Current Events > Trump Disbands Group Meant to Prepare Cities for Climate Shocks

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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-04/trump-disbands-group-meant-to-prepare-cities-for-climate-shocks

The Trump administration has terminated a cross-agency group created to help local officials protect their residents against extreme weather and natural disasters.

The Community Resilience Panel for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems was created by the Obama administration in 2015 within the Department of Commerces National Institute of Standards and Technology. Its chairman, Jesse Keenan, told members at a meeting Monday that its charter was being dissolved that the meeting would be its last.

It was one of the last federal bodies that openly talked about climate change in public," Keenan said in an email to Bloomberg News. I can say that we tried our best and we never self-censored!

The group is the latest in a series of federal climate-related bodies to be altered or terminated since Trump took office. In June, the administration told scientists who sat on the EPAs Board of Scientific Counselors that their terms werent being renewed. In August, Trump ended the advisory committee attached to the National Climate Assessment, the quadrennial review of climate science. Trump has called climate change a "hoax" designed to make the U.S. less competitive with China.

The Department of Commerce didnt immediately respond to request for comment.

"This was the federal governments primary external engagement for resilience in the built environment," Keenan, a researcher at Harvard Universitys Graduate School of Design who focuses on climate adaptation whose role on the panel was unpaid. The panel included representatives from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other departments, as well as city planners and outside experts.

The group advised local officials on making buildings, communications, energy systems, transportation and water more able to withstand severe weather and climate change. That mission made the group especially vulnerable, Keenan said.

Since its creation in 2015, the group has identified potential improvements to building codes, worked on guides for reestablishing cell phone service, and advised municipal utilities on resuming operations after a disaster, among other things.

Brendan Doyle, who was the EPAs representative to the panel until he retired in August, said the idea for the panel came from Superstorm Sandy in 2012. "It was a way of helping communities not only through the recovery process, but to help them adjust to a new normal, in ways that would make them more resilient to the next disaster," he said.

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By climate shocks are you talking about people gasping?
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No offense, but that article does a spectacularly shitty job of explaining what exactly that group does.
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So a group who did absolutely nothing got disbanded? Can anyone actually list their accomplishments?
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Coffeebeanz posted...

No offense, but that article does a spectacularly shitty job of explaining what exactly that group does.

From what I can tell, a bunch of engineering and math to help make cities and municipalities future proof as we see an increase/decrease in flooding, high winds, and drought as a result of climate change (location pending).

ie, if Hurricane Harvey is the new norm, what does the city of houston need to do in order to minimize damage to homes and business? Deeper canals, raised houses, wider diameter drainage pipes, etc? If so, how deep for the canals, how much house raising, etc? Rather than to make every municipality pay for their own engineering consult it'd be net cheaper to have a federal group with a larger data pool who's already done 90% of work for an adjacent city.

Or, we can just deny reality, change nothing, and pray it'll get better.
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