WASHINGTON — Nearly a year into the Trump administration, mentions of climate change have been systematically removed, altered or played down on websites across the federal government, according to a https://envirodatagov.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Part-3-Changing-the-Digital-Climate.pdf (report made public Wednesday).
The findings of the report, by the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, an international coalition of researchers and activist groups, are in keeping with the policies of a president who has proudly pursued an agenda of repealing environmental regulations, opening protected lands and waters to oil and gas drilling, withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate accord, shrinking the boundaries of federal monuments, and appointing top officials who have questioned or denied the established science of human-caused climate change.
The authors of the study said that the removal of the words “climate change” from government websites, and a widespread effort to delete or bury information on climate change programs, would quite likely have a detrimental impact.
“We have found significant loss of public access to information about climate change,” the authors wrote.
“Why are these federal agencies putting so much effort into ‘science cleansing’ instead of using time and resources to fulfill agency responsibilities, such as protecting the environment and advancing energy security?” they wrote. “Removing information regarding climate change from federal websites does not affect the reality of climate change, but may serve to obfuscate the subject and inject doubt regarding the scientific consensus that climate change is happening and that it is caused by human activity.”
The report tracks the Environmental Protection Agency’s removal of hundreds of websites connected to state and local climate change programs; the removal of information about international climate change programs from the State Department, Energy Department and E.P.A. websites; and the deletion of the words “climate change” from websites throughout the federal government.
In many cases, the report found, “climate change” was replaced by vaguer terms such as “sustainability.”
https://envirodatagov.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/WM-CCR-21-DOI-BLM-Website-180109.pdf (In a separate report,) also made public Wednesday, the group found that the Bureau of Land Management had deleted its climate change website and removed text about the importance of climate change mitigation from its main site.
