The Trump administration is infamous for climate change. An independent watchdog has accused the White House administration of deleting references to climate change from government websites, according to a report released by the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI).
References to “climate change” across 5,301 sample pages in the first half of 2016 and the first half of 2018 ranged
25 percent from 6,552 to 4,912.
They did not testify to the data removal of each set – as previously feared. In fact, many federal websites (remember: NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA) are important sources of information on climate change, despite opposition from climate-denying politicians, the authors say.
Restrictions on access to specific pages. In other instances, websites are allowed to go unintentionally. A Government Accounting Office (GAO) page has not been updated since summer 2016. The Obama administration (January to July 2016) allowed climate change references to be compared to the Trump administration (January to July 2018).
For the report – the first attempt by the EDGI to regularly survey the entire federal webspace – the researchers took two “snapshots”.
The method is not completely perfect. Some differences between the two snapshots were some changes in the last few months of his term under Obama. Also, it does not consider any changes since July 2018, but it underscores some interesting trends, as the researchers themselves have noted.
Use of the phrase “climate change” dropped by 25 percent, a small drop (4.5 percent) from the number published on the page. However, it has been completely removed from 136 pages, more than half of which (73) were on the EPA website. Of these, 43 were from the APAVOV / “climate change” domain withdrawn in April 2017.
Since July 2018 – the effective completion date of the study – the Department of the Interior (DOI) has restricted public access to its climate page and removed “climate change” from its list of priorities. “Our research points to subtle, yet systematic amendments to how climate change has been portrayed and prioritized in the areas of horticulture conservation, water management, and exotic issues,” the author writes. “
