RAHMSAVES THE DAY FOR THE EPA
Compiling climate change info Trump team deleted from government website
Mayor Rahm Emanuel is accusing President Donald Trump of trying to erase what Al Gore has called the “inconvenient truth” about climate change, and doing his part to recoup that information.
Emanuel has created a new city website titled, “Climate Change is Real.” It resurrects information about decades of research on the impact of climate change that, the mayor claims, was “unceremoniously removed” from the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency’s own Climate Change website on April 29.
“The Trump administration can attempt to erase decades of work from scientists and federal employees on the reality of climate change, but burying your head in the sand doesn’t erase the problem,” Emanuel was quoted as saying in a press release.
“We are going to ensure Chicago’s residents remainwell- informed about the effects of climate change. And I encourage cities, academic institutions and others to … follow suit to ensure the important information does not disappear.”
Emanuel worked as a brash young political operative under former President Bill Clinton. The mayor was one of vanquished Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s earliest supporters.
Since the election, the mayor and Trump have sparred over everything from Trump’s frequent potshots about Chicago crime and U. S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ decision to review and retreat from police reform agreements nationwide to Trump’s proposed travel ban and his threat to cut off funding to sanctuary cities.
Two months ago, environmental policy became a new front in the ongoing political battle.
Emanuel warned of the “devastating” environmental impact of Trump’s proposal to gut funding for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative.
After hosting mayors and other representatives from 17 cities in 11 different countries at an Urban Waterways Forum in Chicago, Emanuel argued that the proposal to reduce annual funding from “north of $ 300 million” to $ 10 million threatened a return to the ugly days epitomized by his childhood swims in LakeMichigan.
“You’d have to run into the water, dive under the dead fish, hold your breath, swim all the way 20, 30, 40, 50 feet [ in a way that] tested your lungs, and then come up past that,” Emanuel recalled.
A few weeks later, Emanuel joined aldermen and environmental activists in accusing Trump of signing an executive order that amounts to the “single biggest attack on climate action in U. S. history.”
To unshackle coal mining and oil drilling, Trump’s executive order takes aim at a host of environmental protections imposed by former President Barack Obama.
Chief among them is the Clean Power Plan. It requires states to reduce carbon emissions from power plants. Those reductions have helped the U. S. meet its commitments to a global climate change accord reached by nearly 200 countries in Paris in 2015.