The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2018

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The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2018 Page 28

by Sam Kean


  EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman disputed claims that the roughly 15,000-person agency is riven with discord. Career employees are “vital” to the EPA’s work and meet regularly with political appointees and the administrator, she said, citing ongoing deliberations on a water-pollution rule as an example. (Two career employees who spoke to the Center at Bowman’s request confirmed that they routinely work with political appointees and did so on the water rule.)

  “We talk to people throughout the regions, the states, the career staff, and a variety of different perspectives prior to making decisions,” Bowman said, adding in an email that “we follow the Administrative Procedure Act in our regulatory process, meaning taking into consideration comments submitted by ALL commenters, including environmental NGOs, the public, and other commenters.”

  For the public, much is at stake. Under Pruitt, who sued the EPA 14 times as Oklahoma’s attorney general, the agency already has declined to ban a pesticide linked to neurological damage in children, frozen requirements to reduce water pollution from coal-fired power plants, and opened the door to loosening limits on toxic coal waste. The EPA most recently proposed eliminating the Clean Power Plan, an Obama administration rule aimed at reducing carbon emissions in the power sector.

  “These rules [being rolled back] aren’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination. There are ways to improve things,” said Gordon Binder, who served as chief of staff for then–EPA administrator William Reilly under President George H. W. Bush. “But Pruitt’s come in with a flyswatter and is slapping them down instead of laying out the problems with a rule and saying, ‘How can we fix it?’”

  Who’s Running the EPA?

  There’s a striking absence of high-level leadership at the EPA. Only 1 of 13 positions requiring Senate confirmation—Pruitt’s—is filled. These positions—higher-ranking than those held by the 45 political appointees—include leaders of key agency offices that oversee air, water, and other programs. Six people have been nominated for the 12 open slots and are awaiting confirmation (although two of them have joined the EPA in the meantime as senior advisers).

  Most major decisions are made on the third floor of the William Jefferson Clinton South Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, where Pruitt and his handful of confidants have their offices. Among those who most prominently have Pruitt’s ear: EPA chief of staff Ryan Jackson, who previously held the same position with Inhofe, and Samantha Dravis, who worked with Pruitt at the Republican Attorneys General Association and now leads the EPA’s Office of Policy.

  Dravis, widely seen as Pruitt’s closest adviser, came to the agency with a background in law and politics but little environmental experience. That’s a departure from her two immediate predecessors, who were already at the EPA when they were tapped to lead the policy office.

  Jackson helped Inhofe negotiate major bipartisan deals in the Senate, such as the passage of federal chemical-policy reform. Still, emails released under the Freedom of Information Act to The New York Times show that Jackson directed career staff to deny a petition seeking to ban chlorpyrifos, a pesticide suspected of harming children’s brains, directly contradicting the recommendations of EPA scientists.

  Bowman said in an email that career staff were “instrumental” in drafting the denial. The former acting head of the EPA’s chemicals office, a career employee who left the agency last month, told the Times she opposed the decision, even as she followed Jackson’s instructions.

  Other influential political appointees include Sarah Greenwalt, senior adviser to the Office of the Administrator, who worked for Pruitt when he was Oklahoma’s attorney general; Bowman, head of public affairs, who came from the American Chemistry Council, a chemical-industry trade group; and Mandy Gunasekara, a senior policy adviser who worked on the Republican staff of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

  Nine career staff members told the center their opinions seem to hold little weight. They are excluded from meetings, they say, and their advice on agency operations is often disregarded. Some believe this is because of the flurry of leaks that have come from inside the agency since Pruitt took office. Political appointees have lashed out at suspected leakers and relieved them of work assignments, even in the absence of proof, career employees said.

  “They are terrified of career staff leaking,” one said. “And once they get an idea in their head [about] someone, they won’t change it.”

  Bowman said, “Those concerns have not been brought to our attention. And if they are we will do everything we can to address them.”

  Pruitt has broken with tradition by foregoing many introductory briefings with career staff designed to help new administrators set priorities, several current and former employees said. Instead, he’s worked to roll back EPA rules, an effort that also diverges from common practice.

  Political appointees are taking more of a hands-on role in tasks career employees previously would have handled. Take, for example, a recent notice announcing EPA plans to reconsider whether certain vehicle-emission standards for greenhouse gases were too strict. Career staff had drafted a concise version of the notice, but appointees expanded the number of vehicles affected by the review and made the Department of Transportation the lead agency on the decision, despite the EPA’s legal obligations to control planet-warming emissions under the Clean Air Act.

  “This was a much more major rewrite” than would have happened under previous administrations, said an EPA employee familiar with the matter. “At least one plausible outcome of this process,” the employee said, “is that the EPA would unilaterally abdicate its [legal] responsibility.”

