National Climate Assessment Advisory Committee Disbanded

On August 20, 2017, the Washington Post reported that the Trump administration had disbanded the fifteen-person Advisory Committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment. The Advisory Committee was established by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 2015 to advise on stakeholder engagement and other issues relating to the National Climate Assessment. The Advisory Committee was in the process of drafting a report aimed at assisting public- and private-sector officials to use the National Climate Assessment in long-term planning.

Update: 

On January 2, 2018, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that, in his position as co-chair of the U.S. Climate Alliance, he would “reconvene the Advisory Committee to develop recommendations to navigate the challenges of climate change.” The following day, Columbia University’s Earth Institute announced that it had hired the former chair of the Advisory Committee Richard Moss as a visiting senior research scientist in the Research Program on Sustainability Policy and Management. In that role, Moss will re-establish the Advisory Committee, and deliver the report it was due to write. The report was published on April 4, 2019.

On May 15, 2018, documents were released showing that the Advisory Council was disbanded due to concerns that it lacked industry representation. The documents indicate that George Kelly, then the deputy chief of staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, pushed for the council to be disbanded. He reportedly said: “It only has one member from industry, and the process to gain more balance would take a couple of years to accomplish.”