The Trump Administration’s Attack on Science

Well let’s see where things stand…

  1. President Elect Trumps transition team requested the Department of Energy name staffers who worked on climate change programs. Thankfully they refused.
  2. A Trump team member just compared climate science to the flat-Earth theory
  3. The House Science, Space, and Technology Committee tweeted a link to a widely debunked Breitbart article questioning warming due to climate change
  4. Climate denier James Delingpole wrote an article for Breitbart recently, titled “When You Hear A Scientist Talk About ‘Peer Review’ You Should Reach For Your Browning” – a sentence taken almost word for word from the Nazi play “Schlageter”.  Steve Bannon, Trumps named Chief Strategist, served as Breitbart’s former executive chair (note DSN policy is not to link to websites that promote anti-science, sexist, or racist agendas)
  5. Myron Ebell, who heads the transition team at the Environmental Protection Agency, is the leader of the Cooler Heads Coalition, an anti-climate-science group,
  6. Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma’s attorney general, was named the head of the E.P.A. “Pruitt actively opposed to the efforts of the E.P.A. to regulate the environment and in a recent piece for National Review…Pruitt denied the veracity of climate science…also led the effort among Republican attorney generals tin resisting the Clean Air Act.” (note DSN policy is not to link to websites that promote anti-science, sexist, or racist agendas)
  7. Trump tapped another climate change denier for Secretary of Interior

Trump’s own words indicate he actively denies the overwhelming evidence for climate change.

In an precedented move, current Interior Secretary Sally Jewell stated researchers must “fight disinformation” about science during the Trump administration.  She advocate to “Make your voices heard and make them relevant to the people you are talking to.” Secretary Jewell made these statement to audience of one of largest gatherings of scientists in the world, the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco

“I encourage people to speak up and to talk about the importance of scientific integrity, and if they see that being undermined to say something about it”

 

A mentor once told me that you cannot complain about losing a fight if you never fought.