agreement than we expected was by breaking climate diplomacy out of its silo — and making it sort of a peer issue to questions like trade and security. In this world you can’t just walk away from all this stuff.”

Given how Trump appears to be relishing his position as a wild card and a self-described master of the deal, it’s still impossible to say what will unfold starting January 20.

In a blistering speech to thousands of earth scientists in San Francisco earlier this month, California Gov. Jerry Brown vowed to fight Trump in the near term using that state’s influence on everything from automobile standards to the national laboratories, which are managed by the University of California system.

But he also accurately described the climate challenge for what it is: “This is not a battle of one day or one election. This is a long-term slog into the future.”

IMAGE: Participants are seen in silhouette as they look at a screen showing a world map with climate anomalies during the World Climate Change Conference 2015 (COP21) at Le Bourget, near Paris, France, December 8, 2015.  REUTERS/Stephane Mahe