WASHINGTON: The US federal agency tasked with protecting the environment has deleted facts from its website about how human activity drives climate change, media outlets reported Tuesday.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) tweaked its pages to focus on the “natural processes” driving climate change — like volcano eruptions and variation in solar activity — in October, the Washington Post reported.
A webpage titled “Causes of Climate Change” and another that tracks global warming impacts in the US were also altered, the New York Times reported.
And a page describing rising seas and shrinking Arctic ice — both key indicators of a changing climate — was also deleted, the Post reported.
President Donald Trump regularly rails against wind power and sustainable energy, calling for more drilling on US lands, and has slashed research and development to track and mitigate the effects of climate change.
In a statement to the Washington Post, EPA press secretary Brigit Hirsch distanced the Trump administration from predecessor Joe Biden’s “left wing political agendas,” adding: “As such, this agency no longer takes marching orders from the climate cult.”
Fossil fuel interests and extraction industries have lavished Trump with campaign donations and contributions, according to the Brennan Center.
The 79-year-old Republican has already made their policy wishes come true by rolling back electric vehicle rules, fuel-economy standards and other green domestic policies enacted by the Biden administration.
Trump’s climate denialism has also gone global, with his refusal to send a US representative to the COP meeting in Brazil, echoing his withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement earlier this year.
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the University of California, called the website deletions “one of the most dramatic scrubbings we’ve seen so far in the climate space,” the Post reported.
“More and more pages have either been completely removed from the public Internet — or perhaps worse, have been replaced with inaccurate information.”