Inquirer Editorial: Can't trust Trump to protect the environment

This is the state of the earth in the second month of President Trump's administration.

The planet continues to suffer from record-breaking overall temperature increases, which have alarmed scientists concerned about the effects of global warming on flooding, drought, wildfires, and food shortages.

Despite that, the president is building an administration that is warm to fossil fuels and cold to environmental protection, which means Americans can't expect much to be done by him to turn back the devastating effects of climate change.

In fact, Trump has denied the very existence of climate change. But elsewhere there is no debate. Bolivia's Lake Poopo has dried up, taking away the livelihoods of fishing families. In Madagascar and a handful of other African nations, people are starving in a dust belt that was once agricultural and forest land. Here in America, the earth is eroding under the village of Newtok in Alaska.

Yet the drumbeat of climate-change deniers has become so loud that Wyoming legislators in the thrall of coal industry lobbyists are trying to outlaw the use of wind power in a state that already gets 90 percent of its power from coal.

Then there's the president's key environmental appointees, all of whom have questionable records.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who was confirmed Wednesday, has called climate change a hoax. As a congressman from Montana, he voted for a bill that would give states control over federal lands, making them vulnerable to weaker environmental protections and being sold to private entities. And this is the person chosen to oversee our national parks and forest system?

The new Environmental Protection Agency head, former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, let chicken factories dump 300,000 tons of waste into the Illinois River without a fine and took campaign contributions from the poultry industry. He dismantled an enforcement division in Oklahoma to form a team that would instead attack EPA regulations. Pruitt was joined by polluters in a dozen suits and regularly communicated with them. He will be the point man on an order Trump signed Tuesday that rolls back a needed clean water rule that stops toxic runoffs in streams.

The president is also expected to soon relax standards on coal plant emissions, the major source of carbon pollution, which promotes global warming.

Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who once wanted the Department of Energy shut down, changed his mind after being nominated to head that agency. Perry, who was confirmed Thursday by the Senate, replaces Ernest Moniz, a nuclear physicist.

The threats posed by global warming and the sentiments of Trump's cabinet have prompted scientists across the country to save any government climate data they have to make sure it isn't lost.

Still unknown is whether the EPA, NASA, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will be permitted by the Trump administration to continue their scientific research on climate change. If not, Americans may be left to figure out the reason for themselves when the next super storm, drought, or wildfire hits.