Trump Continues To Combat Climate Efforts On Many Fronts

Unsure whether climate change was messing up his hair 
here, but President Trump does not believe that climate
change exists, and is scrubbing away almost all the
work the federal government has done in combating
this threat to the world. 

 We saw how the Trump administration fired hundreds of NOAA workers, harming both weather forecasting and efforts to combat climate change.  

But that's not the only front in Trump's battle against climate change efforts. 

Federal websites have been scrubbed of climate information and data. Government scientists who still have jobs have been banned from collaborating on climate issues with experts in other nations. 

TAKING AWAY THE TOOLS

There is push back, of course. Environmental groups have sued the Department of Agriculture over the removal of climate information from its web sites. 

Per Courthouse News Service

"Filing suit in Manhattan federal court, the groups accused Trump's USDA of abruptly deleting climate-related policies, datasets and resources from its websites in violation of the Paperwork Reduction Act, which requires federal agencies to provide adequate advance public notice when substantially modifying or terminating 'significant information dissemination products.'"

The complaint states:

"In ordering staff to unpublish these webpages, USDA failed to consider how removing these resources would harm farmers, farm advisors, land managers, researchers and other members of the public, and thus failed to engage in reasoned decision-making, in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act."

That's just. Regular folks, the ones Trump falsely claims to champion, need this data to run farms and other enterprises. 

"By wiping critical climate resources from the USDA's website, the Trump administration has deliberately stripped farmers and ranchers of the vital tools they need to confront the escalating extreme weather threats like droughts and floods," Midwest director the Environmental Working Group Anne Schechinger wrote in a statement. 

MAJOR CLIMATE REPORT HOBBLED 

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a United Nations body that makes regular assessments about the state of the warming world. The last detailed assessment came out in 2023.

These reports try to synthesize the latest human understanding of climate change and what can be done to stop it. 

Per the Washington Post:

"Katherine Calvin, NASA's chief scientist and senior climate advisor, has been barred from traveling China to meet with colleagues on work related to the next major report from the IPCC......The next report is expected in 2029, and Calvin is leading one of the three major IPCC working groups.

NASA also terminated its contract with a U.S.-based group of scientists and staff who were working closely with Calvin to coordinate global efforts to craft the next assessment, essentially leaving one-third of the IPCCs next report adrift, with no staff assigned to pull it together."

Par for the course, Trump administration won't comment about this to the media, and won't clarify what they're doing, and so far won't tell any IPCC staff what the status of U.S. employees is regarding the report and work on climate change. 

REGULATIONS DISAPPEARING

A key Environmental Protection Agency scientific finding from a decade and a half ago supports the agency's efforts to combat climate change. Apparently, that scientific finding - factual as it is - does not work for the Trump administration. 

Because, I'm sure they're thinking, 'facts are stupid, especially when they get away with our money grubbing grifting political agenda. 

Per the Washington Post:

"The 2009 'endangerment finding' cleared the way for regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act by concluding that the planet-warming gases pose a threat to public health and welfare. The Obama and Biden administrations used that determination to set strict limits on emissions from cars and power plants."

WaPo says EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has been urging the White House to get rid of that scientific finding, and I'm sure Trump will agree with Zeldin on that point. 

With the science removed and replaced by pseudo-science, to put it mildly, the nation continues to abandon climate change efforts just when they were starting to have an effect.  

Like I noted when Trump and his at-least-for-now bosom buddy Elon Musk ditched all those NOAA and FEMA workers, Trump and his oligarchs don't really care how many people die in climate-related disasters or other misfortunes created by their stupidity and selfishness.

As we've seen with the health care industry, it's all about making more billions for the existing billionaires and oligarchs. Needless deaths are - to them anyway - the cost of doing business.