Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
In a previous post, The DOE vs Ugly Reality, I discussed how a businessman takes over a government department. In this case it’s the Department of Energy (DOE). As a part of the 74 questions posed in the memo from the Trump Transition Team to the DOE, there were a couple of questions that obviously set people’s hair on fire. Let me quote those two questions and my comments about them from my previous post. Questions are in bold type, my comments are below the questions.
13 Can you provide a list of all Department of Energy employees or contractors who have attended any Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon meetings? Can you provide a list of when those meetings were and any materials distributed at those meetings, emails associated with those meetings, or materials created by Department employees or contractors in anticipation of or as a result of those meetings?
Now, this is the one that has the “scientists” involved most concerned. Me, I think they damn well should be concerned because what they have been doing all this time is HALF OF A COST/BENEFIT ANALYSIS!!
This is a pet peeve of mine. You can’t just talk of costs in a vacuum. To do that without considering the accompanying benefits is scientific malfeasance. To do it as a policy matter is nothing less than deliberately lying to the public. As a result, I hope that everyone engaged in this anti-scientific effort gets identified and if they cannot be fired for malfeasance then put them to work sweeping the floors. Talk about “fake news”, the so-called “social cost of carbon” is as fake as they come.
That was the first question that I said had set their hair on fire. The other one was:
19 Can you provide a list of Department employees or contractors who attended any of the Conference of the Parties (under the UNFCCC) in the last five years?
An IPCC Conference of Parties is much more party than conference—it’s basically an excuse to party in some lovely location (think Bali, Cancun, …), with the party occasionally interrupted by the pesky conference. It is a meaningless exercise which ends up with an all-night session that finishes by announcing that everyone has signed on to the latest non-binding fantasy about how to end the use of fossil fuels, drive up energy prices, and screw the poor. And yes, if I were appointed to run the DOE, I would definitely want to know who has gone on these useless junkets.
Now, I know that people are going to complain about “scientific freedom” regarding the memo asking who worked on what … but if you don’t want to tell the incoming team what you’ve worked on … why not? Are you ashamed of what you’ve done? Look, every job I’ve had, if a new boss came in, they wanted to know what I had worked on in the past, and I simply answered them honestly. Scientists are no different.
Finally, government scientists presumably work on what their agency directs them to work on … so the issue of “scientific freedom” is way overblown in this context where they are NOT free to work on projects of their own choice.
Today, we get the first salvo fired in response. From the Washington Post
“Our career workforce, including our contractors and employees at our labs, comprise the backbone of DOE (Department of Energy) and the important work our department does to benefit the American people,” Eben Burnham-Snyder, a DOE spokesman, told the Washington Post in an email. “We are going to respect the professional and scientific integrity and independence of our employees at our labs and across our department. We will be forthcoming with all publicly-available information with the transition team. We will not be providing any individual names to the transition team.” [Emphasis in original.]
When I saw that, I cracked up. Busted out laughing. I thought “You idiots! You just fell into the trap!”
Here’s the deal. The Transition Team sent that memo out. It doesn’t ask for anything other than the duties the employees performed. It doesn’t ask them to change their views or alter their scientific conclusions. It just wants to know, who worked on these projects? There is no reason to refuse that—it’s asked in this situation all over the world. A new boss comes in and says “Hey, who worked on the Jones project?” And Sally and Bob raise their hands. No harm, no foul.
Now, over at my blog … dang, that still sounds strange … anyhow, over at my blog at the request of a commenter I wrote a piece on the rules of thumb that I use to clarify murky situations. However, I forgot a very useful one. It goes like this:
If a man is hiding something … … … it’s because he’s got something to hide.
Applying this to the DOE certainly raises interesting questions. But to return to the issue, here’s why I say that they fell into the trap.
When I wrote the first piece, people noticed that the Transition Team started each memo question out with some variation of “can you provide” … and people wondered why.
Inter alia, this is why—it encourages fools to think that refusing to answer is a real option rather than a polite form of an order.
Anyone with half a brain would look at those polite questions and go nope, not gonna refuse, boss will be here in six weeks, dumb move. But we’re talking government employees here.
