In 2006, when Al Gore published An Inconvenient Truth, released with its complementary film, he couldn’t have picked a better title to warn about planetary emergencies of global warming and climate change. Whether Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1960), Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (1975), or Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), irrefutable facts and advancements in knowledge have always “inconvenienced” ecosystem plunderers and myth merchants.
Because educated populations better resist tyranny, authoritarian regimes keep their citizenry ignorant by denying access to books and other sources of knowledge. Suppressing reliable information, they even persecute educators and defund schools. Ergo the Trump administration has no qualms about withholding grants and gutting the Department of Education, PBS, NPR, libraries, parks and museums to extort rollbacks on egalitarian policies, First Amendment rights and academic freedoms.
Project 2025’s goal is to replace those tributaries of critical thinking, diversity and personal fulfillment with intellectually stagnant backwaters, creating peat bogs of accumulating fantasies and white-washed nationalist histories bearing little resemblance to the truth. This playbook isn’t new. Decades-long deviations from scientific consensus on matters of global warming and climate change, epidemiology and disease control, resource depletion, pollution and mass extinction have now become survival threats unmatched in modern times, not only for our species, but for all.
In 1787, the framers of the U.S. Constitution were well-aware of the importance of science-based deliberation and decision-making in all branches of government, especially the legislative. Thomas Jefferson was in France when the Constitutional Convention convened, but it’s easy to imagine Ben Franklin and James Madison acting on his behalf by insisting the document state America’s commitment to science. Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 is very explicit: “[The Congress shall have Power…] to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times from Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”
Well-before Horace Mann, the original drafters of the Constitution knew that free, universal education was critical not only to a well-oiled, functioning democratic republic, but also to propagate the kind of scientific literacy America needed to succeed. Those same bedrock principles on which this nation fledged are now under siege by Project 2025 and anti-science extremists. Even before this year, we’d be harder-pressed to find a single high school in America in which the aforementioned books, not to mention works by E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan, were required reading. Yet such a list would benefit every creature on Earth. True, we’ve neither reverted to the Dark Ages when vagabond poets and philosophers were beaten at city limits to prevent dissemination of new and foreign ideas, nor are heretics being tortured and burned at stakes for teaching heliocentric astronomy. Measles, though, once nearly eradicated, is mounting deadly comebacks thanks to Lone Star anti-vaxxers and their nescient superstitions.
The costs of repressing science may be higher than ever before. In the space of a week, three “once–in-a-lifetime” floods took nearly 200 young lives in New Mexico and Texas while the current administration cut funding for clean energy initiatives to mitigate climate change. It also proposed the smallest NASA budget since 1961, a reduction of 20% overall and 50% in NASA’s science programs. Left unscathed, our gluttonous military budget, nearly $1 trillion per year, still surpasses the next 11 nations combined, however, while the White House refuses to admit we’ve entered an era of greater floods, wildfires, droughts, mega-storms, glacier melts and heat waves. Forty-five years of failing to address anthropogenic climate change has made it so.
The environmental disasters we scientists predicted as early as the 1970s are now worsening facts of life. Those molecules of carbon dioxide greenhouse gas, already emitted to the atmosphere by generational burning of fossil fuels, will take tens of thousands of years to be naturally attenuated to net zero. On a human timescale, that pretty much guarantees permanent changes in atmospheric composition, and unless we make sizeable reductions in at least CO2 and methane, the planet will continue to warm indefinitely. In other words, while we’re already experiencing dangerous climate change from an average global temperature increase of about 1.4 degrees Celsius in the last 1 ½ centuries, there’s more heating loaded in the troposphere’s pipeline to come.
I’ve been lecturing on global warming for decades. Yet I find the intensities and frequencies of wildfires, floods, heat waves and ecological disequilibria occurring worldwide pretty darn scary. There’s a lot of variability in the climate, usually represented as peaks and valleys on a graph. One hundred and fifty years of worsening anthropogenic carbon emissions have essentially shifted that whole range of variability upward, so the peaks keep getting higher and more extreme. Not only is America unprepared for these crises, but we’re led by nitwits in denial, who want to ramp up fossil fuel production even higher, build more pipelines and defund Green Energy.
