The unwillingness of the Trump administration
to base its programs and policies on relatively undisputed scientific facts has
concerned the scientific community as they watch the prevalence of decisions
based on “shoot from the hip” false statements and dramatically factually
incorrect minority-religious views that play well to Donald Trump’s base. The
views vary from the mythology that inoculations against truly dangerous
childhood diseases (that can spread to any age group) can cause autism, to the
notion that environmental toxins released from industrial processes allow
people to build up immunities against such chemicals or that mankind really is
not the main factor in global climate change (it’s just a normal process) and
there isn’t much we can do about it anyway.
Administrative agencies formed to protect the
public from pernicious environmental practices, predatory financial
institutions, dangers in our food and drug chain, degradation of public
education and erosion of lands held in public trust, to name but a few issues,
are now staffed with senior management that, in their prior incarnations, spent
years attacking these agencies, attempting to tear down their power to protect
the public. Trump has appointed officials dedicated to taking down their
appointed agencies, piece by piece. Notwithstanding a litany of scandals
surrounding many of his most senior cabinet and sub-cabinet level appointments,
these managers are doing a fine job of destroying what they were engaged to run
and protect.
We know how Trump has assaulted the
Environmental Protection Agency, denying or marginalizing the impact of climate
changes and allowing industrial polluters relatively free access to public
lands and waterways as dumping grounds for their toxic effluents. We are aware
of the declarations from the Department of the Interior, opening up land once
protected as national parks or coastal oceans to raw exploitation by industrial
interests with little or no concern for environmental values. Trump’s
Department of Energy is still promoting increased use of
greenhouse-gas-polluting fossil fuels, particularly super-toxic coal. Trump’s
pulling out of the Paris climate accord, one of only a handful of nations that
have done so, are the clearest evidence of his rather dramatic lack of concern
for long-term damage, perhaps irreparable, to our nation.
The failing environmental efforts, the
accelerating ravages of environmental and concomitant natural disasters, and
the dramatic impact on our quality of life have even led many families to
rethink the notion of bringing children into this world. The March 7th
FastCompany.com illustrates one of many of activists focused on this issue. “Shortly after Blythe Pepino decided
that she wanted to have children, she realized that the idea of bringing kids
into a world affected by climate change was making her
uncomfortable…
“Pepino, a 29-year-old musician, started bringing up the
idea with other women in environmental advocacy groups. ‘I said, ‘You’re around
my age: What are you thinking about kids?'’ she says. ‘I was able to ask that
question to a few people, and I was really surprised that there were a lot of
people who were saying, ‘‘I haven’t talked about this to anyone, but I’m really
questioning it.'’
“She started a Facebook group called #Birthstrike to make the idea public; within a few days, 90
women had joined. While some may be partly motivated by the fact that the
choice limits carbon emissions–one recent study found
that not having children is one of the most effective
ways to limit your personal carbon
footprint–the underlying motivation was wanting to avoid bringing a child into
a world where they may suffer. ‘Our main focus is the fact that we’re too
afraid really to bring a kid into that future, Pepino says. After Alexandra
Ocasio-Cortez recently suggested that some young Americans feel the same way,
a survey found
that 38% of 18- to 29-year-old Americans believe that a couple should
consider the risks of climate change before deciding to have kids. ‘I can’t
have a child unless I am seriously, seriously convinced that we are on a
different path,’ one member of Birthstrike, 22-year-old Alice Brown, says in a
video about the group.”
If that sentiment is impacting ordinary people making
ordinary life-decisions, you can readily believe that the scientific community
is equally aghast at this on-going castigation of proven science and
denigration of super-qualified and educated scientists as “out-of-touch elites”
that need to be ignored by policy-makers. One group of such well-qualified
scientists formed the Union of Concerned Scientists, a body dedicated to
presenting their concerns on the administration’s foolish anti-scientific path.
They’ve addressed generally the attack on science, but they have also addressed
specific issues with direct commentary.
