Trump Appoints Climate Realist to NSC

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H. Sterling Burnett

Managing Editor, Environment & Climate News at The Heartland Institute

H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D. is managing editor of Environment & Climate News and a research fellow for environment and energy policy at The Heartland Institute. Burnett worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis for 18 years, most recently as a senior fellow in charge of NCPA’s environmental policy program. He has held various positions in professional and public policy organizations, including serving as a member of the Environment and Natural Resources Task Force in the Texas Comptroller’s e-Texas commission.

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President Donald Trump selected William Happer, Ph.D., an award-winning physicist and the Cyrus Fogg Brackett professor of physics, emeritus, at Princeton University, to run the National Security Council’s (NSC) Office for Emerging Technologies.

Happer, a prominent climate realist, was awarded the Frederick Seitz Memorial Award at The Heartland Institute’s 10th International Climate Change Conference in 2015.

Recently, Happer was the lead author of a brief filed as part of a tutorial on climate science requested by U.S. District Judge William Alsup in a case filed by Oakland and San Francisco against five major oil companies to get them to pay for damages the cities claimed would come from climate change purportedly caused by fossil fuel emissions. Happer and the other scientists involved explained although climate science is fraught with uncertainties, the best available evidence suggests humans aren’t causing catastrophic climate change and carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but instead is beneficial for life on earth.

Of his work at the Office of Emerging Technologies, Happer told E&E News “he would do his best to ensure that federal policy decisions ‘are based on sound science and technology.’”