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Donald Trump Sends Climate Change Enthusiasts Into a Frenzy With Special EPA Message

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The Obama years were salad days for the global warming brigade at the Environmental Protection Agency.

Every study or paper that said something along the lines of “OMG the world is going to die soon unless we take the drastic action the government is recommending!” was propounded by the EPA (I’m giving a highly subjective TL;DR version here). And, in fact, they were more than willing to put these papers on the agency’s website. Most of them, unsurprisingly, involved climate change.

When Donald Trump’s administration came into office, a lot of that information seemed to move or disappear from the EPA’s website pretty much immediately.

The message to the radical environmental movement was unmistakeable: Your day is over.

It now turns out Trump’s EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt was partially behind the move — and predictably, the left is going into a frenzy.

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“Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt was personally involved in the process to remove sections on climate change from the agency’s website, records obtained by a green group show,” The Hill reported Monday.

“The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) said the records it obtained via the Freedom of Information Act show a high degree of involvement by Pruitt in the April process of removing climate sections and replacing several of them with a section on President Trump’s executive order to roll back the Clean Power Plan.

“Environmentalists have been highly critical of the EPA’s decision to remove the pages, some of which still haven’t been replaced and instead forward to a page about the removal process.”

According to the email exchanges they obtained, one says that Pruitt wanted the new page on the Clean Power Plan expedited. Another email exchange had an EPA spokeswoman asking a staffer “if people searching for the Clean Power Plan can be directed to the section on Trump’s climate executive order, which the staffer obliged.”

Do you agree with what Scott Pruitt did?

The reaction from the environmentalist left to Pruitt’s moves has been of a similar vein to the “Literally Hitler™” histrionics directed at President Donald Trump, just more like “Literally a Bad Guy From ‘Captain Planet'” in Pruitt’s case.

In an op-ed published by The Hill the same day it published the revelations about Pruitt being involved in taking down the climate change pages on the EPA’s website, the director of the Sierra Club’s “Beyond Coal” campaign was given free reign to go after the EPA administrator.

“Despite being the driving force behind the Trump administration’s relentless attacks on our environment and our communities, Pruitt is clearly petrified of criticism,” Mary Anne Hitt wrote. “He’s also dodged those who are most responsible for holding him accountable, having testified just once before Congress since getting confirmed.

“That testimony was a frustrating experience for most,” she continued. “That’s because, when confronted by questions about his record, Pruitt reliably responds with platitudes and meaningless catchphrases, using buzzwords to obscure the reality that he is allowing polluters to dump their toxics anywhere they please impunity.”

Yes, the reality is exactly like a “Captain Planet” cartoon: “Sure, evil plutocrat!” Pruitt says, twirling the fake mustache he brings out for clandestine meetings with sinister corporate polluter types. “You can dump three-thousand tons of radioactive and medical waste in Lake Wobegon with anywhere-you-please impunity!”

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Then, with a sudden crash, a group of conspicuously diverse teenagers bust through the wall of his office with the help of a giant blue guy. Oh, if only.

It’s also curious Hitt seems so interested in “platitudes and meaningless catchphrases” as well as “using buzzwords to obscure the reality” of the situation. That’s exactly what the EPA was involved in for eight years under the watchful eye of the Obama administration, using dubious reasoning for dubious regulations. It’s also what almost every politician testifying before Congress does. The idea that Pruitt is sui generis in this matter, at least to Hitt, proves she either doesn’t watch C-SPAN much or just didn’t care about that sort of thing when a Democrat was in the White House.

If you’d like an additional dose of irony, there was always the EDF, who discovered Pruitt’s involvement in the website changes through its FOIA request.

“Obscuring information thwarts meaningful public participation in EPA’s work to protect Americans’ health and safety,” a statement from EDF attorney Ben Levitan read. “It reinforces serious concerns that Pruitt has predetermined that he will repeal the Clean Power Plan, and that the current rulemaking process is a sham.”

So “the current rulemaking process is a sham” because the administration’s take on global warming science and the regulations that ought to surround it was “predetermined.” Completely unlike the former administration, of course.

EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox noted one problem to this whole kerfuffle: all of the information they’re whining about is still accessible on the EPA’s website.

“We are constantly updating our website to reflect new initiatives and projects of the agency,” Wilcox said.

“Of course the site will be reflective of the current administration’s priorities — with that said, all the content from the previous administration is still easily accessible and publicly available –through the banner across the top of our website.”

Yes, if the EPA is to be believed, this is all over moving pages to a different location now that Trump’s administration has taken office, instead of treating the Obama administration’s webpages as sacrosanct documents in the same vein as Martin Luther’s 95 theses.

That evil, evil Scott Pruitt and his dastardly overlord, Donald Trump. If the environmentalists prayers are answered, Gaia and the Planeteers can put an end to webpage migration once and for all.

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C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he's written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014.
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he's written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014. Aside from politics, he enjoys spending time with his wife, literature (especially British comic novels and modern Japanese lit), indie rock, coffee, Formula One and football (of both American and world varieties).
Birthplace
Morristown, New Jersey
Education
Catholic University of America
Languages Spoken
English, Spanish
Topics of Expertise
American Politics, World Politics, Culture




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