Federal employees at the Department of Energy allegedly spent the last days of the Obama Administration scrubbing documents of the phrase “climate change.” The purpose of the “cleansing” was to prevent the Trump Administration from cutting projects that believers in man-made climate consider important.
The report in the Daily Caller is based on claims made in a podcast called “This American Life” dated Jan. 20, President Trump’s inauguration day. A DOE employee identified only as “Laura” told the podcast producer how she and others had been “going through all their internal documents that describe ongoing projects and just scrubbing them, deleting the parts where it says ‘and here’s how this can help us combat climate change.’” David Kestenbaum, the producer of the podcast, described how renewable energy programs were being rebranded as “a jobs program.”
“Most federal projects have a reason for their existence,” Kestenbaum said, “Why draw attention to something by putting the words ‘climate change’ in the description?”
This may actually be a corrective action. For years, climate change has been incorporated into a broad variety of scientific studies. Many critics charge that scientists try to find a tenuous link between climate change and their field of study in order to gain access to grant money.
Several industrious skeptical sites have put together lists of the things that climate change has been blamed for. One of the most comprehensive is the “Not Quite Complete List of Things Supposedly Caused by Global Warming” on WhatReallyHappened.com. The list provides links to articles blaming global warming, which has since been rebranded as “climate change,” for a variety of bad – and some good – conditions. Among them are hotter summers, colder winters, Antarctic ice shrinking, Antarctic ice growing, rainfall increases, droughts, beer shortages, better beer, the Arab Spring and Hitler.
The move by the DOE employees may actually be in line with Trump Administration policy. Reuters reports that the Trump Administration instructed the EPA communications team to remove the agency’s climate change web page. The page contained links to climate research and detailed data on emissions.
More action on the climate may be coming soon. Mr. Trump was critical of the Paris agreement to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that was negotiated by the Obama Administration. According to The Hill, Rex Tillerson said in his confirmation hearings that the US should not withdraw from the deal in order to keep its “seat at the table.” Nevertheless, since Congress never ratified the treaty, it does not have the force of law and the Trump Administration could ignore the agreement with no consequences.
Originally published
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