Story highlights Michael Brune: This assault on scientific truth must not go unanswered

Americans faced by an unprecedentedly anti-environmental Congress and an administration that is out to gut the EPA, he says

Michael Brune is the executive director of the Sierra Club. The views expressed in this commentary are his own.

(CNN) It's no surprise that candidate Donald Trump's disdain for the truth has carried over into his presidency, with its Orwellian embrace of "alternative facts." Nor should we be shocked that his claim that he is "to a large extent, an environmentalist" has been brutally refuted by every action he's taken since he won the election. Rich fossil fuel executives surely felt like they won the lottery last November.

Slightly harder to anticipate, though, was how swiftly the Trump administration would betray ordinary Americans -- none of whom voted to "Make America Polluted Again" -- and how rapidly its reckless actions would lead our nation down a dark and dangerous path of hostility to science, reason and evidence.

Michael Brune

Both of those developments are chillingly confirmed by the administration's attacks on the Environmental Protection Agency. Reports that the administration would demand that the EPA delete all information about climate change from its website were rightly met with outrage. Steve Bannon may as well have started a coal-fueled bonfire on the White House lawn and begun flinging scientific reports into the flames.

The Trump administration's assaults on science are as brazen as they are unconscionable, and they must not go unanswered. Some brave and principled scientists and researchers at the EPA, and in other parts of our government, will surely resist , but the burden of defending respect for the truth should not rest solely on their shoulders. The opposition to this dark curtain of ignorance and denial is the responsibility of every American, regardless of party, who respects knowledge and values the truth.

The sad irony, of course, is that President Trump's perverse brand of populism not only disregards the wishes of American voters but deliberately renounces their health and safety, which is already coming as a rude shock to many who voted for him.

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