Climate change vanished as a relevant governmental issue almost the instant Donald Trump became president when all mention of it was scrubbed from his administration’s website. But its reality was once again recognized on the site Wednesday with a somber acknowledgment of the problem and a vow from President Joe Biden to battle global warming.
A lengthy climate change information page created by the Obama administration disappeared at 12 p.m. on Inauguration Day in 2017 and was replaced with Trump’s “America First Energy Plan.”
President Trump is “committed to eliminating harmful and unnecessary policies such as the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the U.S. rule,” the site noted then. The Environmental Protection Agency was also ordered to eliminate the phrase “climate change” from its site and the Agriculture Department was told to excise it from reports.
Now the White House website features a “Priorities” section that offers a statement saying that Biden will “take swift action to tackle the climate emergency. The Biden Administration will ensure we meet the demands of science while empowering American workers and businesses to lead a clean energy revolution.”
Biden signed an executive order Wednesday, which is available on the site, vowing action to protect the environment and restore science to tackle the climate crisis. The order mentioned climate, climate crisis, climate impacts, climate issues, climate action, climate risk, climate damages, climate solution, climate leadership or climate change 31 times.
Biden has also pledged to roll back several anti-environment changes Trump made and to launch a wide-ranging initiative to fight climate change. And he rejoined the Paris Climate Accords on his first day.
Trump has never been astute about climate science, even though he insisted he knew as much as anyone about the environment. He described climate change as a “Chinese hoax.”
“So I am not a believer, and I will, unless somebody can prove something to me, I believe there’s weather. I believe there’s change, and I believe goes up and it goes down and it goes up again,” Trump said in a radio interview shortly before he became president. “And it changes depending on years and centuries, but I am not a believer, and we have much bigger problems.”
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