Fisher on the NASEM Climate Report

“These are matters of public policy, not science alone. And in no case should a group of allegedly objective scientists attempt to shut down a public policy debate.” (-T. Fisher, below)

Travis Fisher, director of energy and environmental policy studies at the Cato Institute, has rapidly become a trusted voice in the sustainability debates of our time. He recently reported on social media:

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) just declared the [prior] EPA’s endangerment finding on greenhouse gases “beyond scientific dispute.”

While the endangerment finding is the legal foundation for many of EPA’s climate regulations, NASEM’s unsolicited report crosses an important line — from providing objective scientific advice to advocating for a specific policy.

Science can inform policy, but it cannot make policy for us. The Clean Air Act leaves the endangerment decision to the EPA Administrator’s judgment — a fundamentally political question.

Fisher continues:

By jumping in uninvited, NASEM violated its Congressional charter, which allows it to investigate “whenever called upon” by the federal government — not whenever it feels like weighing in on the national debate.

Even if every conclusion in NASEM’s report were correct, we’d still face difficult value judgments: how fast to cut emissions, which sectors to target, and how to balance costs and benefits across generations.

These are matters of public policy, not science alone. And in no case should a group of allegedly objective scientists attempt to shut down a public policy debate.

Comment

The “consensus” or “everyone says” argument is not science. Climate science is highly unsettled, and the alarmist crowd thinks they know all that is needed to know about global climate–and any and all human intervention is negative, even catastrophic. Nope. It is time to move away from the Deep Ecology view of Nature as optimal and fragile. The realm of climate economics and climate policy are in addition to the implications of physical science change itself.

“Two-thirds of the NAS funding comes from the federal government,” Steve Milloy noted in a review of the above report. “President Trump should terminate that funding and make the NAS decide between sound science and junk science.”

Correct. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine is a special interest: Big Science infested with expert failure. Its rushed, one-sided rebuttal is not scholarly, much less definitive.

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[1] Fisher describes his work as follows:

I write and speak on the free market approach to energy policy in the US. As a recovering regulator and former political appointee at both the Department of Energy and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, I translate the obscure energy policy world into plain English for people who don’t live and breathe it every day.

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