Looks like we're gonna need more Solyndras than we previously thought.
E&E News (1/6/21) reports: "President-elect Joe Biden's transition team says the Trump administration has done more damage than anticipated to the government's ability to address climate change. Potentially lowering expectations for the incoming president's early climate efforts, Biden officials say their agency review teams have found deeper budget cuts, wider staff losses and more systematic elimination of climate programs and research than they realized. Some climate moves can't happen until Biden officials remedy those deficiencies, a senior transition official said, because 'those have been very carefully directed budget cuts to the very parts of the [EPA] that are going to be necessary to get rid of [Trump's] outrageous rollbacks.' For instance, the official said, EPA's research laboratories have been hollowed out, and its science advisory boards have been depopulated. At the operational level, each of Trump's rollbacks has shuffled the staff and funding that had been in place to carry out regulations. The EPA workforce has shrunk by more than 600 people since the beginning of Trump's term, another source familiar with the agency review process said. That's on top of the agency's moves to restrict the kinds of public health research that EPA can use for regulations, and its watering down of the social cost of carbon, the government's metric for analyzing the benefits of emissions cuts."
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