Tag Archives: EPA

Climate Science Removed From EPA Site: WaPo

April 29, 2017UncategorizedCensoring Science, Climate Change, EPA, Global Warming, Scott Pruitt, Trump, Washington PostGreg Laden

The EPA has removed climate science from its site in order that the site contents better reflect Donald Trump’s perspective.

From Chris Mooney and Juliet Eilperin at the Washington Post:

The Environmental Protection Agency announced Friday evening that its website would be “undergoing changes” to better represent the new direction the agency is taking, triggering the removal of several agency websites containing detailed climate data and scientific information.

One of the websites that appeared to be gone had been cited to challenge statements made by the EPA’s new administrator, Scott Pruitt. Another provided detailed information on the previous administration’s Clean Power Plan, including fact sheets about greenhouse gas emissions on the state and local levels and how different demographic groups were affected by such emissions.

The changes came less than 24 hours before thousands of protesters were set to march in Washington…

Go to that article to get the gory details.

By the way, given what is happening at the New York Times, the Washington Post has become the US national level go-to major media for climate change. It helps that Chris Mooney is there, and his coverage is excellent, though there are lots of other writers who cover environmental and climate issues as well. If you happen to be a member of Amazon Prime, you can get the Washington Post free for a period of time (I can’t remember how long, I got mine a long time back) and subscribing isn’t too bad. Once you do the free thing for a while you’ll start getting special offers, and I recommend it. Note that even during a period when I wasn’t subscribing to the Washington Post, I used it as my main major media source for ongoing primaries during the election season, as it had the best organized (though not perfect) site with current results. (Prime or not, perhaps this is a good deal for the paper at Amazon as well: The Washington Post.)

Trump Hates You, His Supporters, And Our Planet

March 29, 2017Uncategorizedanti-science, Environment, EPA, Executive Order, TrumpGreg Laden

A few items that I think you should see:

Trump’s executive order puts the world on the road to climate catastrophe

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump issued a sweeping executive order that effectively guts national efforts to address climate change. If he isn’t stopped, the endpoint of this approach is the ruination of our livable climate and the needless suffering of billions of people for decades to come.
The order starts the process of undoing President Obama’s Clean Power Plan standards for power plants. It also spurs fossil fuel consumption and blocks federal efforts to even prepare for the multiple, simultaneous catastrophes that unrestricted carbon pollution the world faces?—?severe drought, ocean acidification, ever-worsening heat waves, rising seas that threaten to destroy coastal cites.
This is not politics as usual. …

Read the rest

Trump’s Executive Order Threatens to Wreck Earth as a Livable Planet for Humans

Decades of progress on cleaning up our dirty air took a significant hit on Tuesday, along with hopes for a livable future climate, when President Trump issued his Energy Independence Executive Order. Most seriously, the order attacks the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) Clean Power Plan, which requires a 32 percent reduction in CO2 emissions from existing power plants by 2030 (compared to 2005 emission rates.)

Tuesday’s blow was just the latest in a series of attacks that threaten our health and the planet’s health. On March 15, Trump also ordered…

Read the rest

I am an Arctic researcher. Donald Trump is deleting my citations

…At first, the distress flare of lost data came as a surge of defunct links on 21 January. The US National Strategy for the Arctic, the Implementation Plan for the Strategy, and the report on our progress all gone within a matter of minutes. As I watched more and more links turned red, I frantically combed the internet for archived versions of our country’s most important polar policies.

I had no idea then that this disappearing act had just begun.

Since January, the surge has transformed into a slow, incessant march of deleting datasets, webpages and policies about the Arctic. I now come to expect a weekly email request to replace invalid citations, hoping that someone had the foresight to download …

Read the rest

Introduced Into The House: H.R.861 – To terminate the Environmental Protection Agency.

February 6, 2017UncategorizedEnvironment, Environmental Protection Agency, EPAGreg Laden

Representative Mat Gaetz (Republican, Florida) introduced HR 861, “To terminate the Environmental Protection Agency” which is said to defund and remove from existence the Environmental Protection Agency.

Details are unclear, but the idea is to have states and local communities regulate their environmental pollution.

The EPA centralizes research programs, policy guidance, and regulatory procedures. To ask each community to do this amounts to a huge tax increase, because the same effort would have to be repeated many times across the country.

The reason we have a national EPA is because pollution does not respect boundaries. People who live in states run by anti-environmental lawmakers will not pay for pollution mitigation, and the pollution they create will flow down stream or blow down wind to states where people act responsibly about the environment. This is unacceptable.

Ask your house member how they stand on the bill. Ask them to explain their position and report how they intend to vote.

Encourage your house member to vote against the bill.

Encourage your house member to act responsibly with respect to the environment.

A response to Trump’s gag order on scientists

January 24, 2017UncategorizedClimate Change, EPA, Gag Orders, President Donald Trump, Trump, USDAGreg Laden

From ClimateTruth.org, in response to Trump gag orders on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA):

“President Trump and his administration have ignored scientific reality, and now they’re trying to hide it.

“Merely five days into Donald Trump’s presidency, the administration is silencing the agencies tasked with protecting our environment, our health, and our food supply. This gag order sets a dangerous precedent and is sending a chilling message to civil servants throughout the country.

“We knew the Trump administration would go beyond President George W. Bush’s administration in attacking science and suppressing research, but we didn’t know it would happen so fast and so egregiously. Suppressing public servant scientists from communicating with the American public is a dangerous move that sets us on a path where policy decisions are divorced from reality.

“Scientists at the agencies should know that we have their backs. They have a right to speak freely and duty to share their research publicly. Even if the Trump administration doesn’t respect science, the American public does.”

By the way, not all elements in the Trump administration are walking in lockstep. Check out this rogue national park that, for a while, was speaking its mind.