Latest news with #CEJST
New York Times
21-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Government Science Data May Soon Be Hidden. They're Racing to Copy It.
Amid the torrent of executive orders signed by President Trump were directives that affect the language on government web pages and the public's access to government data touching on climate change, the environment, energy and public health. In the past two months, hundreds of terabytes of digital resources analyzing data have been taken off government websites, and more are feared to be at risk of deletion. While in many cases the underlying data still exists, the tools that make it possible for the public and researchers to use that data have been removed. But now, hundreds of volunteers are working to collect and download as much government data as possible and to recreate the digital tools that allow the public to access that information. So far, volunteers working on a project called Public Environmental Data Partners have retrieved more than 100 data sets that were removed from government sites, and they have a growing list of 300 more they hope to preserve. It echoes efforts that began in 2017, during Mr. Trump's first term, when volunteers downloaded as much climate, environmental, energy and public health data as possible because they feared its fate under a president who has called climate change a hoax. Little federal information disappeared then. But this time is different. And so, too, is the response. 'We should not be in this position where the Trump administration can literally take down every government website if it wants to,' said Gretchen Gehrke, an environmental scientist who helped found the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative in 2017 to conserve federal data. 'We're not prepared for having resilient public information in the digital age and we need to be.' While a lot of data generated by agencies, like climate measurements collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is required by Congress, the digital tools that allow the public to view that data are not. 'This is a campaign to remove public access,' said Jessie Mahr, the director of technology at the Environmental Policy Innovation Center, a member group of the data partnership. 'And at the end of the day, American taxpayers paid for these tools.' Farmers have sued the United States Department of Agriculture for deleting climate data tools they hope will reappear. In February, a successful lawsuit led to the re-publication of the Centers for Disease Control's Social Vulnerability Index. A banner at the top of the C.D.C. webpage now notes that the Department of Health and Human Services was required to restore the site by court order. The Public Environmental Data Partners coalition has received frequent requests for two data tools: the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool, or CEJST, and the Environmental Justice Screening Tool, or EJScreen. The first was developed under a Biden administration initiative to make sure that 40 percent of federal climate and infrastructure investments to go to disadvantaged communities. It was taken offline in January. EJScreen, developed under the Obama administration and once available through the E.P.A, was removed in early February. 'The very first thing across the executive branch was to remove references to equity and environmental justice and to remove equity tools from all agencies,' Dr. Gehrke said. 'It really impairs the public's ability to demonstrate structural racism and its disproportionate impacts on communities of color.' Just a dozen years ago, the E.P.A. defined environmental justice as 'the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income.' The E.P.A.'s new administrator, Lee Zeldin, recently equated environmental justice to 'forced discrimination.' Nonprofit organizations used both screening tools to apply for federal grants related to environmental justice and climate change. But the E.P.A. closed all of its environmental justice offices last week, ending three decades of work to mitigate the effects on poor and minority communities often disproportionately burdened by industrial pollution. It also canceled hundreds of grants already promised to nonprofit groups trying to improve conditions in those communities. 'You can't possibly solve a problem until you can articulate it, so it was an important source of data for articulating the problem,' said Harriet Festing, executive director of the nonprofit group Anthropocene Alliance. Christina Gosnell, co-founder and president of Catalyst Cooperative, a member of the environmental data cooperative, said her main concern was not that the data won't be archived before it disappears, but that it won't be updated. Preserving the current data sets is the first step, but they could become irrelevant if data collection stops, she said. More than 100 tribal nations, cities, and nonprofits used CEJST to show where and why their communities needed trees, which can reduce urban heat, and then applied for funds from the Arbor Day Foundation, a nonprofit organization that received a $75 million grant from the Inflation Reduction Action. The Arbor Day Foundation was on track to plant over a quarter of a million new trees before its grant was terminated in February. How hard it is to reproduce complex tools depends on how the data was created and maintained. CEJST was 'open source,' meaning the raw data and information that backed it up were already publicly accessible for coders and researchers. It was put back together by three people within 24 hours, according to Ms. Mahr. But EJScreen was not an open source tool, and recreating it was more complicated. 'We put a lot of pressure on the last weeks of the Biden administration to make EJScreen open source, so they released as much code and documentation as they could,' Dr. Gehrke said. It took at least seven people more than three weeks to make a version of EJScreen that was close to its original functionality, and Ms. Mahr said they're still tinkering with it. It's akin to recreating a recipe with an ingredient list but no assembly instructions. Software engineers have to try and remember how the 'dish' tasted last time, and then use trial and error to reassemble it from memory. Now, the coalition is working to conserve even more complicated data sets, like climate data from NOAA, which hosts many petabytes — think a thousand terabytes, or more than a million gigabytes — of weather observations and climate models in its archives. 'People may not understand just how much data that is,' Dr. Gehrke said in an email. It could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per month just in storage fees, she said, without including the cost of any sort of access. She said they were talking to NOAA personnel to prioritize the most vulnerable and highest impact data to preserve as soon as possible. So far, the data they've collected is largely stored in the cloud and backed up using servers around the globe; they've worked out pro bono agreements to avoid having to pay to back it up. Some data have, so far, been left alone, like statistics from the Energy Information Administration, among other agencies. Zane Selvans, a fellow co-founder of Catalyst Cooperative said the group had worked for the past eight years to aggregate U.S. energy system data and research in the form of open source tools. The goal is to increase access to federal data that is technically available but not necessarily easy to use. 'So far we've been lucky,' Mr. Selvans said. 'Folks working on environmental justice haven't been as lucky.'