Let me see if I can explain this plainly. If you want to take over a bureaucracy, the key thing to know is that a single bureaucrat all alone is almost always a weak, pitiful creature for a simple reason.
He/she finds it very, very difficult to make a decision on his/her own.
Why do you think bureaucracies always spawn double handfuls of boards and commissions and working groups and the like? As a group, they can make decisions, no problem. Might not be good decisions, but they can make them. Plus which it makes them brave to have six or eight other men and women in agreement. But by themselves, chronological inertia takes over, and they slowly sink into their natural vegetative state of torpor.
In addition to a group, sometimes you do get a sort of a leader among bureaucrats. All too often they see their function as opposing the management … but they do have enough gumption to encourage others to take foolish chances and do dumb things. So you need to neutralize them along with the groups. When you’ve done that, 95% of the takeover is complete.
SO … if you want to take over a bureaucracy, how do you do it? Well, you either take over or abolish the groups that give individual bureaucrats power, and you isolate or otherwise neutralize the leaders.
Regarding the first one, me offer you question 1 from the memo once again:
1. Can you provide a list of all boards, councils, commissions, working groups, and FACAs [Federal Advisory Committees] currently active at the Department? For each, can you please provide members, meeting schedules, and authority (statutory or otherwise) under which they were created?
Clearly the authors of the memo know that the easiest way to get rid of something is to investigate the authorizing authority. The working group is not statutory? Bye-bye working group. Board membership is bloated beyond initial authorization? Bye bye extra board members. Soooo … that pretty much takes care of the “boards, councils, commissions, working groups, and FACAs”, you can be sure what will happen to those. But what about the leaders?
Well … you could hand the employees a list of questions phrased as “can you provide”, in the hopes that somebody will be foolish enough to stir up the ranks until they refuse to answer. What they refuse lets you know what they are hiding … and of course, who prompted the refusal will also be clear. Want to know who the leaders are? Foment a rebellion …
Here’s the truly insane part to me about this rebellion. It is doomed to fail, and thus can only make things worse.
There’s no conceivable way that they can hide who went to the Paris Conference of the Parties. There are hotel bills, airline ticket stubs, claims for reimbursement, per-diem issuance records, international phone calls, per diem expense vouchers, it’s the freakin’ Government, for heaven’s sake, they live on paper, they produce reams of details. And that’s just internal DOE records, that doesn’t even touch the UN Records of the conference with participant lists and emails and photographs of smiling time-wasters …
And the same is true about the scientific monstrosity called the “Social Cost of Carbon”. The people who worked on that will have their fingerprints all over all kinds of subsidiary documents and timesheets and records. There’s no way it can remain hidden.
But that’s not the bad news for the fools sticking their heads above the parapets. The bad news is that when Rick Perry comes in the door, he is the boss, and he or one of his lesser demons can call up any dang record they please … and he can also call employees one by one into the office and ask “Who worked on the Jones project”. That’s not a question affecting, what was it, their “professional and scientific integrity and independence” of anyone, it’s a bog-standard business question. And you can be sure somebody will want to curry favor with the new boss and will say “It was Jimmy that did it! I told him not to do so but he did it anyway!”.
And what is this nonsense about “independence”??? You are EMPLOYEES, idiots! If you want independence, DON’T WORK FOR ANYONE!
But wait, it’s worse. Rick Perry can also call people in one by one and ask them “whose bright idea was it to not answer the questions in the memo” …
Like I said … if you want to know who the leaders are, foment a rebellion.
I would ask “How can these people be so foolish as to refuse to answer what they will soon be forced to answer, particularly when it can’t possibly be hidden anyway” … but then, to be fair to them, they are government bureaucrats …
Anyhow, that’s why I busted out laughing at the news that they are taking a brave, principled stand against evil people who want to … who want to … want to know what they have been working on. Horrible cruel question.
Best to all, I’ll cross-post this at my blog.
w.
Congratulations to Mr Eben Burnham-Snyder on becoming the first to confirm he has a guilty conscious.
