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Among Trump and Pruitt’s most egregious attacks on environmental protection has been their aggressive effort to undermine science, scientists, the scientific process, and scientific consensus. The attack on science is rooted in the same noxious soil as this administration’s attack on journalists: In a world of no fixed facts and no recognized, impartial arbiters of reality, there is no basis for disputing the Administration’s claims.
Without the revelations of science, we wouldn’t even know about the impacts of DDT. . . the hole in the ozone layer . . . chemical carcinogens . . . and the human-activity–driven climate crisis. Scientific information is necessary for the public to understand our impacts on the environment and demand action, and for federal agencies to design and defend policies to address environmental problems.
The Trump administration is waging an all-out war on science precisely because doing so is key to shutting down environmental regulation. It starts at the top, with Donald Trump’s absurd claim that the climate crisis is a Chinese hoax.
In that vein, Trump has nominated and appointed climate science deniers –- such as Scott Pruitt, Sam Clovis, and Kathleen Hartnett-White –- to lead his environmental and science policy, and Trump’s agency heads have hired additional countless paid hacks and deniers to take over positions throughout the federal government.
Pruitt has gone further by purging unbiased academic researchers from EPA’s scientific advisory boards, while installing those from industry. Across-the-board budget cuts include devastating cuts to research grants designed to further refine our understanding of climate science, among other topics.
Withdrawing the government’s science-based, peer-reviewed estimate of the economic impacts of climate change (and using rigged “interim” estimates) hides the facts and makes it more difficult to justify actions to reduce carbon pollution. And, acting on the principle that what the public doesn’t know won’t bother them, the Administration has scrubbed scientific information from public websites, buried completed studies, and barred agency researchers from participating in conferences. These efforts to bury and discredit science and fact are the tactics used by authoritarian regimes, not freedom-loving democracies.
While climate change has been a top target, the assault on science extends far beyond climate. The Trump budget proposed to cut funding for EPA’s research office in half, as well as to eliminate the IRIS program, which maintains a critical public inventory of the toxicity of individual chemicals. The Administration nominated Dr. Michael Dourson to head up EPA’s toxic chemicals program. Dourson is a notorious industry hack whose research undermined chemical safety standards and whose extreme conflicts of interest finally doomed his nomination. In the same vein, Pruitt’s science advisory board now includes members who dispute air pollution–related health effects, and even one who claims small amounts of pollution are good for children.
After one year of Trump and Pruitt, it’s clear that science, fact, and scientific integrity are under extreme threat, and that we must do everything we can to defend them.