Alarmists are crying to heaven for vengeance after President Trump slashed taxpayer funding of climate change research.
The comically named Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) passed by Democrats in 2022 “directs hundreds of billions of dollars worth of investments to climate and environmental justice projects,” notes Grist, a green advocacy publication, and activists fear that the river of free money may dry up under Trump.
“What it looks like to me is an absolute full-on brakes moment for any further climate advances at least in the short term,” said Gabriel Filippelli, the executive director of the Environmental Resilience Institute at Indiana University, whose $5 million federal grant has been suspended.
“But I think what people don’t fully recognize is that if you disrupt funding on a wide scale, even for a short time, the hangover effect lasts for a long time,” he added.
“These are clear attempts to undermine the scientific community,” lamented Richard Ostfeld, a scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies who researches the effects of climate change on tick-borne illnesses.
“Somehow science and scientists, information and facts, are perceived as the enemy,” he contended. “The casualties of all this, in addition to the scientists, are the American people.”
Critics have long complained of the enormous amount of funding bias generated by government-sponsored research into climate change, where results are engineered to match desired outcomes.
As economist Stephen Moore has written, “[T]he tidal wave of funding does reveal a powerful financial motive for scientists to conclude that the apocalypse is upon us.”
“No one hires a fireman if there are no fires. No one hires a climate scientist (there are thousands of them now) if there is no catastrophic change in the weather,” he added.
Such bias was abundantly clear under the Biden administration, which made no effort to conceal its belief in the “climate crisis” and only funded studies that would corroborate its own prejudices.
As National Public Radio (NPR) noted, “Biden left office having put in place the most ambitious climate agenda of any previous president,” and he described the Inflation Reduction Act as “the most significant action ever on climate in the history of the world.”
It is understandable that recipients of taxpayer-funded climate pork are now on edge.
