Episode Transcript
[00:00:08] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find out Temperate zones and tropic climbs and merge through currents and thriving seas Winds blowing through breathing trees and strong ozone and safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find. Yeah.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: Hello, K SQUID listeners. It's every other Sunday again and you're listening to Sustainability Now, a bi weekly case Good radio show focused on environment, sustainability and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California and the world. I'm your host, Ronnie lipschitz. Today is January 5, 2025. In 15 days, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as President of the United States for his second term. There is considerable trepidation in the environmental policy and activism sectors across the country and indeed the world. Trump's appointees are committed to deregulation across the board, especially where the environment is concerned, to gutting funding for renewable energy and rescinding the Inflation Reduction act and increasing fossil fuel production and consumption. What his administration might want to do and what it will be able to do remains to be seen. My guest today on sustainability now is Dr. Andrew Rosenberg, who most recently was director of the center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. He's been a professor of natural resources and the environment at the University of New Hampshire and dean of the College of Life Sciences and Agriculture at the same university. He's also been chief scientist for Conservation International, the Northeast Administrator of the National Marine Fisheries Services, and later deputy director of the same. At present, he is a senior fellow at the University of New Hampshire, Carsey School of public policy.
Dr. Andrew Rosenberg, welcome to Sustainability Now.
[00:02:11] Speaker A: Nice to be here. Thank you very much.
[00:02:13] Speaker B: Let's begin with some background. You're a scientist with considerable experience in public policy. How did you get into public policy?
[00:02:22] Speaker A: Well, I did a very traditional research Degree, Master's and PhD in Ecology, Marine ecology, mostly working on fisheries. But then when I postdoc in London, I worked for a guy named John Beddington, now Sir John Beddington, who was doing a lot of public policy advice, not only for the UK Government, but internationally. So I sort of got a taste for it. Then when I moved back to the US to work for NOAA Fisheries, the US Federal Fisheries Agency.
I was providing science advice for the policy decisions in the somewhat complex system that is federal fisheries management.
And then someone I was sent to a UN conference negotiating an international treaty, and the lead attorney for NOAA fisheries said, you know, you're actually pretty good at this. And they're looking for someone to take on the position of regional administrator in the Northeast, the policy lead for the Northeast part of the US Why don't you try it? And I thought, well, there's no way they're ever going to hire me. They view me as a scientist and at that time, too young. But to everyone's surprise, mostly mine, I got that position and was sort of dumped into the frontline policy making arena in a very contentious time in New England for changing fisheries management, endangered species, marine mammals management, habitat management and so on. Sort of at the inflection point when things had to change, which is one of the reasons I took on the position. Figured, well, I have to make a change, I might as well give it a try.
[00:04:13] Speaker B: When would that have been?
[00:04:15] Speaker A: That was in the 1990s. So many of the major stocks had collapsed in northeast US waters. I was the way the system works, you negotiate with representatives of the industry and the states as they craft a proposed management plan which is then accepted or rejected by the federal government and then implemented by the federal government if it's accepted.
And so the only federal official in that negotiation was, is the regional administrator of the 20 something people around the table were either industry or state representatives. And putting a recovery plan in place was essential because the stocks were in such terrible shape.
So, you know, there's many things you would, you could do better in hindsight, but at the time it was both engaging and incredibly challenging and very different from writing papers and publishing them in academic journals.
[00:05:14] Speaker B: Yeah, I can imagine. And I think probably many of our listeners took civics classes in their early years. Everyone learns this sort of standard template for passing laws that would implement public policy and that's really hardly the complete process. So I'm wondering if you could give us a brief tutorial about what happens to laws after they're passed and handed over to executive agencies to implement. Who decides what will be done? What is the role of experts in developing the implementation plan and then executing it?
[00:05:48] Speaker A: This is a really critical question and as you say, many people do not fully understand how this works. I mean, let's take the fisheries law, or for that matter marine mammal protections, as examples. Although I've worked in many other areas since those days. Congress passes a federal fisheries law called the Magnuson Stevens Conservation and Management act, which has been amended multiple times through the since 1976 when it was first passed. But basically the law says we want the fisheries to be sustainable, we don't want overfishing to occur, we want you to protect habitat, we want you to protect fishing communities and a few other big goals like that. But it doesn't tell you how to do that. So Congress says, okay, now we've fixed fisheries. I hope somebody goes away and does all that stuff. Because nothing happens when the law is passed other than a federal agency is tasked with implementing it. Now, that law in particular set up count these fishery management councils and a rather unique structure to recommend what the implementation plan would look like. But it is the responsibility and all of the accountability comes back to the federal fisheries agency, not to the people who are on those councils. And so a good example is, okay, we don't want overfishing to occur. Well, what does that mean? And you get a pretty deafening silence unless you ask fisheries scientists or people who have been deeply engaged in management, what does it mean to prevent overfishing on a continuing basis, which is the language of the law.
