Trump is deleting climate change, one site at a time – Here are some of the more egregious examples
| Under President Obama | Under Trump |
| The impacts of climate change are forcing us to change how we manage these resources. Climate change may dramatically affect water supplies in certain watersheds, impact coastal wetlands and barrier islands, cause relocation of and stress on wildlife, increase wildland fires, further spread invasive species, and more. | The impacts of climate change have led the department to focus on how we manage our nation’s public lands and resources. |
By Oliver Milman and Sam Morris
14 May 2017 (The Guardian) – During inauguration day on 20 January, as Donald Trump was adding “American carnage” to the presidential lexicon, the new administration also took a hammer to official recognition that climate change exists and poses a threat to the US. One of the starkest alterations to the White House’s website following Trump’s assumption of office was the scrapping of an entire section on climate change, stuffed with graphs on renewable energy growth and pictures of Barack Obama gazing at shriveling glaciers, to be replaced by a perfunctory page entitled “An America first energy plan”. In the more than 100 days since, the administration has largely opted for a chisel and scalpel approach to refashioning its online content, but the end result is much the same – mentions of climate change have been excised, buried or stripped of any importance. Federal government websites are being combed through to apply new verbiage. The state department’s office of global change, for example, has removed links to the Obama administration’s 2013 climate action report and mention of the latest UN meeting on climate change. Text relating to climate change and greenhouse gases has also been purged. […] Groups such as DataRefuge and the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) have swung into action to monitor and archive climate and other data, just in case. EDGI uses a team of volunteer analysts to track changes to around 25,000 pages across multiple government agencies.
Maya Anjur-Dietrich, member of EDGI’s website tracking committee, said the initiative has “observed several emerging patterns, which notably concern climate change and renewable energy”. “Across multiple agency websites, we have seen a reduction in usage of terms like ‘climate change’ and ‘greenhouse gases’, and an overall reduction in access to information pertaining to climate change,” she said. “In a few cases, we have also observed shifts in economy- and business-oriented language, where the descriptions of the office focuses have increased their mentions of helping to grow infrastructure, create jobs, and stimulate the economy. “On certain DOE (Department of Energy) pages, in particular, we have seen a shift in emphasis away from renewable energy and, in some cases, towards usage of fossil fuels.” [more]