Well it looks like he did delete his tweets about Trump in the past few days.
In this instance I don’t believe DJT is that Machiavellian.
I can imagine a scenario that one of the well organized transition teams came up with that list as questions the incoming Secretary should ask when he/she gets in place. (We now know it is Perry.)
An over zealous staffer made the list public. The Trump team says “that’s not part of our protocol.” (possibly meaning “We really intended to wait ’til after Jan 20 and ask those questions internally”.)
But as Willis mentioned, it DID go out, it was a perfectly legitimate questionaire, and rattled a lot of cages.
The only conceivable negative would be a serious rash of hard drive failures:) .
The data exists in too many places for it ever to be eradicated. Hard drive crashes would just serve to highlight those who need attention.
They seem a little confused. The transition team is not asking anything about data, research, etc. Just “who” and “what”. DOE explicitly decides what to fund. They don’t just hand out money to the scientists at the labs. I worked there, I know. So while you have independence to do your work, DOE decides the topics it wants to fund. Social cost of carbon is a topic. That topic can be defunded. That is the right of the people with the money. You can’t tell the boss he has no right to know who is working on what. That is the most absurd thing I ever heard.
DOE, like all the current Depts, is still run by Obama Appointees. They made the decision to refuse to answer the who went to Paris, etc questions.
They’ll leave their career Civil Service servants behind to hold the shit bag on January 20.
I had a reaction similar to Willis’ reaction to a seemingly basic request by a new boss.
The new boss needs to know what the direction of the company is and who is moving in what direction, in order to know how to … well … boss. Isn’t part of a job expectation that you communicate with your boss about what your employees are doing?
So, where’s the offense? This is how companies and countries work. Refusal to communicate with your new boss seems like refusal to do your job, and so the first person who should be fired is the person doing the refusing. Then the costs of gathering the information requested by the now-fired refusing employee should be deducted from the budget of the organization. And before handing out pink slips to those current employees who are no longer a “good fit” for the organization’s evolved mission, give them a chance to learn or re-educate themselves about the new boss’s new perspective on the facts and priorities dictated by those facts.
You might even find that some of the “sheep” who might have been just going with the flow to keep their jobs actually gain a new appreciation for (get re-energized about) their jobs. Try to keep these good people and direct them along a path more appropriate for fulfilling the refined mission.
the person doing the refusing is likely an appointee and has nothing to lose.
That DOE emblem should have the eagle replaced by a turkey. That’s the bird Ben Franklin originally wanted for the US symbol in any event. Always figured he was a precognitive.
You mean something like THIS, Jim G1:
?dl=0
… and just so you know, I checked if I should be scared about copyright violation per the following:
http://www.citizen.org/pressroom/pressroomredirect.cfm?ID=4087
I’ll say it again: Governments come and governments go, but the bureaucracy is forever. One can always find the “empire builders” as they were known. Gathering influence and power and delegating the actual work to the “aides”. The EPA seems to think that they can say, “Make it so!” and even the climate will fall into line – don’tcha know! 😉 That’s assuming that they were merely incompetent and not worse…
Griff December 15, 2016 at 1:20 am
Griff, you gotta learn how to read. First, in what you quoted I said nothing about that being their only agenda. I just pointed out that what they asked for was totally non-controversial.
Second, you ask, do the Transition Team have another agenda? WHAT DO YOU THINK MY POSTS ON THE TRANSITION TEAM ARE ABOUT??? I have laid out their agenda in great detail, have you been sleeping?
w.
re Griff “have you been sleeping”:
Trolls live under rocks (safe from Polar Bears); one presumes they sleep there, too.
“Me, I think they damn well should be concerned because what they have been doing all this time is HALF OF A COST/BENEFIT ANALYSIS!!”
This is untrue and displays an abhorrent laziness or a calculated deviousness. The next paragraph builds on that untruth, so why continue further with this propaganda.
