While Americans were distracted by belligerent threats against China and Iran made at the United Nations, Donald Trump’s continued support for appointing an accused sexual predator to the United States Supreme Court, and another “great” federal response to a climate change augmented natural disaster, Trump officials at the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) bureaucratically moved to cancel science. Science, which brought the world previously undreamed of medical and technological during the past century, will definitely be missed.
Trump, who calls global warming a hoax perpetrated by China to weaken the U.S. economy, has already pulled the United States out of the Paris agreement on climate change. He ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to drop the Obama Clean Power Plan designed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants and the Interior Department to stop enforcing rules regulating natural gas wells that spout methane into the atmosphere. Scientists have been dismissed from the EPA’s advisory boards and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration dissolved its climate advisory committee.
The EPA now plans to dissolve its Office of Science Advisor, which counsels the EPA administrator on scientific research, an office that is no longer necessary now that the Trump administration has canceled science. A spokesperson for the agency explained that canceling science would “eliminate redundancies.” In addition, the EPA, without explanation, placed the head of its Office of Children’s Health on administrative leave. This office had regularly pushed for tighter regulations on pollution because of its impact on the health of children. The move to reorganize the EPA is headed by its acting administrator, a former coal industry lobbyist.
Eliminating the Office of Science Advisor and the head of its Office of Children’s Health will make it easier for the Trump administration to further reduce environmental regulations on industry. Among other things, it wants to end regulations that restrict mercury emissions by coal-burning power plants. In order to justify these changes, the Trump administration is also reinventing math. This will allow it to ignore the life and health benefits of environmental regulations. The 2011 mercury rule was based on decades of scientific research. It forced utility companies to install clean-air technology that resulted in mercury pollution decreasing by almost 70%. For those unfamiliar with mercury poisoning, it damages the brain and lungs and is especially dangerous to fetal health.
According to the EPA website, on a page that will probably soon be deleted, mercury is defined as a neurotoxin and the effects of mercury exposure can be very severe. Fetuses in the womb are exposed to mercury when pregnant women eat fish and shellfish that contain “methylmercury.” Pre-natal exposure to methylmercury can negatively impact on a child’s cognitive and language development, ability to focus, and their fine motor and visual spatial skills.
Trump’s canceling of science will definitely not make the United States great again!
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