Washington Watch: EPA Staff Told to Lie on Climate Change
New orders from the top in the EPA to its staff: Lie about climate change.
It’s no longer news that the current president and his political appointee to head the Environmental Protection Agency live in a pro-pollution fantasy world on the subject of human-driven climate change. Trump may even believe his own nonsense, and his EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has been in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry for so long that he spouts the most extreme climate change denials effortlessly and consistently. Almost immediately after seizing office, they had official public information websites ‘cleansed’ of inconvenient facts on the matter.
It’s yet another level of outrage, however, that last week EPA public information staff were advised to repeat these false claims about climate change. The “talking points” distributed by EPA’s Office of Public Affairs reflect the scientifically inaccurate claims made by Pruitt about climate science. They emphasize misleading statements asserting scientific uncertainty about how human activity is affecting climate change and what can be done about it.
Michael Halpern, deputy director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told the Washington Post, “The EPA administrator should not be in the business of telling scientists what they should say publicly about basic scientific information. The implication is that EPA wants a political filter on all scientific information emerging from the government, especially if it has to do with climate change.”
