National Park Stands Up to Trump's 'Gag Order'

Badlands National Park spent Tuesday tweeting climate change facts
By Michael Harthorne,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 24, 2017 6:25 PM CST
Renegade National Park Tweets Climate Change Facts
In this April 23, 2015 photo, the sun rises behind a buffalo at Badlands National Park in South Dakota.   (Chris Huber/Rapid City Journal via AP)

As President Trump puts "gag orders" on federal agencies, including the EPA and USDA, pockets of defiance are appearing. On Tuesday, someone running the Twitter account for South Dakota's Badlands National Park—part of the National Park Service—started tweeting facts about climate change, Vanity Fair reports. Those facts included, "Burning one gallon of gasoline puts nearly 20lbs of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere" and, "Today, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is higher than an any time in the last 650,000 years."

The tweets were later deleted but can be viewed here. CNN reports the facts may have run afoul of what the Trump administration wants people to believe about climate change, which the president has previously called a "hoax." The Democratic National Committee responded to the deletion of Badlands National Parks' tweets by saying "Putin would be proud." Meanwhile, the park's Twitter followers ballooned from 7,000 to 70,000 while it was tweeting about climate change. (More climate change stories.)

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