This morning, just a few blocks from Public Justice’s Washington, D.C. offices, Greenpeace protesters unfurled a banner – RESIST – atop a construction crane. It has captured a lot of attention at a time when many are thinking about how to go about making progress under this new, and often challenging, political reality.
Now, there may be some areas where our mission will align with the new Administration . . . if (and this is a big “if”) President Trump governs the way he promised when he was merely Candidate Trump. For example, if the President keeps his many promises to side with the little guy against bank lobbyists, we will have a lot of common ground to work together. (A major part of our work is fighting against predatory lending.)
But there are already several areas where we have no choice but to strongly resist the Administration, and in particular we will fight the Administration’s attempts to claim “alternative facts” as the truth when it comes to climate change.
Today, the new White House team is taking a deeply troubling step to hide the truth by shuttering the EPA’s climate change website and, by extension, deleting volumes of important scientific information. And it is part of a very troubling pattern: President Trump once famously proclaimed that climate change was an idea "created by and for the Chinese." And, in an all-out assault on science and reality, he has nominated Scott Pruitt – a man so extreme that we broke 35 years of silence on cabinet nominees to oppose his nomination – to head the Environmental Protection Agency.
As a public interest law firm that brings a variety of cutting edge lawsuits that help fight the pollution that contributes to climate change, these issues are central to our mission.
The old saw that “the truth hurts sometimes” will prove especially true if we ignore the truth about the science on this issue. As gigantic chunks of ice larger than several states are headed towards “calving” (i.e., breaking away) from Antarctica, as temperatures at the North Pole are frequently 30 and 40 degrees above normal, the actual world is changing, and pretending it isn’t happening is a recipe for disaster.
So until today, the EPA site has been filled with useful and important information on climate change. But today, the new Administration is suppressing the truth and trying to erase three recent, and important, publications that the oil industry and polluters definitely don’t want the public to see.
The Administration can change the EPA’s website, but it can’t un-write the truth that was up there as of this morning. And we think responsible Americans who care about science and our planet can handle the truth. So here are the 3 recent, comprehensive EPA reports on climate change that the new Administration is trying to make go away:
EPA Climate Change FAQs
The Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States: A Scientific Assessment
Climate Change Indicators in the United States: 2016, Fourth Edition
These reports contain important information on the causes and effects of climate change, along with the scientific data to back them up. We think they’re too valuable to go missing, so we’ve given them a permanent home on the Public Justice website.
Because now is the time – when some insist that big is small, cloudy is sunny and fiction is reality – to step up, speak out and RESIST.
Update: We’ve also archived a series of climate change fact sheets that are no longer on the EPA website: How Will Climate Change Affect My Health?, Climate Change and the Health of Children, Climate Change, Health and Environmental Justice, Climate Change and The Health of Indigenous Populations, Climate Change and the Health of Occupational Groups, Climate Change and the Health of Older Adults, Climate Change and the Health of People with Disabilities, Climate Change and the Health of People with Existing Medical Conditions, and Climate Change and the Health of Pregnant Women.