{"id":47610,"date":"2019-08-05T13:15:25","date_gmt":"2019-08-05T18:15:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=47610"},"modified":"2019-08-05T13:15:31","modified_gmt":"2019-08-05T18:15:31","slug":"top-scientist-says-he-quit-usda-because-trump-admin-tried-to-bury-his-study-on-climate-and-nutrition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=47610","title":{"rendered":"Top Scientist Says He Quit USDA Because Trump Admin Tried to Bury His Study on Climate and Nutrition"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.commondreams.org\/news\/2019\/08\/05\/top-scientist-says-he-quit-usda-because-trump-admin-tried-bury-his-study-climate-and\">Top Scientist Says He Quit USDA Because Trump Admin Tried to Bury His Study on Climate and Nutrition<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Rep. Chellie Pingree tweeted, &#8220;Once again, the Trump admin is silencing our scientists.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.commondreams.org\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/cd_large\/public\/headlines\/ziska_usda.jpg?itok=e5PSRzVS\" alt=\"Lewis Ziska\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Plant physiologist Lewis Ziska quit the U.S. Department of Agriculture Friday. (Photo:&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencenewsforstudents.org\/article\/climate-change-global-warming-food-eating\">Peggy Greb<\/a>\/USDA Agricultural Research Service via sciencenewsforstudents.org)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.commondreams.org\/news\/2018\/09\/09\/epa-exodus-nearly-1600-workers-have-left-trump-took-office-analysis-shows\">exodus<\/a>&nbsp;of federal scientists in the era of President Donald Trump continued Friday as 62-year-old plant physiologist Lewis Ziska left the U.S. Department of Agriculture &#8220;over the Trump administration&#8217;s efforts to bury his groundbreaking study about how rice loses nutrients due to rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,&#8221;&nbsp;<em>Politico<\/em>&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.politico.com\/story\/2019\/08\/05\/ziska-usda-climate-agriculture-trump-1445271\">reported<\/a>Monday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;There was a sense that if the science agreed with the politics, then the policymakers would consider it to be &#8216;good science,&#8217; and if it didn\u2019t agree with the politics, then it was something that was flawed and needed to be done again.&#8221;<br>\u2014Lewis Ziska, ex-USDA scientist<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ziska\u2014who worked at USDA under five presidents, both Republicans and Democrats\u2014charged in an interview with&nbsp;<em>Politico&nbsp;<\/em>that he left the department&#8217;s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) because the USDA tried to block the public dissemination of his research on how the human-caused climate crisis&#8217;s impact on rice could threaten the nutrition of 600 million people. The&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/advances.sciencemag.org\/content\/4\/5\/eaaq1012\">study<\/a>,&nbsp;<em>Politico&nbsp;<\/em>reported, was internally cleared at the department and peer reviewed prior to its publication in the journal&nbsp;<em>Science Advances<\/em>&nbsp;last year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>USDA, in a statement to the outlet, said that &#8220;this was a joint decision by ARS national program leaders\u2014all career scientists\u2014not to send out a press release on this paper&#8221; based on scientific disagreement, and the decisions involving the study weren&#8217;t politically motivated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ziska, however, said that &#8220;this isn&#8217;t about the science. It&#8217;s about something else, but it&#8217;s not about the science.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u00a0\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Top Scientist Says He Quit USDA Because Trump Admin Tried to Bury His Study on Climate and Nutrition Rep. Chellie Pingree tweeted, &#8220;Once again, the Trump admin is silencing our scientists.&#8221; Plant physiologist Lewis Ziska quit the U.S. Department of Agriculture Friday. (Photo:&nbsp;Peggy Greb\/USDA Agricultural Research Service via sciencenewsforstudents.org) The&nbsp;exodus&nbsp;of federal scientists in the era [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[3193,7844,19779,26434,582,26433,4717],"class_list":["post-47610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-carbon-dioxide","tag-donald-trump","tag-jessica-corbett","tag-lewis-ziska","tag-nutrition","tag-united-states-department-of-agriculture","tag-usda"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47610"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47610\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47611,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47610\/revisions\/47611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}