The charter for this group CLEARLY states that its output is to be combined with benefit statistics for each department/agency’s required assessment process:
“Under Executive Order 12866, agencies are required, to the extent permitted by law, “to assess both the costs and the benefits of the intended regulation and, recognizing that some costs and benefits are
difficult to quantify, propose or adopt a regulation only upon a reasoned determination that the benefits of the intended regulation justify its costs.” The purpose of the “Social Cost of Carbon”(SCC)
estimates presented here is to allow agencies to incorporate the social benefits of reducing carbon
dioxide (CO2) emissions into cost-benefit analyses of regulatory actions that impact cumulative global
emissions.”
https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/inforeg/scc-tsd-final-july-2015.pdf
Son, I am disappoint.
Henry: Have you ever read one of those “benefit” analyses?? You would die laughing.
I might, that is true. But that’s not the point. If I wanted to read completely made up BS created to support a false narrative…well, I know where I can go to read that.
So, where is the discussions about benefits? Clearly, an official document mandates such a discussion, and yet how often do we hear any mention of the benefits of carbon? I think this document gives legal foundation to the original claim of the topic here.
To use the word “carbon” to mean “carbon dioxide” SPECIFICALLY, smacks of obfuscation posing as academic superiority. And the tone of the document weighs heavily on an unspoken (highly questionable) premise that “carbon” (translation, “carbon dioxide”) has little or no benefits, hence, automatically releasing assessors from the mission statement of trying to assess any benefits. How sneaky.
This is what I found about the benefit component. No idea where to find the “larger analysis”, however:
(3) Value of goods and services whose production is associated with CO2 emissions
Some commenters felt that the SCC estimates should include the value to society of the goods and services whose production is associated with CO2 emissions. Many of these commenters mentioned goods produced using fossil fuels, such as “plastics, chemicals, nitrogen fertilizer, steel, aluminum, synthetic rubber for tires, glass, pharmaceuticals, and paper.” One commenter argued for including the benefits to “regions that depend on employment from energy intensive industry, regions dependent on fossil fuels for heating, cooling, food production and other components associated with preserving their standard of living and regions that are in need of low cost fossil fuels to enable the economic development improving their standard of living.” Similarly, other commenters focused on the negative consequences of regulating CO2 emissions, such as the potential effect on energy prices, economic growth, or international competitiveness. One commenter suggested the inclusion of “… the social costs and economic dislocations that could result from carbon reduction policies that would eliminate fuel options such as coal, the social costs associated with higher electricity prices, and the economic and security risks associated with electric reliability problems.”
Response
Rigorous evaluation of benefits and costs is a core tenet of the rulemaking process. The IWG agrees that these are important issues that may be relevant to assessing the impacts of policies that reduce CO2 emissions. However, these issues are not relevant to the SCC itself. The SCC is an estimate of the net economic damages resulting from CO2 emissions, and therefore is used to estimate the benefit of reducing those emissions.
A rule that affects CO2 emissions may also affect the production or consumption of goods and services, in which case it could create costs and benefits for businesses and households that either produce or use those goods and services. These costs and benefits are important to include in an analysis of the rule’s impacts, but are not a result of changes in CO2 emissions. The SCC is not a measure of social welfare from the consumption of goods and services whose production results in CO2 emissions, or other positive or negative externalities associated with the production of those goods and services.7 In other words, the SCC is just one component of a larger analysis that includes consideration of many other potential impacts, including labor market changes, energy security, electricity reliability, and changes in emissions of other pollutants, among others.
When doing a cost-benefit analysis, one of the options to be considered is the do-nothing option. Costs and benefits must be compared in the same dollars, either current dollars/net present worth or future dollars/expected future value. A primary consideration is “expected,” which must take likelihood or probability into account. As near as I can tell, climate scientists throw probability out the window.
Time to review the …what is it, the Public Service Act? And make it easy to fire these guys for insubordination. Quick first review, expedited appeal, then OUT.
Tex
Yea, good luck with that. Remember how much these guys “contribute” to politicians who would perform the review.
You could ague that the leaders would not name the employees, because they where asked by the leaders to go, but then the leaders should have the guts to tell it.
