EPA Wins Exxon Peace Prize After Deleting 'Fossil Fuels' From Climate Change Webpages
Actual science still found on some pages. Don't tell!
Welp, we all knew this was coming: As part of the Trump administration’s ongoing war on science, the Environmental “Protection” Agency has deleted most references to burning fossil fuels as the primary cause of climate change from many parts of its website. Most notably, the agency’s page on “Causes of Climate Change” no longer mentions that human activity — all the coal, oil, and gas we burn — is the primary source of Earth-heating carbon dioxide.
An archived version of the page was perfectly clear about why the planet has gotten hotter over the last 150 years:
Since the Industrial Revolution, human activities have released large amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which has changed the earth’s climate. Natural processes, such as changes in the sun’s energy and volcanic eruptions, also affect the earth’s climate. However, they do not explain the warming that we have observed over the last century.12
The page went on to explain why we know that the current heating of the planet is due to humans burning fossil fuels, not natural processes, and quotes the finding of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land.”
The current version of the page sent almost all of that down the memory hole, leaving only this weirdass half-statement:
Natural processes are always influencing the earth’s climate and can explain climate changes prior to the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s. However, recent climate changes cannot be explained by natural causes alone.
OK, well then what can explain those changes? What explains them, motherfuckers?
Of course, we know damn well that humans burning fossil fuels explains it, but that goes completely unmentioned, because apparently nobody knows. What remains on the page is a list of those natural causes, and obviously you’re meant to ignore the introductory statement that they aren’t sufficient.
University of California climate scientist Daniel Swain said the redacted EPA pages are now “completely wrong,” adding that “This was a tool that I know for a fact that a lot of educators used and a lot of people. It was actually one of the best designed easy access climate change information websites for the U.S.”
In other changes, the “Frequently Asked Questions” page (archive link) used to include questions like “Is there scientific consensus that human activities are causing today’s climate change?” (you bet your ass there is) and a section on the impacts of climate change, and what people can do to reduce the risks (reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and get ready for the changes that are already happening).
We’ll note here that even the old version of the page stopped short of explicitly saying “reduce dependence on fossil fuels,” instead going with a less confrontational recommendation for “making choices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and by preparing for the changes expected in the future,” leaving the specifics to that link.
The new FAQ page chops out all of that, because some questions that people ask frequently are just too inconvenient.
All told, at least 80 pages of information on climate change have been disappeared from the EPA site, including the entire website for the EPA’s Climate Change Impacts and Risk Analysis (CIRA) project (archive link), which used to provide detailed reports and links to scientific publications on climate. The EPA also deleted its Climate Change Impacts website (archive link), which formerly identified how climate affected weather, human health, agriculture, air quality, forests, and multiple sectors of the economy.
Quite a few pages about climate change’s effects on human health were deleted altogether, such as the umbrella page “Understanding the Connection between Climate Change and Human Health” (archived link). A few, like this discussion of “Climate Change and Children’s Health” (archive version) — are still technically “live,” but essentially hidden. You can only find the information if you know it’s there and go looking for it.
Other pages have been more subtly chopped up, like the “Global Greenhouse Gas Overview” (link to a side-by-side comparison), which still has current information but eliminated a substantial review of historical trends.
Gretchen Gehrke, of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (that’s one EDGI acronym!), which tracks changes in federal websites, points out that the EPA changes don’t stop at chopping away at the basic science, which is quite bad enough. Beyond that, EPA is eliminating (or hiding) information that connects climate change to the impacts it’s already having on people’s real lives. “It’s specifically targeting the information about why we should care,” she said.
EPA Propaganda Minister Brigit Hirsch basically said as much, in an an assholish statement to media outlets that she must be very proud of:
“Unlike the previous administration, the Trump EPA is focused on protecting human health and the environment while Powering the Great American Comeback, not left-wing political agendas. As such, this agency no longer takes marching orders from the climate cult.”
Instead, the agency takes its marching order from the cult of Big Oil and from the cult of science deniers. Isn’t that wonderful?
This isn’t simply about undermining science and education, of course; as Swain notes, it seems very much aimed at preemptively eliminating potential objections to the EPA’s plan to reverse its finding that climate change endangers human health, which has up until now been the legal basis for the agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases. “It was almost a pre-bunking effort,” Swain says.
Wipe away the EPA’s own evidence that burning fossil fuels harms our health and the economy, and there’s magically no longer a reason to regulate emissions! Look right here at our website, which lists only natural causes of climate change.
In a sane world, we might hope that legal challenges to the administration’s attempt to roll back the “endangerment finding” will fail, even if the EPA scrubs its website of references to the harm done by climate change. Reality is still very pointedly real, and if anything, the website deletions simply show the administration is trying to conceal the evidence.
If only the current members of the Supreme Court gave two shits about reality.
[E&E News / WaPo (gift link) / AP / Environmental Data & Governance Initiative / Grist]
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As I've mentioned elsewhere, I am a librarian, with a couple decades of experience in the profession.
I used to be able to tell my patrons that they could limit their searches to .gov or .edu in order to get more accurate information from the government or from accredited universities. This is another huge blow to digital literacy and against misinformation, which I realize is entirely the point, but it still pisses me the fuck off.
I contacted ExxonMobil about this and they said they would be glad to get me more information about climate change. They said the person I needed to speak to was Valdeez Nutz.