This week, Myron Ebell, the former head of President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition team, said he expects the agency to see significant cuts in its budget and workforce-- by up to at least half to begin with.
In response to reporting this morning from Reuters indicating that "U.S. President Donald Trump's administration has instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to remove the climate change page from its website" Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune released the following statement.
WASHINGTON, DC - Tomorrow, Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order to begin the process of repealing several Obama-era actions tackling the climate crisis and protecting clean air and water, including steps to begin the process of dismantling the Clean Power Plan, roll back Oil and Gas New Source Performance Standards, rescind NEPA guidance that directs agencies to account for the climate crisis, and end efforts to reform the broken federal coal leasing program.
Today, the Badlands National Park twitter account starting posting facts about climate change -- only for those tweets to be swiftly deleted, while others from the day remain. Its part of a disturbing trend that began with Donald Trump almost exclusively appointing climate deniers to his administration and continued when all references to climate change (& LGBT protections, protections for the disabled, and civil rights) were deleted from the White House website and a gag order was imposed on the EPA and other agencies this week.
White House Homeland Security Advisory Tom Bossert, when pressed on the increased severity and frequency of Hurricanes by a White House reporter, just told the American people that “We continue to take the climate change seriously, not the cause of it, but the things that we observe.” This statement stands in stark contrasts to the actual actions taken by this administration, including repeated efforts to defund climate change research, censorship of the term “climate change” throughout the federal government, the appointment of climate deniers to the highest posts in the Administration, and the elimination of President Obama’s flood risk rule just weeks before Hurricane Harvey hit.
Late yesterday, President Trump announced his nomination of Bill Wehrum, a lobbyist and former George W. Bush-era EPA official, to lead the EPA's air and radiation office. Wehrum was nominated for this position once before, in 2006, and rejected by the Senate.
In the wake of Hurricane Harvey’s devastation along the Gulf Coast and Hurricane Irma’s havoc in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean and pending threats in Florida, Scott Pruitt has eliminated the EPA’s climate adaptation office, according to a spokesperson and as reported by Politico Pro.
Donald Trump’s tax speech showed that he continues to deceive the public about his own environmental policies when he claimed, in contrast to everything he has done in office, that he wants “crystal clean air and water.”