So experts have to say, well, there's a number of ways to define it, but here's how we're going to define it. When we review the plans that come from the constituent bodies that are going to be recommending things to us, and ultimately the law sets up that as long as it meets the goals of the, the law itself, no overfishing, protect habitat, protect communities, safety at sea, etc. Then the fisheries agency can only accept or reject the plan. They can't modify it. They can't say, well, we do it differently, or anything else. You can only accept or reject, or partially accept or partially reject, if you like. So it's really designed by what is essentially a management system of representatives, representatives who are appointed from the states and from the industry and from conservation organizations, you know, recreational fishing representatives, etc. At the time I was doing it, it was almost all commercial fishing representatives with, and state representatives with one or two people from what was viewed as the recreational sector. So then, if you accept the plan, the agency accepts the plan and it is signed off on by the Secretary of Commerce, which means in the first instance, by the regional administrator, and then my boss and the Secretary of Commerce is the boss of the head of noaa. Then the agency has to figure out how to implement what the council constructed, even though we weren't able to modify it, and say, you know, if it do you did it this way, it'd be much better. You can only do that through negotiation. And that's true for many, many types of law. They don't all have constituent councils, but they all have some structure like that. The Clean Air act, the Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water act, all of these things are implemented either by the states, with federal approval, under certain guidelines, or by the feds with state Approval under certain guidelines or other structures like that. But when Congress passes the law itself, nothing happens. Now, when someone objects to the law, which is to the way that you've implemented the law, let me put it that way. So to a management plan, for example, they don't sue the, the council that designed it. They don't sue the fishermen who are engaged in fishing or any of the other businesses that are engaged in it. They sue the federal government for not properly implementing the law. And I have to tell you, you are sued on everything. Every regulation that I have ever put into place, and I signed off on a lot of them in my time in government, elicits some kind of a lawsuit that goes to federal court or if you, unless you agree and make the change, but that rarely happens. So then the court holds you accountable. Did you do what the law told you to do? Did you have the authority to do what the law told you to do? If I can expand for a minute this idea that people just go off and do stuff in the federal government without congressional action and the famous phrase unelected bureaucrats are making all the rules. You can't do a single thing you don't have a legal mandate to do. And even if you have a legal mandate to do it, people are going to argue over whether in fact you met your legal mandate or not. And ultimately a judge will be the decision maker on whether in fact you met your legal mandate. A federal judge.
[00:10:43] Speaker B: Well, in June, the Supreme Court ended the Chevron deference ruling that instead of deferring to the expertise of agencies on how to interpret ambiguous language and laws pertaining to their work, federal judges would now have the power to decide what a law means for themselves.
They would get to decide what would a law mean? The ambiguity is a long standing issue. Right. What did the founding Fathers mean by X, Y and Z? Right. Which we're still debating. So what are the implications of that ruling?
[00:11:15] Speaker A: Well, there's actually two parts to the ruling. One is, as you read it, that a federal judge has the power to say, no, I'm going to interpret the law, not the agency experts. It's not really the experts in the agency. It's the agency using all of its expertise to interpret the law. Or the judge can say, well, it's unclear. You have to go back to Congress and get them to clarify it. Some judges will defer to the experts in the agency. They'll say, explain this to me. And then they will evaluate whether in fact you have a reasonable interpretation. Other judges will say, no, no, no, I know better. I had a judge once say to me, well, I don't agree with your economic analysis that went with this plan. And so I'm going to go ask my high school economics teacher because he's the smartest economist I know. You know, I mean, literally, that's what the judge said from the bench and did. And so the judges have an enormous, have enormous scope now. They're no longer bound by the precedent of Chevron deference, which said, well, you know, if the interpretation isn't obvious, then defer to the experts who actually work in this field and that are in the agency. They don't have to do that, but they can do it. The other part of it is go back to Congress, clarify is quite interesting to me as someone who used to be in that role of trying to figure out what my legal mandate was, having to meet with members of Congress all the time, testify before Congress multiple times. I would like to be able to say, oh, sure, you can get Congress to clarify, but in reality that just doesn't happen. You know, which members of Congress, is it the committee chair and, or the ranking member, or is it the person with the loudest voice or the person who, I mean, who is going to clarify? You're going to have them amend the law. That's a pretty difficult process. So let me go back to my overfishing example. The law says you shouldn't overfish, so prevent overfishing on a continuing basis. The agent, I can interpret that as a scientist. I've worked on it for 40 years now, you know, as a student, as a researcher, as a, you know, federal scientist, as an academic scientist, etc. There isn't probably very many judges who would be able to tell you what overfishing means in a way that could be implemented in a management plan, but they might decide that they want