Latest in Trump/Pence Regime’s Relentless Assaults on Environment:
Erasing Mention of Climate Change from Government Websites

October 30, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Evidence is all around us of the catastrophic direction the world is heading in because of climate change: the series of devastating hurricanes hitting the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, with warming seawater and air a major factor... record-setting global temperatures year after year... rising numbers of “climate refugees” around the world from poor countries, forced out of their homes because of drought and other weather-related hardships... accelerated melting of glaciers and shrinking of Arctic ice... and much more. In the face of this, the Trump/Pence regime is plowing ahead with its relentless, predatory assaults on the environment—putting its foot down on the gas pedal of the accelerating environmental emergency.

One of its latest moves: erasing all mention of “climate change” from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) website, which previously included crucial information about climate change, including decades of research and data about emissions of carbon gases and other greenhouse gases that are key drivers of global warming. The EPA took down those pages in April, with a message saying they were being updated to reflect the Trump/Pence regime’s “new priorities.” According to Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, a group that monitors federal sites for climate change content, when those pages went back up online, “Large portions of climate resources that were formerly found on the previous website have not been returned, and thus have ultimately been removed from the current EPA website.”

A recently published public review draft of EPA’s four-year “strategic plan” also has no mention of “climate change” nor any references to “carbon dioxide” or “greenhouse gas emissions.”

The head of the EPA, Scott Pruitt, is one of the many climate change deniers that the regime is chock-full of—anti-science lunatics who deny, contrary to the overwhelming consensus among scientists worldwide, that climate change poses a threat to human and other life on earth, or that it is caused by the burning of fossil fuels and other human activity. In early October, Pruitt announced that the EPA will move to end the Clean Power Plan, a set of regulations that had put some restrictions on emissions of carbon dioxide—one of the main greenhouse gases.

Several other recent outrageous Trump/Pence moves relating to the environment:

• As part of the moves to muzzle government scientists, in late October, the EPA cancelled the scheduled appearance of three of its scientists at an environmental conference in Rhode Island. The scientists had written a report on the effect of climate change on air/water temperatures and sea level in Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay and were going to talk on the subject at the conference.
• Trump is set to nominate yet another climate denier—Kathleen Hartnett White, a former top aide to former Texas governor Rick Perry, now Trump’s energy secretary—to a key post, as chair of the Council on Environmental Quality. White is a senior fellow at a right-wing think tank in Texas heavily backed by huge fossil fuel corporations; one policy paper she authored claimed there was a “moral case” for the continued burning of fossil fuels.
• Trump announced on October 27 that he was accepting the recommendations of his interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, to shrink two national monuments in Utah, opening up huge amounts of public land to more gas drilling and other for-profit uses—and signaling more such turnovers of public lands to come.

For more on the Trump/Pence regime’s war on the environment, see the poster from Refuse Fascism on what the regime has done and is doing—part of the series of seven hard-hitting posters indicting the crimes of the regime.

Climate change and the global environmental emergency did not begin with the rise of Trump and Pence to power. Under this system of capitalism-imperialism, nothing can be done unless, ultimately, there is profit. Different blocs of capitalists compete against each other, driven by the ruthless commandment of “expand or die”—compelling them to rapaciously despoil the environment without regard for consequences for humanity and all species of life. And the U.S. has done more harm to the environment than any other country on Earth. An actual revolution is needed to uproot and sweep away this predatory system and bring into being a radically new and much better system, which will have a completely different approach to the environment.

But it’s also a fact that the Trump/Pence regime is an extreme concentration of this system—and has already made the danger of climate change much worse just in the past few months. They must be driven out before they can do even greater harm to the environment and life on this planet.

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