EPA’s December Website Edits Cap Off Yearlong Assault on Climate Info

In 1969, a year before the Environmental Protection Agency was born, one of President Nixon’s aides sent out an alarming memo about a novel existential threat to the administration. Was it the Soviet Union? Nuclear weapons? Nope. It was the “carbon dioxide problem.” That aide, Daniel Moynihan, was explicit about the impact humans were having on a warming planet. “[M]an has begun to introduce instability through the burning of fossil fuels,” he wrote. In Moynihan’s own words, the stakes of projected planetary warming and sea-level rise were apocalyptic: “Goodbye New York. Goodbye Washington, for that matter.”

It’s hard to believe that almost 60 years later, today’s EPA—the federal agency responsible for protecting environmental and human health—has wiped away the connection between humans and climate change from its website.

In early December, the EPA surreptitiously removed at least 80 webpages related to the causes, indicators, and impacts of climate change, by far the most extensive removal of climate change information from the agency’s website yet during Trump’s second administration. One of the most alarming changes was the deletion of any mention of anthropogenic climate change (warming specifically caused by humans) from its Causes of Climate Change webpage.