As the director of the National Security Archive’s Climate Change Transparency Project, Rachel Santarsiero is in the business of monitoring and facilitating the flow of information from the government to the public. What she’s seeing now, in the first weeks of President Donald Trump’s second administration, is throwing the continuity of that process into doubt.
“We’re really losing our history here; we’re losing our environmental history,” Santarsiero told the Bulletin last week.
To some extent, government watchdogs, scientists, and climate and environmental activists were expecting this. During the first Trump administration, the use of terms like “climate change,” “clean energy,” and “adaptation” across federal environmental websites fell by 26 percent. In some cases, those terms were replaced by more ambiguous phrases like “energy independence” and “resilience”; other pages referencing climate change simply vanished.
But what Santarsiero and others are witnessing now goes far beyond that. Thousands of datasets have... Read more
