Donald Trump’s silencing of science is free speech hypocrisy - Yorkshire Post Letters

What’s happening to science in America under Trump amounts to censorship. The Trump administration is no longer providing support for scientific research that contains a word he finds particularly inconvenient: ‘climate’.

Trump has also cut 800 jobs from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that is one of the world’s leading institutions tracking the disastrous progress of climate change on our planet.

It isn’t stopping there because people on the front line of climate change are being denied facts. The US coast guards can no longer see the term ‘climate change’ in its staff training material and the US department of agriculture is withholding vital information that it previously supplied to farmers. What next; will we see books being burned?

Suppressing science so that it can be replaced with political ideology whilst promoting freedom of speech is hypocrisy. Trump wants the freedom to use disinformation as a political tool and has no regard for scientific facts.

He’s playing with fire, both figuratively and literally as the recent events in California show. And the damage is not limited to the USA because, in 2024, Amazon fires scorched an area equivalent to the entire state of California.

And don’t think this couldn’t happen here because some right wing politicians in the UK are cosying up to the Heartland Institute with its roots growing in dirty money from fossil fuel interests and the declared aim to cast doubt on climate science.

We need our politicians to seek the facts, not build their policies on politically crafted ignorance.