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A Freedom of Information Act lawsuit found that the Advisory Committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment was allowed to expire last year by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross because there were not enough members of “industry” on the panel, the Washington Post reports.


The panel was tasked with translating the findings of the National Climate Assessment to make them applicable for local governments and businesses. From the Post:

George Kelly, then the deputy chief of staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, questioned the panel’s ideological makeup. “It only has one member from industry, and the process to gain more balance would take a couple of years to accomplish,” Kelly wrote in a June 13 email. But some of NOAA’s senior career employees, who worked with members of the committee, said it helped inform a sweeping federal assessment of climate science, which is supposed to be issued every four years. The government is finalizing its fourth such assessment; the underlying climate science report for it was issued in November.


Luckily, we no longer need these sorts of advisory committees, because Donald Trump has made a deal with the atmosphere and climate change is no longer a problem.