Michael Regan, EPA

As part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to action on climate change and restoring science to federal government agencies, the Environmental Protection Agency is taking the first step in a relaunch of its climate change website, according to a press release just out on the newly launched email list. Both the website and the email list had gone dark under the former president, who frequently dismissed the scientific consensus that humans are warming the planet by burning fossil fuels, along with his first EPA administrator Scott Pruitt.

For the first time in four years, EPA now has a webpage to guide the public to a range of information, including greenhouse gas emissions data, climate change impacts, scientific reports, and existing climate programs within EPA and across the federal government.

“Climate facts are back on EPA’s website where they should be,” new EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan said in a video. “Considering the urgency of this crisis, it’s critical that Americans have access to information and resources so that we can all play a role in protecting our environment, our health, and vulnerable communities. Trustworthy, science-based information is at the foundation of strong, achievable solutions.”

Confirmed by the Senate last week, Regan said, “Combating climate change: it’s not optional, it’s essential at EPA.”

The Biden-Harris Administration has made it clear that addressing climate change is a national priority. In the weeks and months to come, EPA will be adding new, updated information on climate change science, impacts, what EPA is doing and what you can do, providing a trustworthy, accurate public resource on climate change issues and solutions.

“Climate change leads to rising seas, retreating snow and ice, and to changes in the frequency and intensity of heat waves, precipitation, and extreme weather events. These changes, occurring as a result of the buildup of greenhouse gases due to human activities, are changing the climate at a pace and in a way that threatens human health, society, and the natural environment,” Regan said. “Children, the elderly, and the poor are among the most vulnerable to climate-related health effects.”

Related: NASA Joins White House National Climate Task Force

The new climate site, with English and Spanish versions, is sparsely populated and promises “more content to come.” But environmental advocacy groups are already praising its return for the early symbolic shift it represents in federal climate policy.

“Only when we’re armed with the facts about what we face now and in the coming years — and have information on what we can do to make a difference on climate change — can we make the best decisions,” Andrea McGimsey, senior director for Environment America’s “global warming solutions” campaign, said in a statement.

After Trump’s 2016 election as president, some environmental activists and scientists worried that the president’s dismissal of climate change and his appointment of like-minded agency heads could imperil federal scientific data,” according to The Washington Post and other news outlets.

They began to feverishly copy and archive large sets of public information on everything from historical temperature records to data about droughts and floods, as well as climate projection models. The efforts spanned a “guerrilla archiving” event in Toronto to meetings at the University of Pennsylvania, where researchers mapped out how to download as much federal data as possible before Trump took office.

“Those fears that the Trump administration would simply delete existing data or forbid any kind of climate-related research largely did not come to pass,” the Post reporters say. “But the administration did downplay references to climate change in many federal reports and policies, and it was never an issue of priority.”

Among former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt’s first actions in office in 2017 was removing the agency’s long-standing climate webpage, which had existed for about two decades, as well as other information on the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan. The Trump administration did maintain a publicly available archive of how the page looked on the day before his inauguration.

The climate web pages of some other agencies, notably NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, remained largely intact. Yet across federal agencies, the use of the term “climate change” declined by almost 40 percent between 2016 and 2020, according to the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, a nonprofit that tracked the changes, on direct orders of the former president.

“We are relieved to see that the EPA is now actually going to post information about climate change on its website — again,” Dominique Browning, co-founder of the activist group Moms Clean Air Force, said in a statement Thursday. “The site was removed by a denier administration, and their denial is endangering all of us. It’s time to face reality.”

Of course the dismantling of the science website and the email list made it more difficult for the press and broadcast media to cover science related to climate change, even as news of the state of the environment on many fronts was buried by the avalanche of misinformation pumped out daily by Trump and his allies on TV and Twitter. At the very least, the new administration’s policy is reversing that trend, which should show up in public opinion survey research as more public concern for the environment in general.

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