Does Trump Really Believe That Climate Science is a Hoax? Is He Purging the Government of Climate Scientists?

Does Trump Really Believe That Climate Science is a Hoax? Is He Purging the Government of Climate Scientists?

Update:  Press Secretary Sean Spicer said that the White House did not send out the gag orders, especially the part where the agencies could not inform the Congress.  Wasn’t Sean or the Press concerned that some other unknown source was giving Departments unusual orders that they must follow?  This could get very hazardous.  Why don’t they find the culprits and put them in jail?

It’s hard to imagine that the United States, the most scientifically advanced country in the world, is now going to have a purge of climate scientists.

On this Day 5, I was upset that CNN was wasting an hour about Trump’s old claim that he won the popular vote, something that is totally irrelevant to his election, instead of discussing the gag order to the EPA earlier today. Van Jones finally pointed this out.

Rachel Maddow pointed out that at 4:30 pm Eastern time, the gag order has been extended to the Department of Transportation, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institute of Health, and the USDA Agriculture Research Service, with 2,000 scientists.

Will this be extended to the entire government by tomorrow morning?

The Secretaries of some agencies have not fully taken office yet, so this is the transition team acting.

Will this last the entire Trump term?

I suspect it will be the new norm, and I remember that George W. Bush issued such censorship in his term, even removing factual material about global warming from scientific reports, and renaming it climate change.  George W. Bush and VP Dick Cheney were Texas oilmen.

I was considering whether the Cabinet members who come from the scientific fossil fuel fracking industries, and investment firms that employ trained physicists, actually believe their climate science waffle of not knowing if it is caused by man? Obviously not, since Exxon Mobil was caught with emails planning North Shore Arctic drilling once the ice had melted away. Yet to kill opposition to fossil fuel restrictions, they mislead the public with “alternate facts”.

I was thinking that President Trump, being a super salesman and liar, also was just using this ruse, to get the oil money and votes from fossil fuel states to get reelected.

But let’s go back to what the news was “wasting” their time with. Press Secretary Sean Spicer said that Trump actually believes that he won the popular vote, if you now exclude 3 to 5 million illegal immigrant votes. That is odd, since California has 3 million illegals, but Clinton won the state with approximately 9 million votes to Trump’s approximately 4.6 million. If illegals were 5 million, then half of all Clinton voters would have been illegal, and a third of all voters. Don’t you think somebody would have noticed this in the voting establishment?

So Trump actually believes he won the popular vote. He actually believes the intelligence agencies plotted against him like Nazis. He actually believes that God did not allow it to rain on his parade (actually his inauguration speech). He actually believes that he knows more than the generals, and the security agencies. He actually believes that vaccines cause autism, based on some undocumented cases of coincidences. He believes that Goldman Sachs has the only financial people that know anything. He believes that he had the largest inauguration audience and TV audience in history. He gets his doctor to affirm that he is the healthiest man to ever become president. He actually believes that the polls are wrong, and that he is beloved by Americans.

So yes, he does actually believe that climate science is a hoax, and he will act accordingly.

None of his greedy oil and financial millionaires and billionaires around him would dare to shatter this illusion of his. The reports in the “dishonest, loser” press could not dissuade him, especially when he is surrounded by the Breitbart crowd.

By the way, since Trump claims that God favored him to stop the rain, what are people going to say when the country suffers from inevitable weather and climate catastrophes, like the tornadoes this week? Obviously, God no longer approves of Trump’s actions, and the catastrophes are Trump’s fault. The two sides have gone together for ages, if you don’t replace them by science.

Trump is now a pawn of the oligarchs that he has chosen, and will be dragged along with them.

About Dennis SILVERMAN

I am a retired Professor of Physics and Astronomy at U C Irvine. For two decades I have been active in learning about energy and the environment, and in reporting on those topics for a decade. For the last four years I have added science policy. Lately, I have been reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic of our times.
This entry was posted in Climate Change, Climate Science, Donald Trump, EPA, Fossil Fuel Energy, Freedom of Speech, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Oil, Politics, Purge, Trump Administration, Trump on Climate Change, US Intelligence Agencies. Bookmark the permalink.

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