President Trump's words and actions since taking office—including scrubbing the entire concept off the White House website—have made it abundantly clear that he opposes climate change. After his administration banned the EPA and Department of the Interior staff from going on social media on Tuesday, a federal account under the National Park Service appeared to go rogue and started tweeting out climate change facts and other goofball shit:
The Badlands National Park, a 242,756-acre preserve in South Dakota that boasts eye-popping, castle-like rock structures created by millions of years of erosion, suddenly felt the need to tweet out objectively true facts about the connection between climate and the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. It noted that the CO2 concentration is "higher than at any time in the last 650,000 years," for instance.
It also posted a photo of two goats at a sort of are-they-fucking-or-not angle, and prompted the reader to caption it:
While it's unclear who was behind the tweets, the National Park Service seemed to thumb its nose similarly at Trump when its official account retweeted a comment on the size of his inauguration crowd on Friday. Shortly after that, the Department of the Interior announced that all accounts under its aegis were no longer allowed to tweet until Monday, citing concern that one of its accounts was hacked.On Tuesday, a memo to the Environmental Protection Agency (along with the Department of Agriculture) placed the organization under a total media blackout—which includes Twitter. Although these kinds of gags are not unusual during a change in leadership, they could signal significant change for federal environmental organizations, considering Scott Pruitt, a noted climate change denier, is Trump's pick to lead the EPA.Badlands National Park's climate tweets did not comment directly on Trump administration policies, nor have they made a connection between the raw, numerical values and the need to act on climate change. Since they were posted this afternoon, the statements have been removed from Twitter.Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.
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