  “Checking the Box”

  On the rare occasions when career employees are asked to brief Pruitt, he seems unwilling to change his antiregulatory posture on major industry priorities, according to some career employees. Betsy Southerland, who headed an office within the EPA’s water program until August, said her team met with Pruitt twice about a rule designed to limit wastewater discharges from power plants as he considered weakening parts of it.

  The team told Pruitt that industry arguments against the rule already had been considered and found to be inaccurate. They offered more nuanced actions the administrator could take to address concerns expressed by the Small Business Administration, a separate federal agency, and the Utility Water Act Group, a lobbying organization. Pruitt was unmoved, she said. In August, the EPA announced it would reconsider key parts of the rule.

  “You get the feeling that his mind was made up before we started the briefing process,” Southerland said. “It looked like he was kind of checking the box to meet with us.” The Times found similar behavior by Pruitt when the EPA declined to ban chlorpyrifos. Pruitt didn’t follow agency scientists’ advice, having “promised farming industry executives who wanted to keep using the pesticide that it is ‘a new day and a new future,’” the Times reported.

  These episodes could simply reflect inexperience—appointees struggling to figure out the agency they lead. They also could reflect pressure placed on the EPA by executive orders and presidential memoranda to act quickly on big-ticket issues like the Clean Power Plan.

  But Pruitt’s pro-industry bent has convinced some current and former employees that he and his like-minded advisers are aiming to destroy the EPA from the inside.

  “Look, I think he does not support what the agency has been trying to do for 40 years,” said William Ruckelshaus, EPA administrator under Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. “He wants to dismantle—not improve or reform—the regulatory system for protecting public health and the environment.”

  PART VI

  “It’s Not Rocket Science . . . (Actually, Some of It Is)”

  Space Science

  REBECCA BOYLE

  Two Stars Slammed into Each Other and Solved Half of Astronomy’s Problems. What Comes Next?

  from FiveThirtyEight

  Progress, as they say, is slow. In science, this is often true even for major breakthroughs;
rarely is an entire field of research remade in a single swoop. The Human Genome Project took a decade. Finding the first gravitational waves took multiple decades. So it’s hard to overstate the enormous leap forward that astronomy took on August 17, 2017.

  On that day, astronomers bore witness to the titanic collision of two neutron stars, the densest things in the universe besides black holes. In the collision’s wake, astronomers answered multiple major questions that have dominated their field for a generation. They solved the origin of gamma-ray bursts, mysterious jets of hardcore radiation that could potentially roast Earth. They glimpsed the forging of heavy metals, like gold and platinum. They measured the rate at which the expansion of the universe is accelerating. They caught light at the same time as gravitational waves, confirmation that waves move at the speed of light. And there was more, and there is much more yet to come from this discovery. It all happened so quickly and revealed so much that astronomers are already facing a different type of question: now what?

  “Even people like me, who have been waiting for this for a long time and preparing for this, I don’t think we’re ready,” said Edo Berger, an astronomer at Harvard who studies explosive cosmic events. “Now it’s a question of, do we have the right instrumentation for doing all the follow-up work? Do we have the right telescopes? What’s going to happen when we have not just one event, but one a month, or one a week—how do we deal with that flood?”

  From Copernicus and Kepler to Hubble and Einstein, astronomy has experienced plenty of tectonic shifts. The discovery of GW170817, as the August event is known, will be another of these. Astronomers often describe the detection of gravitational waves—which happened for the first time just last year, and was awarded a Nobel Prize in October—as a new form of perception, as though we can now hear as well as see. The neutron-star merger event was like seeing and hearing at the same time, and with a dictionary to make sense of it all.

  The August 17 gravitational wave gave astronomers a glimpse at an entirely different universe. For most of history, they’ve studied stars and galaxies, which seem static and unchanging from the vantage point of human timescales. “You can look at them today and look at them 10 years from now, and they will be the same,” Berger said. But GW170817 revealed a universe alive, pulsating with creation and destruction on human timescales. Think about that: GW170817 was a relatively close 130 million light-years from Earth, meaning its gravitational waves and light were emitted while the first flowering plants were busy evolving on Earth, around the time stegosauruses roamed the plains. But the event itself unfolded in less than three human-designated weeks. This faster timescale is “pushing the way astronomy is done,” Berger said.

  When the wave crashed through Earth, it caused a tiny shift in the path of laser beams traveling down long corridors in observatories called the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), in the United States, and the Virgo interferometer, in Italy.* On August 17, LIGO’s twin detectors and Virgo each felt the wave, which allowed astronomers to roughly triangulate from which direction it rolled in. They swung every bit of glass they had, both on Earth and in the heavens, in that general direction. In space, the Fermi space telescope glimpsed a burst of gamma radiation. Within an hour, astronomers made six independent discoveries of a bright, fast-fading flash: a new phenomenon called a kilonova. Astronomers saw the telltale sign of gold being forged, a major discovery by itself. Nine days later, X-rays streamed in, and after 16 days, radio waves arrived too. Each type of information tells astronomers something different. Richard O’Shaughnessy, an astronomer at the Rochester Institute of Technology, describes the discovery as a “Rosetta stone for astronomy.” “What this has done is provide one event that unites all these different threads of astronomy at once,” he said. “Like, all our dreams have come true, and they came true now.”

