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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.'
Yahoo
11-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
In Trump's new purge of climate language, even ‘resilience' isn't safe
In his first hours back in the White House in January, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled 'Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.' Yet it was immediately clear he was in fact imposing rules on language, ordering the government to recognize only two genders and shut down any diversity equity and inclusion programs. In one executive order, he redefined 'energy' to exclude solar and wind power. Within days, not just 'diversity,' but also 'clean energy' and 'climate change' began vanishing from federal websites. Other institutions and organizations started scrubbing their websites. Scientists who receive federal funding were told to end any activities that contradicted Trump's executive orders. Government employees — at least, the ones who hadn't been fired — began finding ways to take their climate work underground, worried that even acknowledging the existence of global warming could put their jobs at risk. The Trump administration's crackdown on words tied to progressive causes reflects the rise of what's been called the 'woke right,' a reactionary movement with its own language rules in opposition to 'woke' terms that have become more prevalent in recent years. Since Trump took office, federal agencies have deleted climate change information from more than 200 government websites, according to the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, a network that tracks these changes. These shifts in language lay the groundwork for how people understand what's real and true, widening the deepening divide between how Republicans and Democrats understand the world. 'I think that all powerful individuals and all powerful entities are in some sense trying to bend reality to favor them, to play for their own interests,' said Norma Mendoza-Denton, an anthropology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who co-edited a book about Trump's use of language. 'So it's not unique, but definitely the scope at which it's happening, the way it's happening, the speed of it right now, is unprecedented.' Gretchen Gehrke, who monitors federal websites for the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, says that government sites are one of the few sources the public trusts for authoritative, reliable information, which is why removing facts about climate change from them is such a problem. 'It really does alter our ability as a collective society to be able to identify and discuss reality,' Gehrke said. 'If we only are dealing with the information that we're receiving via social media, we're literally operating in different realities.' Institutions that fail to follow Trump's executive orders have already faced consequences. After Trump rechristened the Gulf of Mexico 'the Gulf of America,' for instance, the Associated Press stood by the original, centuries-old name in its coverage — and its reporters lost access to the White House as a result. The effects of these language mandates have reverberated across society, with university researchers, nonprofits, and business executives searching for MAGA-friendly phrases to stay out of the administration's crosshairs. The solar industry is no longer talking about climate change, for instance, but 'American energy dominance,' echoing Trump's platform. The new language rules are expected to limit what many scientists are permitted to research. 'It's going to make it really hard to do the climate justice work,' said Amanda Fencl, director of climate science at the Union of Concerned Scientists, referring to the field that studies how a warming planet affects people unequally. The National Science Foundation, which accounts for about a quarter of federal support to universities, has been flagging studies that might violate Trump's executive orders on gender and diversity initiatives based on a search for words such as 'female,' 'institutional,' 'biases,' 'marginalized,' and 'trauma.' 'I do think that deleting information and repressing and silencing scientists, it just has a chilling effect,' Fencl said. 'It's really demoralizing.' During Trump's first term, references to climate change disappeared from federal environmental websites, with the use of the term declining by roughly 38 percent between 2016 and 2020, only to reappear under the Biden administration. Trump's second term appears to be taking a much more aggressive stance on wiping out words used by left-leaning organizations, scientists, and the broader public, likely with more to come. Last summer, a leaked video from Project 2025 — a policy agenda organized by The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank — revealed a former Trump official declaring that political appointees would have to 'eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.' Read Next DeSantis says he's 'restoring sanity' by erasing climate change from Florida laws Kate Yoder Some government employees are finding ways to continue their climate work, despite the hostile atmosphere. The Atlantic reported in February that one team of federal workers at an unnamed agency had sealed itself off in a technology-free room to conduct meetings related to climate change, with employees using encrypted Signal messages instead of email. 'All I have ever wanted to do was help the American people become more resilient to climate change,' an anonymous source at the agency reportedly said. 'Now I am being treated like a criminal.' The last time Trump was in office, federal employees replaced many references to 'climate change' with softer phrases like 'sustainability' and 'resilience.' Now, many of those vague, previously safe terms are disappearing from websites, too, leaving fewer and fewer options for raising concerns about the environment. 'You really cannot address a problem that you can't identify,' Gehrke said. A study in the journal Ecological Economics in 2022 examined euphemisms for climate change used under the previous Trump administration and argued that the avoidance of clear language could undermine efforts to raise awareness for taking action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Yet using more palatable synonyms could also be viewed as a way for scientists and government employees to continue doing important work. For example, when the Federal Emergency Management Agency rebranded its 'Climate Resilience' site to 'Future Conditions' in January, it stripped references to climate change from its main landing page while leaving them in subpages. 'To me, that reads as trying to fly under the radar,' Gehrke said. Of course, the reality of the changing climate won't disappear, even if the phrase itself goes into hiding. Florida's Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, who last year signed a bill deleting most mentions of climate change from Florida state law, is still dealing with the consequences of a warming planet, continuing to approve funding for coastal communities to adapt to flooding and protect themselves against hurricanes. He just calls it 'strengthening and fortifying Florida' without any mention of climate change. 'You can ban a word if you want,' Mendoza-Denton said, 'but the concept still needs to be talked about.' This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In Trump's new purge of climate language, even 'resilience' isn't safe on Mar 11, 2025.
