#epa website

[rjzimmerman]

This is what you see when you open the EPA website.....finally, truth and science are back and regressive right-wing denial politics are hiding in the shadows......for now, hopefully for a long, long time.

Excerpt from this story from Common Dreams/EcoWatch:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Thursday brought back its climate change website — a resource the former Trump administration had yanked.

"Climate facts are back on EPA's website where they should be," newly confirmed EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a statement Thursday.

"Considering the urgency of this crisis, it's critical that Americans have access to information and resources so that we can all play a role in protecting our environment, our health, and vulnerable communities," Regan continued. "Trustworthy, science-based information is at the foundation of strong, achievable solutions."

New information on climate science and the crisis' impacts will soon be added to the website, the statement added.

In April of 2017 the Trump administration, with Scott Pruitt then at the helm of the EPA, rendered the agency's climate change site basically useless, with readers being redirected to a page that said, "This page is being updated." Any pretense of ongoing or pending updates, however, was dropped in 2018. The moves were seen as on-brand for an administration carrying out a war on science and pushing forth pro-fossil fuel policies.

[oilchangeus-blog]

Scott Pruitt Responds to Climate Change Facts By Deleting Them From EPA Website

If you were thinking of preparing for Saturday’s People’s Climate March by brushing up on a few climate science facts at the Environmental Protection Agency’s comprehensive website, forget about it.

OUTRAGED? Take the pledge to stand up for science: climatetruth.org/standupforscience

[rjzimmerman]

"We want to help you find what you are looking for."

Excerpt from this EcoWatch article:

The Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) climate change page might be gone, permanently.

Four months after Donald Trump took office, the agency replaced its "climate change" page with an update message saying the site was being changed to "reflect the agency's new direction under President Donald Trump." But now even the promise of an update is gone, a new report from the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) discovered Thursday.

Instead, if you type epa.gov/climatechange into your web browser, you get a rather ironic error message reading, "We want to hep you find what you are looking for.”

The EDGI report said that the changes occurred between 5:12 p.m. Oct. 16 and 3:04 a.m. Oct. 17. In addition to changing the main text of the page, the website also replaced a link to a snapshot of the EPA's Obama-era climate change page with a snapshot of the EPA's Obama-era main page and deleted a link to a press release explaining the changes. In September, the EPA also removed a link on the page to the EPA's searchable archive and technical support request form."

The cumulative effect of removing these links from the splash page is the substantial reduction of access to EPA's historical public information about climate change," the EDGI report said.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this article from Earther:

A new report released on Friday by the Environmental and Data Governance Initiative shows that the EPA overhauled many of its pages on fracking, shorthand for hydraulic fracturing. That term has all but disappeared from the site, replaced by “unconventional oil and gas”. A lot of context has also been wiped out, and while it’s not a wholesale deletion a la EPA’s climate change page, it illustrates how the government is limiting access to information and putting out propaganda for the industries it’s supposed to regulate.

There are two ways to interpret the EPA’s replacement of the phrase “hydraulic fracturing” with “unconventional oil and gas.” The benign take is that the pages are now inclusive of a variety of ways we continue to extract fossil fuels from the ground. Fracking is just one step in one process to get at hard-to-access oil and gas. Unconventional oil and gas include all sorts of things like tar sands, for example, though the new EPA pages don’t get into those or even defining what the term means.

There’s another, less charitable read on the change, though. Anti-fracking sentiment has been on the rise for years, and majorities of Americans of all political stripes favor tighter regulation, according to Gallup polling done earlier this year. The Trump administration does not agree.

Unconventional oil and gas may well be more accurate in industry parlance, but it’s also far less used in public discourse. By removing nearly all instances of the term “hydraulic fracturing,” the EPA has created a bit of a bait and switch.

[rjzimmerman]

Environmental Defense Fund has obtained emails indicating EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt's personal involvement in efforts to remove information about climate change from EPA's website.

Excerpt:

Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) has obtained emails indicating U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt's personal involvement in efforts to remove information about climate changefrom EPA's website.

EDF obtained the emails from EPA in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. We have posted the files for easy public access.

The emails center on a website purge at EPA in April 2017. Along with webpages about climate change and climate science, the purge removed the webpage about the Clean Power Plan—the most significant action that the U.S. has ever taken to address climate change, and one that Pruitt is now attempting to repeal.

The website purge undermined access to information about the Clean Power Plan's immense benefits for climate and public health, as well as supporting materials about the rule's legal and technical underpinnings. The public comment period for Pruitt's proposal to repeal the Clean Power Plan is ongoing.

The emails also suggest EPA staff were directed to manipulate search results. Website visitors searching for information about the Clean Power Plan would be diverted to the page promoting Trump's executive order—instead of what they were actually looking for.

