777 former EPA officials signed a letter urging Congress to reject the Trump administrations 'climate denial policies'

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Donald Trump Scott Pruitt Mike Pence Ryan Zinke

AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

President Donald Trump shakes hands with Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt, flanked by Vice President Mike Pence and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, before signing an Energy Independence Executive Order, Tuesday, March 28, 2017, at EPA headquarters in Washington.

In honor of Earth Day, the March for Science, and the upcoming Climate Marches due for Saturday, 777 former EPA officials signed a letter Thursday to Congress urging lawmakers to reject the "Trump Administration's climate denial policies" and to take "action needed to help arrest human-caused climate change."

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The letter detailed the science confirming climate change as well as condemned Trump's actions ignoring the climate science.

"The Trump Administration and its supporters in Congress are turning their backs on science and what it tells us about the gravest environmental problem of our times - climate change," the letter to Congress reads.

In the letter, Trump's climate policy was contrasted with those of other Republican presidents in the past, with examples including Republican President Richard Nixon's Council on Environmental Quality and Republican President George H.W. Bush's agreeing to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

"The President's reckless disregard for the science and consequences of climate change stands in stark contrast to his predecessors' respect for science and common sense," the former officials wrote in the letter.

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The recent repeal of the Clean Power Plan by Trump and EPA chief Scott Pruitt's decision to reverse a ban on the agricultural pesticide chlorpyrifos, despite science against it, have worried environmentalists and former EPA officials, some of whom have spoken to Business Insider, for the future of the environment under the Trump administration.

"The Trump Administration efforts to extinguish U.S. climate change policy and leadership flout scientific fact and common decency," the letter reads. "We are in a global race against time to limit climate change. Unless action is taken now, Americans and people around the world will face the ever-encroaching, increasingly devastating effects of climate change."

Thursday's letter was organized by the same watchdog group, the Environmental Integrity Project, as the letter opposing Pruitt's confirmation from February.

Read the full letter document with all of its signatories here.

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