to, just as the Supreme Court judges decided that what water should be covered by the Clean Water act was, you know, something that they should decide as opposed to, you know, following the science of says, how do waters connect to each other? So now we have a situation where their interpretation of what a navigable waterway and the navigable waters that are affected by pollution are no longer really connected to some, you know, wetlands, because they didn't think that that constituted the Clean Water act, even though any scientist and almost any school child would say, well, water goes downhill, so it's connected even temporarily in this pollution upstream, it's going to end up in the navigable waterway. So now that you've removed deference as a precedent it's not binding, but it is a. Was a precedent. It meant, watch out. If you don't use this precedent, if it goes to appeal to a higher court, then we might ask you why the heck didn't follow precedent. What it's done is it's added uncertainty into the system. And so what does increased uncertainty do in the system of governance? It adds arguments not to take action. Fundamentally, it means don't take action. That's why people on climate change spend so much time saying, well, are we really sure? Because until we're sure, we shouldn't really take any action because the actions have consequences in managing fisheries or protecting mammals, marine mammals, or turtles, or whatever it might be. Well, are you really sure that we're overfishing? Are you really sure the animals are endangered? Because if you aren't, we really shouldn't take action until we're absolutely sure. And a quite famous guy in the fisheries world who nobody else would know unless you were in fisheries, named John Gulland, who I used to work with, would say that fisheries management is about arguing endlessly about how many fish there are in the sea until all doubt is removed, and so are all the fish. And that is a pretty good description. If you remove all doubt, it's too.
[00:15:36] Speaker B: Late to do anything, and then the problem is gone. Right?
You're listening to Sustainability Now. I'm Ronnie Lipchitz, your host. And my guest today is Dr. Andrew Rosenberg, who is a marine scientist by training and a public policy expert. Having engaged in public policy for. For many decades, and we were just talking about how laws are made and implemented, I have to say that I think that was a. Was a great overview of how things happen or don't happen. Why don't we turn to the second coming of Donald Trump? He's promised to eviscerate existing environmental, energy, and public health institutions, and he is appointing people who he believes will what he wants. And the question is, can he do the things that he says he wants to do? And what might we expect?
[00:16:27] Speaker A: Yeah, I've obviously been thinking about these issues and writing about these issues quite a bit in a substack newsletter that I co edited called Silent. In the first Trump administration, there was much of the same rhetoric, and some of the appointees were adamantly opposed to the mission of the agencies that they were appointed to run. For example, a man named Scott Pruitt was appointed to run the Environmental Protection Agency until he was forced out for various kinds of corruption. A very long list of things that he did were, which were fundamentally Corrupt in terms of using agency resources for his personal benefit, etc. You know, a man named William Penley was at the Department of Interior. He used to work for the external organization that believed that all public, federal, public lands should be privatized, and now he was overseeing federal lands and so on. Ryan Zinke, who's now back in Congress, was the Secretary of Interior and pretty much opposed to much of what the Interior Department. So we've seen that before. And in the first go round, what we found is that while there was a lot of rhetoric, the people that were appointed in those positions were remarkably ineffective. And while they did do a significant amount of damage for those people who were deeply engaged in different issue areas, they also got an awful lot of pushback, both publicly, but also from the courts. So you asked, how does anything get done? Well, it does get done. It gets done because you keep working at it. It doesn't happen quickly, but things do get done. And in most administrations that I, you know, the last five or so that I'm pretty intimately familiar with, the government usually prevails on the multitude of lawsuits. You go to court. The government doesn't do these things unthinkingly. It's not because I woke up one morning and decided I wanted to be mean to fishermen, I wanted to be nice to whales or whatever it is. It's a very careful, involved process. And the government prevails in court most of the time. Between 75 to 95% of the time, the government will prevail on a lot of environmental suits. I'm not talking generally in all lawsuits. In the Trump administration, those numbers were reversed because they believed their own rhetoric that people just came in and did things for political purposes and did whatever they wanted. And so they came in and did things for political purposes and did whatever they wanted without going through the steps that are required to actually implement under the law, the Administrative Procedures act, all the other applicable law, blah, blah, blah, all of which we don't have time to go into, but, you know, I've had to deal with for many years. And they just sort of thought none of that mattered. They were in charge and they could do what they wanted. And the court said, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's not what you get to do. And there was a pretty big public outcry this time around. They are better organized, but you have many people who are being appointed into positions or to take on tasks where they really don't understand the legal basis at Department of Health and Human Services and Medicare and Medicaid services. That's certainly true for Mr. Kennedy and Dr. Oz at the EPA. It's almost certainly true for the appointee, Lee Zeldin for the epa, even though he was a congressman. So he knows more about this process than