EPA: From Obama’s Protection to Trump’s Destruction to the Emergence of Resistance
Using the Wayback Machine, we can keep watch on some aspects of the Environmental Protection Agency website now that Trump and his EPA pick for Secretary of the EPA, Scott Pruitt are in charge. Trump wants to cut the EPA, and Pruitt, with ties to the coal, oil and gas industry, and champion litigator against the EPA while he was Attorney General for Oklahoma, is no friend of Earth’s environment, other than helping those who take from the Earth what ever they want.
On January 24, one of the first things the Trump administration did was to demand that the EPA take down all of its Climate Change pages. Then they were told to hold off, then told to remove them, and then to put them back. As of this writing the Climate Change page is still on the website. But the fact that the White House actually ordered the page to be taken down set in motion a lot of resistance.
EPA Page on January 19, 2017: Note that climate change is on the page. Using the Wayback Machine, you can visit the EPA website the way it was before Trump
There has been a vigorous attempt to keep climate data safe, and people and groups have worked feverishly to download and keep all the climate data found on various governments site, including EPA, NASA, NOAA, the US Geological Survey.
Terri Hansen, in a Truthout article, reports that even concerned citizens lended a helping hand. Hansen tells us that John Rosa, a graduate student at Easter Michigan University starting downloading as many copies of pages as feasibly possible (more than 28,000 files). He’s putting the data on a website called EPA Data Dump. (follow on Facebook).
So, what ever page you want to see (in the past) you can use the Wayback Machine.
There are also sites you can visit that claim to be run by employees of EPA, who mask their identity. These sites are called “Rogue” sites, such as Rogue EPA Staff (@rougueepastaff). You can also find these Rogue sites:
However, a word of caution. We don’t know who actually runs these sites. In some cases, all it says is “Operated by a#US citizen that is not affiliated with any Federal Agency. I’ve managed websites since 1995, first at Georgia State University where we developed the website The Global Thinking Project. The original site exists only on the Wayback Machine, while the GTP archives are preserved here. The main that I manage now is the Art of Teaching Science, and it has been hacked several times, most recently five months. It was a serious hack, and in the end I had to secure the services of a web security firm. The recent hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s web servers, as well as Hillary Clinton and John Podesta’s accounts resulted Donald Trump stealing the White House. Hackers, in this case from Russia, were able to make use of files they stole, and create stories disparaging the Clinton campaign. The FBI, looking into files associated with Hillary Clinton, did help when the director opened his mouth a few days before the election.
It’s possible that these rogue sites could be hacked, and that hackers could embed files that could cause chaos on your own computers. For more on this you might consult this article.
Even with these concerns, these sites give access points for Americans to join Resistance to Trump’s destructive path of denying science, and making it easier for the commercialization of public resources.
On Earth Day, the March for Science for Science (#marchforscience) will take place in cities and towns across the United States and around the world.
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