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Energy Department Refuses To Give Trump Team Names of People Who Worked On Climate Change (businessinsider.com)
The Department of Energy said Tuesday it will reject the request by President-elect Donald Trump's transition team to name staffers who worked on climate change programs. Energy spokesman Eben Burnhan-Snyder said the agency received "significant feedback" from workers regarding a questionnaire from the transition team that leaked last week. From a Reuters story, syndicated on BusinessInsider: The response from the Energy Department could signal a rocky transition for the president-elect's energy team and potential friction between the new leadership and the staffers who remain in place. The memo sent to the Energy Department on Tuesday and reviewed by Reuters last week contains 74 questions including a request for a list of all department employees and contractors who attended the annual global climate talks hosted by the United Nations within the last five years. "Our career workforce, including our contractors and employees at our labs, comprise the backbone of (the Energy Department) and the important work our department does to benefit the American people," Eben Burnham-Snyder, Energy Department spokesman said. "We are going to respect the professional and scientific integrity and independence of our employees at our labs and across our department," he added. "We will be forthcoming with all publicly available information with the transition team. We will not be providing any individual names to the transition team."
The management has to know this will get them sacked, and yet they still protected their team.
Good on them, and may they be showered by job offers once sacked.
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The Most Transparent, Ever!(tm)
Good luck.... Refuse a lawful request from your new employer.
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
Instead of just immediately refusing the request, has anyone bothered to ask the Trump Transition Team why they want the list? Everyone seems to think they want this so they can blacklist them. Maybe they want this so they can hire the proper people for certain cabinet positions. Especially to ask for the list this early in the game, it seems weird that it would be for a blacklist. Generally you would wait until you were in office to go after the opposition.
I call it a witch hunt against scientists by evil men, enabled by morons like yourself.
CO2 won't stop magically absorbing solar radiation and heating the lower atmosphere just because Trump and his science-hating peons get rid of the scientists. The universe doesn't give one flying fuck about Donald Trump or some halfwit who goes around by the handle SuperKendall.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Gov: Whatcha huntin' Doc?
Trump: Ducks.
Gov: This is wabbit season.
Trump: Why. You. Little.... Grrrr (steam comes out of ears).
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Trump has openly and repeatedly stated that he thinks climate change isn't real, and that it's a conspiracy. On at least one occasion, he directly attributed this conspiracy to the Chinese government. There really aren't very many reasons someone who thinks those things would want this information.
"Oh, and since the science is settled abuot climate change, the EPA obviously doesn't need anybody to research it... right?"
Actually since so many are rejecting facts, we need to keep proving the fact as many times as possible until it gets through their thick heads or they give up. If those that reject facts would get out of their feelings and look at the data for what it is, not what they want it to be, we could have stopped researching "is it happening" and we could be on , "how do we fix it." But as usual, science deniers are holding all progress back, because it just does not feel real.
"Science is the power of man"
Nothing Trump has said makes anybody think they would want this list for anything good. Trump is an ignorant, egotistical fool. I'm not even sure he means well, I think he's doing the whole president thing solely for his ego. While the backlash that would occur should the electoral college not install Trump would be massive, I think they would be fully justified in not voting for him. This is exactly why the electoral college exists, but it's unfortunate that there are no good alternatives to Trump right now. At least the alternatives wouldn't be doing it for their ego, and wouldn't be completely ignorant about pretty much everything.
and rejects this monstrosity. Not likely, but that's the reason they exist.
Science doesn't just stop. More research is always needed in virtually every area of research.
There's no real trade off. Don't start curbing CO2 emissions substantially now, and the cost to national and global economies in fifty years will be beyond astronomical.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"There are 3 managers that I will fire when I become Energy Secretary: Jane, Rick and... [pause] ...oops!"
Yes, modded insightful, because it actually supports science, instead of a pack of delicate right wing snowflakes that want a government that tells them happy stories about how CO2 doesn't lead to vast increases in energy (heat) in the lower atmosphere.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I wonder what the US situation with respect to international relationships will look like in 4 years time.
When I first heard that Trump had won, my first thought was, how much damage could he really do?
