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Trump's transition team wants to know who worked on Obama's climate policies
(Donald Trump and Barack Obama.Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Donald Trump's transition team has asked the Energy Department for a list of people who worked on policies designed to address climate change under Barack Obama, Bloomberg reports.
The transition sent a memo to the Energy Department with 65 questions, according to the report.
Among them was a request for a list of employees and contractors involved in Obama-era climate change legislation. Specifically, Bloomberg reports that the request asked for the names of people who either attended United Nations meetings on climate change or helped develop measures designed to evaluate the long-term economic impact of carbon emissions.
Representative Bill Foster (D, Il-11) issued a statement by email on Friday that condemned the probe, indirectly comparing it to McCarthyist politicking of the 1950s:
"The report that President Elect Trump wants to identify civil servants at the Department of Energy who work on climate change and international diplomacy is deeply disturbing. It harkens back to an era when politicians sought out individuals for partisan politics with little basis of any wrongdoing. The United States has always been at the forefront of scientific inquiry and innovation. These Cold War era tactics threaten to undo the decades of progress we have made on climate change and to dissuade a new generation of scientists from tackling our world’s biggest problems. No one should have to work in fear of political retaliation. Our leaders should encourage an atmosphere of open research and scientific inquiry without political obstruction."
Business Insider contacted a representative for Trump's team for a response to Foster's statement, but we did not immediately receive a reply.
Trump's team also reportedly requested a complete list of projects from the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. The ARPA-E, founded in 2009, has paid out about $1.3 billion in funding to clean and renewable energy technologies like grid-scale energy storage, biofuels, and wind turbines.
The transition seems interested as well in the wing of the Energy Deparcharged with evaluating and forecasting costs of renewable and fossil fuel energy sources, according to Bloomberg.
The memo also suggests the Trump administration will be interested in preserving nuclear power in the US. However, presidential transitions routinely involve the incoming administration examining the workings of the outgoing administration's various bureaucracies, so it's the specific questions Trump's team is asking that may signal their targets for the most significant changes.
So far, Trump and his team have shown a strong interest in reversing many Obama-era US environmental policies.
Trump has picked Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a man who is actively suing the Environmental Protection Agency over some of these policies, to lead the agency. Myron Ebell, whose career has focused on disputing the science of climate change, also holds a key role on Trump's transition team. In addition, a Trump advisor recently outlined plans to remove funding for NASA's unique, 58-year-long Earth science mission. The Trump transition website also says it will "scrap the $5 trillion dollar Obama-Clinton Climate Action Plan and the Clean Power Plan."
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