original/source
The news
was hard to digest until one realized it was part of a much larger and
increasingly disturbing pattern in the Trump administration. On Aug. 18,
the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine received an order
from the Interior Department that it stop work on what seemed a useful
and overdue study of the health risks of mountaintop-removal coal
mining.
The
$1 million study had been requested by two West Virginia health
agencies following multiple studies suggesting increased rates of birth defects, cancer
and other health problems among people living near big surface
coal-mining operations in Appalachia. The order to shut it down came
just hours before the scientists were scheduled to meet with affected
residents of Kentucky. ...
This
is a president who has never shown much fidelity to facts, unless they
are his own alternative ones. Yet if there is any unifying theme beyond
that to the administration’s war on science, apart from its devotion to
big industry and its reflexively antiregulatory mind-set, it is horror
of the words “climate change.”
This
starts with Mr. Trump, who has called global warming a hoax and pulled
the United States from the Paris agreement on climate change. Among his
first presidential acts, he instructed Scott Pruitt, the Environmental
Protection Agency administrator, to deep-six President Obama’s Clean
Power Plan, aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired
power plants, and ordered Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to roll back
Obama-era rules reducing the venting from natural gas wells of methane,
another powerful greenhouse gas.
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