Trump Lets Federal Climate Advisory Panel Quietly Expire, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Federal Climate Science Was Being Translated Into Practical Guidance For Levee Engineers And Farmers Who Might Then Use It

WASHINGTON. The Trump administration on Sunday confirmed it would not renew the charter of the 15-member federal Advisory Committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment, dissolving a panel whose sole function had been helping municipal water managers, levee engineers, agricultural extension agents, and state planners turn the federal government's legally mandated National Climate Assessment into practical decisions about pipelines, crops, and seawalls.

The decision, conveyed to the committee in an August 18 email from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declining to renew the panel's charter, resolved a long-standing concern within the administration that the federal government had been operating a small bureaucratic apparatus dedicated to ensuring that climate science, having been produced at considerable taxpayer expense, actually reached the Americans paying for it.

The Advisory Committee, an unpaid 15-person panel of academic scientists, state officials, insurers, and private-sector representatives, had been in the middle of producing a guide for cities and businesses on how to incorporate sea-level rise and heat projections into infrastructure plans. The work product, when reached for comment by reporters, declined to comment, citing its imminent nonexistence.

"The federal government will continue to support climate research," a Commerce Department spokesperson said, declining to specify how the research, in its untranslated form as peer-reviewed academic papers, would now reach the small-town water managers and farm-belt agronomists for whom the committee had been writing decision guides. Asked whether the underlying climate would also be canceled, the spokesperson clarified that no, only the committee.

Committee chair Richard Moss noted in subsequent interviews that the panel's members would continue the translation work voluntarily, in their personal time, without federal coordination, federal funding, or formal channels to deliver it to the federal agencies that had previously requested it, an arrangement administration officials described as "exactly the kind of decentralized, market-based solution we like to see."

The dissolution arrived ten weeks after the President had withdrawn the United States from the Paris Climate Accord and within a broader pattern of decisions described by the White House communications office as "energy dominance" and by climate scientists at the now-disbanded committee as "the climate getting somewhat worse, somewhat faster, on a deliberately uncoordinated schedule."

At press time, the National Climate Assessment itself remained on the federal calendar, scheduled to be released by its congressionally mandated deadline into a federal government that had now formally stopped helping anyone understand what to do about it.