Here ’s What the EPA’s Website Looks Like After a Year of Climate Change Censorship

Throughout the Trump administration’s first year in office, the Environmental Protection Agency has been quietly scrubbing mentions of climate change and tweaking related language on its website – an effort critics have decried as scientific censorship. The EPA is far from the only federal agency to get a Trump-era work over. But monitoring organizations say it has suffered the most extensive revisions over the past year. These alterations, which began within days of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, reflect a marked departure from the EPA’s roots in an era of burgeoning environmental activism. In 1962, marine biologist Rachel Carson ignited an advocacy movement with her book Silent Spring, which warned that humans were poisoning their environment with pesticides, and, in turn, the environment would eventually poison humans too. The message, compounded by environmental disasters of that decade, attracted the sympathies of President Richard Nixon, who created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 in part to regulate the impact of human activities on the environment. Nearly five decades later, the current administration is waging a blitzkrieg against the widely held consensus that human activity is a driving force behind climate change. This reorientation has triggered a purge of environmental websites, and especially, the EPA’s, which once boasted readers had “come to the right place” for the latest information on climate c...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized climate change Environment EPA onetime overnight Source Type: news