Latest news with #EnvironmentalDataandGovernanceInitiative
Chicago Tribune
3 hours ago
- Politics
- Chicago Tribune
Local activists undeterred after report shows Trump administration removed environmental data
A new report shows how environmental information has been deleted since President Donald Trump was inaugurated, but local activists refuse to let the changes impact how they operate. 'With every stroke of the pen and deletion, Trump can try to eliminate environmental and climate justice from his administration, but he won't erase our communities,' Ashley Williams, executive director of Just Transition Northwest Indiana, said in a statement. 'We are a testament that the fight will continue because everyone should have access to a clean, healthy environment and a better quality of life.' The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative released a 55-page report detailing how the Trump administration has altered the availability of environmental information in the last six months. Information about environmental justice and climate change have disappeared from federal websites, according to the organization. 'The pace and severity of this administration's attacks on environmental information in its first six months have been far worse than in the first Trump administration,' Izzy Pacenza, lead author of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative study, said in a news release. The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative's website governance team monitored more than 4,000 federal environmental pages to find changes for the report. According to its data, the organization found 70% more website changes in Trump's first 100 days in office in 2025 compared to during his first term in 2017. The organization is monitoring 20% of the webpages it tracked for changes during the first Trump administration. Information about climate change has been altered and removed, including from the U.S. Global Change Research Program website and informational resources from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website. Climate change information remains 'virtually unaltered' on the Environmental Protection Agency's website, according to the report. 'The Trump administration's changes to public information are part of a broader agenda to reshape the form and function of the federal government,' according to the report. Changes relating to environmental justice and diversity, equity and inclusion have been made most frequently, according to the report. Information about environmental racism has been 'entirely excised' from federal websites, according to the report. Environmental racism is the intentional pollution and waste facilities in communities primarily made up of people of color, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. Those communities are disproportionately exposed to fumes, toxic dust, ash, soot and other pollutants, according to the NRDC. Gary was one of the communities visited by EPA officials in 2022 due to its history of heavy industry and proximity to five Superfund sites. At the time, residents were encouraged to keep tabs on environmental data. Removing language about environmental racism denies facts and generates misinformation, as well as undermines the collective ability to address issues. 'Trustworthy information is critical for a functioning democracy,' Gretchen Gehrke, study lead author, said in a news release. 'These removals reflect a broad deregulatory agenda by this administration to disavow the intersecting issues of environmental justice and climate change.' Carolyn McCrady, member of Gary Advocates for Responsible Development, responded to the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative Study's findings, calling federal cuts relentless, ruthless and lawless, especially for communities of color. 'While (they are) depriving organizations, cities and states of the funds needed to repair environmental damage, they are also destroying the laws that provided protection since the inception of the EPA,' McCrady said in a text. 'But the assault will only strengthen the resolve of people to fight to protect and preserve the very foundation of life in these targeted communities. No one is giving up.' Earlier this year, in Indiana, Gov. Mike Braun signed two executive orders that target the environment, including one to make state regulations consistent with national ones and one prohibiting the use of the phrase 'environmental justice' in permitting, enforcement and grant decisions. '…the concept of 'environmental justice' has become increasingly politicized and has often led to the introduction of subjective, non-scientific factors into environmental policy and regulation…' according to one executive order. Northwest Indiana activists previously told the Post-Tribune that Braun's executive orders were concerning, and targeting environmental justice would be harmful for the public health and wellbeing of region communities. In July, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced a plan to rescind the 2009 Endangerment Finding at an Indianapolis auto dealership, which Braun and other Indiana officials supported in person. The 2009 Endangerment Finding found six greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare of current and future generations. The American Lung Association announced in April that Hoosiers are breathing some of the nation's most polluted air in its 'State of the Air' report. The Indianapolis metro area ranked at the 54th worst in the nation for ozone pollution and 21st worst for particle pollution. In Northwest Indiana, the American Lung Association gave Lake County failing grades in three categories: ozone pollution, 24-hour particle pollution and annual particle pollution. Porter County only received a passing grade for annual particle pollution. Ozone and particle pollution can cause premature death and other health effects, including asthma attacks, heart attacks, strokes, preterm birth and impaired cognitive function, according to the American Lung Association. The organization also found particle pollution can cause lung cancer. 'Indiana ranks as the worst state for pollution,' Williams said. 'Northwest Indiana is the epicenter of these emissions. This reality is getting worse with each rollback, each attack on those most vulnerable.'