The Guardian
24-02-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Elimination of federal climate tools, some used to inquire in to Musk's firms, sparks alarm
As Donald Trump's administration continues its purge of federal agencies, environmental justice campaigners are alarmed by the disappearance of federal environmental and climate data tools – some of which have been used to identify pollution concerns about Elon Musk's companies. Several federal agencies, including the EPA and CDC, previously published data regarding pollution levels across the country, as well as data about the vulnerability of each census tract, such as poverty rates and life expectancy. Several of the websites containing that data have gone dark in the weeks following Trump's inauguration. Some, such as the CDC's Social Vulnerability Index, came back online on 11 February following a court order, though they now include a note that the administration and department 'reject' the pages. Climate experts are concerned about the loss of two tools in particular: EJScreen, which mapped pollution burdens alongside socioeconomic indicators and was run by the EPA, and the climate and economic justice screening tool (CEJST), which identified disadvantaged communities that would benefit from climate-related funding. 'The elimination of environmental justice data and environmental justice tools is monumental,' said Naomi Yoder, a GIS data manager in the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice. Yoder is worried about not only the loss of data, but the loss of accessibility. The tools are how 'we show the rest of the world and policymakers that the issues people are talking about on the ground are backed up by data'. The data purge threatens to stymie efforts to protect some of the nation's most polluted communities – including ones where Musk's companies are located. Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI, began building the world's largest supercomputer, dubbed 'Colossus,' in South Memphis, Tennessee, over the summer. The facility began operating in December to train Musk's chatbot, Grok. To power the massive data center, xAI has been operating 15 gas turbines. The gas turbines pump pollutants like formaldehyde and nitrous oxide into the surrounding primarily Black neighborhood, campaigners say. A permit application to operate the turbines filed last month indicates the turbines' annual hazardous air pollutants of up to 11.51 tons over 12 months could exceed the EPA's allowed maximum of 10 tons, according to the figures listed in the application. Attorneys from the non-profit Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) used EJScreen to establish that South Memphis, where the xAI facility was built, already suffers from a disproportionately high pollution burden. The census tract is in the 90th percentile in the US for 'toxic releases to air', and neighboring tracts are within the 95th percentile for ozone, according to EJScreen data that has now been preserved by archivists. The SELC campaign says that the gas turbines used by xAI will further worsen ground level ozone, better known as smog. South Memphis has long suffered from high asthma rates and poor air quality. People with asthma are particularly susceptible to ozone, which can aggravate the condition and increase hospital admissions. Libbie Weimer, a geospatial analyst at SELC, has used EJScreen in her day-to-day work for years. 'There are pollution concerns at that facility,' explained Weimer, and the surrounding neighborhood 'is a historically African-American community' that already experiences an outsized pollution burden. The SELC also used the National Emissions Inventory (NEI) to show that xAI's gas turbines, when used at full capacity, constitute the 9th-largest emitter of nitrous oxide in Shelby county, Tennessee. The NEI was taken down, but later restored after the 11 February court order. SELC referred to the NEI data in August, when asking the Shelby county health department to order xAI to cease operations until it had obtained a permit for the turbines, which it says are illegal. Tools like EJScreen 'help us quickly and efficiently get some baseline information about who's impacted', explained Weimer. 'The thing that's really important about it is that EJScreen, especially … democratizes access to this information.' The tools allowed anyone to 'easily look up and access information that's super relevant to the work they're doing, without necessarily going through the bottleneck of consulting technical experts'. An EPA spokesperson said in response to queries that the agency 'is working to diligently implement President Trump's executive orders, including the 'Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing''. They continued: 'President Trump was elected with a mandate from the American people to do just this. President Trump advanced conservation and environmental stewardship in his first term and the EPA will continue to uphold its mission to protect human health and the environment in his second term.' xAI did not respond to requests to comment. Campaigners say the missing datasets from various federal environmental data tools could have been used to examine the impact of Musk's business efforts elsewhere. Musk's SpaceX is seeking permission to launch starships from the Kennedy Space Center. The company's application for a commercial launch vehicle operator license to launch their Starship Super Heavy is still pending with the FAA. Its application is opposed by various environmental groups and advocates, including the Southeastern Fisheries Association, who have urged the FAA to consider environmental justice and the project's 'substantial impacts to disadvantaged communities'. That application must pass several steps first – including an environmental permit review. In EPA comments to the FAA, the agency 'strongly' urged the FAA to use the now-deleted EJScreen tool during their environmental review, in order to account for environmental justice. If the FAA were still able to use the tool, it would find the area where SpaceX intends to launch Starships is among the 88th percentile for cancer rates for adults. Some of Musk's Starships have exploded during flight, creating vast clouds of metal particulates, which have been linked to lung cancer. In response to queries from the Guardian, FAA public affairs specialist Steve Kulm said 'the FAA is committed to conducting environmental reviews in compliance with all applicable executive orders and environmental laws and regulations'. SpaceX has previously been found to have reportedly ignored environmental regulations: the company's headquarters in Cameron county, Texas, discharged thousands of gallons of industrial wastewater into the environment, for which it was fined over $150,000 for violating the Clean Water Act. SpaceX was facing multiple lawsuits from environmental groups. One of those lawsuits was dropped Monday after campaigners said they no longer felt optimistic about the suit's outcome. The EJScreen tool indicated that the headquarters in Cameron county are in an area in the 98th percentile of drinking water non-compliance, according to its environmental justice index, which takes into account the percentage of low-income homes and people of color alongside compliance with the Safe Drinking Water Act. The new administration has also ordered the elimination of any directives associated with Biden's Justice40 initiative – affiliates of which have campaigned against his Tesla Gigafactory. The EPA's office of environmental justice and external civil rights has also been eliminated. 'There's been a huge effort from the Trump administration to wipe out access. Those datasets might even still be there, but the public can't readily use them,' said Yoder. 'Now it's going to require a team of specialists for many hours to get anything close to the same thing.' SpaceX did not respond to requests to comment.