As I see what he is doing, it seems a lot. ;)
Take for example China. Most of the EU countries have already privately told China that they will follow the status quo regardless of that Trump does or says.
Most of the world is pretty angry about the anti-climate change stuff and there is already talk about locking the US out of the market.
Naturally this would have a huge impact on EU companies as well.
The more I see what this ass hat is doing though, the more I think this is really a turning point for the US and its decline in prominence from the world stage. I guess that is natural. Countries come and go, rise a fall. I do not imagine that will stop just because it is the present.
It is not just about climate change either. Heck, he is even gutting the FCC and forbidding them to protect consumers. Remember how the FCC made those carriers stop the millions in over billing? Those days are over.
The carriers, under Trump will literally be able to do what ever they want.
I have customers who cant wait for Trump because they think they can stop testing their devices for the US market and just sell it.
Still, I really do wish those of you in the US the best of luck. There is a good chance though that you fuckballs screwed us all. At least we dont have to worry about your F35 shooting down our planes though
You're the delicate little snowflake
"Oooh noooo, science says we're doing something bad, but i'm a whittle baby and want my cheap dirty energy! Science bad!"
We're fucked, and it's because of contemptible even morons like you.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
> You also have yet to prove why 2C (current prediction) of potential warming does anything except bring unprecedented prosperity to humanity.
The 6 meters of sea-level rise that will eventually happen as a consequence of 2C in temperature increase will put major parts of coastal areas underwater.
And CO2 won't stop magically absorbing solar radiation and heating the lower atmosphere just because we keep hiring more scientists that keep telling us the same thing over and over again. We don't need thousands of researchers researching something on which there is basically broad consensus.
Where there isn't broad consensus is what to do about it. That's a tradeoff between economic growth and carbon emissions. Climate scientists are not qualified to speak to that, and their beliefs, opinions, or research results are irrelevant to that question.
Figuring out what to do about it requires climate research. We need to understand the mechanisms in much greater detail, to be able to predict the effects of various actions, and to figure out just how bad the problems are going to be so we know what kind of actions make sense.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Sure, just like the scene from Mars Attacks where the Martians kept repeating "don't run, we are your friends" as they walked through the streets evaporating humans with their phasers.
The 6 meters of sea-level rise
Even the IPCC says it's between 60-150cm over the next 100 years.
Do you even know how large a centimeter is (not)?
That is a max of 1.5 meters - over a 100 year span! Do you seriously think coastal areas will not be able to deal with that incredibly slow rise? Do you not seriously think warming will be greatly abated as inevitable update of technologies like solar and nuclear power slows down warming, even over the next 50 years???
Again what really bugs be about you warming cultists is how much you think your unwavering opinions are based on science when most of it is based on utterly irrational groupthink, without any ability to predict anything that will occur.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
your post nicely demonstrates how common sense isn't.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
This is what losing an election like this means...it means your time of screwing over the other side is up and now you best lube up yourself. Then it will sawp back and be same as always.
And this is what is wrong with America. So many people want to cheer and say "screw the other side" or "lube up" as you put it. Well, you realize the "other side" is a good 30-40% minimum of the population of America. You screw that many people over and what you are really doing is screwing the country over, yourself included. I mean hell, Americans didn't hate each other as much during the Civil War as they do now. We are on a downward path of animosity, fiery rhetoric, obstructionism, and retribution that would leave America in such a state that even Nero would put down his lyre. Make America great again? With the current state of our politics I'm not so sure we deserve to be great anymore.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
And yet 30% of America is 100% verifiable idiots. Trump is their leader of denying reality. Climate change isn't even the most obvious of his ridiculously retarded misconceptions, and they seem to be multiplying.
So yes, FUCK THOSE RETARDS, regardless of whether or not they are "my fellow" Americans.
Democrats did get more votes than Reps. However this argument is moot and irrelevant.
You can lose chess even though you still have more pieces. This is checkers game, where you have to have more pieces. In chess, number of pieces does not matter if you have been checkmated.
Can this argument about winning more popular votes be no longer used? 2020 will come and we will show Trump real democratic candidates, our gold team, such as Sanders/Biden 2020!
