When You're Friends With Phil Berger, You Get the Cushy Job

Jeffrey Warren

Late in the 2016 regular session of the North Carolina General Assembly, the Republican honorables created out of thin air a new "center" for study at UNC-Chapel Hill, the "UNC Policy Collaboratory," a fancy name for something that looked like an official way to obstruct environmental policy reform in the state.

The GA established the "collaboratory" without faculty input, and many observers assumed the new center was being established to give Republican Senate leader Phil Berger's "science advisor" (a guy named Jeffrey Warren) a new job and a perch from which to stand guard over actual science and any resulting academic meddling in environmental policy.

Well, sure enough, news comes this morning that Jeffrey Warren has been named Research Director at the collaboratory. This is the guy, in his former job as Berger Whisperer, who was apparently the brains behind many pieces of bad environmental legislation, including the law that stops local governments from regulating the fracking industry and the law that restricts how scientists measure sea-level rise.

Warren's salary at the collaboratory will be $175,000 per annum. Obstructing science has its rewards.