Al
Gore Revives Climate Summit The CDC Abruptly Canceled
“They
tried to cancel this conference but it is going forward anyway,”
Gore said.
01/26/2017 07:43 pm
ET | Updated 7 hours ago
Lydia O’Connor
Reporter, The
Huffington Post
Former Vice
President Al Gore is hosting his own climate change summit after the
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention abruptly canceled the
one it had been planning for months.
Gore announced
Thursday that he’ll hold the Climate & Health Meeting in
Atlanta on Feb. 16 with Howard Frumkin, former director of the CDC’s
National Center for Environmental Health, and a host of other health
and climate groups: the American Public Health Association, The
Climate Reality Project, Harvard Global Health Institute and the
University of Washington Center for Health and the Global
Environment.
“They tried to
cancel this conference but it is going forward anyway,” Gore said
in a statement announcing the meeting. “Today we face a challenging
political climate, but climate shouldn’t be a political issue.
Health professionals urgently need the very best science in order to
protect the public, and climate science has increasingly critical
implications for their day-to-day work. With more and more hot days,
which exacerbate the proliferation of the Zika virus and other public
health threats, we cannot afford to waste any time.”
Studies warn that
climate change could undermine a half-century of health advances as
more people experience health issues associated with heat waves,
droughts and flooding.
The event serves to
fill the gap left by the CDC’s canceled Climate & Health
Summit, which was intended to explore the “translation of science
to practice” in dealing with climate change’s consequences on our
health. Despite being in the works for months, the event was canceled
just days before President Donald Trump was sworn into office.
Health professionals
urgently need the very best science in order to protect the public,
and climate science has increasingly critical implications for their
day-to-day work.
Al Gore
CDC spokeswoman
Bernadette Burden told The Huffington Post last week that the agency
is “exploring options to reschedule the meeting while considering
budget priorities for fiscal year 2017.”
The cancellation
isn’t surprising given how politicized climate change is, Frumkin
said.
“Sometimes the
agency is subject to external political pressure; sometimes the
agency self-censors or pre-emptively stays away from certain issues,”
he told E&E News, who broke the news of the summit’s
cancellation. “Climate change has been that issue historically.”
Sources inside
federal agencies said this week that the Trump administration has
started taking action to limit access to government climate change
information. Sources inside the the Environmental Protection Agency
say they’ve been instructed to stop sending out social media posts
and press releases, that their grant program has been frozen and that
the EPA’s main climate change web page may come down.
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