Trump And Climate Change: Memo Sparks 'Witch Hunt' Fears At Energy Department

President-elect Donald Trump has ignited concerns of a type of “witch hunt” at the Energy Department, Bloomberg and Politico reported. Trump’s transition team has requested the agency to identify those who have worked on climate change with the Obama administration.

The recent move shows Trump is likely to dismantle President Barack Obama’s environmental legacy. During Trump’s presidential campaign, he promised to back out of the Obama’s Paris climate agreement, and has previously tweeted global warming was a hoax invented by the Chinese.

Trump has picked Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a strong critic of the Environmental Protection Agency with close ties to energy companies, to run that very same agency, transition officials told the New York Times.

Politico obtained a document that was sent to the Energy Department earlier this week in which Trump advisors requested that the agency identify the employees and contractors who worked on Obama’s climate policy.

Among the dozens of questions included in the document, one of them asks for the names of employees who attended any UN climate change conferences over the past five years. Another calls for the names of the personnel on any of the interagency working groups that played part in the creation of a "social cost of carbon," a financial measurement the government uses to help calculate costs and benefits of some C02 emissions regulations.

“Sounds like a freaking witch hunt,” one former DOE staffer said in an email, according to Politico.

“It is a remarkably aggressive and antagonistic tone to take with an agency that you’re about to try to manage,” a current employee in the Department said. Another agency employee said they felt that “some [of the questions] are harassment, some are naïve, some are legitimate.”

“Why is that important for informing the transition team?” the person asked, according to Politico .

Besides asking for identification of employees, the Trump transition team also asked questions like, "Which programs within DOE are essential to meeting the goals of President Obama's Climate Action Plan?"

Another question, for the DOE’s undersecretary for science and energy office, asks about where cuts could be made if it were required to make a 10 percent reduction starting in fiscal 2018.