The US under Trump: Alone in its climate denial

The administration has dismantled climate research, firing some of the nation’s top scientists, and gutted efforts to chart how fast greenhouse gases are building up in the atmosphere and what that means for the economy, employment, agriculture, health, and other aspects of American society. The government will no longer track major sources of greenhouse gases, data that has been used to measure the scale and identify sources of the problem for the past 15 years.

“We’re not doing that climate change, you know, crud, anymore,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told Fox Business on May 8.

By getting rid of data, the administration is trying to halt the national discussion about how to deal with global warming, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The notion of there being any shared factual reality just seems to be completely out the window,” he said.

At the same time, through cuts to the National Weather Service and by denying disaster relief through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the administration has weakened the country’s ability to prepare for and recover from hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, and other extreme weather that is being made worse by climate change.

The president is also moving to loosen restrictions on air pollution, which experts say will lead to more planet warming emissions, and to overturn the government’s legal authority to regulate those gases.

Taken together, these moves are poised to leave the world’s biggest economy less informed, less prepared and, over time, more polluted.

Trump dismisses the threats posed by climate change, suggesting that rising seas would create more “oceanfront property.” He blames “climate lunatics” for environmental regulations that he says have been a drag on the US economy.

On his first day in office, Trump declared a national energy emergency, something that experts dispute because the United States is producing more oil than any country in history and is the world’s largest exporter of natural gas. Trump has cited the emergency as justification for speeding approvals for oil, gas, and coal projects and expanding logging in national forests.

Some agree that reforms to the nation’s environmental regulations were overdue. Complex and lengthy processes to get permits to build pipelines, transmission lines, and drilling projects have also meant significant delays for wind farms, solar projects, and other clean energy, said Robert Stavins, a professor of energy and economic development at Harvard University.

“Permitting as whole in the United States is just a mess,” he said.

But the president has gone much further than just trying to speed up permits. He’s made the US government a global outlier in its denial of science.

“It’s as if we’re in the Dark Ages,” said Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director with the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

At the most basic level, the Trump administration is dismantling the government’s ability to monitor a rapidly changing climate.

Last month, the Trump administration dismissed hundreds of scientists and experts who had been working on the National Climate Assessment, a report mandated by Congress that details how global warming is affecting specific regions across the country.

In recent weeks, more than 500 people have left the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the government’s premier agency for climate and weather science. That has led the National Weather Service, an agency within NOAA, to warn of “degraded operations.”

NOAA also stopped monthly briefing calls on climate change, and the president’s proposed budget would eliminate funding for the agency’s weather and climate research. The administration has purged the phrases “climate crisis” and “climate science” from government websites.

Trump is also reducing the federal government’s response to disasters, a function that dates to 1803.

Instead, the White House is trying to shift responsibility to the states. The administration has canceled a FEMA program aimed at making communities more resilient before disasters hit, calling it “wasteful and ineffective.” And it said FEMA staffers would no longer go door to door to help survivors after a catastrophe.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the National Security Council said that when disasters strike, states must have “an appetite to own the problem.”

As human-caused global warming increases, disasters are becoming more frequent, destructive and expensive. The agency said last week that it would no longer tally and publicly report the costs of extreme weather.

Daniel Kaniewski, who served as FEMA’s acting deputy administrator during the first Trump administration, said it made little sense to cut programs that help harden communities against extreme weather.

“The longer we go without these programs, the more risk will accrue to these communities and the nation,” said Kaniewski, who is now a managing director at Marsh McLennan, an insurance broker and risk adviser. “And soon enough, we’ll all bear the consequences.”

The Environmental Protection Agency, which has been the government’s lead agency in terms of measuring and controlling greenhouse gas emissions, is being overhauled to end those functions. The administration is shredding the EPA’s staff and budget and wants to revoke its two most powerful climate regulations: limits on pollution from tailpipes and smokestacks.

Trump has said that relaxing limits on pollution from automobiles wouldn’t “mean a damn bit of difference to the environment.”

But transportation is the largest single source of greenhouse gases generated by the United States, and its pollution is linked to asthma, heart disease, other health problems, and premature deaths.

“Rolling back regulations will have a catastrophic effect on health in America,” said Harold Wimmer, CEO of the American Lung Association.

The president’s proposed budget calls for eliminating funding for “the Green New Scam,” including $15 billion in cuts at the Energy Department for clean energy projects and $80 million at the Interior Department for offshore wind and other renewable energy. The administration has frozen approvals for new offshore wind farms and imposed tariffs that would raise costs for renewable energy companies. Republicans in Congress want to repeal billions of dollars in tax incentives for production and sales of solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, and other clean energy technologies.

Some Republicans are trying to preserve the tax credits, saying that they have helped drive investment in manufacturing.

The American retreat from climate action has made the United States a global outlier. Nearly every other government has recognized that a hotter planet poses a profound threat to humans and ecosystems. Not the Trump administration, which made the United States the only nation to formally withdraw from the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit planetary warming.

“Here we see a government that is taking a hatchet to the scientific enterprise,” Cleetus said. “It’s the kind of destruction that will have implications for a while to come.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.