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Trump wants a talk-radio host to be the USDA's chief scientist


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2017 Jul 21, 12:47pm   620 views  4 comments

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Yesterday, the Trump administration formally named its candidate for the Department of Agriculture's undersecretary of research, education, and economics, a post that serves as the agency's chief scientist. Its choice? Sam Clovis, who has no scientific background but is notable primarily for having been a conservative talk-radio host. If approved by the Senate, the US' attempts to understand climate change's impact on agriculture will be led by someone who called climate research "junk science."

Clovis, who has also taught economics and management at an Iowa liberal arts college, was an early supporter of Trump's candidacy. He's been working at the USDA as a White House advisor since shortly after Trump's inauguration. Suggestions that he'd be nominated to this position have been circulating for a while, but his official nomination only came yesterday.

While the USDA doesn't have as prominent a role in science as, say, the Department of Energy, its Agricultural Research Service (ARS!) has over 1,000 permanent scientists and over 100 research facilities. It and other components of the research, education, and economics group are responsible for research in areas like nutrition, agricultural productivity, pathogens that affect agricultural animals, and non-food agriculture, such as forestry.

In 2014, when Clovis was running for senate in Iowa, he did an interview with the state's public radio station in which he was asked about climate change. After the interviewer highlighted the widespread acceptance of climate change within the scientific community, Clovis responded by saying, in effect, that scientists were trying to fool him. "I have looked at the science, and I have enough of a science background to know when I’m being boofed," he said. (Pro Publica checked and found that Clovis had never even taken an undergraduate level course in any science.)

Despite his lack of expertise, Clovis went on to claim that "a lot of the science is junk science. It's not proven; I don't think there's any substantive information available to me that doesn't raise as many questions as it does answers." He then went on, somewhat incoherently, to talk about sunspots and volcanoes before saying that the whole thing was a conspiracy to support wealth redistribution. "This global warming, or whatever the climate change," Clovis said, "is really about income redistribution from rich nations that are industrialized to nations that are not."

More: https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/07/trump-wants-a-talk-radio-host-to-be-the-usdas-chief-scientist/

#USDA #ClownShowExtraordinaire #WeAreSoFucked

Comments 1 - 4 of 4        Search these comments

1   anonymous   2017 Jul 21, 12:52pm  

sounds like a top notch choice to filter the bullshit coming out of the climate cult. don't need any science for that, just common sense.

2   FNWGMOBDVZXDNW   2017 Jul 21, 2:10pm  

Are we going to start watering the plants with Gatorade? Just think, we won't have to worry about drought anymore and the plants will be super energetic.

3   HEY YOU   2017 Jul 21, 6:44pm  

This has got to be the dumbest Administration America has ever had & I've lived through a few of them.

4   HEY YOU   2017 Jul 21, 6:46pm  

This has got to be the dumbest Administration America has ever had & I've lived through a few of them.
Wait! This is the dumbest voter base,EVER!

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