Like a lot of us, Amy and I filed our taxes today, a day before the due date. (Whew!) We owed this year. It’s all good; I don’t actually mind paying my fair share of taxes for the good services our government provides. Our kids attend a great school staffed with fantastic teachers. We had to call 911 once for our daughter when she was a little baby (she’s fine), and our town’s publicly funded ambulance was right there. I’ve had the opportunity of doing some work inside the wastewater treatment plant for a major metropolitan area; if you haven’t seen inside one of those, you’d be amazed at the operation your taxes pay for, you know, to take care of our business. Most summers we drive across the country on great highways. Our freedom is protected by the best military the world has ever known, and under civilian leadership.
All this stuff is expensive.
My taxes next year, I presume, will help pay for an enhanced wall on our Southern border. I wouldn’t personally elect to pay for that. I tend to believe professional border guards whom I have heard say there are more efficient ways to buy border security improvements. I also don’t think it’s all that high on our priority list of problems — the already dwindling number of illegal immigrants crossing the border with our peaceful trading partner to the South.
But I still don’t very much mind paying for that wall. I understand it’s important to lots of other Americans and they voted, fair and square, for our current President partly based on that promise. Sometimes in a democracy we end up buying what other people want more than we do.
I’ll tell you what I do not wish to buy with my taxes.
I do not wish to pay for my government to employ Maria Caffrey, a climate scientist at the University of Colorado, to spend the greater part of 6 years researching and writing an 86-page report about projected climate change impacts on coastal parks of the National Park Service, only to sit on the final draft for over a year after it was submitted right before the 2016 presidential election.
If, for example, the conclusion of a such a professional scientific study, funded by my tax dollars, is that the National Mall in Washington, D.C. could be extensively flooded by a category 3 hurricane on top of a higher sea level that might result from one of our worst-case emission scenarios, I think we should know that!
“It would create flooding across a massive area.”
-Climate scientist Maria Caffrey commenting on the projected effect on the National Mall of a category 3 hurricane on top of rising sea levels that might occur due to anthropogenic climate change, according to her analysis
I do not wish to pay for government employees, while they are sitting on such a report (that we purchased), to edit it in order to remove words and phrases which correctly state that climate change is human-caused, and that there are various potential outcomes over which we have control based on our emissions choices. Check out the edits:
“Anthropogenic” and “human activities” have been removed, suggesting climate change is just a fact of life, not the direct result of human choices (in direct contradiction of the overwhelming scientific consensus based on a wealth of well studied evidence). Perhaps most insidiously, the phrase, “will have a significant impact on how we protect and manage our public lands” has been edited to read, “will impact how we manage our public lands.” Whoa, that’s way different! The scientist wrote that the impacts would be significant! And that we might need to protect and manage our public lands. As in, we might have choices to do more protecting and less managing! But after some well-placed bureaucratic strike-outs, presto, it’s just some impacts we’ll need to manage. Nothing significant. No worries.
“I want an investigation into how that document got around to the press before we even had a chance to look at it.”
-Ryan Zinke, U.S. Secretary of the Interior and an old friend of the fossil fuel industry, responding to questions from lawmakers about the report his employees appear to have had a chance to look at, based on the edits above
“I was legally required to release these records.”
-Maria Caffrey, potentially ending Zinke’s investigation by explaining that she works for a public university, which is required to supply the press, or anyone, with its records on request. Your taxes at work – yeah!
This is what I do not wish to pay for. Why should any of us want to? Why pay a scientist to study something for 6 years, then bury and seek to alter the resulting report? Why indeed, when the conclusions look pretty darn important? My family and I walked across the National Mall over Spring break. It’s beautiful, many people have worked hard to build it, and in its monuments are a record of our most important memories and greatest hardships, sacrifices, and triumphs as a nation. If the scientists we’ve already paid have concluded in the future it might be destroyed, and that’s preventable, well then we should know it! My money bought that answer!
I do not wish to pay for cover-ups, lies, and half-truths.
I do not wish to pay for my government to corruptly and falsely play favorites with the fossil fuel industry; I already pay them at the pump.
“Potentially it’s hopeful. We could choose to try and go down that lower emissions path and be able to divert ourselves away from much higher sea levels.”
-Maria Caffrey, climate scientist
That’s a message of hope, but only if we’re in possession of the truth we paid for.
#rescuethatfrog