As I am on the road for a couple of weeks, this will be short.
It should be no news to anyone that the toll of chaos, corruption, and confusion that Donald Trump and Elon Musk are visiting on the nation as key elements of their wrecking the federal government with indiscriminate firings and undermining of the constitution could—no hyperbole—mean irreparable damage to democratic rule.
In light of all this destruction they’ve been delivering, all the careers they’re ruining, all the contempt they’re showing by shrugging off court decisions they don’t like, it may seem like small potatoes to complain about funding cuts in research. But it’s all of a piece.
Here’s Oliver Milman at The Guardian:
The US government is withdrawing grants and other support for research that even references the climate crisis, academics have said, amid Donald Trump’s blitzkrieg upon environmental regulations and clean-energy development. [...]
Researchers said work mentioning climate is being particularly targeted. One environmental scientist working in the western US who did not want to be named said their previously awarded grant from the Department of Transportation for climate-adaption research had been withdrawn, until they retitled it to remove the word “climate”. [...]
References to climate are being scrubbed elsewhere, too. Course materials at the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center at the University of Hawaii will delete mentions of “climate change”, leaked emails seen by the Guardian show. The alterations, at the behest of the Trump administration, affect about a dozen different course materials.
Donald Trump has, of course, long considered the climate crisis a “giant hoax,” specifically a “Chinese hoax.” But since real life disasters have been making outright denial too moronic to keep asserting, at least some members of his cabinet and ever-more elected Republicans say they believe climate change is happening. However, they still slip up. Especially when it comes to doing anything significant to address these changes.
Take, for instance, Chris Wright, the new, Koch-friendly Energy Secretary. He recently said: “Net zero 2050 is a sinister goal, it’s a terrible goal. This is not energy transition, this is lunacy.” This echoes his 2023 remark “there is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition either.” It’s tempting to call him a jackass or a fool, but he’s far worse than that. Because it’s obvious he knows better, but saying so would mean undermining one of his boss’s most expressed goals: more fossil fuel extraction.
It’s been clear that actual maliciousness was at work since 2012 when the North Carolina legislature decided that government planners could not consider potential sea level rise in their studies of new housing and other development. This was followed, among other things, by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s deciding that erasing that very word “climate” from government documents and websites would make the climate crisis itself disappear—at least from official conversation. Clearly, the current occupiers of the White House are of the same mind. We will all pay the price for that.
