No talking climate change to Zuckerberg, White House tells scientist

Interior Department doesn't want to talk to the Facebook founder about climate change

Published July 23, 2017 3:29PM (EDT)

  (AP/Ben Margot)
(AP/Ben Margot)

This piece originally appeared on Grist.

As part of his “not running for president” cross-country tour, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a trip to Montana’s rapidly melting Glacier National Park last weekend.

But a few days before his visit, according to a report in Mic, the Interior Department canceled his plans to chat climate change with Daniel Fagre, a research ecologist and climate specialist at the United States Geological Survey.

“I literally was told I would no longer be participating,” Fagre told the Washington Post, adding that he received little explanation for the cancellation. The move prompted speculation that the Interior Department wanted to avoid drawing attention to *whispers* climate change.

If that was the intention, Zuckerberg wasn’t playing along. “The impact of climate change is very clear at Glacier,” he wrote on his Facebook page alongside photos from his visit. “In the last hundred years, the average global temperature has risen 1.5 degrees. But in the high elevations of Montana where Glacier is the temperature is warming at three times the global average — enough to melt glaciers.”

Glacier is not the only national park facing an identity crisis over climate change. But is Zuckerberg facing an identity crisis over trying to appear human? TBD.


By Kate Yoder

Kate Yoder is a contributing writer from Grist.org.

MORE FROM Kate Yoder


Related Topics ------------------------------------------

Campaign 2020 Climate Change Facebook Glacier National Park Grist Mark Zuckerberg Montana Sustainability