Trump Dumps Climate Change Advisory Board

During the weekend, the Trump administration dissolved the Advisory Committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment. The committee, formed last summer, was comprised of 15 experts working to help policymakers create a plan to combat climate change. The dissolution affects many industries, including civil engineers who were reliant on its guidance to create infrastructures that depend heavily on weather patterns. “We need to work on updating our standards with good estimates on what future weather and climate extremes will be,” Richard Wright, a prominent civil engineer, told The Washington Post. “I think it’s going to be a serious handicap for us that the advisory committee is not functional.” In January, the Trump administration removed all mention of climate change on official government website WhiteHouse.gov. After withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, this latest move by the Trump administration further distances the United States from the mounting environmental crisis created by a combination of factors, including animal agriculture—which the United Nations reported amounts for two times more greenhouse gas emissions than all of the transportation sector combined. The disbandment of the committee does not affect the publication of its forthcoming quadrennial National Climate Assessment (NCA) report (to be released next spring) that outlines projected global climate change trends and predicts their effects on biodiversity, human health, social systems, transportation, and agriculture.