Climate denial is undermining true mission of EPA (The Republican Editorials)

You might, one day soon, go on a federal government website and read the moon is made of cheese. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention might say bumps on the skull predict personality. The day could come, in the next few years, when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration posts images showing the earth to be flat.

Think we’re kidding?

The Environmental Protection Agency under President Donald Trump is racing to scrub its internet presence of science and knowledge. In their place, apparatchiks with the EPA shovel in ideological tripe.

As recently as October, an EPA webpage labeled “Causes of Climate Change” informed visitors about findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land,” the group said. The EPA, which exists “to protect human health and the environment,” saw a duty just two months ago to make sure people were aware of that.

But no longer. That information has since been vaporized from the EPA’s site. In its place, a Washington Post story this week noted, the agency says the planet’s climate changes due only to things like volcanoes and solar activity.

Climate scientists told The Post they’ve seen evidence of the climate crisis removed at a brisk pace from government web pages. Gone, for example, is evidence of rising sea levels and losses in the Arctic ice pack.

In comments straight from Trump’s PR playbook, an EPA spokeswoman blamed everything on the administration’s regularly updated and lengthening list of enemies, telling the newspaper that (insert required anti-Biden slap) “Unlike the previous administration”) the agency is (cue the capital letters) “Powering the Great American Comeback, not left-wing political agendas … this agency no longer takes marching orders from the climate cult.”

Even the asking of questions – the heart of the scientific method – is seen as radical treachery.

Also gone from the EPA website, The Post detected, are questions like this: “Is there scientific consensus that human activities are causing today’s climate change?”

The answer doesn’t hinge on who you want running the country. The answer, researchers around the world have found, is yes.

The Trump administration’s refusal to join in a global search for solutions to a warming planet – and to deal with the consequences – will go down as one of its most profound failures.

The website deletions would be funny if they weren’t so harmful.

The hocus pocus behind the EPA’s deletions is a craven effort to misinform Americans. We can only hope that few will be fooled.