Leftists don't believe in guns, and definitely not for using them in a civil uprising.
The Bolsheviks would like a word with you...
#DeleteChrome
Democrats did get more votes than Reps. However this argument is moot and irrelevant.
In response to a "going against the will of the voters" argument, it is in no way irrelevant. It is not being brought up to try claim HRC is the real president - it's being brought up to refute the claim that DT has some sort of mandate from the masses.
Everyone seems to think they want this so they can blacklist them. Maybe they want this so they can hire the proper people for certain cabinet positions.
Then why did he make a climate change denier the head of the EPA to start with?
The left in the US has blue haired feminists and drug-addled pajama boys packed into the cities with no food, supplies, survival or weapons training. The right has the rural areas and farmland, the police, the FBI, the rednecks, the veterans, most of the military. How exactly is the left going to stage an armed insurrection?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
I think he will sack entire agency, and you cannot find a better reason.
Sack the entire Department of Energy? Ridiculous. They're responsible for some of the most critical government research, including nuclear energy (including weapons), renewables, and even supercomputing. Trump isn't just going to replace a scientist with 30 years' experience working on laser energy sources with some college kid because he doesn't believe in climate change.
Breakfast served all day!
If you genuinely want to know what to *do* about climate change, don't you think it would be helpful to better know exactly how it's going to happen, along with where, when, and of course how much? So we can predict in detail what will happen, and prepare appropriately for it. You do want to use your mitigation and adaption budget as effectively as possible, right?
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Well yeah, philosophically there isn't any really good comeback to nihilism.
How about this (said to a self-proclaimed nihilist): "You are a liar and a hypocrite. If you really thought nothing mattered, you not bother to continue living." Every living self-proclaimed nihilist is a lying hypocrite. The "nihilism" is only selectively deployed against things they don't like (yet again proof of their lying hypocrisy).
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
I'd hardly call meeting the standards the Constitutional (you know, law of the land) mandated method of choosing a president, a mere "technicality".
If you think that, I'd suggest you start boning up on your old civics classes.
You are a member of your state FIRST, and then a member of the United States second. There is a valid reason it is set up the way it is.....to balance the power of the States and the States' voices for who the president is.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Evolutionary dead ends do not care.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Even when he had the House and Senate Obama couldn't submit them on time (as required by law). Of 8 attempts, he only submitted on time twice, 2010 and 2015. And Mr. Pie in the Sky has such wacky budgets they don't even pass. I know they are policy plans, but his has been so out-of-touch that even a Democratically controlled Congress wouldn't pass them.
Congress can pass laws that mandate the existence of agencies.
Funny how a political cult that proclaims the sanctity of "original intent" is ignorant about the intent of the Electoral College. It is to prevent unwise popular passion from selecting an unfit executive.
From Federalist Paper 68:
It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder. This evil was not least to be dreaded in the election of a magistrate, who was to have so important an agency in the administration of the government as the President of the United States. But the precautions which have been so happily concerted in the system under consideration, promise an effectual security against this mischief. The choice of SEVERAL, to form an intermediate body of electors, will be much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements, than the choice of ONE who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes.
Thats right. The Electoral College exists specifically to thwart an "extraordinary or violent movement" that might directly select one unfit person.
If the Electoral College does not do its duty this year, fulfilling the specific reason it was created, then it should be abolished.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Ok, they *can*..but I do wonder of all these departments and agencies...how many were actually set up and mandated by law vs just being set forth as a decree from the Executive Branch, in order to help enforce the laws from congress....?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
When you submit budgets that your own party tries to prevent coming to the floor for a vote and even when they do, receive votes in the single digits between both houses I don't think you could really say a real budget proposal was submitted.
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!
No, we won't. Stop being delusional. First off, Biden is not part of the Sanders camp, he's a lot closer to the Hillary camp, though admittedly he isn't remotely as scandal-plagued or charismatically-challenged as her. Secondly, Biden and Sanders are both quite old now; it's really doubtful either one of them is up for a 2020 run. They'd both probably be the oldest contenders in history for those offices.
