Betsy Southerlan, former water quality official at the EPA. Credit: Jamie McCarthy/ Getty
From weakening vehicle emissions to blocking warnings about how coastal parks could flood or the impact on the Arctic, the Trump administration is accused of muzzling climate science.
Here six whistleblowers and former government scientists describe being sidelined by the administration—and why they won’t be quiet.
JEFF ALSON
ROLE: A FORMER SENIOR ENGINEER AT THE ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY (EPA)’S VEHICLES LAB IN ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN
What did the work involve?
“I was an engineer at the EPA, working for 40 years in a very technical job. In 2009, after the election of Barack Obama, the EPA started working on greenhouse gas standards for vehicles for the first time. It felt like we were making history.
“There was a team of around 25 people producing thousands of pages of analysis for the standards. We knew it would be controversial but it was a very big deal, the first critical steps to address the climate crisis.”
What changed under the Trump administration?
“Once Trump was elected it became pretty clear […]
You can find evidence that 9/11 was pulled off by Cheney/Bush administration on purpose to justify the Military-Industrial-Banking Complex coup, which started with the Reagan administration, despite who says it is “just” a conspiracy theory; it is real. They even squashed the information about the woman in Pa. who saw the plane being blown out of the sky by a military fighter jet; that’s why the engine landed a mile away from the crash site. Now most everyone has forgotten about that fact, and believe the occupants on board the flight overpowered the hijackers and crashed the plane. That works well in the coverup, but Cheney gave the order to shoot it out of the sky. Any rational person with a degree of knowledge of physics knows the towers did not come down because of planes hitting them, that is physically impossible.
I’ve read a number of convincing stories about the 9-11 hoax and find them credible except it’s just too hard to swallow that the Bush-Cheney crowd, despicable as some of them are, would kill 3,000 Americans just so they could have an excuse to get into the Mideast militarily. My ability to visualize that kind of nefarious betrayal doesn’t reach that far, in which condition–limitation, perhaps–I feel fortunate. I would only harm my own psyche to go around believing in a world where our leaders would deliberately go to so much trouble to create such devastation for so many fellow citizens. As my grandma used to say, I’d rather trust others and be wrong some of the time than live with a suspicion all of the time. Not that I admire the work of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld–they represented an ominous start to a new millennium for sure, starting with the appalling Gush v. Bore Supreme Court ruling. But would they really lay down a plot like the 9-11 conspiracy theorists suggest? Three sky-scrapers, all those lost lives, just so they could invade Afghanistan? As Rumsfeld was supposed to have complained, “There’s nothing to blow up there!” So in summary, tempting as it is to “follow the science,” my gut tells me that 9-11 was a spectacular victory for Osama bin Laden & Co., which is very hard for Americans to accept, which is the real reason conspiracy theories become so much more palatable than the less comfortable reality that the event happened pretty much as we saw it on TV, surprising even the terrorist plotters themselves.
While I don’t know and of course have no proof that the official 9/11 story is untrue there are many suspicious details that could lead an independent thinking person room for doubt. Unfortunately for my psychic health I believe that our leaders could and would create or allow such a thing “for the greater good”.
I am firmly convinced that at some high level decisions were made, at a minimum, to allow the already identified bin Laden plot to be executed. There are too many well documented FBI and CIA investigations saying a plot was afoot yet no action was taken.
9/11 was too perfect offering those who seized power after 2000 an opportunity to implement their end-times fascist agenda. So begins the “never ending war on terror” which too many Americans fully embraced because we were attacked! This gives untold billions increase for the MIC and the national security state.
Or alternatively for too many years the USA has killed thousands of innocents the world over and now the wheel of karma turns to bring balance to an rich, arrogant empire.