Scott Pruitt Responds to Climate Change Facts By Deleting Them From EPA Website

If you were thinking of preparing for Saturday’s People’s Climate March by brushing
up on a few climate science facts at the Environmental Protection Agency’s
comprehensive website, forget about it.

On Friday evening, just ahead of the march that is expected
to draw tens of thousands to the nation’s capital, the EPA scrubbed its
site of key pages on climate science. Apparently, the website’s facts on
the causes of climate change didn’t jibe with EPA administrator Scott Pruitt’s “alternative
facts” on the issue.

One of the first pages to be axed explained former President
Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan. Visitors to the EPA’s site are now treated
to—you guessed it—a photo of Donald Trump signing an executive order to roll
back the plan’s environmental regulations on power plants and other steps to mitigate climate
change.

In a statement explaining the decision, the EPA stated that EPA.gov “is
undergoing changes that reflect the agency’s new direction under President
Donald Trump and Administrator Scott Pruitt. The process, which involves
updating language to reflect the approach of new leadership, is intended
to ensure that the public can use the website to understand the agency’s
current efforts.”

But understanding the “agency’s current efforts” shouldn’t
be too difficult, considering that in March Pruitt said he doesn’t believe
carbon dioxide is a major driver of climate change, contradicting practically
every climate scientist in the world.

EPA Associate Administrator for Public Affairs J.P. Freire
explained the scrubbing by saying, “We want to eliminate confusion by removing
outdated language first and making room to discuss how we’re protecting the
environment and human health by partnering with states and working within the
law.”

The EPA’s statement also borrowed from Trump’s playbook on
gaslighting by referring to Obama’s environmental regulations as the “so-called
Clean Power Plan.”

The Washington Post confirmed
that Pruitt approved the changes to the agency’s website.

The newspaper also noted that another page containing two
decades of research on climate change (called “global warming” when the page
was launched in 1997) also was removed and replaced with a message stating, “This
page is being updated.” The EPA did provide a snapshot of what the site looked
like on Jan. 19, the day before Trump took office 100 days ago:

David Doniger, director of the Natural Resources Defense
Council’s Climate and Clean Air Program, was one of the first observers to spot
the changes:

There is no indication yet what type of new information will
be posted to reflect the EPA’s “current efforts,” but judging from past
misleading statements by Trump and Pruitt, it could very well be that
information is gleaned from sources like the conservative think tank The
Heritage Foundation, which as CNN noted played
an important role in Trump’s transition into the White House.

Trump has cited in the past a
Heritage study that claims the costs for the U.S. of complying with the
Paris climate agreement are too high, and the benefits are too low. As the World
Resources Institute noted, that Heritage study provided no credible estimates
of climate action costs and benefits. In other words, it was based on
alternative facts. Which is probably what we can expect for the EPA’s
forthcoming website changes.