Environmentalists are panicking over the Trump administration’s first actions at the EPA. From Reuters:
U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to remove the climate change page from its website, two agency employees told Reuters, the latest move by the newly minted leadership to erase ex-President Barack Obama’s climate change initiatives.
The employees were notified by EPA officials on Tuesday that the administration had instructed EPA’s communications team to remove the website’s climate change page, which contains links to scientific global warming research, as well as detailed data on emissions. The page could go down as early as Wednesday, the sources said.
“If the website goes dark, years of work we have done on climate change will disappear,” one of the EPA staffers told Reuters, who added some employees were scrambling to save some of the information housed on the website, or convince the Trump administration to preserve parts of it.
Regardless of your position on anthropogenic climate change, this serves as an object lesson in the folly of politicized science. It shifts with the wind. The only reason this data is in danger of disappearing is because it resides on government servers. If it were on a private server somewhere, not only would it likely be backed up, but it would not depend upon political continuity.
The lesson here, which the left will surely fail to learn, is that government should not be where we house our scientific endeavors. Of course, acknowledging that would mean depending on private funding. And who in the real world would pay for the things done at the EPA?
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