What Does Ivanka Trump Know About Climate Science?
Climate change is one of the most important issues facing literally every person on the planet, yet it’s almost impossible to get Republicans to accept the facts that nearly every climate scientist agrees on. Per NASA, “97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree: Climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities.”
That said, here are five things that President Trump and his administration are doing about climate change that should alarm you.
1. President Trump has just appointed Ivanka Trump, who is an Assistant to the President, to “head a review of US climate change policy.” The First Daughter has zero background in climate science. The best you can say is that she has a bachelor’s in economics. This comes ahead of the “United Nations climate change meetings next week in Bonn, Germany next week,” the Times of Israel reports (via Joe.My.God.).Â
2. For assistance, Ivanka Trump will reach out to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, a noted climate change denier who has sued the Environmental Protection Agency – which he would prefer to dismantle – 14 times.
3. Pruitt, who does not subscribe to any current tenet of climate science, just “dismissed at least five members of a major scientific review board,” The New York Times reports. The members are described as “academic scientists.”
4. Pruitt will be considering replacing them with lobbyists from the very industries the EPA was created to regulate.
5. Meanwhile, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has suspended “more than 200 advisory panels,” the Washington Post reports.Â
The review will effectively freeze the work of the Bureau of Land Management’s 38 resource advisory councils, along with other panels focused on a sweep of issues, from one assessing the threat of invasive species to the science technical advisory panel for Alaska’s North Slope.
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Image by usbotschaftberlin via FlickrÂ