New White House Website Scrubs All References to Climate Change

In the period between Election Day 2016 and Inauguration Day, there was widespread concern about how Donald Trump’s website would handle climate change science. Most memorably, the Trump transition team requested the names of everyone at the Department of Energy who worked on climate change, and the DOE refused to comply. In digging through the new, Trump-era version of WhiteHouse.gov, Motherboard found some potential cause for concern: There’s no mention of climate change on the site. At all.

It’s expected that the content of the website would be completely new once the Trump administrator took over. Still, Google site search results for “global warming” and “climate change” all bring up either deleted pages or pages on the newly archived Obama site. You can see the old Obama Climate Change section as it sat before today on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The page devoted to Trump’s “America First Energy Plan” does use the word “climate,” but only in the context of this sentence: “President Trump is committed to eliminating harmful and unnecessary policies such as the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the U.S. rule.”

UPDATE – 5:55 p.m. EST: The White House website has also been scrubbed of its page dealing with LGBT issues:

Moments after Donald Trump became president, the White House's LGBT rights page vanished. It now redirects to this: https://t.co/4zYox7VpzY pic.twitter.com/YPufwUCBMd

— CBS News (@CBSNews) January 20, 2017

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