As part of the Environmental Protection Agency’s complete overhaul of its website to “to reflect EPA’s priorities under the leadership of President Trump and Administrator Pruitt,” the agency scrubbed a number of climate change related web resources from its site, according to a new report.
An EPA website that was previously called the “Climate and Energy Resources for State, Local and Tribal Governments” was recently replaced with a new site that only provides energy resources for governments, the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative said in a report released Friday.
On April 28, the EPA removed several webpages dealing with climate change from public view. The new energy resources site — which launched in July — is the first webpage that has been returned since then. At least 15 mentions of the words “climate change” were removed in the transition and the website overall was cut from 380 pages to about 175, according to the report.
Among the many climate-related resources excluded from the new site is information about the risks of climate change and a tool that helps state officials curb carbon emissions. The former front page of the website mentioned the word “climate” 17 times, but is not mentioned at all in the new “Energy Resources for State, Local and Tribal Governments” site.
The former website is still accessible through the Jan. 19 snapshot of the EPA website, which archived all the information the agency made available under former President Barack Obama’s administration, but not on the official government site.
An EPA spokesman told The New York Times the Obama-era climate pages have been archived and can be found by searching the EPA archive website.
