Scientists are sounding the alarm that their "worst fears" are being realized as President Donald Trump's energy secretary moves to re-examine and potentially rewrite climate reports going back decades.
According to The Guardian, Secretary Chris Wright, who previously worked in the oil and gas industry, "told CNN’s Kaitlin Collins earlier this week that the administration was reviewing national climate assessment reports published by past governments. Produced by scientists and peer-reviewed, there have been five national climate assessment reports since 2000 and they are considered the gold standard report of global heating and its impacts on human health, agriculture, water supplies and air pollution."
Wright, who has committed to boosting U.S. fossil fuel production, told Collins, “We’re reviewing them, and we will come out with updated reports on those and with comments on those reports.”
He added to CNN that the climate reports “weren’t fair in broad-based assessments of climate change,” and “When you get into departments and look at stuff that’s there and you find stuff that’s objectionable, you want to fix it.”
The statement has triggered outrage and fear among scientists, who believe that their findings will be politicized or outright covered up.
Michael Mann, a renowned climate science researcher, told The Guardian, “This is exactly what Joseph Stalin did." The Soviet dictator was notorious for politicizing government data, even jailing and executing census analysts who produced figures that embarrassed the state.
The Trump administration's appointees tiptoed around whether or not they accepted climate science during confirmation, but have moved to aggressively roll back all environmental and climate policies they can.
In one of the most controversial recent developments, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin has signaled intent to repeal the agency's landmark 2009 "endangerment finding" that greenhouse emissions pose harm to human health and safety, which forms the foundation of the EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse emissions altogether.