The Trump regime (and some other people) are continuing their war against science in many ways. Many aspects of our lives and our society need solid, honest science in order to understand the world around us and devise smart public policies. But powerful interests (oil companies, various big businesses, rigid ideologues, religious bigots, and others) vigorously oppose honest science and want to bury the truth so they can impose their narrow, greedy, bigoted and ideological dogma upon us through public policy, even though they are violating human rights, hurting our health, hurting the environment and climate, and causing a wide variety of other kinds of damage.
The Trump regime is the worst offender nowadays, but certainly not the only one. We remember the tobacco lobby’s decades of denialism, which devised the strategies that the climate deniers are using now. Anti-LGBTQ people and anti-choice people distort and lie about the science about those issues. The list goes on and on.
Mother Jones compiled information about the worst B.S. about science in 2018. Read the article at https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2018/12/the-worst-anti-science-bs-of-2018/?utm_source=mj-newsletters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=econundrums-2019-01-07
In November 2018 a truly impressive group of more than 300 of the top climate scientists from 13 federal agencies produced a powerful report about the climate crisis, but Trump — who says he read only parts of it — totally rejected it because his “gut” told him to reject it.
After Scott Pruitt seriously hurt the Environmental Protection Agency, his successor Andrew Wheeler (a long-time coal company lobbyist) is further destroying the EPA’s scientific staff. On October 4, 2018, the Union of Concerned Scientists (www.ucsusa.org) wrote that Wheeler is “eliminating the EPA’s science advisor office and burying its staff deep within the agency. Days before Children’s Health Month kicked of this October, he threw the EPA’s Office of Children’s Health Protection into disarray by abruptly suspending its lead scientist. And just yesterday, we learned that top EPA scientists were excluded from discussions around a proposal to restrict the use of science in agency decisions.”
Scientists in the federal government have expressed concern about Trump’s negativity toward science. See information in these three charts, which show the dismal state of science under Trump: https://grist.org/article/3-charts-show-the-dismal-state-of-science-under-trump/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=daily
Fortunately, several scientists ran for public office in the November 2018 election, and some were elected. We need more!