Regardless of all that, I simply cannot believe that the DNC would back Sanders again (or a Sanders clone). They're simply too corrupt; they proved it in this election. They even re-elected Pelosi to her position.
I think what's going to happen is one of 2 things: 1) Hillary will be backed, yet again, and will lose, *again*, to Trump, even amidst a terrible recession caused by Trump's policies. I think the DNC just isn't ready to throw in the towel on pushing their queen to the Presidency. 2) Some other (younger, slightly less scandal-plagued, but obviously sold-out corporatist) Hillary clone will be nominated again, again with dirty tricks by the DNC just like this year, and they'll lose, again.
And cut it out with your comments about "real democratic candidates". See the No True Scotsman fallacy. Candidates like Hillary and DWS are *real* Democrats. They epitomize the Democratic party, and this was proven this year by the DNC's backing of them.
Face it: the Democratic party has a *long* history of running establishment-backed losers. Every once in a while there's a big upset or exception, but most of the time they pick the most uncharismatic people they can find, and frequently the most corrupt. They ran Mondale and Dukakis, both horribly uncharismatic. Then they picked Bill Clinton; corrupt (though it wasn't so obvious back then) but he made up for it in charisma and the Republicans' vote was split by Perot so he won with a minority. He got lucky and presided over an economic boom fueled by the internet so he got re-elected (Dole had no charisma too). Then they ran Gore, who had the charisma of a wooden pole, and he lost (partially thanks to the vote being split by the much more progressive Nader) to Bush, who had some charisma though he was dumber than a chimp and looked like one too. Then they tried running Kerry against Bush, and Kerry too had no charisma and was totally unlikeable. Then they tried coronating their corrupt and utterly unlikeable queen Hillary, but Obama (who had lots of charisma) threw a wrench into their machinations there and beat her in the primaries in a big surprise. So now that Obama can't run for a 3rd term (which is too bad, I'll take him over Hillary any day), they did it again, and succeeded this time with lots of dirty tricks against another charismatic upstart named Sanders, and just as Michael Moore predicted, she lost to Trump, the second most unpopular candidate in history.
If the Democratic Party can't learn their lesson after at least 32 years, I have no idea why you think they'll suddenly change their ways now.
how is this insightful? flamebait or troll or off topic maybe
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
All of them were set up by law. Executive branch discretion doesn't go nearly as far as you are imagining. Among other things, Congress funds all of the departments.
This is easy-to-find stuff - for DOE, it's in the second graf of the history section on wikipedia:
On August 4, 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed into law The Department of Energy Organization Act of 1977 (Pub.L. 95-91, 91 Stat. 565, enacted August 4, 1977), which created the Department of Energy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The Fourteenth Amendment made you a citizen of the United States first.
It is easy to advocate destruction of, say, the EPA, but once you are the chief of the EPA, then is is your organization, and there is a natural desire to defend your turf.
But if you're the head of the organization and the rest of the organization don't obey your orders, it's not "your" organization, is it?
And if you think the organization should be disbanded, or gutted and rebuilt in your image, this gives you just a DANDY excuse. It's "insubordination" (the bureaucratic equivalent of "mutiny") and cause for dismissal.
How convenient.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I am sure that Hillary Clinton will have her day one way or another. She will successfully run in 2020, she will win against Trump, and she will be a president. It is simply her turn and it will be historic justice. By 2020 all these scandals will be forgotten and people will be rushing to polls to vote against Trump. There is no more qualified and seasoned person to campaign.
Hilary Clinton will be like 73 years old for the next election, and she just lost this one to a guy that couldn't have beaten *me* in a general election, and I'm an atheist who doesn't like people and who has the TV presence of Moe Syzlak. You think she might not be a viable candidate for the nomination in four years? Wow...what an amazing prediction there, Karnak.
She isn't going to face a justice department investigation because she didn't do anything particularly wrong, and the scandal has now served its purpose. You don't want to spend the next four years as President Trump having the New York Times and Washington Post running daily articles about yet another day's worth of courtroom testimony about the ratfucking (that's a real term, ladies and gents) that took place to get you elected in the first place, even if it doesn't really matter because the voters are all reading the Breitbart expose about the lizard people using the UN to run a global conspiracy to replace Bud Light with Seize Soixante Quatre or whatever that communist bubble water is called.
