By Sheldon Greaves

With the release last Friday of the Fourth National Climate Assessment came Trump’s predictable denial of the science behind it, and the equally predictable (and justifiable) exasperation expressed by anyone with even a moderate knowledge of the science behind the report.

Those who are familiar with how things work in Washington understand that the political appointees who lead the various agencies are often put there to promote the ideology of the party that put them there. Meanwhile, the agencies continue to do the work much as they had before, usually without much interference from the political leadership. This means that there is often a disconnect between the political rhetoric from an agency head and the work of turning pronouncements and legislation into working policies. The conversations, discussions, and debates in the bowels of Washington are where stuff gets done, almost always out of the public eye. It may or may not reflect what the President, agency head, or whomever claims to believe or want.

Historically, these experts and policy wonks are left alone to do their jobs, which is why interference from the Bush Administration on previous climate change reports, and Trump’s astounding neglect, bordering on hostility to the Departments of State, Energy, Agriculture, and Environmental Protection (among others) are so noteworthy. Given the Administration’s very public and well-covered desire to undo regulations limiting the emission of greenhouse gases and other measures designed to curtail global warming, the following is surprising and even a little bit perplexing:

In interviews with about a dozen authors of the report, all said that White House officials had not sought to soften or weaken its language.

“I will give credit where it’s due: No one at the political level did any monkeying around with this,” said Andrew Light, a co-author of the report and a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, a Washington research organization. “For all the criticism of the Trump administration quashing climate science, this is one case where they did not do that.”

What? No push-back? No attempted censorship from Trump officials, the President’s denials notwithstanding? What’s going on?

The Changing Debate

What’s happening, is that the Administration has accepted the science, and the debate has moved on. Let me repeat that: those who oppose taking action on climate change have abandoned denying the science because it simply isn’t a tenable position. This has been clear for some time (I blogged about this not too long ago, see “Why Exposing Scott Pruitt’s Bogus Climate Science Probably Doesn’t Matter”), but keeps getting lost in the back-and-forth over denial. This makes the science denial of the President and his allies even more pernicious, in my view, because besides spreading disinformation, it has become a distraction from the actual debate now taking place in the back rooms and obscure committee meetings where policy is actually hammered out.

In several recent reports, such as a draft environmental impact statement released by the Department of Transportation attempting to justify rolling back auto emission standards, there is no attempt to deny the science. None. In fact, the report speaks highly of the science, and contains excellent explanations and summaries of the science to date, the potential risks, and favorably quotes IPCC and other reports.

The New Battleground

If denying the science is no longer the basis for the Trump Administration rolling back environmental regulations governing climate change, what is? One is the old ploy of using the uncertainty inherent in complex systems to claim that we cannot truly know how this will all turn out unless we see the “experiment” to its conclusion, ignoring the fact that since we only have one earth, we can only “do the experiment” once. Testing to failure is not an option. (I cover these and other points in my post mentioned earlier.)

But the most pernicious argument can be summed up in a single word: economics. That, plus a side-helping of some truly perverse moral arguments.One variation of the argument goes like this: over the next century, if we spend a bunch of money on countering the effects of climate change, we will, in effect, be taking money out of the pockets of poor people and putting it in the bank accounts of rick people in the future. Do we really want to do that? Even allowing for the fact that this is likely to happen because that’s how capitalist economies tend to go (per Picketty), what it really amounts to is a re-framing of a different and much better question, which is whether we have an obligation to future generations. Ask any sizable group of people, and I am pretty certain that a majority would say that yes, we do.

The shifting nature of the climate change debate requires us all to pay attention to these developments, even when they only appear in obscure documents. The denial debate has actually been settled for a long time, even if it some continued to insist to the contrary. But now our attention needs to shift to this new venue, where the future of our efforts, and perhaps the fate of the planet will be decided. This is particularly important because the opposition to meaningful change is employing arguments that, while wrapped in economic jargon and philosophical doublespeak, when rendered intelligible, they reveal a significant poverty of moral and intellectual bases. The sooner and the more publicly we can dismantle that foundation, the closer we come to crafting the policies we need to create a better future.