The Trump regime has formally disbanded the Community Resilience Panel for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems. The panel, which was first created in 2015 under President Obama, helped cities prepare for climate change and included officials from several federal agencies, city planners, and experts on infrastructure.
This move comes just a week after Moody's Investors Services warned cities and states that their credit ratings could be downgraded if they don't prepare for climate change.
From Bloomberg:
The Community Resilience Panel for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems was created by the Obama administration in 2015 within the Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology. Its chairman, Jesse Keenan, told members at a meeting Monday that its charter was being dissolved that the meeting would be its last. [...]
"This was the federal government’s primary external engagement for resilience in the built environment," Keenan, a researcher at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design who focuses on climate adaptation whose role on the panel was unpaid. The panel included representatives from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other departments, as well as city planners and outside experts.
The group advised local officials on making buildings, communications, energy systems, transportation and water more able to withstand severe weather and climate change. That mission made the group especially vulnerable, Keenan said.
I laughed out loud for all the wrong (or right) reasons when I first read this.
As you might infer from the photo that appears at the top of this post, my first immediate thought after reading it was the residents of Tangier Island; a conservative community that, for some inexplicable reason, believes Trump is going to help them.
Experts and officials estimate the island community could disappear under the sea as early was 20 years from now, but a majority of the island's conservative residents voted for Trump; a climate change denier who says it's a Chinese hoax. The local mayor and residents have made headlines twice in the past year, first for expressing gratitude that Trump called the mayor to tell him everything's going to be fine, and later for demanding and expecting that Trump will build them a sea wall.
I certainly wouldn't object if Congress appropriated money to build sea walls around Tangier and other vulnerable communities, but it's not going to happen. Not under this Congress and not under Trump.
Maybe they can build a sea wall out of red MAGA hats.