Within seconds of the outrageous nightmare scenario being announced as reality, scientists around the world started to mobilize to capture key science information and data from US government websites to maintain knowledge in what some suspected would be a Dark Ages period. Some thought this is absurd, that the Trump-istas just wouldn’t go there.
They’ve been going there. By mid 2017, thousands of climate references had disappeared from US government websites.
In the intervening months, the climate zombies have extended their reach and extended the darkness.
The Environmental Data & Governance Initiative has just released a report Changing the Digital Climate documenting “how climate change web content is being censored under the Trump Administration”. As Vice put it, Trump is hiding climate change.
Anyone looking at the official websites of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, or the White House might be under the impression that climate change isn’t a threat.
That’s because the Trump Administration has been systematically scrubbing its online references to climate change,
This isn’t an issue of ‘just’ Polluting Pruitt at EPA or Zimke at EPA, but is one of the few things that Team Trump looks to be effective at across the board.
the words "climate change" and "carbon" have been stripped from government websites across a wide range of agencies, including the departments of Health and Human Services, Transportation, the Interior, Energy and State, the report found. They have been replaced with vaguer terms like "sustainability" and "emissions."
The group also found a wide swath of alterations to climate change webpages.
- The White House no longer lists climate change as a priority.
- EPA, along with the departments of State and Energy, removed language related to U.S. international obligations to address climate change.
- Hundreds of pages at the EPA site that were designed to help local and state governments mitigate the effects of climate change have been removed.
- The Interior Department scrubbed a website for tribal climate programs of the word "climate change."
- The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences dropped a link to an educational fact sheet about climate change and human health.
- the Bureau of Land Management altered and removed language and links about climate change, renewable energy and the overall mission of the agency and took down its climate change webpage without replacing it.
Every day is pretty good until we remember that these destructive fossil fools are in control of the U.S. government. And, from promoting polluting fuels to damaging the development of science to reducing data collection to disappearing basic science from government websites, Team Trump is choosing to #ActOnClimate: to act to make the climate situation worse.