many. And you could argue Kennedy should, because he's a lawyer and he should know how the law works, but I wouldn't. There's plenty of lawyers in Washington and elsewhere that don't seem to necessarily know how the law works. So you've got a lot of people who are opposed to the missions of their agencies, and surprise, surprise, they're still bound by their legal mandates. They can't. They have to do what Congress, the laws Congress passed and the president signed under whatever administration, unless those laws are eliminated. And so there is high risk that they will avoid that. And the president elect himself, of course, seems to be a master of avoiding accountability for legal requirements. But I'm not sure that extends to all of the people that work for him, just because even if the Supreme Court says the president might be immune for his official acts, every appointee in every agency and political appointee, of which there's about 4,000, is still bound by the ethics of government. Everyone is required to meet their legal mandates. And so, you know, there is pushback possible and there is accountability possible. What the courts will do, we'll have to see the other damage that they can do. And I think this is the scariest part, is they really can undermine the capability of the agencies to do their jobs in future. I mean, thousands of scientists left government in the first Trump administration because it was just untenable. A lot more will leave this time, and younger scientists are less likely to want to go and work in a federal agency. And that's, you know, cutting off the supply of talent. Exactly. At the time when you need more and better talent. And I say that as, you know, somebody approaching 70, we need a new generation of scientists to populate these agencies. All of the people that, you know, I worked with either have retired or are retiring. And so the loss of federal employees is demographic as well as just in response to the Trump administration. And that's the time when you want younger professionals to come in, or earlier career, however you want to phrase it, professionals to come in and find that they can do their best work in government, and government is welcoming them. And I don't think that's going to be a hard, harder sell under this next Trump administration.
[00:22:08] Speaker B: But, you know, that sort of suggests that that the agencies will do as little as they can get away with, even given the legal mandate. And the other thing I wanted to bring up, and this is partly a statement, partly a question, right, is that there will be lawsuits, right? There will be lawsuits about failure to. To implement, as well as overextending implementation. And the. The government is likely to weigh in on the side of those who want to overturn regulations and interfere with agency activities. I mean, is that an accurate description or am I wrong?
[00:22:46] Speaker A: It is, but it doesn't necessarily eliminate the legal mandates. What we know that we will give up is the capacity concerns, the capability of agencies to currently and in future meet their missions, and the ability to make progress on many, many, many issues. We might not lose too much ground on environmental issues, for example, or some public health issues, but we're unlikely to make any serious progress. And if you view serious progress as meaning that environmental threats to communities, environmental threats to people and their public health, environmental threats that undermine public resources, that we're not doing that any better, we're going back by losing four years of progress is very significant, not only on climate change, but on clean water, on clean air, on public health threats, on a huge range of issues. And it's not certainly just environment, it's also things such as workplace safety. Do we think we're really going to make serious progress on workplace safety when the people who are pushing aside unions and union rules and workplace safety issues and federal agencies like OSHA are in charge? The rules might still be in place, but we're not going to be making real progress either on continuing to strengthen those rules or implementation. And I think that's a very sad state of affairs.
[00:24:14] Speaker B: What can the president do with executive orders in this arena?
[00:24:19] Speaker A: The president's executive orders, leaving aside things like national security, where he has a freer hand and is completely terrifying, you know, an executive order basically says to the federal government and its employees, this is what I want you to do within your legal mandates. You cannot say, I've decided you're not going to implement the Endangered Species Act. I don't care about those critters. President doesn't have the authority to do that. The law is in place. You still have to take action.
[00:24:49] Speaker B: So presumably he's not really sensitive to that. Trump is not really sensitive to.
[00:24:53] Speaker A: No, I'm sure. I don't think he views that there are any restraints. But an executive order cannot override legislation. An executive order can prioritize, though, and say, I want, you know, any particular agency, the Department of Interior, I don't want you to prioritize the rights of indigenous people and conservation on tribal lands as well as on federal lands. I don't think that's so important. I want you to focus on other things, such as providing opportunities for companies to drill on federal lands. Now, as long as that's within the law, that's telling the agency, this is where your priority is. He can't wave his hands and say, I don't want there to be, you know, offshore wind energy. But he can say, that's not a priority for this administration, so don't put resources towards it unless it's specifically instructed by Congress. And even then, under Project 2025, despite his hollow disavowals of I don't know anything about Project 2025, Project 2025 is recommending that the President not necessarily follow the budget, the appropriations that Congress passes, but withhold money if he doesn't want to, which, as far as I'm concerned, is illegal. So that will be subject to lawsuits. But by the time the lawsuits are settled, time has passed.
