Trump Disbands Panel That Helped Cities
Respond to Climate Threat
In the Trump
administration's latest attempt to quash any efforts by the federal government
to raise awareness or mitigate the effects of climate change, a community
resilience panel announced Monday that the president had terminated the
two-year-old group.
Chairman Jesse Keenan,
a Harvard University professor, told the other members of the Community
Resilience Panel for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems on Monday that there
would be no further meetings and the panel would dissolve, per President Donald
Trump's orders.
"This was the
federal government's primary external engagement for resilience in the built
environment," Keenan told Bloomberg News.
"It was one of
the last federal bodies that openly talked about climate change in
public," he added. "I can say that we tried our best and we never
self-censored!"
The panel was created in 2015 by former President Barack Obama in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, and had more than 350 volunteer members. Its mission to guide municipal governments and local groups to improve buildings, communications, energy systems, and transportation in response to climate threats made the panel especially vulnerable under the Trump administration.
Keenan told E&E News that the
panel's abilitiy to collaborate resilience efforts across local, state, and the
federal government as well as the private sector were especially notable, and
described the group's key activities:
We identified gaps in
codes and standards, we proposed streamlined communications channels, we vetted
best practices in design standards, we created guides for operators of
infrastructure facilities, etc. ...
It was a very diffuse
effort by virtue of the diversity of infrastructure sectors that we covered,
but we built a meaningful entity that served as a direct avenue of engagement
with the federal government.
The panel was
sponsored by the Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and
Technology, and co-sponsored by the Department of Housing and Urban
Development's Office of Economic Resilience, the Commerce
Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA),
the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), National Academies of
Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, and the Department of Homeland
Security's Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as well as its
Office of Infrastructure Protection.
The group's members
were scheduled to meet again in the spring of
2018.