EPA chief: ‘True environmentalism is using natural resources that God has blessed us with’

By Joe Romm

Another day, another attempt by Trump officials to silence scientists.

The latest egregious example of censorship is the Environmental Protection Agency’s last-minute move to forbid three of their scientists from speaking on climate change at a long-planned conference focusing on the health of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay and Watershed, the New York Times reported Sunday. Of course, the health of a major coastal watershed can’t be preserved without understanding and planning for climate change.

“These efforts by the Trump administration to stifle scientific research inconvenient to its corporate masters threatens all of us,”  climatologist Michael Mann told Think Progress. “It must not be tolerated.”

EPA spokesperson John Konkus — an anti-science hatchetman — confirmed in an email to multiple outlet that “EPA scientists are attending, they simply are not presenting.” Konkus is a Trump political operative with little environmental expertise, who was given unprecedented oversight to vet hundreds of millions of dollars in annual EPA grants, as we reported in September. His primary focus is cutting grants that include the words “climate change,” and he has already axed such life-saving grants as a clean cookstove program.

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