When asked about PM Mark Carney’s plans to build more Canadian pipelines to circumvent Trump’s tariffs and ship oil to China and the EU instead, Vancouver biologist David Suzuki said such throwback policies not only choose politics over decades of science, but constitute “moral and economic madness!” Exasperated, he reflected on a major international conference held in Toronto in 1988 at which each and every delegate agreed that global warming and climate change represented an existential threat second only to all-out nuclear war. A 20% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in 15 years was set as a goal, but never achieved. Had it been, Suzuki agrees, it would have saved trillions of dollars and millions of lives. “When you dig your own grave,” he said. “The first thing you do is stop digging.”
There are nine planetary boundaries which we ecologists consider inviolable for the planet to continue to support life. These biosphere guardrails are carbon levels in the atmosphere, oceanic pH, potable freshwater, phosphorus and nitrogen cycles, stratospheric ozone, deforestation, biodiversity loss and species extinction, atmospheric aerosol loading, and general ecosystem disruptions from human activity. Each also plays a role in potentially triggering climate change “tipping points” such as melting glaciers, thawing permafrost, and Earth’s resource renewal and sustainability. As animals, we can’t exceed those boundaries for long and hope to keep the planet habitable. Passing one should be terrifying. We’ve already passed seven! No nation, therefore, especially ours, has the latitude to elevate politics and economics above moral imperatives and science. Doing so absurdly raises human contrivances above the very atmosphere we and every other organism on the planet needs to survive. Yet, our governing body of dunderheads is willing to do just that.
From last year’s hurricane disasters in the Southeast to the catastrophic floods in Central Texas and New Mexico, the world has entered an era of surfeit rainfalls from added evaporative moisture in the atmosphere caused by our greenhouse gas emissions warming the globe. With so much moisture-laden air to fuel precipitation, even storms of relatively short duration are increasingly likely to move water vapor from heated oceans to downpours hundreds of miles from the coast. Given combined effects of Trump’s underfunding flood response efforts, nonexistent evacuation plans, and warning systems cut by crippling FEMA, NOAA, NASA and other storm-tracking, meteorological and emergency response teams, such deluges inevitably produce more damage and fatalities.
As in parts of North Carolina during Hurricane Helene, the Texas Hill Country is a landscape of winding rivers and steep terrain which quickly funnels heavy rains into massive torrents. In Earth’s rapidly warming atmosphere, storms now obliterate rainfall records because roiling air masses contain much more water vapor than they did in the past. Months of rainfall in a matter of hours are becoming commonplace.
Dismissing science is also dangerous on smaller scales. Ethologists are studying and deciphering sophisticated ultrasonic languages of bats. Researchers found mother bats actually identify and warn their young about rogue males in the colony, the way humans might urge their kids to stay clear of unsavory neighborhood riffraff. Weighing under an ounce and having solved, with birds and insects, the mystery of flight by convergent evolution, we now know these tiny mammals can live in the wild for thirty-five years, a lifespan comparable to 180 years in humans, aided by their supercharged immune systems and astonishing lack of tumors. Reasons for the latter seem to be threefold: a tumor suppressing gene, self-renewing chromosomes which protect against botched and uncontrolled cell divisions, and the extraordinary bat immune system ever-ready to hunt and destroy antigens without overreacting and causing inflammation.
Cancer risk usually increases with age because every new cell division provides an opportunity for DNA damage, a pattern described as Peto’s paradox because other animals with far more cells than humans don’t suffer higher rates of cancers. While the age-to-cancer correlation holds true for most mammals, at least four separate bat lineages are exceptions to the rule. One, the little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus) common to our North American backyards and eating hundreds of mosquitoes and other insects every night, carries two working copies of a key tumor suppressor gene called p53, whereas we Homo sapiens only have one. High levels of p53 in the body can destroy cancer cells before they become harmful and metastasize, a process of eliminating unwanted cells called apoptosis. In fact, at the other end of the mammalian size spectrum, elephants who stockpile twenty or so variations of the same gene tend to be cancer-free, as is true of bowhead whales and mole rats.