[00:26:12] Speaker B: Actually, that was not one of the things I wanted to ask about, especially with regard to the Inflation Reduction Act. Does the President have the power to impound funds that have already been appropriated? What's the current sort of reading of that?
[00:26:29] Speaker A: Well, again, I'm a biologist, not a lawyer, so I can't tell you whether there's legal authority.
[00:26:34] Speaker B: But it's better than you're a biologist. It's better that you're a biologist.
[00:26:38] Speaker A: For lots of reasons, it's better I'm a biologist. Nobody would want me as their lawyer. My understanding is, no, the President doesn't have the authority to say, well, I don't feel like spending that money. However, they're going to push that to the limits. As far as I can tell. Again, if you look at Project 2025 or the America first agenda or all of these things that he's saying, oh, well, I didn't have anything to do with that. It's just all the people that I bring around me, they're the ones who wrote it. So there is a great push to get as much of the Inflation Reduction act money obligated as possible. The interesting thing is that while you've got this enormous rhetoric about federal spending from the Republican caucus, if you go into any office for any member of Congress, regardless of party in either house, almost the first thing you will see in every office is, is a chart of how much money that person brought home to their district. Most of the Inflation Reduction act money has been spent in red states and in districts of people who voted against it and who are now trumpeting the fact that they brought all this federal money into the district, that they voted against, funds that, you know, so now they would have to say, they would have to support the idea that they're not going to get the money that they bring. They don't want those factories in their district. They don't want those jobs in their state. And that's a different matter. It's fine to say in the abstract, I don't think we should be spending this money. But now that the money is flowing under the Chips and Science act, the inflation Reduction act, bipartisan infrastructure law, how many Republican members who are supporting the president are going to say, no, don't give us money to rebuild the bridges, don't give us money for a new factory and 5,000 jobs in my district. We want to turn that back. The only money they ever turned down is things like Medicaid for, you know, medical services, for people who don't have resources to purchase insurance and so on. States turn that money down. They're not turning down a lot of infrastructure money, they're not turning down IRA money and so on. They're getting as much as they can. And the reasons those are investments are in, in red states is because that's where the biggest need was for, in many cases, for certainly for infrastructure. But also, you know, that was the opportunity to support some of the primary goals for the Inflation Reduction act as well. So I think it's hard to say, yes, maybe the president can slow things down, and if you depopulate the federal agencies, things will slow down and everybody will say, oh, my God, these agencies. How come they can't get anything done? Well, you just, you know, 20% of their staff just went out the door and you wouldn't replace them. What did you think was going to happen? But that's not the rhetoric that we hear.
[00:29:28] Speaker B: You're listening to sustainability Now, I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschutz, and my guest today is Dr. Andrew Rosenberg, who has been in a number of different policy positions, including marine fish fisheries agencies. And we've just been talking about whether the incoming Trump administration will be able to accomplish its purported objectives. Given the various legal mandates that they have to operate under and basically the resistance of implementation, it's not so easy to stop things. But I want to turn. Now, you mentioned Project 2025 from the Heritage Foundation a couple of times, and what I read the other day was that the document argues that much of the information coming from NOAA favors one side in the climate debate and they recommend closure of Noah's Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research. Can you tell us about the logic behind that argument and what is actually going on?
[00:30:31] Speaker A: I can tell you about the illogic behind that argument. Of course, much of the information that comes out of climate science does support overwhelmingly the fact that climate change is occurring and unfortunately occurring more rapidly, and that it is anthropogenic. It's caused by emissions from the burning of fossil fuels or the use of fossil fuels, not just their burning, deforestation and other sources, but it's anthropogenic in origins, caused by us. And so it's quite true that any group that is doing climate science, except for a few fringe groups that are sort of off on the side and find, you know, a very small number of, of scientists who have decided that they are going to take this, a contrarian view, is going to be producing a lot of information that would say, yeah, here's some climate impacts that are really important. Here's what we think the course of climate change will be. It's slower, it's faster, whatever. Most of the time, unfortunately the answer is it's faster. So not doing the science doesn't mean that that isn't true. It just means that you're pretending that we don't want it first for some reason you don't want to know about it. It is a little bit like saying, well, if we didn't do hurricane forecasting, we wouldn't have to worry about it because then we wouldn't know the hurricanes were coming or the, you know, the tornadoes were coming. Let's not do hurricane forecasting, let's not do, to NATO forecasting or you know, severe storm surge. Let's not forecast those things because then it won't be a problem. And I'm sorry, that's not logic, that's illogic.
