Riccardo Liguori The Trump administration has issued a directive requiring the removal of all references to climate change from government websites. In addition to undermining institutional transparency, this move raises questions about the long-term consequences for scientific research and environmental safety. Does deleting the problem from official documents really solve it?
A strike against transparency and science
The Trump administration wasted no time establishing a reputation for itself by issuing a flurry of controversial executive orders. Revoking birthright citizenship, restricting automatic citizenship to those born in the U.S., reopening an immigrant detention facility at Gitmo, withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, and rolling back gender incorporation policies in the military, these are all Trump’s policies that command headlines in the reshaping of the American political landscape. One of the earliest acts was a major blow to environmental policy: systematically removing all mentions of climate change from official government websites.
An assault against transparency and science
Trump ordered the department of Agriculture to delete anything referring to the climate crisis. Amongst other pages, several from the Forest Service, including links to wildfire risk assessment tools, have disappeared from the U.S. government’s intranet, and the major sites for risk assessment for preventing environmental disasters are now gone. All that meets the user’s eye is an error: “You are not authorized to view this page.”
Among sites taken down is the Climate Change Resource Center, which provides important information to the academic community and environment professionals. This worked in their favor as an initial blow. In addition, the Climate Action Tracker went offline for several days. This hardly leaves any doubt: Trump has declared war on the scientific narrative of climate change.
The corrective unfavorable climate purge mandates federal agencies to review any and all materials available on the Internet and eliminate any explicit reference to the climate crisis. One point that must have been on their agenda for removal was that they were clearly major targets in the war — against information that could potentially monitor global warming or be used to mitigate effects from extreme weather events.
Experts have warned that deletion of this information might impede local communities in preparing for fire, flooding, and other natural catastrophes aggravated by climate change. Environmental organizations are already raising alarm bells over this matter and attacking this erase decision, marking it directly as an assailant on scientific transparency and public access to data.
The real question now is: how long can climate denial dictate policy before reality forces a reckoning?
