Why Scientists Are Scared of Trump: A Pocket Guide - by Elizabeth Kolbert

Next week, the American Geophysical Union will hold its annual conference in San Francisco.  The A.G.U. meeting is one of the world’s première scientific gatherings—last fall, some twenty-four thousand experts in fields ranging from astronomy to volcanology attended.  This year, in addition to the usual papers and journals, a new publication will be available to participants.  It’s called “Handling Political Harassment and Legal Intimidation:  A Pocket Guide for Scientists.”

The guide is the creation of a group called the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund.  One of the group’s founders, Joshua Wolfe, and its executive director, Lauren Kurtz, made the decision to write it on the day after the election.  “There is a lot of fear among scientists that they will become targets of people who are interested in science as politics, rather than progress,” Wolfe told me in an e-mail.

With each passing day, that fear appears to be more well founded.  The one quality that all of Trump’s picks for his cabinet and his transition team seem to share is an expertise in the dark art of disinformation.

Consider, for example, Scott Pruitt, who is reportedly Trump’s nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency.  Pruitt, currently the attorney general of Oklahoma, is an outspoken critic of the agency that he would lead.  This is not, in and of itself, disqualifying, but, as a 2014 investigative piece in the Times revealed, Pruitt’s criticisms have little basis in evidence.  Instead, he has basically served as a mouthpiece for talking points dreamed up by the oil and gas industries.  In one case, Pruitt signed a letter criticizing the E.P.A. for supposedly exaggerating the air pollution attributable to natural-gas drilling in Oklahoma.  It turned out that the letter had been written for him by one of the state’s biggest drilling companies.

“Outstanding!” was the reaction that the company’s director of government relations sent to Pruitt’s office.

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