Oregonians Are Helping To Drain The Swamp In Washington, DC

Growing up in the rural Washington County town of Buxton, Oregon, Kimberley Strassel excelled at shooting, fishing, and demolition derbies, not exactly the skills that would lead her to fame as a member of the Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board. But she was also the Valedictorian of her graduating class at Banks High School in 1990. That led her to Princeton University, where she studied public policy and international affairs. She intended to go on to law school, but was persuaded to accept a position as a reporter at the Journal. She so loved the job that she has now been there for more than two decades.

In 2014 Kim received the Bradley Prize for Excellence in journalism, and her parents traveled from Oregon to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC to view the awards ceremony. Her mother Annie commented “As sweet of a girl as Kim is, as fair minded and kind, she has a little bit of mama in her,” referring to her daughter’s demolition driving. “She was very aggressive and still is today when she gets her teeth into something.”
Fast forward to May 25 this year, and we find Strassel writing in the Journal:

“On May 8 a woman few Americans have heard of, working in a federal post that even fewer know exists, summoned a select group of 45 people to a June meeting in Washington. They were almost exclusively representatives of liberal activist groups. The invitation explained they were invited to develop ‘future plans for scientific integrity’ at the Environmental Protection Agency.”

“Meet the deep state. That’s what conservatives call it now, though it goes by other names. The administrative state. The entrenched governing elite…”

Shortly after reading this, I received an invitation from the Heartland Institute to travel to Washington to confront the deep state at the very meeting Strassel warned us about. We were to sign up to attend the meeting at the EPA on June 14th to act as a counterbalance to the invited ‘Union of Concerned Scientists,’ a political organization that Ann Coulter has characterized as a “Union of Concerned Lawyers” who might have taken one science course in high school.

Because physicists traditionally defend the integrity of science against political intrusions, I was more than happy to accept. I would be following in the footsteps of such great physicists as Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Andre Sakharov. And I would be helping the Trump Administration to drain the swamp by rooting out government employees who are really political appointees. They were deliberately placed deep in the federal bureaucracy as civil servants to carry out Barack Obama’s agenda long after his presidency ended.

Before I left, I attended a lecture by another famous Oregonian, Myron Ebell, who has long since made the transition from a 2,000 acre cattle ranch that his family originally homesteaded near Baker City in the 1860s to be Director of Global Warming and International Environmental Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC. Myron holds a Master’s degree from the London School of Economics and relishes in the fact that various leftist groups have characterized him as a “climate criminal” wanted for “destroying our future.” They even went so far as to paste ‘Wanted’ mugshot posters of Ebell all over Paris ahead of the climate conference there in 2015. In conversations, Myron will tell you with a smile that he is from the “right-side of Oregon.”

Ebell’s latest claim to fame is that he was appointed last August by then presidential candidate Donald Trump to head his EPA transition team. The team was tasked with reorganizing an out-of-control agency should Trump be elected. That, in turn, led to the appointment of the aggressive Oklahoma Attorney General, Scott Pruitt, to be EPA Administrator.

It also led to President Trump’s proposal to cut the EPA budget by 31%, a cut that is really a 62% cut, because about half of EPA’s current budget is earmarked for the states. If Congress goes along, there will be a lot of empty offices at EPA headquarters in Washington, DC.

Let’s hope that one of the offices to be vacated is that currently occupied by Dr. Francesca Grifo. She is the EPA’s “Scientific Integrity Official” whom Strassel discovered was placed there by the Obama Administration to keep scientists who might dare to question climate orthodoxy from being able to do so. It was all part of President Obama’s pledge in his 2009 inaugural to “restore science to its rightful place,” a pledge designed to warn Republicans that there would be no debate about climate or any other science deemed ideologically crucial to Obama.

Although Grifo has a PhD in botany, she long ago abandoned science for political advocacy, working for (you guessed it) the Union of Concerned Scientists.

When Grifo saw us coming, she promptly took ill and canceled the meeting, with of course a promise to reschedule it as soon as we had gone home. This is a familiar tactic, designed to make it exceedingly expensive to confront the deep state. But the cancellation had the positive effect of highlighting their devious ways. No longer are they able to sabotage the Trump Administration in secrecy. Their cover has been blown.

So what did forty scientists do in Washington? We met at a hotel near the Capitol and discussed how best to help the new administration deal with the EPA swamp.

Central to our concerns is the very egregious ‘Endangerment Finding’ for carbon dioxide that forms the EPA’s legal basis for regulating CO2 as ‘a pollutant.’ Such a miscarriage of justice angers all who understand that CO2 is the ‘gas of life’ and very far from the ‘gas of climate.’ Water vapor is, by far, the Earth’s climate gas. We feel that the EPA must move expeditiously to right this wrong, by finally allowing all the real science to be heard.

Once the ‘Endangerment Finding’ has been reversed, the Trump Administration will be free to continue its plans for deregulation. But should they leave it in place, they will be forever harassed in the courts, because government agencies are given “deference” to dictate the science.

Obama understood this, as does Pruitt, and, hopefully, Trump. But neither Trump nor Pruitt have shown any inclination so far to learn the applicable science, unfortunately ceding that high ground to Obama’s alarmists.

That is worrisome. Trump should appoint a very capable scientist like the celebrated Professor of Physics from Princeton University, Will Happer, to be his science advisor and to handle climate issues. Happier is more than a match for any alarmist.

I can understand why President Trump may be reluctant to trust any scientist, after all too many have misbehaved. But there are still plenty of us who remain true to objective reality and have never become political witch doctors selling snake oil.

Our meetings in Washington ended with a bang, as a lone gunman tried to assassinate Republican Congressmen at a baseball diamond in Virginia near Ronald Reagan National Airport. I was traveling nearby on their Metro, just after the attack ended. Happily all I noticed was the steamy Capitol climate and later the heavy police presence, as I ventured up to Capitol Hill to visit Oregon Republican Congressman Greg Walden’s office.

I was pleased with the no-nonsense atmosphere I encountered. It is about time!

We are slowly draining the swamp.

Gordon J. Fulks lives in Corbett and can be reached at gordonfulks@hotmail.com. He holds a doctorate in physics from the University of Chicago’s Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research and has no conflicts of interest on this subject.

(Unless otherwise noted, the opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Northwest Connection.)