Trump Orders EPA to Take Down Its Climate Change Page, Says Reuters

As of midnight January 24, the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate change webpage and links were still up and operating. Among the important data that the agency collects and maintains is the inventory of greenhouse gas emissions trends in the United States. It is true that the EPA website is reporting the consensus view that climate change in recent decades is largely the result of increases in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases generated from burning fossil fuels. But slashing and burning data that both skeptics and alarmists use would be stupid.

Reuters reported:

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to remove the climate change page from its website, two agency employees told Reuters, the latest move by the newly minted leadership to erase ex-President Barack Obama’s climate change initiatives.

The employees were notified by EPA officials on Tuesday that the administration had instructed EPA’s communications team to remove the website’s climate change page, which contains links to scientific global warming research, as well as detailed data on emissions. The page could go down as early as Wednesday, the sources said.

Climate science is politicized from top-to-bottom. Of course, the current holdover EPA website is promoting Obama administration policies aimed at cutting greenhouse gases that President Trump has vowed to overturn. Obviously, those webpages will change as the new administration develops its own plans and policies. In contrast to views of those advising the Trump administration, the Obama administration also argued that climate model projections are sufficiently robust to guide policy.

If Reuters‘ sources are accurate, it’s pretty clear that the haste with which Trump and his minions are acting is meant to send a strong signal to the permanent bureaucracy that there’s a new sheriff in town. Presumably the actual data on things such as sources and amounts of greenhouse gases are not being erased and access to them will be restored quickly. It will be interesting to see how “alternative” the new Trump administration’s EPA climate change webpages will turn out to be.