Thousands of people are out on the streets of Washington D.C. (and other cities) again today, this time for the People’s Climate March, the latest in a steadily increasing number of liberal activist protests that have sprung up in the wake of the election of Donald Trump. Per its name, the Climate March is all about raising awareness of the reality of climate change, and to protest Trump’s policies and assertions that the phenomenon is simply the invention of evil scientists who want us to all be enslaved by high-tech Chinese factory robots and their terrible, emissions-indifferent claws. And while plenty of people are lending their support to the March—either by getting out there on foot, or posting their love via social media—the Environmental Protection Agency has put its own fun twist on celebrating the event: hiding and obscuring the “climate change” page that’s been hosted on the agency’s web site for the last 20 years.
That’s per The Washington Post, which initially reported that the site—which contains a mixture of plain-English descriptions of the case for human-influenced climate change, plus plenty of data to back it up—had simply been scrubbed from the internet. (It’s not immediately available under the EPA’s hotbar of ”Environmental Topics,” for instance.) Things aren’t quite that drastic, though; rather, the site’s Climate Change page now reads “This page is being updated,” along with a link to a press release about the change, and an archived version of the climate change page as it existed on the day before Trump’s inauguration.
The old version of the page was seen as something of an embarrassment for current EPA head Scott Pruitt, directly contradicting a number of his statements on the effects of human activity on the climate. (Pruitt went on the record with CNBC last month to say that he doesn’t think human actions are the primary cause of climate change, something the old site flatly disagreed with.)
An EPA staffer said that the changes are being made because “We can’t have information which contradicts the actions we have taken in the last two months.” The agency’s official statement says something similar, noting that it wants to “eliminate confusion by removing outdated language.” (Outdated, in this case, apparently meaning “accurate but politically inconvenient.”) On the plus side, the agency has confirmed plans to keep an archived version of the old site up, even if it’s not making it the easiest thing in the world to find.