Barely 24 hours into Donald Trump’s presidency, telling changes have already occurred to the official White House website.
As of the inauguration, the White House website no longer contains any mention of “climate change” or “global warming”, as well as removing an entire page dedicated to the topic. In fact, the URL where all this information used to live, http://www.whitehouse.gov/energy/climate-change, no longer exists.
The changes appeared at noon ET, when the official changeover took place.
This comes as a big change from the Obama administration, which listed climate change as a “Top Issue”. The closest current equivalent is the “American First Energy Plan“, which discusses Trump’s broad policy goals in terms of U.S. energy policies, the page for which contains the following troubling passage:
“For too long, we’ve been held back by burdensome regulations on our energy industry. President Trump is committed to eliminating harmful and unnecessary policies such as the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the U.S. rule. Lifting these restrictions will greatly help American workers, increasing wages by more than $30 billion over the next 7 years.”
As of today though, the United States Environmental Protection Agency, EPA.gov still lists climate change as one of its most popular pages, but with Trump not even 48 hours into office, who knows if it will remain in the coming months.
These changes could have a profound impact on the availability of environmental data, as well as on future policy changes.
It has also been noted that the White House website pages for LGBTQI rights and Civil Rights have also been removed following the presidential changeover.
Things removed from WH website since #Trump's #inauguration:
1) #CivilRights Page
2) #LGBT Page
3) #ACA Page
4) #ClimateChange Page— Iry (@IryNEicher) January 20, 2017
While concerning, the White House has announced that this information from Obama’s tenure still exists, but has been archived at ObamaWhiteHouse.gov.