On October 3rd, they wrote: “The United States has a complicated history
when it comes to science. The very birth of the nation is bound up with the
European Scientific Revolution and Age of Enlightenment, culminating in the
notion that reason should inform the self-government of free peoples. President
Jefferson wrote that science ‘is more important in a
republic than in any other government.’ Decades later, President Lincoln established the
National Academy of Sciences to ‘provide independent, objective advice to the
nation on matters related to science and technology.’
“But science has also been frequently misused by the
US government. And in the Trump era, independent scientific advice is
increasingly under threat. Such advice has been ignored and devalued
across federal agencies under this administration, including at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), where last year [2017], we might
well have had a ‘Chief Scientist’ with no scientific credentials at all, but for that nominee’s past
racist statements and unseemly ties to Russians during the Trump presidential
campaign.
“And it is at the USDA that we are observing
what follows after merely ignoring scientists. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny
Perdue is relocating, defunding, muzzling and otherwise belittling the standing
of his department’s scientists. In a move that stunned the staff and
administrators of the Department’s Economic Research Service (ERS) and National
Institute for Food and Agriculture (NIFA), the Secretary summarily announced,
without consultation, that these agencies would be banished from their DC
locations and that the ERS would be shuffled from its current position in
the organizational chart, where it logically reports to the Department’s
Chief Scientist, to within the Secretary’s office…
“Lest you believe that these are obscure
bureaucratic moves of little consequence, opposed only by self-interested
researchers and administrators who are threatened by what Perdue is
characterizing as a cost-saving, streamlining move, take stock that no informed observers accept or understand the Secretary’s
stated rationale, including professional scientific societies, farmer organizations, and even the members of Congress charged
with USDA oversight. In fact, over 1,100 scientists have stated their
resolute opposition to this move.
“But what is clear is that the agencies will become less
effective in fulfilling their mission to support independent scientific
research and analysis, that the agencies will be less appealing to scientists and economists, and that
ERS in particular will be subjected to political pressure to ensure its
analysis supports the Secretary’s agenda. In the words of Susan Offut, former ERS administrator
under both Republican and Democratic administrations, the Secretary is
“throwing away a world class research institution.” Bottom line, well-educated
and long-term government scientists are being shoved aside in the agencies
where they were once revered, with many retirements and resignations becoming
the norm. We are losing some of our most valuable federal employees.
This hostility to facts is staggering. Red
state administrators often join ranks with senior EPA officials to make sure
data that might contradict Trump’s inane assertions never see the light of day.
The March 6th Los Angeles Times provides one small example: “In the
weeks after Hurricane Harvey’s catastrophic 2017 sweep through the Houston area
— which led to chemical spills, fires, flooded storage tanks and damaged
industrial plants — rescue crews and residents complained of burning throats,
nausea and dizziness.
“Fifteen hundred miles west, in the high
desert city of Palmdale, NASA scientists were preparing to fly a DC-8, equipped
with the world’s most sophisticated air samplers over the hurricane zone to
monitor pollution levels… The mission never got off the ground. Both the state
of Texas and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency told the scientists to
stay away.
“According to emails obtained by The Times via
a public records request and interviews with dozens of scientists and officials
familiar with the situation, EPA and state officials argued that NASA’s data
would cause ‘confusion’ and might ‘overlap’ with their own analysis — which was
showing only a few, isolated spots of concern…
“An investigation from the Associated Press
and the Houston Chronicle showed there was widespread, unreported pollution and
environmental damage in the region. The team identified more than 100
Harvey-related toxic releases, most of which were never publicized or vastly
understated, including a cloud of hydrochloric acid that leaked from a damaged
pipeline and a gasoline spill from an oil terminal that formed ‘a vapor cloud.’
“Even if the DC-8 flight had not detected that
pollution, it is unsettling that NASA was prevented from even looking, Newman
said… ‘Science is about numbers,’ he said. ‘And if you’re unwilling to look,
you’re not doing science.’” There is no way that Americans are better off, now
and in the future, because of this concerted anti-science mantra that envelops
the GOP these days and clearly all things Trump. But it is the youngest in our
midst that will suffer the most as the world become increasingly inhospitable
and dangerous over time. What will they believe, years from now, about their
parents, grandparents and great grandparents who let this happen?
I’m Peter Dekom, and if you believe that you
vote does not count… it won’t!
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