Letter Sent in Advance of Climate March on Saturday Calls for Immediate Action on Scientific Consensus About Greenhouse Gases
Washington, D.C. – In advance of Saturday’s planned Climate March, 776 former scientists, managers, analysts and other employees of the Environmental Protection Agency signed a letter condemning the Trump Administration for ignoring science and endangering the public on climate change.
“His proposed budget would defund EPA climate science and virtually eliminate EPA’s capacity to take regulatory action or promote voluntary action in response to scientific findings showing that climate change already threatens the lives, health and property of Americans and people around the world,” the signatories wrote.
The letter was sent today to the White House and leaders of Congress by the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization founded by former EPA officials to advocate for the enforcement of environmental laws and the protection of public health.
The letter described President Trump’s false claims that climate change is a “hoax,” and his executive orders to roll back greenhouse gas regulations, as a standing in “reckless disregard” for the well-established science and in “stark contrast to his predecessors’ respect for science and common sense.” The document criticizes the Trump Administration’s “unprecedented and irrational break with science.”
For nearly 50 years, Republican and Democratic administrations have recognized scientific evidence that pollution has the potential to alter the world’s climate in dangerous ways.
In 1970, Republican President Richard Nixon’s Council on Environmental Quality recognized the phenomenon of “man’s inadvertent modification of weather and climate” by growing levels of air pollution. In 1992, President George H.W. Bush, also a Republican, agreed to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the first international treaty to address human-caused climate change.
In 2008 under Republican President George W. Bush, and again in 2009 under President Obama, EPA conducted exhaustive, public rounds of review of the available scientific evidence of climate change. The agency relied primarily on major, peer-reviewed assessments of the climate science literature by the government-wide U.S. Global Change Research Program, the National Research Council and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
After considering more than 11,000 individual public comments, EPA concluded in 2009 that climate-changing pollution endangers Americans’ health and welfare – and in ways unprecedented in scope and severity.
Trump administration officials and allies are now discussing ways to undermine that conclusion, and this endangers everyone on the planet, the letter suggests.
“Action to reduce climate change needs to be taken now,” the letter from the former EPA officials declares. “While many air pollutants stay in the atmosphere only a short time, most climate-changing pollution remains in the atmosphere for tens, hundreds or even thousands of years depending on the pollutant. That means that the longer we wait to rein in the pollution, the more it builds up in the atmosphere and the more it warms the Earth, creating damaging impacts.”
The signatories of the letter will be forwarding it to their elected leaders at all levels of government.
View the full letter, including a list of the signatories, here.
(Other versions of the letter, addressed to Senator Mitch McConnell and other leadership in Congress, are also being sent today)
Note: This letter was updated on April 9, 2018. Earlier versions of this letter and press release included 777 signatories, the updated value reads 776.
Media Contact: Tom Pelton, Environmental Integrity Project (443) 510-2574 or tpelton@environmetnalintegrity.org
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