EPA websites now downplay link between humans and climate change
By Ella Nilsen, Andrew Freedman, CNN
(CNN) — The Environmental Protection Agency has altered and removed information from its website that connected climate change to the burning of fossil fuels.
The changes come as the Trump administration tries to supercharge US oil and gas production and resurrect the coal industry. Now, the EPA’s webpage detailing the ‘causes of climate change’ no longer lists human activities such as burning oil, gas and coal — the key drivers of a warming climate since the industrial revolution.
In some cases, the agency has left information that implies the existence of human-caused climate change, while removing direct references to that fact. Other EPA webpages, including one explaining the ‘future of climate change,’ still mention the link between humans burning fossil fuels and a changing climate.
The ‘causes of climate change’ page, for example, now reads, “Natural processes are always influencing the earth’s climate and can explain climate changes prior to the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s,” before listing such issues as changes in Earth’s orbit, variations in solar activity and volcanic activity. “However, recent climate changes cannot be explained by natural causes alone.”
Previously, that webpage contained an entire section on the human causes of climate change and cited the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s statement that “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land.” That section is now missing.
Changes to the site were made sometime after early October, according to Internet Archive’s webpage archive website Wayback Machine.
In addition, the agency’s webpages on ‘climate change indicators’ are no longer active. This was a popular resource among educators since they detailed how climate change was affecting the United States. Other federal agencies have also made changes to climate-related websites, such as the discontinuation of climate.gov earlier this year.
The changes have alarmed climate scientists.
“This isn’t just about data on a website; it’s an attack on independent science and scientific integrity,” Rachel Cleetus of the Union of Concerned Scientists said in a statement.
Phil Duffy, chief scientist at Spark Climate Solutions, called the changed webpages “misleading,” and took aim at the altered page on the causes of climate change. “This is like a website on causes of chest pain that mentions indigestion but not heart attack: it leads to the wrong treatment,” he said.
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, also told CNN the bigger problem is not the pages that have disappeared, but the ones like ‘causes of climate change’ that have been modified “so that it is no longer accurate.”
“The fact that a government agency would do that on their public facing website and make that choice within the past week or so, according to the timestamps, to change content that was previously correct and make it wrong, according to the overwhelming volume of scientific evidence, is highly concerning,” Swain said.
In a statement, an EPA spokesperson said it is no longer focused on protecting “left-wing political agendas.”
The “agency no longer takes marching orders from the climate cult,” an EPA spokesperson said in a statement. The spokesperson said the agency is committed to “uphold gold-standard science at the Trump EPA” and “previous iterations of the website that do not meet those standards are archived and available to the public.”
The webpage changes are coming ahead of a widely anticipated EPA rule change that, if successful, would effectively take away the federal government’s main way to fight climate change.
The 2009 landmark scientific finding, known as the “endangerment finding,” determined planet-warming pollution from fossil fuels endangers human health. Since the Obama administration, it has served as the basis for federal rules limiting greenhouse gas pollution from power plants, cars and trucks and the oil and gas industry.
The EPA unveiled its proposal to repeal the rule in July and is widely expected to finalize the decision early next year. The agency’s proposal also sought to repeal rules that regulate greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, since they stemmed from the finding.
The webpage changes are part of a larger picture of the Trump administration’s aggressively pro-fossil fuels stance, said former Biden administration EPA official Joe Goffman.
“No matter how seemingly discreet the actions being taken across the executive branch, it’s still the same project,” Goffman said, adding that the EPA has traditionally been a public source of current, user-friendly scientific information on climate change and its link to humans burning fossil fuels.
“They’ve got to wipe that out, and that’s what they’ve done by changing the website, removing any reference to human activity,” Goffman said.
It’s not the first time the Trump administration has downplayed climate change. The Trump administration also removed past National Climate Assessments from government sites.
And last summer, the Energy Department released a report written by a small group of longtime climate contrarians, which minimized humans’ role in global warming as well as its severity. Mainstream climate scientists heavily criticized the report for cherry-picking evidence and misinterpreting key climate science findings. The group dissolved after it was sued by environmental organizations.
Though the DOE report was first issued in conjunction with the EPA’s proposal to repeal the endangerment finding, it may ultimately not be relied on for the final product, Goffman said.
“Their first effort through DOE report was to try to justify why they were doing this, claiming that climate science didn’t support the conclusion that human activity was causing climate change,” Goffman said. “But, by issuing that report, I think they actually ended up in a worse position vis a vis the public.”
The-CNN-Wire
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