More than two months ago, Trump’s Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke raised his very special flag to show that a study already underway on the health effects of mountaintop removal mining was being put into the freezer. The justification was that it was a money saving effort, though the $1 million cost of the study hardly seemed enough to make halting it a priority. And here’s the funny thing ...
At the time, Interior officials downplayed the move as simply part of a broader review of all funded projects that cost more than $100,000. But the academies later revealed that the mountaintop removal study was the only one of the Interior-funded academies projects that had been blocked for a financial review.
But then, Donald Trump did use one of his very first executive orders expressly to make mountaintop removal mining easier by removing barriers to dumping coal waste into streams and rivers. Producing a study to show that the boss’s campaign promises were killing children might be a little inconvenient ...
[Democratic Representative Raúl] Grijalva added, “It increasingly appears that DOI ended the study because of fears that it would conclusively show that mountaintop removal coal mining is a serious health threat to the health of people living in Appalachia. Cutting off funding for a scientific study because it will likely produce uncomfortable results for powerful administration allies is unconscionable, especially when these political games are affecting public health.”
Halting this study directly puts Americans at risk, simply so mining companies in Appalachia can use a technique that’s cheaper—cheaper because it employs fewer people than alternatives.
But it’s not the only place where Trump is deliberately keeping scientific truths that Americans paid for from reaching the public.
The Environmental Protection Agency has canceled the speaking appearance of three agency scientists who were scheduled to discuss climate change at a conference on Monday in Rhode Island, according to the agency and several people involved.
This isn’t a request for new research. These are EPA scientists being muzzled to keep them from revealing the information they already know—and the powers that be are not even trying to explain it.
John Konkus, an E.P.A. spokesman and a former Trump campaign operative in Florida, confirmed that agency scientists would not speak at the State of the Narragansett Bay and Watershed program in Providence. He provided no further explanation.
It’s easy to find claims of censorship floating around the internet. But this is the real thing. It’s not a disagreement. It’s not a dispute. It’s not private citizens arguing a point.
This is the United States government clamping down on science that the American public paid for, science that Americans need to both understand policy and plan for their own futures. And that knowledge is being buried to benefit the handful who gain by keeping the rest ignorant.
“It’s definitely a blatant example of the scientific censorship we all suspected was going to start being enforced at E.P.A.,” said John King, a professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island who chairs the science advisory committee of the Narragansett Bay Estuary Program. “They don’t believe in climate change, so I think what they’re trying to do is stifle discussions of the impacts of climate change.”