Additionally, according to researchers Vera Gorbunova and Andrei Seluanov at the University of Rochester Biology Department-Wilmot Cancer Institute, bats keep their chromosome tips (“telomeres”) long and healthy thanks to an enzyme suppressed in many of the tissues of adult humans called constitutive telomerase. Telomeres, shortened by age and repetitive cell divisions, where their roles in keeping chromosomes orderly are critical, have long been linked to tumors. Logically, you would think that at least some small portion of America’s massive military budget could be redirected to saving lives by supporting research on developing bat-like cancer preventions and treatments. Therapies might include replicating robust p53, using prudent telomerase in treatments and/or preventing chronic immune response inflammations in patients by toning down type 1 interferon and NLRP3 inflammasome, the latter yet another key to longevity in bats.
But this is a regime that ignores and hinders rather than supports scientific inquiry, even trying to eliminate the 2009 “endangerment finding” which formally identifies CO2, methane and four other greenhouse gases as threats to human health and welfare. While anti-science elements try to rollback 31 EPA environmental safeguards by calling air quality, drinking water protection, food security and saving human lives “elitist government overreach,” the EU, China, Japan and virtually everyone else on the planet are investing hundreds of billions of Euros and equivalent currencies into green energy transitioning. The European Green New Deal, in fact, has been hailed as an exemplary economic/ jobs growth model. Trump would rather jeopardize the future by replicating William McKinley’s failures. As a result, he recklessly engages in tariff fiascos, culture wars, witness tampering, team mascots, Coca Cola recipes and swamping our economy in a storm of international chaos and U.S. pariah status. China with a military budget one-third as big as ours directs its revenues into building thorium nuclear reactors, providing quality universal healthcare and exploring the Mariana Trench (about which we know less than the surface of the moon) for rare earth minerals.
Science and ecologically-grounded moral philosophies pave the way to wisdom. While Trump’s administration insists on repeating flaws in America’s past, China relies heavily on science to problem-solve and focus on the future. Take for example the changing color of the oceans. China’s news outlets quickly reported satellite images (referenced in a research paper in Science) showing oceans becoming greener near the poles and bluer near the equator thanks to global warming. The reason: chlorophyll from concentrations of phytoplankton, the algal basis of marine food webs, makes the water greener. Absence of the photosynthetic pigment makes the water bluer, suggesting scarcity of phytoplankton. Reduced phytoplankton populations in equatorial waters indicate that these especially warm oceanic areas are becoming less productive, impacting species higher up the food chain, including fish populations, a key source of human protein. Not only that, but less phytoplankton means less CO2 taken out of an atmosphere that already has too much, exacerbating the greenhouse effect heating the oceans in the first place.
Dr. Francis Collins, geneticist and former director of the National Institutes of Health, has described Trump’s-DOGE’s gutting of the NIH as primary cause of an American “brain drain.” After decades of benefitting from talented scientists leaving foreign lands to come to our shores, our best young American minds, especially in the sciences, are leaving for opportunities elsewhere. Among those welcoming destinations, where intellectual merit is both appreciated and rewarded, are Australia, the UK, EU, and Japan. Chinese students and researchers, once intent on making their marks in the United States, are now being awarded jobs and lured back to China with incentives. The Trump administration meanwhile has cancelled over 2,500 projects in cancer and HIV research, Alzheimer’s disease, and vaccine development for no apparent reason other than politically-driven malice. Negative effects on U.S. healthcare are already being felt. Dr. Collins describes it as mortgaging America’s foundation for scientific breakthroughs, adding that “medical miracles don’t happen overnight, you have to invest in them”…usually many years.
