Trump And Climate Change: Summit Canceled By CDC Following Inauguration

The United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention has canceled the Climate and Health Summit, a climate change summit scheduled to take place next month in Atlanta following the inauguration of President Donald Trump, according to a report from E&E News.

The news comes from emails announcing the cancelation of the conference directed to speakers scheduled to be at the event, which was scheduled for Feb. 14-16. E&E News, a trade publication for energy and environmental professionals, obtained a copy of the note from the CDC.

"We are currently exploring options so that the Summit may take place later in the year," CDC officials wrote in the email.

Bernadette Burden, the senior press officer for the CDC, told International Business Times the CDC began notifying registered participants on On Dec. 22 that the Climate and Health Summit had been postponed.

"We are exploring options to reschedule the meeting while considering budget priorities for fiscal year 2017, including the current continuing resolution, and potential overlap with an APHA conference on the same topic also being held later in 2017," the Burden said.

One of the partnering groups set to participate in the summit, the American Public Health Association (APHA), confirmed to IBT that the event was canceled.

Dr. Georges Benjamin, the executive director of the APHA, told IBT, "we're all very disappointed” in the summit’s cancellation and hoped the event would just be delayed until later in the year or could take place through the private sector.

“I think it was a strategic decision by the CDC,” Benjamin said, noting the recent change in administration has left the CDC and related agencies without leadership in place to either continue already scheduled events like the summit or initiate a new agenda.

"This administration has verbalized a lack of support for climate change,” Benjamin said, “but climate change is here."

The CDC is currently headed by Anne Schuchat, who previously served as principal deputy director to director Tom Frieden. Schuchat is acting as the interim head of the agency until Trump appoints its own pick for the role.

While no appointments to the CDC have been made by the Trump administration, it is likely it will have considerably different views than were held under the Obama administration, which began treating climate change as a public health issue.

The Trump administration has already scrubbed the White House’s website of any reference of climate change. It also appointed climate change denier Scott Pruitt to head up the Environmental Protection Agency. Advisors to the Trump transition team indicated Trump would strip funding of climate change research, calling it a “politicized science.

Trump himself has called the concept of global warming a hoax and claimed it was “created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive” in a tweet sent in 2012.