SCOTT PELLEY (ANCHOR): The Tump administration is also temporarily silencing the Environmental Protection Agency to align the EPA's public statements with the president's. Here's Jim Axelrod.
JIM AXELROD (NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT): At president President Trump's alma mater, the university of Pennsylvania, environmental professors like Bethany Wiggin listened carefully to candidate Trump talk about climate change.
DONALD TRUMP: All of this with the global warming and the that -- a lot of it’s a hoax.
AXELROD: Which is why she, her colleagues, and her students are now racing to back up on other servers information available on government websites. Temporary restrictions announced today that EPA employees can no longer post or blog from government accounts stoked their fears the administration will limit access to data as it rolls back environmental protections.
BETHANY WIGGIN: I'm really worried that the facts might become more difficult to access, so there is a kind of a vulnerability of internet materials already. They become more vulnerable still when controlled by an administration who finds them inconvenient.
AXELROD: Just today the Badlands National Park tweeted about climate change in defiance of the White House and then deleted them. And while the president's nominee to run the EPA, Scott Pruitt, disagreed with Mr. Trump in his hearings...
[BEGIN VIDEO CLIP]
SEN. ED MARKEY (D-MA): Do you agree that global warming is a hoax?
PRUITT: I do not, Senator.
[END VIDEO CLIP]
AXELROD: Just last may Pruit wrote, "Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind. That debate should be encouraged…”
RACHEL CLEETUS (CLIMATE POLICY MANAGER, UNION OF CONCERNED SCIENTISTS): What we heard at the hearings was a dangerous new form of climate denial.
AXELROD: Rachel Cleetus is with the Union Of Concerned Scientists.
CLEETUS: This is a sort of climate denial that says, “Yes, it's real, but we don't know what’s causing it,” and basically, it’s yet another way to kick the can down the road and not take any action.
AXELROD: Cleetus says with data showing 2016 as the hottest year on record and sea levels rising at alarming rates that could trigger massive flooding by the end of the century, limiting regulations on energy production could be catastrophic.
CLEETUS: This is a false choice. We don't have to choose between a safe climate and economic growth. We can have both.
AXELROD: The Centers For Disease Control has now canceled the conference that would have explored the effects of climate change on public health. As for President Trump, after that meeting with auto executives today, he also said, “I am to a large extent an environmentalist. I believe in it.”
