San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee became the 13 U.S. mayor to use public resources to repost Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) web pages on global warming that were deleted by the Trump administration earlier this year.
Lee said the “American people are entitled to the publicly-funded EPA research on climate change” in announcing his office would post the deleted pages on the city’s Open Gov website.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel became the first city mayor to repost the pages in May, and gave instructions to others on how to do it. Since then, 12 other mayors of U.S. cities, including Lee, have posted the pages.
The Trump administration deleted the EPA global warming pages earlier this year while redoing the agency’s website. EPA still has web pages on global warming, contrary to what the mayors insinuate.
“Deleting federal web pages does not reset the scientific consensus that climate change is real,” Lee said. “And while the federal government continues to undermine the progress we’ve made on climate change, cities are taking a stand. San Francisco will continue our fight against climate change by taking aggressive local actions to protect our citizens and planet.”
Late last year, environmentalists and some scientists began claiming the Trump administration would delete global warming data from the public domain. The conspiracy gained steam as months went by and deep budget cuts to EPA and other agencies were announced.
Some scientists gathered together to download as much public data as they could before it could be deleted by Trump, bu it never happened.
Instead, the Trump administration redid agency websites to reflect their priorities — something past administrations have done to government web pages. An EPA spokesman said “outdated language” was removed from its website “to reflect the views of the leadership of the agency.”
Obama administration priorities to fight global warming were largely replaced with Trump administration goals to focus more on traditional environmental issues.
Lee is part of a coalition of 270 U.S. mayors who pledged to honor the goal of the Paris climate accord, which Trump announced he would withdraw from in early June. Lee set a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2017 and recently mandated the city get all of its electricity from green energy by 2030.
All told, San Francisco’s efforts will have no measurable impact on global warming. It’s also unclear if the city will contribute to sending $100 billion to the developing world every year by 2020 — another promise made by signatories of the Paris agreement.
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