Now, under the leadership of the former lobbyist David Bernhardt, the agency has sought to remove consideration of climate change from many of its decisions, while expanding oil and gas drilling on federal land. Multiple whistleblowers have accused the department of stifling climate science.
Bernhardt in a May 2019 hearing told lawmakers there are no laws obligating him to combat climate change.
After Reilly asked his staff to calculate the wildfire emissions numbers in November, an interior spokeswoman emailed him asking for the same information so she could put out a statement from Zinke. A few days later, the agency published a press release on Zinkes behalf, with the title New Analysis Shows 2018 California Wildfires Emitted as Much Carbon Dioxide as an Entire Years Worth of Electricity.
Theres too much dead and dying timber in the forest, which fuels these catastrophic fires, Zinke said. Proper management of our forests, to include small prescribed burns, mechanical thinning, and other techniques, will improve forest health and reduce the risk of wildfires, while also helping curb the carbon emissions.
Hanson, the forest and fire ecologist, said that in addition to using the government data for political purposes, the department numbers overstated the carbon emissions from forest fires while downplaying emissions from fossil fuels.
He said that the carbon emissions numbers generated by USGS and released to the public were an overestimate that cant be squared with empirical data from field studies of post-wildfire burn sites in California. Other scientists the Guardian spoke with did not dispute the governments data, but did find fault with the way it was presented to the public.
The comparison of fire to electrical emissions [in California] was not explained or justified, said Harmon, the Oregon State University scientist. Picking other sectors would have left an entirely different image in the readers mindIf the comparison had been made nationally it would have been found that fire related emissions of carbon dioxide were equivalent to 1.7% of fossil fuel related emissions. So it is hard to escape the conclusion that some cherry picking was going on.
Jayson ONeill, the deputy director of the Western Values Project, said the emails are another example of the administration trying to find ways to tell a story to achieve industry goals.
As wildfire experts have repeatedly explained, you cant log or even rake our way out of this mess, ONeill said. The Trump administration and the interior department are pushing mystical theories that are false in order to justify gutting public land protections to advance their pro-industry and lobbyist dominated agenda.