Regarding social cost of carbon. You could also calculate the social cost of food. How much land and energy it costs to produce it and all the waste it generates when consumed. It really hurts mankind. And most of the food turns to CO2 when used if it not turns to methane, ohh horror.
A few of Paris Conference attendees. Thank Scott.
United States of America:
H.E. Mr. Barack Obama President The White House
Mr. Todd Stern Special Envoy for Climate Change Department of State
Mr. John Forbes Kerry Secretary U.S. Department of State
Ms. Sarah (Sally) Jewell Secretary U.S. Department of the Interior
Mr. Thomas Vilsack Secretary United States Department of Agriculture
Mr. Ernest Moniz Secretary U.S. Department of Energy
Ms. Regina McCarthy Administrator U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Mr. Ed Markey
Ms. Jeanne Shaheen
Mr. Jeff Merkley
Mr. Al Franken
Mr. Benjamin Cardin
Mr. John P. Holdren
“His Eminence” (H.E. B.O.), King and train of lemmings, all clueless as to value of carbon dioxide.
Good riddance.
Al Franken? Was he the comic relief for the conference?
Changing culture in a group requires it be eliminated, decapitated, gutted, eviscerated.
On every M.B.A.’s list of required reading is: “Resistance to Change” (Harvard Business Review)
No one likes change.
One thing to keep in mind about scientists, engineers, and other technical people is that they are more loyal to their discipline than to the organization they work for. That is one of the issues that must be addressed when managing their work. They tend to work on what interests them instead of the work they are assigned. Unless they are completely unbiased, they tend to ignore evidence that does not support their “pet” theories. They view any “attack” on one of them as an “attack” on all of them and will band together to oppose and fend off the perceived attack.
All that you say applies to people doing real work.
That’s the question here: just what the heck are these people doing? Big chunks of what they do might not qualify as real work (e.g.: attending 12-day Paris climate conf).
Well one thing people who do real work do, including scientists, engineers, and other technical people, is to keep current with their area of expertise. In addition to formal and self-study, that will involve attending conferences and other similar gatherings. The agency where I worked limited attendance to a limited number of people who were expected to write trip reports and do presentations to other employees on what they learned. In this case, it appears there was excessive attendance, showing poor management of resources, including employee time and travel/training funds.
Willis,
I think you might be overlooking something here. The refusal to answer Trump’s questions is likely coming from political appointees at the top of the Department, not career civil servants further down. The former will be gone once Trump takes office, so they have nothing to lose by defying him. But they do have something to gain. Their “principled” defiance will give them street cred with the environmental groups where they will be seeking jobs after leaving the government.
It may simply be that they wish to include every deserving DOE employee individually, who either worked on the astoundingly complex “social cost of carbon” question or attended a COP conference and undoubtedly engaged in heroic last minute bargaining to literally save the last best hope of the planet(!), on the Nobel Peace Prize nomination form.
In agonizing over the vexed question of “the social cost of carbon”, I’d like to point out that all life on Earth is carbon-based. Droll, I know, but reference to the word “photosynthesis” seems to be in acute short supply. Perhaps it’s because the word too long?
The questionnaire simply illustrates the first concise effort of adults to retake control of the US government agencies.
“Turn out the lights, the party’s over!”
https://youtu.be/QoQZ0qmf-mk
I laughed when I first read about their refusal and I wondered how in hell they could be so stupid. Then I reminded myself these fools were proclaiming their moral and intellectual superiority for so long they started believing it and suddenly it was all making sense.
Interesting, now how about those NOAA emails concerning Karl et al. 2016. Has everyone forgot about that? A bureaucrat claiming proprietary deliberation is key to their work? That literally made want to punch Karl in the face.
Henry December 15, 2016 at 8:58 am Edit
Right. And the charter of the KGB says that they are supposed to be the good guys. What makes you think the DOE folks pay any attention to the Charter? I’d lay good odds not one in ten of them has even read it. I look at what they DO, not what they’re SUPPOSED TO DO. What they DO is talk endlessly about the “Social Cost of Carbon”, and never mention one word about the benefits.
