Trump’s latest senior science nominees are a talk-radio ignoramus and a career poisoner / Boing Boing
▻https://boingboing.net/2017/07/21/we-are-fucked.html
The Department of Agriculture’s chief scientist oversees more than 1,000 scientists in 100 research facilities: Trump’s pick to run the agency is Sam Clovis, a climate-denying talk-radio host who not only lacks any kind of scientific degrees — he didn’t take a single science course at university.
Meanwhile, Trump has nominated Michael Dourson to head the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention; Dourson’s last job was at the helm of Toxicology Excellence for Risk Assessment, the company that DuPont picked when it needed experts who would claim that its toxic waste wasn’t so bad for the people who were imbibing it.
Here’s a little taste of Sam Clovis, the talk radio host Trump picked to run the department that keeps us all from starving to death: “After the interviewer highlighted the widespread acceptance of climate change within the scientific community, Clovis responded by saying, in effect, that scientists were trying to fool him. ’I have looked at the science, and I have enough of a science background to know when I’m being boofed,’ he said. (Pro Publica checked and found that Clovis had never even taken an undergraduate level course in any science.).”