Now there's a huge amount of climate of science going on around issues of climate change. And there is a view, I think in Project 2025 and in some circles that say, well, there's this group of climate scientists who are, you know, constructing this thing that doesn't, isn't real or isn't due to human activity. And you know, that they've made up this. Even the President Elect has said, you know, this is a made up issue. Well, first of all, there are people who study how the atmosphere and how the oceans work. Oceanographers, climatologists, you know, atmospheric scientists, atmospheric chemists, they're multiple disciplines on how does the Atmosphere, out of the ocean, out of the Earth systems work. I'm a marine biologist by training, so I'm working, you know, suppose I'm working in fisheries or in marine habitat or, you know, whatever the various fields that I've worked in. I have to be a climate scientist, too, because everything's moving. You know, the working assumption when I was a young scientist is that the background environment is. Is so called stationary. It varies around some constant mean and with constant amount of variation. That's no longer true. We see it in the ocean. If you wanted to pretend that the fish aren't moving towards the poles into deeper water to maintain their preferred temperatures, then you would be fooling yourself. You couldn't do your work. It would be nonsensical. The same is true in forests. The same is true in agricultural sciences. The same is true in water resources. Almost every field that studies the natural world is seeing the effects of a changing climate. So it's not just this, you know, a few people who have constructed this bizarre model about how they think the Earth system works. It really is the entire science enterprise. And so now you're going to say, maybe we should eliminate that because the problem would go away. I mean, that's the kind of illogic what they want to do with noaa. NOAA provides incredibly important services and incredibly important climate services. You know, tell local governments they're not going to get any information about what's changing in terms of water tables or shoreline protection or rainfall patterns and all of the other things that. That are essential for farmers, for fishermen, for communities to plan on flooding, for home builders. For all of these things, they may not like the answer, but they probably want to know what it's going to be. What's the best weight of scientific evidence telling us? So Project 2025 is basically the, you know, project put your head in the sand.
[00:34:54] Speaker B: Yeah. You know, I wrote to you, hurricanes are political events, even though, of course, we don't regard them as such. Right. We recently saw that in, in North Carolina, I think, when FEMA was accused of favoring someone over someone else. But I also think about Trump's redrawing the trajectory of a hurricane as a kind of a political act. And so even if we ignored hurricanes, of course, if they came ashore and destroyed things, that would of course be political as well as, you know, natural disasters. I actually wanted to go back to something else that 2025 proposes, which is privatization of the National Weather Service. And somewhere I read you told a story about the origins of the British Weather forecasting Service and the opposition by private interests. And I wonder if you could tell that story and then, you know, tell us what would happen, you know, if we tried to privatize the National Weather Service.
[00:35:51] Speaker A: So there was a famous sea captain who was actually the captain of the Beagle, the vessel that Charles Darwin sailed around the world, named Fitzroy, Robert Fitzroy. And when he came back from the Beagle voyage and from some other things, he, because he was a sea captain and a very intelligent man, he was watching very carefully, as mariners always do, the weather patterns. And he, he realized that if you given communications in the night in the 19th century, the advances in comm. In longer distance communication, you could actually get a lot of information that would tell you about weather patterns moving in. So he wasn't modeling the atmosphere, he was actually using communications from west, essentially of the uk, and he was able to provide much greater warning to mariners based on this system that he developed of understanding if things were coming in for the west, how fast were they moving, what were the actual changes in barometric pressure, etc. I'm not getting into the, the science here. The interesting part is he came out with this system and the ship owners were very angry because it meant that mariners, including fishermen, when they knew that now, knew in advance that a big storm was coming, didn't want to go to sea. Because fishing then, as now, is one of the most dangerous occupations that we have. It still is a. You know, in the town that I live in, people, every year, people are lost.
And we have extraordinary weather forecasting capabilities now on every single vessel. But it's a very dangerous environment.
And the ship owners were very angry because sometimes the fishermen on the boats that they owned would refuse to go and fish, and therefore they thought they were going to lose money. And so they attacked Captain Fitzroy and said, you know, keep your damn opinions about the weather to yourself. We don't need to know this. It's going to undermine business.
And so he was actually forced to back off. Now, ultimately, the system, you know, grew and was put into place and, you know, created the Met Office and so on in the uk, which was a forerunner of most of the eight weather agencies and meteorological agencies in the world world. So why does that matter for privatization? Well, the reason why weather forecasts should be a public service, not a private service, is because they should serve all of the public and it shouldn't matter whether it's profitable to produce the forecast or not. And so there's, yes, you have the regular forecasts and all the information that you get on, you know, radio and television or audio online or whatever. It ultimately, you know, originally comes from NOAA with bells and whistles that are added by various companies. And sometimes companies sell services to noaa. And NOAA puts that out. The weather National Weather Service puts that out to the broader community, whether it be forecasts for farmers, forecasts for coastal communities, you know, the marine forecast, the regular weather forecast when people are commuting to work for whatever purpose, Things about storm surge and hurricanes and severe weather, all of that comes through the National Weather Service. And it doesn't matter for those products whether they are profitable.
