OPINION:
Climate activists are trying to derail the Trump Environmental Protection Agency’s effort to rescind the Obama EPA’s 2009 endangerment finding for greenhouse gases. The plan includes litigation supported by a rigged review of climate science from the National Academy of Sciences.
The academy pioneered a rigged scientific review 70 years ago when it undertook to thwart the budding nuclear power industry. Examining what the academy did to the nuclear industry in 1955 will reveal what the organization has planned for the Trump administration this year.
The National Academy of Sciences was chartered by Congress in 1863 to advise the federal government on scientific and technological matters. The idea was for the government to fund the academy in a consulting role, but that was not what happened in 1955.
Congress established the federal Atomic Energy Commission in 1946 to foster the development of atomic energy. The commission was responsible for setting radiation safety practices. However, the Rockefeller Foundation, established and funded by Standard Oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, lobbied President Eisenhower in 1955 to allow the National Academy of Sciences to usurp the Atomic Energy Commission’s role in setting standards.
Whether the Rockefeller Foundation did this for well-intentioned reasons or in hopes of thwarting the nuclear power industry in favor of the oil industry is unknown and perhaps unknowable at this point. However, given subsequent developments, as revealed by recent research, high jinks cannot be discounted.
The key scientific issue to be fleshed out by the National Academy of Sciences’ Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation I (BEAR I) project was whether there was a safe level of exposure (i.e., a threshold) or no safe level of exposure (i.e., no threshold) to radiation. The latter could frighten the public about all non-military uses of radiation, from medical X-rays to nuclear power plants.
With its presidential commission in hand, National Academy of Sciences President Detlev Bronk, simultaneously president of Rockefeller University, gave the project to Rockefeller Foundation staff to manage. Warren Weaver, director of the Rockefeller Foundation’s natural sciences division, was assigned to organize what turned out to be BEAR I’s key committee: its genetics panel. Weaver stocked that panel with compliant researchers dependent on Rockefeller Foundation grants.
What happened next was most unscientific, if not unethical and worse. Transcripts of the BEAR I genetics panel obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show that its members never even discussed the key threshold vs. no-threshold issue. Without discussion, debate or any credible science, the genetics panel endorsed the no-threshold model at its very first meeting, as it was instructed to do by a panel member who was a Rockefeller Foundation-funded geneticist.
The genetics panel was subsequently presented with the best radiation study conducted up to that date, of 75,000 Japanese atomic bomb survivors. The data showed no lasting genetic damage from the survivors’ exposure to A-bomb levels of radiation. In other words, a safe exposure to radiation did exist, but panel members inexplicably ignored the results.
This led directly to the adoption of the no-threshold model of health risk from radiation exposure, which was adopted by the EPA in the 1970s. It’s why the public is so scared of radiation and why it is so expensive to build nuclear power.
The National Academy of Sciences is now similarly lining up the Trump administration’s proposal to rescind the endangerment finding for greenhouse gases. Without being asked or funded by the EPA, the academy has initiated a secretly funded project to review and comment on what the EPA has proposed.
The academy has been promoting what President Trump calls the “climate hoax” since 1979, and the left-wing Rockefeller Foundation has boasted of funding some of its climate work. According to a just-completed analysis by the CO2 Coalition, the proposed 15-member committee to do the endangerment finding review is chock-full of academics who are not experts in physics or atmospheric science but are all believers in the climate hoax.
The coming National Academy of Sciences report will probably support the climate hoax and be used in litigation in an effort to stop the Trump EPA from rescinding the endangerment finding. It is imperative that the Trump administration take defensive steps to save its energy agenda.
Two-thirds of National Academy of Sciences funding comes from federal agencies. Mr. Trump should use that leverage to stop yet another rigged travesty of science by the academy. He has successfully taken on and defunded politicized federal agencies and prestigious universities. The vulnerable National Academy of Sciences needs a similar cutting down to size.
• Steve Milloy is a director of the Energy & Environment Legal Institute.
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