Nor are the DOE the only group trying this bogus anti-scientific tactic. In 2008, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals faulted the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for failing to explicitly monetize climate benefits. Are you gonna point out to us how their charter makes them consider both sides of the question? Because it does … lotta good that did.
If you had any evidence of such a true DOE cost/benefit analysis, you’d have given it to us. You are just passing gas.
And as for whether I’m displaying, “an abhorrent laziness or a calculated deviousness”, man, you are a nasty little piece of work, aren’t you. You talk to your momma with a mouth like that? I am neither lazy nor devious, I think you must have mistakenly glanced in a mirror while writing.
w.
I quoted your exact words, do you not understand how important it is to address the exact quote being disputed? You seem to now have moved onto some tangential claim about whether or not the benefit analysis was done correctly, or whether it was incorporated at all, or some other moving of the goal posts.
Your EXACT words were: “what they have been doing all this time is HALF OF A COST/BENEFIT ANALYSIS!!” and that is FALSE. They are creating the cost data that goes into the ultimate cost/benefit analysis.
Also: “You can’t just talk of costs in a vacuum. To do that without considering the accompanying benefits is scientific malfeasance.” Also FALSE. The cost team was to look at cost…and to have that added to the benefit data for a true c/b analysis.
More: “To do it as a policy matter is nothing less than deliberately lying to the public.” FALSE again since this is not what they did.
And then, after an argument based on outright lies and half-truths, you come to this recommendation: “As a result, I hope that everyone engaged in this anti-scientific effort gets identified and if they cannot be fired for malfeasance then put them to work sweeping the floors. Talk about “fake news”, the so-called “social cost of carbon” is as fake as they come.” That is beyond the pale considering that you falsified the information that you use to support this recommendation.
If you want to argue the calculations, or the benefit data, or ITS calculation, hey, I’m all for that. But what you have done here is channel the very worst of those you so haughtily deride in your critical posts.
If it wasn’t deliberate deception or laziness to not bother to get the facts correct…then what was it?
Reagan.. where is your link to a benefits calculation?.
Henry, you might enjoy my previous post on this question.
Or if not, here’s Ed Caryl making the same point.
The problem is not just limited to the DOE, far from it. Here is the NYT’s take on the question:
I see … it’s reasonable to want a coherent, single number for the social benefits of carbon to be used across governments … but where is the “social benefits of carbon” 120-orgainzation task force to do the same for the benefits?
w.
I remember when Jimmy Carter was President and we had double digit inflation. The official inflation rate for government agencies doing cost-benefit analyses was about 7 percent.
I await the … “benefit” … part of the analysis, and since an official document seems to establish our expectation to see this benefit part of the analysis, I have faith (church bells ringing) that it will be forthcoming soon. [Please notice the “high” reading on your sarcasmometers.]
I guess some of us are impatient, since we have not seen hide nor hair of any such thing at any time that I can remember.
If I am wrong, then list the official summary of ANY government agency ever producing a benefit analysis of carbon (i.e., carbon dioxide). Link us to the pdf [in this case, “pdf” would seem to stand for “pretty damn farfetched”).
As I was surfing the net trying to find some official report on carbon benefits, I ran across the following United Nations project that leaves me scratching my head in amazement over the blatant misappropriation of language for the purpose of advertising a program that does the opposite of what the words suggest:
http://www.unep.org/climatechange/carbon-benefits/
Am I missing something here, or is this the most convoluted attempt ever to subvert language?
A new Presidential administration has the ability to prioritize agencies in which it wants to appoint non-career SES employees. Those are the people that run things… DOE’s response has guaranteed that DOE will be a focus for the new President. While it might be a bit more nuanced, you could probably eliminate ALL the employees at DOE outside of the nuclear agencies and do no harm. This will be fun to watch. It will take a little time, but this may be a great place to start draining the swamp –at the Forrestal Building.
Like over here in OZ. They just don’t get it. I just can’t wait for the figures to come out….. how much money is being squandered on climate ‘science.’
Cost and benefit is very simple.
You calculate the cost of extra CO2 and then you calculate the benefit of less CO2.
Don’t say it is not a cost-benefit analysis.