On Tuesday, EPA officials told employees the Trump administration had ordered that the EPA’s communications team remove the website’s climate change page, reports Reuters on Wednesday.
And while the White House has put gag orders on a number of federal agencies over the past few days, restricting communications between several agencies and the public, this is the first time that an agency mandated with protecting the public’s health has been ordered to remove science-based content from its website, according to Forbes.
“If the website goes dark, years of work we have done on climate change will disappear,” one of the EPA staffers told Reuters. Some agency employees are scrambling to save as much as they can of the information found on the website, while others want to try and convince the Trump administration to preserve part of the information.
The agency’s website, www.epa.gov/climatechange, is a vast treasure trove of climate and environmental data, including information on greenhouse gas emissions, worldwide temperature change, and many more peer-reviewed scientific studies on the environment and global warming.
Quartz writes that the move by the Trump administration is not surprising for a president that has called climate change a “hoax.” Myron Ebell, a climate change denier and vocal opponent of environmental issues and climate change, led the EPA’s transition team. And Scott Pruitt, the man chosen to head up the EPA is also a climate change denier, even though he equivocated on the subject during his confirmation hearing.
Interestingly, the EPA meets Section 207(f)(2) of the E-Government Act of 2002. The rule requires federal agencies to publish information online by teaching the public, students, and educators about environmental issues that affect health. In case you have trouble bringing up the webpage, you can find it on the National Archives website, www.archives.gov/about/laws/egov-act-section-207.html.
The public probably won’t need to wait much longer before NASA, NOAA and other federal agencies have their websites scrubbed of any scientific information referencing climate change science or global warming. The EPA’s climate change website could be taken down today, but as of 11:00 a.m. it is still up.
