Trump administration cuts back on information related to climate change

When the Trump administration declared two weeks ago that it would largely disregard the economic cost of climate change as it sets policies and regulations, it was just the latest step in a multipronged effort to erase global warming from the American agenda.

But President Trump is doing more than just turning a blind eye to the fact that the planet is growing hotter. He is weakening the country’s capacity to understand global warming and to prepare for its consequences.

The administration has dismantled climate research, firing some of the nation’s top scientists, and gutted efforts to chart how fast greenhouse gases are building up in the atmosphere and what that means for the economy, employment, agriculture, health and other aspects of American society. The government will no longer track major sources of greenhouse gases, data that has been used to measure the scale and identify sources of the problem for the past 15 years.

“We’re not doing that climate change, you know, crud, anymore,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told Fox Business on May 8.

By getting rid of data, the administration is trying to halt the national discussion about how to deal with global warming, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The notion of there being any shared factual reality just seems to be completely out the window,” he said.

At the same time, through cuts to the National Weather Service and by denying disaster relief through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the administration has weakened the country’s ability to prepare for and recover from hurricanes, wildfires, droughts and other extreme weather that is being made worse by climate change.

The president is also moving to loosen restrictions on air pollution, which experts say will lead to more planet warming emissions, and to overturn the government’s legal authority to regulate those gases.

Taken together, these moves are poised to leave the world’s biggest economy less informed, less prepared and, over time, more polluted.

Mr. Trump dismisses the threats posed by climate change, suggesting that rising seas would create more “oceanfront property.” He blames “climate lunatics” for environmental regulations that he says have been a drag on the U.S. economy.

On his first day in office, Mr. Trump declared a national energy emergency, something that experts dispute because the United States is producing more oil than any country in history and is the world’s largest exporter of natural gas. Mr. Trump has cited the emergency as justification for speeding approvals for oil, gas and coal projects and expanding logging in national forests. ...

But the president has gone much further than just trying to speed up permits. He’s made the American government a global outlier in its denial of science.

“It’s as if we’re in the Dark Ages,” said Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director with the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

...