Part of a crackdown
More on the silencing of the EPA:
The Trump administration is examining the website of the Environmental Protection Agency to determine which information will remain, underscoring concerns that climate change and other scientific data might be removed.
EPA employees have also been instructed not to release press releases, publish blog posts or post anything on social media. It’s part of a crackdown by the new administration that seems to be especially felt at the EPA and the Interior Department, leaving some employees “terrified.”
EPA spokesperson Doug Erickson said the objective of the website review is to have an agency page that reflects the new administration’s policies.
But the science is what it is, regardless of policies.
Asked if climate change data on the EPA site would be removed because it doesn’t reflect the ideas of the new administration, Erickson responded, “you can speculate that if you want but I didn’t say that. I am only saying we are reviewing the website to make sure material on it reflects the new administration.”
Trump was outspoken during the campaign about wanting to curb environmental regulations that he said were hurting businesses. The President has also been a known climate change denier, tweeting in 2012 that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.”
Which is one of those “alternative facts,” aka lies that Trump pulls out of his ass. The EPA website should not be reflecting Trump’s lies and delusions.
Career staffers at the Interior Department, which includes the Park Service, are “terrified” that their day-to-day operations could run afoul of the Trump administration’s desires, a source with knowledge of the situation inside the government agency tells CNN.
Tensions are even higher after Friday’s tweets, the source says, leaving many at the department feeling like they have to be extra careful as they go about their daily routines because it is unclear what could set off the White House or Trump’s political appointees.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said reports of gag orders to the EPA are “just appalling” and that the Trump administration seems “to be happy to be in a fact-free zone.”
Speaking to reporters in the Capitol Wednesday, Pelosi also addressed reports of efforts to take down climate change material on the EPA website, calling such activity a “deterioration of intellectual sources to prevent information to flow.”
Jeremy Symons, a former career employee at the EPA who worked through the transition between President Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, said this sort of information lock down is “unprecedented.”
Welcome to the New Age of Ignorance.
Which means that those who are saying, cool it, this is just what all incoming presidents do are just blowing smoke up our skirts.
I remember the Bush administration coming in. It was a bad time, but nothing like this. No total shut out of pertinent information.
The real effect it will have is to make America lose our standing scientifically. The rest of the world isn’t going to put off doing science, waiting for us to get our act together so that we can keep up. No, they are going to forge ahead, and we will find ourselves scientifically damaged and brain dead.
Indeed; nearly three quarters of a century of economic, scientific, and political dominance is going up in a puff of smoke.
We’re gonna look like France after the war… maybe even GB…
BKiSA @2, Indeed… except that after the war France and the UK had good reason to be broken, bankrupt, dysfunctional and to have lost their previous status. The US has done this too itself, literally eating itself from within at the height of it’s power. I weep for you all. I weep for all of us.
iknklast@1:
This is exactly it. Objective reality is not going to change, and other countries will be happy to step in to fill the void that the USA leaves behind as we exit the science stage. Moreover, scientists aren’t going to sit on their thumbs while this happens—they will leave to go where the science IS happening. We’re going to witness an incredible brain drain and dumbing-down, and there is no corrective mechanism. This is a positive feedback loop.
eppur si muove
Despite what the traitor in chief says
I was actually working on an EPA project at the time of the First Dubya administration. As he took over, there was nervousness, there was knowledge that there would be changes (though most of the people in our office voted for him, against their own jobs, and threatened all of us who were not suitably Dubya-centric with all sorts of awful repercussions). Nonetheless, there was no freeze, no shut down, no immediate scrubbing of all records, no stopping of all science. Yes, Dubya eventually brought the agency into line with his view, and manipulated the message, but stuff kept happening in spite of him. This…this is orders of magnitude different.
Iknklast, @6
I’m amazed at how many people vote for policies that are inimical to their personal and class interests. It’s one of the great mysteries of representative democracy.
Well, RJW, if you think the single most important issues are illegalizing abortion and removing welfare benefits from people of color, you will find yourself voting against middle class interests as well, because those are part of a package.
And so many people who tell me, without any trace of irony, that they have received absolutely nothing from the government, even while sitting in a public school classroom getting an education the government paid the lion’s share on, or working in a government job…or, for that matter, turning on lights, driving on roads, and eating subsidized food.
In short, it’s ignorance of how things work, and a huge amount of self-satisfied conviction that they have worked for everything they got, while everyone else took from the government.
RJW, I’ve never liked that argument. I think that most people don’t see voting as a crude exercise in “what’s in it for me?” People who see voting in those terms are most likely not going to bother to vote at all — they’ll weigh the even mild inconvenience and time involved against the minute probability that their vote will affect the outcome.
And I think that’s the wrong way to view it, too. Most of us don’t think it’s extraordinary when wealthy liberals vote for a candidate who will act against their pecuniary self-interest; it’s not considered remarkable that they would vote based on their moral principles instead. Why should the wealthy be the only ones who vote their conscience?
I think the problem is that too many working class people see Republicans as upholding their moral values. I don’t mean so-called “values voters” for whom abortion or gay marriage is a dispositive issue; I mean economic values like “government handouts are bad.”
And that view is no doubt influenced heavily by the phenomenon that iknklast identifies @8, by which “my mother’s Social Security benefits, and that time I was on unemployment, and my daughter’s subsidized college loan aren’t government handouts, they’re earned,” while “those people” are getting handouts.
Screechy Monkey,
iknklast@8 has already provided a very good illustration of the point I was making. My argument was not that citizens don’t vote on broader ideological or altruistic principles but that they either don’t understand, or don’t bother to seriously consider the implications of the policies that politicians present. I can’t think of any better examples than Trump’s economic ideas, eventually the US working class will pay the price, not the plutocracy. The notion that Mexico should finance the Wall is patently hare-brained and so counter productive to US interests, it’s incredible that American voters would support it.