The last president recognized climate change as the greatest long-term threat facing the planet, so he enacted rules that cut emissions across our economy, hiked fuel efficiency standards, and, in a masterstroke of diplomacy, brokered the first international accord to reduce greenhouse gases in Paris.

The current president spent his first week taking steps toward enforcing his credo that "environmentalism is out of control." No joke: If you visit Whitehouse.gov and type "climate change," you'll get exactly one hit - under a biography of Mamie Eisenhower.

Soon, Reuters reports, you may get another air ball if you attempt the same search on the Environmental Protection Agency website. Besides this green-wash, Donald Trump has imposed a media blackout (news releases and social media posts) and has frozen all EPA's grants, effectively ending all environmental work - at least temporarily. That's a pause button on $1.4 billion Passaic River restoration and 117 other Superfund cleanups in New Jersey.

The new administration says it is common to scrub some information to reflect new policy positions and to suspend projects until they are reviewed by new management, but given what we know about Trump, you cannot blame the scientific community for panicking, and it's easy to see why George W. Bush's EPA administrator, William Reilly, believes the agency "is going down a very dark road."

So let this serve as a periodic reminder that any climate action will be local until further notice, and anyone who values the environment should begin organizing now. One place to start would be to sign up for the People's Climate Mobilization in Washington on April 29.

It's hard to fathom the damage Trump may cause in the three months before that march, but a radical shift in environmental policy was anticipated. He has threatened to trash the Clean Power Plan; he wants to appoint a rapacious climate denier as the new EPA administrator; and his transition head, a former tobacco lobbyist, said the EPA budget will be cut by $1 billion to tamp down its "global warming alarmism" and "junk science."

Environmentalist Bill McKibben concedes that Trump is "going to gut the EPA and turn the Department of Energy into a playground for the oil industry. For now, there's only defense to be played, but defense is half of any game."

You might recall that after Election Day, 50 scientists frantically stored climate data (greenhouse gas levels, sea levels, atmospheric trends) from the EPA, NASA and other agencies out of fear it could be purged. One organizer explained, "It's easier to deny climate change if you don't have data." This guerilla archiving was called an act of paranoia.

But now Trump has gagged EPA scientists, a violation of its scientific integrity policy - it prohibits "political interference in the public dissemination of scientific findings" - so red flags are up: As Princeton scientist Michael Oppenheimer told the New York Times, "If the Trump administration doesn't want rumor, invective and anxiety running amok, they should say publicly that they believe in science and have no intention of hiding science from the public. And they haven't done that."

Don't get your hopes up, Doc.

If this is the start of a war on science, climate action must be rekindled in state capitals and through grassroots activism. Consider what happened here Wednesday: New Jersey's environmentalists banded with labor, community and faith groups to form Jersey Renews, a huge coalition seeking to establish our state as a leader on clean energy issues.

It has to start locally - and immediately - because after just one week of Trump, the EPA has stopped doing science.

The week actually began with a Pew poll that said that 55 percent of Americans believe the environment should be among Trump's top priorities. We hope the same people are making plans for April 29.

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