Donald Trump has turned the Environmental Protection Agency into a climate change-denying warehouse at this point. Not only will the agency not be using the term “Climate change” in any official documents, but they have now decided to stop granting financial awards to scientists and organizations that wish to study the climate. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.
Transcript:
To say that Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency has been hostile towards the environment would be a very gross understatement, but what they have decided to do recently puts them really at odds with the actual thing that they’re supposed to be protecting, which is the environment.
Donald Trump’s EPA has decided that they’re going to stop issuing grants to organizations or individuals or universities that want to study the climate. They want to study climate change. They want to conduct climate research, and the Scott Pruitt led EPA is now telling them, “Guess what? We’re taking back your funding and we’re not going to issue any new grants to you to study all of the horrible things that are happening in the environment.”
So far, $2 million worth of grants that were supposed to go to public universities and nonprofit organizations have been rescinded by the Environmental Protection Agency because those grants were going to be used to study the effects of climate change.
I need to reiterate this fact right now, folks. Hurricane Harvey happened less than two weeks ago in the state of Texas. It intensified very rapidly, and scientists are telling us that that rapid intensification was due to climate change. The West, western part of the United States is on fire, sending [inaudible 00:01:28] of smoke as far as east as New York and Kentucky.
Hurricane Irma is about to make landfall in the state of Florida as one of the most destructive storms in the history of the United States. So yeah, let’s stop funding research into climate change, which is directly responsible for each one of those three catastrophes that we have had in the span of two weeks.
We as a country have made a lot of advances in the field of sciences. We have studied a lot of things. We’ve invented cures for things. We’ve invented vehicles and airplanes and all kinds of great things, and we did it because we had a federal government that allowed us to do those things.
We have a federal government that is at the forefront of funding of medical research in the world, and yet we still pay higher prescription drug prices than any other country on this planet. We have a federal government that subsidize renewable energy, but they subsidize fossil fuels even more so that those things could stay alive and try to snuff out renewable energy.
Our federal government at this point, instead of advancing us forward in the field of science, they’re taking us backwards. They’re literally taking money away from organizations that want to study the way the world is working now because they don’t want to know. That’s what’s at the heart of this. The Trump administration doesn’t want to know. They don’t want to see the truth.
They don’t want to accept the truth, and they don’t want anybody else out there to know it either because a dumb down American public is more likely to vote Republican than a public that understands the catastrophic threat that climate change poses to this country, and that’s what the EPA’s trying to do here. They want to keep burying their heads in their sands, not even realizing that the tide is starting to come up and cover those holes of their heads.
We don’t have a whole lot of time left to study climate change, folks. We are seeing the effects of it today. We saw them yesterday. We saw them two weeks ago. We’re about to see them again in a very big way in a few days. How many more disasters, how many more catastrophes, how many more deaths do we have to suffer before the Trump administration and the entire Republican Party understands that climate change is not a partisan issue? It doesn’t stop happening because we have a climate change denier in the White House.
Climate change is coming regardless of who’s in power, regardless of how much money corporations give to politicians, regardless of the banter and the bickering. It’s happening and it’s time for the Trump administration to admit that, so that we can move forward and jump back to the front lines of the scientific research that’s going to be absolutely necessary to help fend off the pending catastrophes.
