President Trump and Administrator Scott Pruitt took down climate change information since they have decided the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) website needs to undergo changes, “which [involve] updating language to reflect the approach of new leadership,” according to a news release.
“That kind of censorship reveals the extent to which powerful corporations are willing [to] conceal scientific reality so as to increase profits for as long as possible,” said David Klein, director of the CSUN Climate Science Program. “Even though doing so puts the entire planet in grave danger.”
The news release goes on to state that “language associated with the Clean Power Plan, written by the last administration, is out of date.” Instead of having a page dedicated to the Clean Power Plan, the website now has a page dedicated to Trump’s executive order on energy independence.
“I don’t think the Trump administration has the right,” said Alexandra Smith, 22, a screenwriting major at CSUN. “By taking things down, [the EPA’s] work doesn’t matter.”
On April 29, hundreds of thousands of people at the Climate March in Washington, D.C., gathered “to protest the Trump administration’s environmental agenda and the decades-long history of American inaction on climate change,” according to The Atlantic.
“The protests against inaction in the face of this danger need to increase in size and intensity until the government responds with effective and concrete actions,” Klein said.
Those that marched believe that the most vulnerable victims of climate change are the Native Americans, who will lose their land to fossil fuel development, and Black Louisianians, who will lose their land to receding coastlines. The People’s Climate Movement organized the march to get Trump to protect these groups, according to Color Lines.
“[Climate change] is real and it is extremely dangerous,” said Klein, “It is the greatest threat humanity has ever faced.”
Klein said unified and global actions need to completely reorganize the economic system because the economic system of capitalism is the biggest cause of global warming.
“Capitalism, by its very nature, must expand,” he said. “Without perpetual economic growth, capitalism undergoes crises like the Great Depression. We need an alternative system…which is capable of a steady state economy, rather than perpetual growth.”
Currently, nothing has changed on the EPA’s website. Climate change information is still not available.
“The danger is imminent because of the threat of irreversible tipping points in the earth-climate system,” Klein said.
If interested, Klein wrote a free book on climate change available on Gumroad or Amazon.
