By Gryphen
Courtesy of The Guardian:
During inauguration day on 20 January,
as Donald Trump was adding “American carnage” to the presidential lexicon, the
new administration also took a hammer to official recognition that climate
change exists and poses a threat to the US.
One of the starkest alterations to the
White House’s website following Trump’s assumption of office was the scrapping
of an entire section on climate change, stuffed with graphs on renewable energy
growth and pictures of Barack Obama gazing at shriveling glaciers, to be
replaced by a perfunctory page entitled “An America first energy plan”.
In the more than 100 days since, the
administration has largely opted for a chisel and scalpel approach to
refashioning its online content, but the end result is much the same – mentions
of climate change have been excised, buried or stripped of any
importance.
Federal government websites are being
combed through to apply new verbiage. The state department’s office of global
change, for example, has removed links to the Obama administration’s 2013
climate action report and mention of the latest UN meeting on climate change.
Text relating to climate change and greenhouse gases has also been purged.
Trump’s desire to champion the coal
industry is reflected in the Department of Energy’s online pages aimed at
educating children. Sentences that point out the harmful health consequences of
burning coal and other impacts of fossil fuels have gone.
It is one thing to remove data from
websites visited by adults, who may have the wherewithal and intellect to find
the right information elsewhere, but when you take it off of educational sites
visited by children you are purposely misinforming them down and directly
interfering in their education.
This reminded me of a scene from that
very troubling "Jesus Camp" documentary in which one of the kids,
Levi, is reading from home school material that purposefully minimizes global
warming, and attacks Evolution.
Having a parent purchase home school
materials to help misinform their children, and keep them ignorant, is bad
enough, but when our own federal websites are doing the same that is
indefensible.