On the 20th of December, 350.org and several other environmental groups gathered in front of the GSA office at 1800 F st. Trump's transition team is being permitted to use that Federal building. The pro-Earth groups were there to denounce such Trump appointments of people like climate denier Scott Pruitt as as head of the EPA and Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State.

Organizers of the protest included 350.org, the Sierra Club, Climate Truth,and Oil Change International. They held a short "teach-in" in front of the Trump transition team HQ in the GSA building and also had a stack of petitions that Trump no doubt will disregard. A lot of attention was paid to Trumps's nomination of the head of Exxon as Secretary of State. Another appointment drawing fire was the appointment of Scott Pruitt to run the EPA, which was compared by one speaker to putting an arsonist in charge of the fire department. This is actually true of most of Trump's appointments but Mr Prutt is a special case.

For years Mr Pruitt, in his role as Oklahoma's GOP attorney general has sued the EPA over initiatives such as the Clean Power Plan to clean up electrical utilities. On Dec 7 (fittingly Pearl Harbor Day), Trump nominated him as none other than head of the EPA itself. A mention of alt-right Breitbart founder Steve Bannon (Trump's chief of strategy) also drew a chorus of boos from the crowd.

Scott Pruitt is more than a science denier and climate denier. He is a direct threat to the safety of climate scientists, He has gone so far as to call for prosecution of scientists he calls "alarmists" on climate change for "fraud," citing the ongoing investigation of Exxon for repeatedly and knowingly misleading the public since the 1970's as a precedent. He referred to Exxon and other oil companies as "skeptics" of what is actually well established science. This is rather like the creationists who will probably come in with Mike Pence who "question" evolution, which like climate change science is accepted by a broad consensus of scientists. Due to the ongoing fear being driven by Trump, climate scientists now employed by the US government have been reported to be backing up all their data to non government owned computers as a precaution against expected orders to delete all their work. This in turn brings to mind Scott Pruitt and the other Trump appointees as book-burners being placed in charge of libraries.

Somehow arsonists running fire departments and book burners in charge of libraries seems an apt description of the incoming Donald Trump presidency.

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