Khm, "unfit"? When I called Obama "unfit", you called me racist. If I called Hillary Clinton "unfit", you would've called me sexist.
You are calling Trump unfit — what do you call yourself? He won — fair and square. Suck it up, cupcakes...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
There is a valid reason it is set up the way it is.....to balance the power of the States and the States' voices for who the president is.
There's a reason it's the way it is, it's so my vote counts more than yours and I like it that way. The actual reasons are not what you claim. You are ignorant of history and rationalizing away a real problem.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
So his opposition to some of the purely political "solutions" to climate change make him a climate change denier? His urge to see countries like China held to the same standard as, say, France or the US - that makes him a "denier?"
No, the article he wrote for National Review in which he trotted out the old denialist tropes about scientific uncertainty shows he's a denialist:
That debate is far from settled. Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind.
It must be wonderful to be able to set any arbitrary standard rather than "preponderance of evidence" for your preferred policy position -- in this case unanimity of all scientists in the world (apparently without regard to their particularly disciplinary qualifications going by past appeals of denialists to "scientific disagreement").
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Sorry, no. Go read the 22nd Amendment. Presidents can't run for more than 2 terms, consecutive or not.
"No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once."
There certainly are records of who worked on what project, who traveled to what conferences, and who belongs to what professional society. You don't work at DoE without the government knowing that information, it's part of the job.
Ignoring this request is easy: "We'll be happy to perform this important data collection, we think the budget required for this effort is approximately $2.4 million. As soon as Congress appropriates that, we'll get right on it." Delay, re-direct, give the task to the biggest fuck-up in the department... this could never get done.
It's kind of mind boggling to me (as someone who worked as a government scientist) that the management would fight instead. You get constant calls for information reports and surveys as a federal employee. A good number of them are for nothing other than identifying political enemies of the current administration, the GAO, the EPA, some important Congressman, your Secretary... lots of people try this technique. Ignoring them carries far less risk than responding.
Keep your head down, and work on what you're paid for, and you'll stay out of trouble. As a civil servant, any attention is bad attention. I've seen someone get hit with a BS lab safety investigation based on an award talk he gave.
Fighting, on the other hand, is a sure fire way to lose your position and your project. There is nothing that management likes better than finding reasons to de-fund or transfer "troublemakers." Also, all government scientists are "troublemakers."
With the current state of our politics I'm not so sure we deserve to be great anymore.
Newsflash: You never did.
Greatness isn't deserved, it just happens, often as an accident of history. In the case of the USA, because Europe tore itself apart in two wars that a) destroyed its industrial base b) either killed or drove away a lot of its most capable scientists and engineers, many to the USA and c) make the transition from colonial empires times to modern times more rough, so places like the British Empire simply disintegrated and still haven't recovered.
The USA is the big winner of WW2 and was coasting on that for a long time, but that time is coming to an end. Now you are having the tough transition period. Tech and media kept you up after the industrial base went away to China, but now that is failing, too. There's great tech coming out of Europe and Asia now, and Hollywood is losing its grip on the media/culture market because they are greedy fuckers and only re-re-re-hash the same old ideas. Meanwhile China and India are creating their own movie industries, and even the believed-to-be-almost-dead european cinema is picking up again. Heck, there are really good SciFi movies coming out of Russia right now.
Trump is calling back to a time with ignorance to history. The circumstances that made America great have changed.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The problem is that Trump has no idea whatsoever what the Department of Energy does. So many people joked about what a moron G W Bush 43 was when he got elected, and now we have an actual ignoramus who is probably borderline senile in office.
Bush was a moron when he got elected. The problem was he let a war mongering psychopathic VP and cabinet run the show. Trump is in a similar situation although I think his cabinet is looking much more clueless than Bush's. I'm hoping these clowns can do less damage due to their ignorance. At any rate, please vote in the mid term elections in two years.
When has Trump displayed evidence that he /ever/ considers the consequences before doing something?