Technically, no one's forcing you to stare down the barrel of imminent climate doom, inevitable as it seems to be. You can always bury your head in the sand instead — which is pretty much what the Trump administration has decided to do, on the behalf of all of us.

As the Guardian reports, the US government has started pulling grants for not just research about climate change, but any that even dares to reference it. It feels like an unmistakable sign that we're now, if we weren't already, heading down the path of the 2021 satirical disaster film "Don't Look Up" — a movie about a killer asteroid that functioned as an extremely thinly-veiled metaphor for politicians who won't grapple with the climate crisis.

In any other context, the flagrancy of the censorship on display here would be almost comical. An environmental scientist who chose to remain anonymous told the Guardian that their previously awarded grant from the Department of Transportation was suddenly revoked under the Trump admin — until they changed the title to remove the word "climate."

"I still have the grant because I changed the title," the scientist told the newspaper. "I was told that I needed to do so before the title of the grant was published on the US DoT website in order to keep it." 

"The explanation was that the priorities of the current administration don't include climate change and other topics considered 'woke,'" the researcher added.

The action comes as part of the Trump administration's broader freeze on climate spending via an executive order that has cut off federal investments in numerous clean energy projects, in a bid to supercharge the domestic fossil fuels industry. It also goes hand in hand with Trump's crusade against DEI initiatives and, as the scientist mentioned, other "woke" rhetoric and policies.

Trump, who has called climate change a hoax, has long been hostile to environmental initiatives. In his first term in office, he withdrew the US from the Paris climate accord, an international agreement to limit global warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. Upon taking office for a second time, Trump immediately withdrew the US from the agreement again, after President Biden had returned the US to the fold during his term.

Regarding the ban on the word "climate," the writing was on the wall last month when the US Department of Agriculture began scrubbing information about climate change from its website. Now, the Trump administration's latest swing at censorship has also affected the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center at the University of Hawaii, where an administrator is carrying out orders to delete "climate change" references in course materials.

"Specifically, references to 'climate change' and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) have been removed or revised to align with the new priorities," the administrator wrote in a leaked email obtained by the Guardian. "Please exercise caution when referencing these topics during instruction."

CNN reports that the Trump administration has also blocked US government scientists from attending a meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the leading authority on the issue which publishes a comprehensive report every five to seven years worked on by thousands of scientists. The US's absence now means that the meeting, scheduled to take place next week in China, is in limbo.

The administration's stance isn't just an assault on climate research, but science itself.

"I'm very concerned about science being politically influenced," the scientist who was awarded the DoT grant told the Guardian. "If researchers can't use certain words, it's likely that some science will be biased."

More on climate change: Glaciers Are Shrinking at an Incredible Rate


Share This Article