In March, the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory concluded, “the impact of dark energy may be weakening over time.”

That report runs counter to a finding last December by the Royal Astronomical Society:

“One of the biggest mysteries in science – dark energy – doesn’t actually exist, according to researchers looking to solve the riddle of how the Universe is expanding.”

Science is a work in progress, as should be expected of something concerned with the continued flux of cosmic processes. It answers to a doctrine of variable verification. In this way, science and its parent philosophy defy dogma. Dogmatists are never pleased.

In times past, honest inquiry fell victim to religions desperate to protect the power their metaphysical myths gave them. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake as recently as 1600, and Galileo narrowly escaped the same fate a few decades later.

Today, the unfettered exploration of the mysteries of Planet Eden faces a new religious foe, identified about 100 years ago by John Dewey as “a money culture [whose] cults and rites dominate.”

He dubbed the prevailing ethos “our religion of prosperity” in 1929, long before Joel Osteen and others proclaimed a prosperity gospel. But, like most prophets, Dewey was sounding a warning, not endorsing a way of life whose end goal is “more, more, more.”

Ed Abbey was more blunt 50 years ago. “Greedheads” threaten the natural world and everything within it. And John D. MacDonald sounded that clarion call even earlier.

But the allure of lucre, filthy or not, fueled by Madison Avenue’s advocacy of disposable consumerism, overwhelmed any old-fashioned, common sense thrift. The country progressed [?] from Gordon Gecko’s “Greed is good” mantra in 1987’s “Wall Street” to the Great God Greed sentiment that prevails today.

And, as in the past, today’s religious Greedism sees science as an enemy to be demonized and silenced to preserve and promote the current power structure.

The main issue is that climate liars such as Grifter-in-Chief Donald Trump and the Big Oil gang that bought him object to hotter-than-hell hard facts that over-reliance on carbon-based fuels has changed the planet’s environment and threatens to make parts of it increasingly less habitable.

Since taking office, Trump has pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accords [again] and struck any mention of global warming or climate change. One would surmise that this includes Department of Defense assessments of problems arising when parts of the hemisphere south of us become uninhabitable.

Planning based on common sense – not really that common in Trump World – has been replaced by religious creeds such as “Drill, baby, drill” regardless of future consequences.

And, heresy though global warming is to Greedists, science itself represents a dangerous foe to them since there is no predicting what free-thinking investigators might discover next to threaten their static quo.

Writing for The Guardian in March, Alexander Hurst observed:

“In six weeks, the Trump administration’s ‘rapid scheduled disassembly’ of American science has been as sharp and deep as its trashing of the U.S.’s alliances and goodwill; Earth science, weather forecasting and early warning systems, medical research [including cancer research], NASA.”

Christina Pagel, a German-British professor at University College London told Hurst:

“This isn’t chaos. The attacks on research appear to follow a three-pronged objective: to forcibly align science with state ideology; undermine academic independence and suppress dissent; and maintain geopolitical and economic goals.”

The American “state ideology” is the aforementioned religious devotion to greed. The overriding goal of all oppressive religions is to eradicate dissent – and dissenters. Trump and his minions have cut funding and threaten more cuts to any institutions who do not submit to Trumpian disinformation.

The apostles of greed have natural allies with religious fundamentalists, also smarting from conclusions of scientists that disturb their claim of a monopoly on truth. They work together to demean, diminish, deny, even demonize science and the pursuit of unvarnished truth.

Aldous Huxley told us, “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

Earth will get hotter, climatological events will get more severe. But true believers do not care. They echo their chosen liars, vilify scientific heretics and, in the case of Trump and his Greedists, try to rake in ever more money as if that could buy them eternal life.