It matters that they save lives. They provide people public information.
Now, I'm sure that private companies would say, no, no, no, we're really in the business of saving lives too. But no, they're in the business of making a profit. And if it's not profitable, why would they do it? If there are communities that they don't feel are profitable entities to purchase their services or to see the advertising that goes with their services because they're not going to be responsive to the advertising, why would they continue to do this? I mean, it's the same discussion that's have happening now. You know, you may have read that the president elect is thinking maybe we should just privatize the postal Service. Well, that's fine if you think the postal Service's purpose is to make a profit. When you've got FedEx or you've got DHL or, you know, whatever it might be, and they're gonna, they make a very large profit and there's a lot of places they won't go because why would they bother? There's a lot of rural communities that don't matter. There's a lot of poor communities where there isn't much delivery, disadvantaged communities of all kinds. And, you know, the same thing is true for weather forecasts. We also provide an enormous amount of weather information globally, particularly to places that don't have their own capability to do weather forecast. Does that matter? Yeah, it matters for people's lives. It matters for the ability of people to, you know, to make a living, but also to, to live. And so it is a public function. If I can just for a minute. I mean, this is the problem of saying, well, government should run like a business, you know, which you're hearing from the, from Ramaswamy and, and Musk right now for their, what I would call illegal advisory commission because it doesn't follow the laws that everybody else has to follow when they're on fire. Conditions that I've been on. And so it's fine for a business to say, well, ultimately we make all our decisions about are we going to be able to make money.
Well, government doesn't do that. Government isn't in the business of having that single goal. You know, government has a board of directors of 535 people which no company could operate on. It's called the US Congress.
Government has a mission to serve every member of the public as far as is possible, or at least the public interest, not the individuals, but the public interest.
And that's totally different from what a business does. Totally different. And so once when I was a federal manager, we had a, some kind of a seminar for senior executive service members, which I was part of. And they brought in someone from one of the major defense contractors who just not to talk about his business, but to talk about management principles. And in the end of it, somebody, it might have been me, said, so how would you apply that to government? You know, we all work for government agencies, we work under a legal mandate. We report to political entities.
You know, we don't have a profit motive to guide us.
And he thought for a minute and he said, well, I mean, frankly, none of this applies to managing government. I don't have any idea how you do what you do.
And I appreciated it because it was an honest answer. It's just not the same.
[00:43:01] Speaker B: You're listening to Sustainability now. I'm your host Ronnie Lipschutz. My guest today is Dr. Andrew Rosenberg. And we're talking about what we might expect from the second coming of Donald Trump.
And in our last few minutes, I wanted to, to ask you something about ethics.
And you know, one of the, one of the things that's of interest to me, continuing interest to me, is the struggle between scientific knowledge and what I think of as social emotions. We can call this ideology, we can call it beliefs, whatever, whatever you want.
Scientists can tell us what is happening now and what might happen if we do nothing.
But science can't motivate us to act on this knowledge, even if it is in our long term interest.
That's politics. Right, but my question is, do scientists have an obligation to act on what they see as the long term interest of society and the world? And that gets into this question of should scientists take on politics, you know, get involved in politics? And of course we've seen, you know, reactions against this in the past couple of decades and I was wondering how you think about that.
[00:44:20] Speaker A: So I do think that science can motivate policy. I don't think that science determines what the policy will be because there's many different policy solutions to address the problem. But science identifies both challenges, problems and potential paths that may be taken and the consequences of those paths. That's what you do with scientific information. It's not the only source of knowledge, but it is an important part of public policy. So people will say, you only have to follow the science. No, that's not right. I mean, there's community experience, there's indigenous knowledge, there is, you know, input from, you know, social impacts, which is also science. But, you know, is, is only now rising to a major role in, in terms of the science informing much of public policy a little bit later than the natural science informing public policy. So I, I do believe that science should motivate policymakers to say, this is a problem that we need to consider. And, you know, what are some things that we should do and that needs to be that back and forth with science advisors, not to say, okay, you must do this. I found this. Therefore you must do that. Science can say, you know, here's a problem that will be serious. We think, here are the consequences. We the weight of scientific evidence, not an individual study or an individual scientist. The weight of scientific evidence.
