The Environmental Protection Agency has reportedly barred three agency scientists from giving talks about climate change at a conference in Rhode Island days before they were scheduled to speak. EPA spokesman John Konkus, a former Trump campaign operative in Florida, provided an emailed statement to The Washington Post and The Hill confirming the cancellations: “EPA scientists are attending, they simply are not presenting, it is not an EPA conference.”Konkus did not respond to an email and text message from HuffPost on Sunday evening. The move comes days after the EPA scrubbed dozens of links from its website to materials that helped local governments deal with the effects of climate change. Administrator Scott Pruitt has said he does not believe greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels cause climate change, and has scrapped or proposed eliminating numerous regulations to reduce emissions. Two weeks ago, he proposed repealing the Clean Power Plan, the federal government’s primary policy for slashing utilities’ output of planet-warming gases.

Source: Huffington Post October 23, 2017 03:45 UTC