Vox
21-07-2025
- Politics
- Vox
Inside the federal government's purge of climate data
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. For 25 years, a group of the country's top experts has been fastidiously tracking the ways that climate change threatens every part of the United States. Their findings informed the National Climate Assessments, a series of congressionally mandated reports released every four years that translated the science into accessible warnings for policymakers and the public. But that work came to a halt this spring when the Trump administration abruptly dismissed all 400 experts working on the next edition. Then, late last month, all of the past reports vanished too, along with the federal website they lived on. A lot of information about the changing climate has disappeared under President Donald Trump's second term, but the erasure of the National Climate Assessments is 'by far the biggest loss we've seen,' said Gretchen Gehrke, who monitors federal websites with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. The National Climate Assessments were one of the most approachable resources that broke down how climate change will affect the places people care about, she said. The reports were also used by a wide swath of stakeholders — policymakers, farmers, businesses — to guide their decisions about the future. While the reports have been archived elsewhere, they're no longer as easy to access. And it's unclear what, if anything, will happen to the report that was planned for 2027 or 2028, which already existed in draft form. So why did the reports survive Trump's first term, but not his second? You could view their disappearance in a few different ways, experts said — as a flex of executive power, an escalation in the culture war over climate change, or a strategic attempt to erase the scientific foundation for climate policy. 'If you suppress information and data, then you don't have the evidence you need to be able to create regulations, strengthen regulations, and even to combat the repeal of regulations,' Gehrke said. This isn't climate denial in the traditional sense. The days of loudly debating the science have mostly given way to something quieter and more insidious: a campaign to withhold the raw information itself. 'I don't know if we're living in climate denial anymore,' said Leah Aronowsky, a science historian at the Columbia Climate School. 'We have this new front of denial by erasure.' By cutting funding for research and withholding crucial data, the Trump administration is making it harder to know exactly how the planet is changing. In April, the administration pulled nearly $4 million in funding from a Princeton program to improve computer models predicting changes in the oceans and atmosphere, claiming the work created 'climate anxiety' among young people. That same month, the Environmental Protection Agency failed to submit its annual report to the United Nations detailing the country's greenhouse gas emissions. In May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ended its 45-year tradition of tracking billion-dollar weather disasters. Trump also hopes to shut down the Mauna Loa laboratory in Hawaii, which has measured the steady rise in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide since the 1950s — the first data to definitively show humans were changing the climate. 'This kind of wholesale suppression of an entire field of federally sponsored research, to my knowledge, is historically unprecedented,' Aronowsky said. In a response to a request for comment, a NASA spokesperson said that it has 'no legal obligations to host data,' referring to the site that hosted the National Climate Assessments, adding that the US Global Change Research Program had already 'met its statutory requirements by presenting its reports to Congress.' The EPA directed Grist to a webpage containing past greenhouse gas emissions reports, as well as a version of what was supposed to be this year's report obtained by the Environmental Defense Fund. However, the agency confirmed that the latest data has not been officially released. The White House declined to comment, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration did not respond. Climate denial first took off in the 1990s, when the oil and gas companies and industry-friendly think tanks started sowing doubt about climate science. Last year, a leaked training video from Project 2025 — the policy roadmap organized by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank — showed a former Trump official declaring that political appointees would have to 'eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.' The strategy appears to be designed to boost the fossil fuel industry at a time when clean energy has become competitive and the reality of climate change harder to dismiss, as floods, fires, and heat waves have become perceptibly worse. 'We will drill, baby, drill,' Trump said in his inauguration speech in January. The administration hasn't exactly been subtle about its endgame. Lee Zeldin, the head of the EPA, doesn't deny the reality of climate change (he calls himself a 'climate realist'), but he's zealously dismantled environmental programs and has recommended that the White House strike down the 'endangerment finding,' the bedrock of US climate policy. It comes from a 2007 Supreme Court ruling on the Clean Air Act that required the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants since they endanger public health. If the administration can convince the courts that climate change isn't a health consideration, it could end that regulatory obligation. 'If you're removing information about climate change, its reality, and its impact on people, then I think it's a lot easier to make the case that it's not an environmental health issue,' Gehrke said. There's a word for the idea that ignorance can serve political ends: agnotology (from the Greek 'agnosis,' or 'not knowing'), the study of how knowledge is deliberately obscured. What Trump is doing to information about climate change fits squarely in that tradition, according to Aronowsky: 'If you remove it, then in a certain sense, it no longer exists, and therefore, there's nothing to even debate, right?' Climate denial first took off in the 1990s, when the oil and gas companies and industry-friendly think tanks started sowing doubt about climate science. Over the decades, as the evidence became rock-solid, those who opposed reducing the use of fossil fuels gradually shifted from outright denying the facts to attacking solutions like wind and solar power. What the Trump administration is doing now marks a radical break from this long-term trend, said John Cook, a climate misinformation researcher at the University of Melbourne in Australia. 'This is a 180, not just a turn, but diving into something we've never even seen before,' he said. On the other hand, Cook said, the administration is taking a classic climate denial tactic — painting scientists as 'alarmists' or conspirators who can't be trusted — and turning it into government policy. Half a year in, the second Trump administration's treatment of climate information hasn't yet reached the 'eradication' levels that Project 2025 aspired to, at least on government websites. The EPA's climate change website, for instance, is still up and running, even though all references to the phenomenon were erased on the agency's home page. Most of the website deletions so far have served to isolate climate change as an issue, erasing its relationship to topics such as health and infrastructure, Gehrke said. Up until the National Climate Assessments disappeared, she would have said that 'climate erasure' was an inappropriate characterization of what's happening. 'But now, I'm really not so sure,' she said.
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.
