According to emails obtained by Politico, officials at the USDA have ordered employees to create a spreadsheet documenting all references to climate change on the agency’s website and to delete landing pages dedicated to climate change. Some pages have already been deleted. In addition, Politico reported that President Trump’s nominee to lead the agency denied that there is established science showing climate change is caused by human action in her written responses to Senate Agriculture Committee questions.
During Trump’s first term, he scrubbed the term “climate change” from the USDA vocabulary and withheld releasing the agency’s own studies on potential dangers climate change could cause farmers and the American food supply.
The new directive follows his earlier executive order pausing disbursement of Inflation Reduction Act funds, which includes billions of dollars in USDA grant funding allocated to farmers and rural communities for climate-smart practices and projects.
In recent years, American farmers have increasingly grappled with climate-related disasters, including hurricanes, drought, rising sea levels, and wildfires. In their most recent global report, the world’s leading climate scientists found those impacts will get worse. They also found solutions in food and agriculture could significantly contribute to slowing warming—but that the window for action is rapidly closing. (Link to this post.)
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