And, you know, here's the consequences of not doing anything. Here's the consequences of different actions you might take. And I emphasize the weight of scientific evidence because we're quite used to the press saying a new study says, you know, fluoride in the water, you know, may be problematic. Yes, but every, it is not the individual study. It's the weight of the evidence that matters. There are formal ways to weight the overall evidence. Same thing on climate change, same thing on any other issue. Now, we talked a lot about fisheries, but I also worked at the unit of Concerned Scientists in public policy advocacy and science policy advocacy for 10 years. And I firmly believe that yes, scientists should be engaged in public policy discussions. And I think, think that for a number of reasons. One is that every scientist is also a constituent. We are no longer monks in the 14th century who are, you know, this is not. Or any other century who are cloistered away and trying to understand God's work. Some scientists might be cloistered away, but we also are constituents, all political constituents within society. Why would anyone think that we would not have views about public policy and they are informed views in our fields doesn't mean we know about every public policy issue. I mean, I have opinions about public health issues, but I'm not a public health scientist. I'm not bringing my science to bear. What I am bringing is the view of someone with scientific training as I evaluate information about what people are saying about public policy. So a good example of that is vaccines. I don't know. I'm not an immunologist, but I do know that there are a number of studies that have been used, you know, very large population size studies and statistical methods that I'm familiar with to understand the efficacy and the dangers, potential risks of vaccines. And the weight of evidence is pretty overwhelming. And the evidence that says things such as vaccines cause autism was generated by a study and a researcher who falsified the information and is still, that information is still being used by people like Mr. So I can evaluate it as a scientist and I should, and I should express public policy decisions and how science should be used in supporting those decisions. I also think, which many of my colleagues would disagree with, that the idea that scientists should hold themselves apart from the policy discussion and you should never express your advocacy opinion because it compromises your objectivity as a science scientist is nonsense. It's just complete nonsense. It's a cop out to say, oh well, I don't really want to get involved in something that might be controversial. And the reason I think it's nonsense is, you know, I published, I don't know, 120 papers in my career and much of my career has been, you know, not working directly as a researcher. So it's not a huge number of papers, but it's a reasonable number of papers as a researcher. All of those papers went through exactly the same scrutiny and science process as anybody else, regardless of what their political opinion was and whether they spoke out or not. Why did it compromise my, my science that I decided to advocate for certain public policies like that you should have scientific integrity policies in federal agencies to prevent political manipulation of the science didn't compromise the scientific work. I did. If it did, the reviewers should have said this doesn't look right. And believe me, the reviewers sometimes say this doesn't look right. So I don't think that it compromises. Many people would argue in science and technology policy studies that scientists aren't objective in any sensible use of that word. You choose the problems that you want to study. You choose the research topics you're going to do focus your career on or your time on. At some point in your career, you try, you know, the way that you frame the questions, all of that contains some subjectivity. The important part is it doesn't dictate the answer. The way that you Interpret the data necessarily. And so I think now probably more than any other time, scientists have an obligation to be engaged in public policy because we're at a time when people are saying, no, your training and expertise doesn't really matter. It shouldn't matter. You know, society isn't interested. It's much more important to look at TikTok. That's where you get your information.
So, you know, get out there. And yes, is it difficult and frustrating and, you know, sometimes for it has been for me and for, you know, many scientists, it can even be risky. Not just career risk, but physical risk. But if you don't do it, who do you think is going to do it? And do you want to live in the world that says no, we don't care about expertise.
You know, science doesn't matter. Once had a member of the Senate say to me, you know, it's really interesting these days because everyone is in support of, you know, STEM education, science, engineering, mathematics and technology, STEM education. But nobody seems to want to listen to the STEM educated any longer. In some sense, that has become true. I mean, a lot. You know, many parents are very proud if their kids go into technology fields or, you know, or study science in one way or another. But that doesn't seem to translate into their, you know, view of the policies that we need to make it a better country, a better world, a better environment, a safer planet. And so you need all of those people who are STEM educated to not just talk to other scientists.
[00:52:03] Speaker B: Okay, well, we're out of time, but I want to thank you so much, Dr. Rosenberg, for being my guest on Sustainability Now.
[00:52:10] Speaker A: Thank you. I really enjoyed it. Sorry my answers were so long, but it's a complicated question.
[00:52:16] Speaker B: You've been listening to a Sustainability now interview with Dr. Andrew Rosenberg, who was a senior fellow at the University of New Hampshire Carsey School of Public Policy. We've been talking about how environmental policy is made and what might Donald Trump and his administration be able to do to existing environmental policy during the second coming of Donald Trump?
If you'd like to listen to previous shows, just visit k squid.org sustainability now or. Or Spotify, YouTube and Pocket Casts and look for Sustainability now on KSQD. So thanks for listening and thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make K Squid your community radio station and keep it going. And so, until next every other Sunday, Sustainability Now.
[00:53:14] Speaker A: Good planets are, are hard to find out Temperate zones and tropic climbs and through currents and thriving seas.
Winds blowing through breathing trees Strong O zone and safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find.
[00:53:36] Speaker B: Yeah.
