If you want your child to understand the harrowing implications of climate change or the impact of coal mining on the environment, don’t look to the U.S. Government to teach them anymore. An article jointly published in Pro-Publica and The Atlantic shows that the incoming Trump Administration has taken its climate-change denier message to a new low by erasing inconvenient facts from a popular, award-winning website designed to inform children about forms of energy.
Twenty years ago, the Energy Information Administration, an arm of the Department of Energy, created Energy Kids, a site to inform kids about energy sources and the science behind them. The current iteration of “Energy Kids” also explicitly bills itself as a “teaching tool" for educators, and encourages teachers to “use our website in your lessons.” Drawing about 410,000 unique visitors last year, the site has won multiple awards for its content and design. But that was during the Obama Administration.
Wary of wholesale changes being made to government websites to accommodate Trump and the anti-science “philosophy” of the fossil fuel industry that supports him, the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, a group of scientists, lawyers and activists, identified numerous glaring alterations to the site made during the past month:
In recent weeks, language on the website describing the environmental impacts of energy sources has been reworked, and two pie charts concerning the link between coal and greenhouse gas emissions have been removed altogether.
In its goal to profit from the continued suffering of the human species wrought by man-made climate change, Trump’s cabal of fossil fuel CEO’s and climate change denialists have already telegraphed their intent to drastically cut back environmental enforcement by the EPA. But that apparently isn’t enough--Trump's team now appears bent on fostering climate ignorance in our children as well.
On a page dedicated to coal, the following sentences were deleted: “In the United States, most of the coal consumed is used as a fuel to generate electricity. Burning coal produces emissions that adversely affect the environment and human health.”
The two pie charts that were axed showed that although coal generated only 42 percent of total U.S. electricity in 2014, it created 76 percent of total carbon-dioxide emissions linked to electricity generation.
These are the pie charts showing CO2 emissions from coal that were eliminated:
(h/t nomandates)
The new version of the website also pointedly eliminates the word “impact” when referring to environmental pollution caused by fossil fuel extraction and usage:
The sentence “Reuse and recycling can also reduce coal’s environmental impact” was changed to “Reuse and recycling can also reduce the environmental effects of coal production and use.” “Underground mines have less of an impact on the environment compared to surface mines” became “Underground mines generally have a lesser effect on the landscape compared to surface mines.” “Impacts of coal mining” was changed to “Effects of coal mining,” and “Reducing the environmental impacts of coal use” became “Reducing the environmental effects of coal use.”
Other changes involved reducing any mention of methane, one of the strongest and most harmful greenhouse gases to the environment, to a mere footnote, and deleting hyperlinks that led to explanations of the primary sources of man-made greenhouse gases. And there are obvious alterations in the language stressing the harm of fracking:
In a section on oil, the sentence, “There are environmental concerns associated with hydraulic fracturing” became “Hydraulic fracturing has some effects on the environment.”
The percentage of greenhouse gases emitted by the United States from burning fossil fuels in comparison to other countries has also been deleted.
Most kids do not spend their Internet time reviewing DOE websites, so the obvious intent of this whitewashing of the impact of man-made greenhouse gases to the environment was to filter down to science classes taught in our public schools, where such language would be dutifully memorized and regurgitated in school assignments:.
“Control of the stream by which we educate the young, that’s how you control the future understanding of generations, of how the world works,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
Jamieson said that while it’s hardly surprising that information about energy has been shifted toward the pro-fossil-fuel views of this administration, “You expect that in the explicit messaging of those talking about the policy, rather than in deleting things that we know.”
A spokesman for EIA told Pro-Publica that the changes were simply part of an “ongoing update process.” That sounds suspiciously like the words of someone desperate to keep his own job. These are not “updates” but wholesale deletion of factual, scientific data. They aren’t being made pursuant to any recent “trend” in science, but a deliberate anti-science ideology.
This know-nothing Administration has already demonstrated its utter contempt for the environment of our country and our planet. The only “climate” it seems to be interested in is a climate of ignorance.