While the current administration (aided and abetted by Congress) worsens the fiscal deficit, a more ominous peril looms. Put bluntly, we suffer truth, trust, intelligence, and compassion deficits. It now takes courage to state the truth or be openly secular because we’ve normalized lying and allowed deceit and disrespect for knowledge to control societal narratives, even when statements made by charlatans in social media and politics are demonstrably false. Science (in conjunction with the arts) is critical to reversing this trend because it’s the only source of valid information lacking vested interests, making it the #1 tool for debunking rampant myths.
One such figment is “American exceptionalism,” the widespread belief that the U.S. is the greatest country on Earth, no matter what. That isn’t to say we haven’t accomplished a lot of extraordinary things, among them our Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution, which neither Trump nor any other authoritarian should be permitted to abrogate. Assertions of greatness even held water during a 35-year stretch from the late 1940s through early 1980s. While the old guard in Europe was retooling and digging out of WWII wreckage, we built the interstate, cured polio, put men on the moon, fostered compassion for other life forms, fitted capitalism with New Deal restrictions and social movements, declared war on poverty (not on the poor themselves), and ideally elected the best of us instead of the worst. But while freedom, democracy and rule of law remain sacrosanct in Canada, Japan, France, Norway, New Zealand and scores of other nations, truth, justice and camaraderie are being trampled here. To blame is an elected and appointed body of poster children for the Dunning-Kruger effect, empowered by media, who’ve tapped into voters’ xenophobic fears and feelings of inferiority, abandonment and loneliness.
Today, we rank far below social democracies of Europe in quality of life not because we haven’t reversed course to some illusory fairytale of grandeur, but by refusing to accept reality and facts as commonalities with which to plan the future. Western religions also deserve blame for indoctrinating their faithful with the notion that they are “the chosen ones” and life, no matter how uncomfortable or injurious to others (human or nonhuman) is just an initiation rite for better things to come. It’s from these prevailing attitudes that unsubstantiated “exceptionalism” stems, allowing conflict, suffering and wealth inequality, to which capitalism and the gods are indifferent, to be more tolerated in the U.S. This, I think, accounts for our current oligarchic feudalism in America with longer work hours and anemic benefits and vacation time making Europeans cringe.
Moreover, U.S. educational rankings, according to international (i.e., PISA) assessments, are nothing to crow about. The U.S. ranks 36th in global literacy, 26th in math, and 10th in science. In other parameters, we’re 48th in life expectancy, 33rd in infant mortality, 3rd in labor force; 5th in median household income. In four categories we do actually take top honors ─ imports (showing our reliance on global supply chains), number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe in angels, and the gargantuan U.S. military budget.
We used to object to what was wrong in this country and ignored, rather than celebrated, individuals who exhibited our worst tendencies. We defended and wrote laws to support moral causes. Our allegiances were less malleable to outward trappings, propaganda and slogans on caps and bumper stickers. We aspired to intelligence and didn’t belittle it out of envy. We trusted and revered experts, who informed, mentored and united us in times of crisis to accomplish great things. And seldom did we beat our chest about it. For most of us, deeply suspicious when wealth and power plot to control government, America remains a nation that champions community over capital. Otherwise, Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life” wouldn’t tug our heart strings. But we must face facts in order to solve our problems.
Until we can elect sane, competent leadership in Washington, we must do what we can to defend science, truth and the flowering of good will. Here and abroad hundreds of thousands of people have already repurposed lawns and clear-cut areas into ecologically regenerative gardens and forests which act as carbon sinks and habitat for pollinating insects and other wildlife. Much of that healing of the biosphere is part of a free-membership global program called RESTOR to increase the planet’s biodiversity and sustainability. Like the “Book People” safeguarding literature in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, who memorized verbatim and shared the contents of books outlawed and burned, we too must seek, cherish and exchange truth and science at every turn. We must recognize oppression through ignorance, and stymie anyone willing to destroy our knowledge for power, societal control and dystopian futures.
Scott Deshefy is a biologist, ecologist and two-time Green Party congressional candidate.