{"id":1397,"date":"2015-01-15T17:53:56","date_gmt":"2015-01-15T17:53:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/?p=1397"},"modified":"2015-01-15T17:53:56","modified_gmt":"2015-01-15T17:53:56","slug":"real-political-science-with-ted-and-marco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/2015\/01\/15\/real-political-science-with-ted-and-marco\/","title":{"rendered":"Real (Political) Science With Ted and Marco"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"marco\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Roger Pielke, Jr. quoted in a U.S. News article:<\/p>\n

Real (Political) Science With Ted and Marco<\/strong>
\nWhat happens when Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio chair committees that deal with global warming? Nothing – probably.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

U.S. News<\/a>, January 14, 2015
\nby Joseph P. Williams<\/p>\n

It sounds like the premise of a new political sitcom: two anti-science, climate change-doubting politicians take control of a pair of critical, science-based committees that deal with global warming, Hilarity ensues when minority Democrats, playing the wacky, meddlesome neighbors, try to thwart them as the ice caps melt and Florida and Texas slowly vanish.<\/p>\n

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and his fellow Republican, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, just picked up chairman\u2019s gavels at subcommittees whose portfolios collect data and record the planet\u2019s changes, the cornerstone of the climate-change debate. Cruz now oversees the Senate subcommittee that oversees NASA, the atmosphere and science policy; Rubio now chairs the subcommittee with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration — one of the largest weather data-gathering organizations on the planet — in its portfolio.<\/p>\n

What could possibly go wrong?.<\/p>\n

Lots, says Benjamin Schreiber, head of the the climate and energy team at Friends of the Earth. He says the Senate transition from Democrat blue to GOP red has consequences, and doesn’t augur well for how the nation tackles the critical challenge of global warming.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe flip of the Senate is a huge change in the way our country is going to deal with the environment,\u201d Schreiber told Talking Points Memo. \u201cWe\u2019ve already seen that the Senate took up the Keystone XL pipeline as their first order of business. This is a huge symbolic vote to say that the first order of business is going to be to allow a Canadian company build a pipeline through the U.S. to export oil to the rest of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Paging Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye. Report to the Senate Commerce Committee, stat.<\/p>\n

But Roger Pielke, director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, has taken the long view: He thinks that having Rubio and Cruz in charge at NASA and NOAA probably won\u2019t change very much, if anything.<\/p>\n

Their public statements aside, \u201cI would fully expect the significance of these two individuals to be muted,\u201d Pielke, whose organization examines the intersection of science and politics, tells Whispers. He noted that science-based committees have changed party hands dozens of times over the decades, scientists and nonscientists have led them, and the world keeps spinning — mostly because bureaucracies are hard to penetrate, even by politicians with one eye on the next presidential campaign.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think we should expect business as usual, with a few new faces,\u201d he says. \u201cI don\u2019t expect Republican revolution of the sort we saw in \u201894, but who knows.\u201d<\/p>\n

The reason: \u201cChange is hard in the best of cases, even with a Republican House and Senate,\u201d Pielke says.<\/p>\n

Even skeptics like Rubio and Cruz don\u2019t have the juice to defund, gut or kill NASA, an agency closely tied to the national identity and scientific research, or NOAA, which provides weather forecasting information to the airline and shipping industries, and has jobs \u201cthat show up all over the country,\u201d Pielke says. \u201cIt\u2019s not quite pork, but they\u2019re spread around nicely.\u201d Read more \u2026<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Roger Pielke, Jr. quoted in a U.S. News article: Real (Political) Science With Ted and Marco What happens when Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio chair committees that deal with global warming? Nothing – probably. U.S. News, January 14, 2015 by … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-10-23 18:47:28","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1397"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1397\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1399,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1397\/revisions\/1399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}