Fmr. Science Envoy: It Was Time To Step away After Trump’s Arizona Rally Showed Science Was Not on the Agenda

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VELSHI: "A science envoy who has resigned from the state Department has a not so subtle message for President Trump. The first letter of each paragraph in Daniel Kach’s resignation spells out the word impeach. Kachb is a professor of energy at uc Berkeley he writes, quote, particularly troubling to me is how your response to charlottesville is consistent with a broader pattern of behavior that enables sexism and racism and zrards the welfare of all Americans the global community and the planet. Daniel kafb is with me now. Was it charlottesville that frirgd your resignation or was it the fact that you were a scientist in the trump Administration and was frustrated by the stuff that was being done by this administration that you didn’t agree with?"
KAMMEN: "Right. It was really the latter. The president withdrawing from the Paris climate accord that the U.S. had played such a big roll in brokering was a major problem for me. That directly contra convenience my mandate to work on energy and climate issues in the middle East and Africa. And as you read, the pattern of behavior following the attack in Virginia was very much, unfortunately, in line with that. And then the president’s speech in Arizona really showed that science based action and bringing people together to up lift us was not, in my view, on the agenda right now. So it was time to step away."
VELSHI: "Let’s talk about the role that science plays at the department of state, in particular where you were and in the government as a whole, because we’ve heard a lot of things anecdotally about the administration, sort of scrubbing some references to climate science and things like that. But what role does — how important is it that someone like you was in the department of state?"
KAMMEN: "Well, I think it’s very important to have the role of science well represented and across department of state, EPA, housing and urban development, all those agencies have really exceptional teams on infrastructure, on science, on communication, and those teams are definitely being weakened right now. And the discussions about potentially very large budget cuts in the future really drive good people away from those agencies. Now, I’m not an employee of the State Department. I am a private citizen working in conjunction from the outside. But I just don’t see from this administration the recognition of the huge value that science and technology has played in our country so far."