On Monday, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report detailing what the effects of climate change have cost the federal government, putting the price tag at $350 billion over the last decade. That's without taking into account the costs of recent climate change-related disasters, such as the three hurricanes and the wildfires that have caused untold damage in the past two months.
Even as the costs mount up, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Trump appointee Scott Pruitt, seems convinced that climate change will go away if people stop talking about it. Pruitt, whose hostility towards the scientific realities of climate change seems to have been the reason President Trump picked him in the first place, has been clamping down on all manner of EPA-related communications that offend his delicate sensibilities. Specifically, he doesn't want EPA staff to admit the undisputed scientific truth that climate change is real, is affecting the environment in all kinds of ways, and is primarily caused by human activity.
Three recent reports showcase the extent of Pruitt's censorship efforts. The New York Times reported on Sunday that three EPA scientists were forced to cancel their scheduled appearances at a program hosted by the Narragansett Bay Estuary Program, in which the effects of climate change on the bay are to be discussed. Last week, Pruitt announced that he's banning any scientist who has received an EPA grant from advising the EPA. Friday, the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative reported that the EPA website that used to be titled “Climate and Energy Resources for State, Local, and Tribal Governments” has not only excised the word "climate" from its title, but that links to climate change resources have largely been deleted.
"We should not be reversing course on the ability of people to access information, for scientists to speak out, for scientists to share their knowledge and information with the public," Andrew Rosenberg, the director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Salon.
Rosenberg, a scientist who has spent decades studying fish and oceans, likened Pruitt's actions to the Soviet Union's censorship of scientists. He told a story of attending a Soviet scientist's presentation a couple decades ago and becoming frustrated because a political officer stepped in and refused to let the scientist answer audience questions about his research.
“We were only going to get the political answer," he said. “I feel like we’re returning to those days.”
Trying to justify his decision to bar EPA grantees from advising the EPA during his Heritage Foundation speech last Tuesday, Pruitt said that merely getting a grant "causes question on the independence and the veracity and the transparency of those recommendations that are coming our way."
For decades, there have been criticisms, backed by research, of industry-backed studies and scientists, who are more likely than other scientists to come up with research results that align with industry interests. So right-wing, pro-industry groups like Heritage Foundation have created a counter-strategy, Rosenberg said: Claiming "that people who have grants to work on a particular area from an agency are therefore conflicted because somehow they’re going to do the agency’s bidding."
It's a classic false equivalence strategy meant to muddy the waters by painting "both sides" as equally corrupt — or even to suggest that scientists who have received government grants are more corrupt than those funded by private industry. (After all, Pruitt's EPA treats industry representatives as legitimate sources of information, and arguably as the only legitimate sources.)
It's a gambit that falls apart upon even a cursory examination. If industry-supported scientists come up with studies that aid and abet industry profits, that's a straightforward story with an obvious motivation. But there's no reason to believe that the government wants climate change to be real, still less that scientists receiving government grants feel under pressure to support that idea. If anything, most scientists would almost certainly prefer to report that we're not facing a potentially catastrophic shift in global temperatures caused by human shortsightedness. Most government officials, regardless of party or ideology, surely wish we weren't facing a worldwide environmental crisis. Unfortunately, what we wish were true doesn't always fit the facts.
As the GAO report makes clear, the environmental and fiscal effects of climate change are already here, which means Pruitt's insistence on pretending otherwise is directly interfering with the EPA's ability to help Americans deal with the effects of climate change.
"If states and cities and tribes are going to deal with climate change and the effects of climate change," Eric Nost of the Environmental Governance & Data Initiative told Salon, "they need to have access to the resources that will allow them to do that."
It's exactly those resources that Nost and his colleagues have found that the EPA has now buried on its website, with no "news release or any indication of why these changes were made," he said.
Similarly, barring EPA scientists from speaking at the Narragansett Bay conference directly prevents them from fulfilling the agency's function, which is largely to help state and local governments deal with environmental problems in their own backyards.
“These scientists are looking at the ecology of the Narragansett Bay, and that ecology is being affected by climate change," Rosenberg said. “The fish are moving because the water temperature is changing, and in some cases, productivity patterns are changing.
"I could pretend that they are not moving," he added, "but I'm not stupid. And neither are the people working on forestry, wildlife, diseases in natural environment, oceanography, every field you could name."
In fact, concerns about the effects of climate change on local environments and the economy are why Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, a Republican, joined Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington, a Democrat, to ask for the GAO report.
“In Maine, our economy is inextricably linked to the environment," Collins said of her home state. "We are experiencing a real change in the sea life, which has serious implications for the livelihoods of many people across our state, including those who work in our iconic lobster industry.”
Pruitt seems to mistake being the head of the EPA for being a political apparatchik enforcing the party line, or a paranoid dictator cracking down on thought crimes. Not only is he using his power to suppress empirical facts that run counter to his magical right-wing thinking, Pruitt has also surrounded himself with 30 security guards, who protect him 24/7. Perhaps he's afraid Mother Earth herself will rise up and swallow him whole in revenge for his wanton disregard for the danger facing the only home our species has.
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