  As O’Shaughnessy put it, every discovery eventually becomes a tool. Astronomers hope to use neutron-star mergers to test general relativity, the mind-bending conceit that what we perceive as gravity is actually a curving of space and time. Binary neutron stars and black holes may deviate from the gravitational fields predicted by general relativity, which could put Einstein—and alternative theories for gravity in extreme systems—to the test, said Jacqueline Hewitt, a physicist who directs MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.

  Gravitational waves aren’t blocked by dark matter, dust, or other space objects, so they can serve as messengers from the insides of stars, Hewitt said. When LIGO upgrades are finished next year, astronomers will be able to investigate how the waves form and reconstruct the violent smashups.

  Eleonora Troja, an astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who studies X-rays, had hoped for years to detect the light from a neutron-star merger, but many people thought she was dreaming. “I had a lot of proposals rejected because they were considered too visionary, too advanced,” she said. But even Troja never imagined witnessing what happened this summer. “Sometimes, I am still like, ‘Did that really happen?’”

  Troja says that the information gathered in August could eventually serve as a template for finding other neutron-star collisions and gamma-ray jets. We may have already unwittingly captured evidence of many such events, but the record is likely buried in a decade’s worth of data from the Fermi and Swift gamma-ray space telescopes, waiting to be uncovered. Those observatories, and new ones under construction now, will allow humanity to see even more violent, rapidly changing astronomical phenomena. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, for example, is currently under construction and will eventually photograph the whole sky every three nights. “In the future, when we digest all this information, it will be a drastic change in the way we study these cosmic objects,” Troja said.

  This event that unfolded across a couple of weeks will also inform our deepest experience of time, the beginning and the end of our cosmology. Combinations of light and gravitational waves, like those detected after the neutron-star merger, can be used to measure the rate at which the expansion of the universe is accelerating.*

  “It’s totally new,” Troja said. “Comparing the two independent measurements, the one from light and the one from gravitational waves, you can measure the rate of the expansion of the universe.” All our futures are wrapped up in this question.

  Thanks to the August 17 event, astronomers now know what to look for. Soon, they will be able to sift through an embarrassment of neutron-star mergers and other phenomena. And as with any disruption, there will be a period of adjustment. Huge telescopes in space and on Earth are few and far between, and on Earth, most of them can only work when it’s dark and the skies are clear. That means thousands of people vie for limited time at the proverbial eyepiece. Telescope committees are set up to review proposals and grant that time, and assignments are often allotted months in advance. That will have to change as astronomers chase events in real time.

  “In our case, for the telescopes we were using in Chile, people traveled to Chile to use the telescopes, and we asked them to give up their time [to track the August 17 event]. And everybody did it with so much enthusiasm,” Berger said, adding that anyone who sacrificed hard-won telescope time was credited in the scientific literature. “But we need better mechanisms. You can’t call up every individual person and negotiate and explain, especially when these objects are fading away so quickly, while you’re on the phone with them.”

  Hewitt is chair of a committee that develops 10-year plans for astronomy, known as the decadal surveys, and said the detection of gravitational waves—and neutron-star mergers—were listed as goals for the next several years in the most recent report in 2010 and in the midpoint report in 2015. We got there early, and now astronomers are talking about how to prioritize their time, where to focus, and how to pivot to the next big thing, she said. Many are now hoping that the United States rejoins a space-based gravitational wave experiment called LISA. And they are talking about how to turn their eyes to the sky, at a
moment’s notice, the next time the universe throws something big their way.

  “It’s a wonderful time, it’s a terrifying time,” O’Shaughnessy said. “I can’t really capture the wonder and the horror and glee and happiness.”

  KENNETH BROWER

  The Starship or the Canoe

  from California

  In 2015, an observatory high in the Atacama Desert of Chile detected three planets orbiting an M star, an ultra-cool dwarf, in the constellation Aquarius about 40 light-years, or 232 trillion miles, from Earth. Until then, the dim star was designated 2MASS J23062928–0502285. Not such a charming name. The discoverers of its satellites, a team of astronomers who operate the Chilean observatory remotely from Liège in Belgium, took the opportunity to warm up that appellation. The Belgians called the new system TRAPPIST-1, after the robotic telescope that had done the work, TRAPPIST, the Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope.

  This acronym cheats a little with the gratuitous “I,” a nod to the Trappist order of monks, who have several famous abbeys in Belgium. Inmates of the abbeys produce wonderful beers, dark, full of residual sugars and living yeast, beers that improve with age, like wine. The astronomers celebrated their find with monk-brewed bottles of Westvleteren 12, the best beer in the world.

 

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