The removed webpages are still accessible through various EPA archives, but the archives are a poor substitute. They do not appear in a search of the EPA website. They are harder to find with certain search engines, including Google. And they are no longer being updated, which is especially problematic for cutting-edge pages like EPA's overview of climate science.

The website purge fits Pruitt's troubling pattern of ruling EPA under a cloak of secrecy, which is no way to run an agency entrusted with protecting the public health and environment. As part of EDF's commitment to shining a light on EPA actions, we are making these records easily available to the public. Members of the public may contact EDF with any observations after viewing the records.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt:

In the Trump administration's ongoing efforts to pretend that climate change doesn't exist, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has made dramatic changes to a website catered to helping states, local and tribal governments learn about global warming and how prepare and respond to the impacts of our hot new world, according to a new analysis from the watchdog group Environmental Data and Governance Initiative(EDGI).

As you can see in the screenshot above, the website site was previously titled "Climate and Energy Resources for State, Local, and Tribal Governments." Now, it's called, "Energy Resources for State, Local, and Tribal Governments." Fifteen mentions of the term "climate change" were scrubbed from the original main page alone, and the old epa.gov/statelocalclimate URL even redirects to epa.gov/statelocalenergy.

But that's not the only change—the old site consisted of about 380 pages of content, while the new site consists of about 175. The current website leaves out vital resources including information on how local governments can invest in clean energy, curb emissions and adapt to extreme weather conditions.

EDGI, which has been closely tracking changes to federal websites since President Trump took office, notedthat this is the first example of returned content since the EPA began overhauling its climate change website on April 28.

"Large portions of climate resources that were formerly found on the previous website have not been returned, and thus have ultimately been removed from the current EPA website (though many of these resources can still be found in the January 19 snapshot of the EPA website)," the organization explained. "The new website launch was done without an accompanying news release and the decision not to include particular climate resources was not explained."

[rjzimmerman]

13 U.S. Cities Defy Trump by Posting Deleted Climate Data

"Deleting federal webpages does not reset the scientific consensus that climate change is real. The American people are entitled to the publicly-funded EPA research on climate change."

Excerpt:

More than one dozen U.S. cities have banded together to post deleted climate change information and research from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) website that was notoriously scrubbed by the Trump administration.

In May, Chicago became the first city to host the deleted pages, and now other mayors are following in Rahm Emanuel's footsteps by creating their city's own "Climate Change is Real" website.

The "Climate Change is Real" website contains information on the basic science behind climate change, the ways weather is impacted from increased greenhouse gas emissions and actions the federal government has taken to reduce the impact.

Major cities including Atlanta, Boston, Houston, San Francisco and Seattle have joined the effort.

If you want to see what one of these city climate change websites, using the old EPA website, looks like, here’s the link to the one posted by the City of Chicago. At the top of the Chicago website, you’ll see the following:

The City of Chicago wishes to acknowledge and attribute this information to the United States Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies, for their decades of work studying climate change and developing approaches to protect the environment. While this information may not be readily available on the EPA’s website, in Chicago we know climate change is real. We are joining cities around the country to make sure citizens have access to information on climate change. We will continue to take action to adapt to climate threats while reducing our dependence on fossil fuels.

[rjzimmerman]

Administrator Scott Pruitt’s senseless decision is a broadside against scientific integrity.

Written by Jason Samenow, the Washington Post’s weather editor and Capital Weather Gang's chief meteorologist. He earned a master's degree in atmospheric science, and spent 10 years as a climate change science analyst for the U.S. government.

Excerpt:

This spring, political officials at the Environmental Protection Agency removed the agency’s climate change website, one of the world’s top resources for information on the science and effects of climate change.

To me, a scientist who managed this website for more than five years, its removal signifies a declaration of war on climate science by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. There can be no other interpretation. I draw this conclusion as a meteorologist with a specialization in climate science and as an independent voter who strives to keep my political and scientific views separate. I concede that this specific issue is personal for me, given the countless hours I spent working on the site. But it should be obvious to anyone how this senseless action runs counter to principles of good governance and scientific integrity.

The EPA’s official line is that it is “updating” the climate change website to reflect new “priorities” under Pruitt and Trump. It has archived the old site but put nothing in its place nor announced a timetable for “updating” it. Pruitt may not accept mainstream climate science conclusions, but if he wanted to promote his alternative views, a much more defensible and transparent action would have been to leave the site up while posting his perspective as well. Instead, one of the world’s best climate science sites has vanished.

Pruitt’s order to delete the site feels purely spiteful, as if he simply couldn’t abide knowing that the agency he leads was publishing information he doesn’t believe. But science is not about belief — it’s about evidence. Of all people, the head of the EPA should have the utmost respect for this evidence and its transparent communication. Pruitt’s choice to destroy carefully vetted scientific information rather than preserve it is a reckless and dangerous abdication of his responsibility.