Elizabeth Kolbert

And only the court, I'm afraid, will solve this.

But I think that people who worked on the Clean Air Act, who actually wrote the Clean Air Act, would say that it was designed to be very forward-looking.

They knew that things were going to come up and they tried to leave room in the Clean Air Act for future generations to use this act to do what needed to be done.

But the court is going to settle this question.

And as many people have pointed out, this current Supreme Court has, you know, three members who are appointed by Donald Trump.

Well, the National Science Foundation disperses, I'm sure, billions of dollars to do scientific research.

That's their job.

And they have an advisory board that sort of guides them in a very high level, those decisions.

And

Anyone will tell you who is in academic science that the National Science Foundation has been really hard hit during this administration.

It's really hard to know whether you're going to get your grant or not, even if it's already been awarded.

But by terminating that board, once again, we're getting another very clear signal that we don't value science.

Now, to live in a highly technological world...

Where, you know, basically everything, you know, that we do and everything that we're surrounded by is in some all the technologies that we that are an integral part of our lives or, you know, products of science and say that we are just not interested in science anymore.

Once again, it's something that you would think.

would be eliciting more opposition because clearly we are putting ourselves, as many people would say, at a competitive disadvantage with other countries who are eager to grab our best scientists.

But it gets at this fight with reality, honestly, that is at the heart of the Trump administration.

If it's something that's inconvenient, if we don't like what the facts tell us, we're going to try to suppress them.

Well, I can't point to, you know, direct ways in which Donald Trump is sort of, you know, lining his own pockets through this, although there was a very famous moment during the 2020

24 campaign where he said to fossil fuel industry executives, raise a billion dollars for me and it'll be worth it to you, basically.