By John Pickard
One of the most dismal features of Donald Trump’s administration – and one which would be repeated by a Reform government here, if it ever got the chance – is its reactionary bias against modern science. It is as if these people, not content with foisting their opinions on everyone else, believe they can operate with their own set of “facts” in their own parallel world.
American scientific research is reeling from swingeing cuts to budgets over the last year. The US National Institute for Health (NIH), for example, is now banned from research into any comparative medical issues between different communities, as for example, complications during pregnancy, stillbirths, high blood pressure and preterm deliveries. This is because such research fall under the now banned label of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’. This is despite the fact that Black women are known to be far more likely to suffer these difficulties in pregnancy.
Trump’s cuts are affecting all aspects of research in health and his aim is to drastically cut the research bill of the NIH. It goes far beyond health and last year, almost 2,000 researchers including dozens of Nobel Prize winners, issued an open letter expressing their alarm. “We see real danger in this moment,” the letter said. “We are sending this SOS to sound a clear warning: the nation’s scientific enterprise is being decimated.” (Financial Times, April 23, 2025).
The head of the federal Food and Drugs Administration left office last year, accusing the Secretary for Health, Robert F Kennedy of spreading “misinformation and lies” about vaccines. Predictably, having a vaccine skeptic in charge of the nation’s health care, there has been a surge in the last year of Measles among young children in the USA.
But perhaps the worst of all of Trump’s assaults on science has been on climate science. He has drastically reduced funding for the research into and even the monitoring – such as the measurement of sea temperature – of global warming. Where US scientists were at one time in the forefront of the global drive to raise awareness about the dangers of continued emissions of greenhouse gases, Trump has clamped down. All this research is unnecessary, he claims, because global warming is a “hoax”.
“Endangerment” to climate no longer recognised
This week Trump revoked an important ruling from the Obama era on climate change. In a declaration in 2009, the US scientific community declared that greenhouse gases represented a real and actual “endangerment” to the climate, the economy and the world community. It became a government ruling that would underpin a large part of federal policy and efforts – however limited – to reduce emissions, particularly from vehicles.
Trump has reversed this completely, calling his action the “largest deregulation in American history“, and claiming it would make cars cheaper, and bring down costs for motor manufacturers.
Ironically, Trump’s announcement this week coincided with yet another warning from climate scientists about the dangers inherent in the trajectory the world economy is now on. They have argued that the planet is closer than thought to a “point of no return” and that if there is no significant change in the way energy is sourced, climate change may increase at such a pace that it could not be stopped.
The Guardian this week contained a sombre report on the scientists’ views. “Continued global heating could trigger climate tipping points” it says, “leading to a cascade of further tipping points and feedback loops, they said. This would lock the world into a new and hellish “hothouse Earth” climate far worse than the 2-3C temperature rise the world is on track to reach”.
“We are running profound risks…”
The scientists, from many countries, including the USA, published their views in the science journal One Earth. One of them, Tim Lenton of Exeter University, told the Guardian: “We know we are running profound risks on the current climate trajectory, which we can’t rule out could turn into a trajectory towards a much less habitable state of the climate for us. However, we don’t need to be heading towards a hothouse Earth for there to be profound risks to humanity and our societies – these will already be upon us if we continue to 3C global warming”
Although the Trumps and Farages of the world do not want to admit the facts, climate change is already costing hundreds of billions of dollars in flood, wildfire and storm damage every year, and in the coming years it will more severely affect food production and therefore prices.
Human history is replete with examples of the repression and censorship of science, more often than not in the name of religious orthodoxy and state control. But the present phase of science denial is far more dangerous than at any time in past history.
It is a sombre and sobering exercise, for us older socialists to contemplate what kind of world we are bequeathing to the next two, three or four generations – and serious climatic disruption is that close. But the dangers of climate change are not an argument for inaction; they should spur us all into greater efforts to do away with this ruinous economic system, which is responsible for trashing the planet.
The ‘Green’ agenda is so-called because it has the preservation of the natural environment as its primary focus. That is a laudable idea, but that aim is unrealisable without a focused and concerted effort to abolish the system. Capitalism is rigged to enrich a vanishingly small number of people while impoverishing the rest. We need to take the power and wealth from the billionaire oligarchs who are happy to coin it in, while the Earth goes to Hell in a hand-cart.
[Feature picture from Wikimedia Commons, here]
The poison and mis-facts, Trump and his mirror image, Nigel Farage put out on the Internet and other social media; which then gets taken in by the working class. The amount of bullshit that I have to counteract on a daily basis, whether on the bus or in the library you would not believe. But the most effective answer to them and which most agree with when I say: “It’s the billionaires that don’t pay their taxes, that cause me problems. Not the migrants fleeing wars in small boats. In the thirties it was the Jews that was the problem, in the fifties it was the blacks, in the sixties it was the Irish, in the seventies it was the Gypsies, in eighties it was the lazy bastards on the dole (as it with the sick and disabled today) but also today it’s the Muslims that are the problem.” Some things never change, just the scapegoats for the ruling class to divert attention away from themselves.