Are You Better off Today Than at the Dumbest Time in Recent Memory?
Photo by BRENDAN MCDERMID/POOL/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
However dumb you think it was, it was dumber.
Former President Trump launched a thousand memes by asking recently if people are better off today than they were four years ago, apparently forgetting the bodies in trucks and millions of lost jobs and so on. The response has generally been a focus on the pandemic and its economic fallout, and rightly so, but it is worth remembering that while the horse paste of it all may have felt like a culmination of the administration’s very dumb anti-science stance, it was far from its beginning.
To start with, the people Trump chose to run agencies tasked with scientific endeavors were about as far from experts as can be imagined. Before taking over the Department of Energy, Rick Perry both wanted to abolish it entirely and also believed the Energy Secretary’s role was as “a global ambassador for the American oil and gas industry.” Scott Pruitt’s whole deal was about eliminating the sort of government regulation the Environmental Protection Agency engages in, and he continued to deny the link between carbon dioxide and climate change while in office there.
From there things got worse. The Union of Concerned Scientists documented hundreds of what they termed “attacks on science,” from censoring scientists to rolling back regulations. They stopped a study on the health effects of mountaintop removal mining and disbanded a committee on particulate air pollution. They let asbestos make a comeback.