The United States—and the world—is reeling in the wake of Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. Scientists are feeling more worried than ever about a mounting onslaught against the production—and safeguarding—of scientific knowledge.
They have good reason to be.
Debi Daviau, president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada—which represents thousands of government scientists—remembers when, under the previous Stephen Harper administration, the Canadian government burned massive piles of library books in 2014, ostensibly to save money.
The government also prevented scientists from speaking, and removed data from websites. Critics said the “Canadian libricide” and muzzling of scientists was for political reasons, to destroy evidence that could be used against industry regardless of damage to human health or the environment. “I still get choked up when I think about the incineration of books,” Daviau says.
Ethan Goffman
People's Climate March, April 29, 2017, Washington, D.C.
Is this scenario now unfolding in the United States under the Trump Administration? Not if Canadian scientists can help it.
“I still get choked up when I think about the incineration of books.”
“The Trump Administration, from its very first day, was gleefully saying, ‘We’ll take apart the EPA,’” says Michelle Murphy, director of the Technoscience Research Unit at the University of Toronto. Already, crucial EPA web pages on carbon emissions and on the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan appear to have been removed, as has information on Department of Energy and Interior Department websites.
Realizing the dire threat to critical U.S, science, Canadian scientists moved to help even before Trump was sworn in. During the difficult Harper years, Daviau remembers, the Union of Concerned Scientists had circulated a petition, signed by 800 prominent U.S. scientists, supporting the freedom of their Canadian colleagues. With the situation reversed in late 2016, it was time to give back.
Canadian scientists at the University of Toronto partnered with scientists, computer experts, environmentalists, and activists around the United States to begin saving as much data as possible. The resistance began with a guerrilla archiving event in December 2016, starting an arduous process of saving at-risk data. The next phase was a series of Data Rescue events in Canada and the United States in early 2017.
While climate data was the first to be threatened, other environmental and public health datasets are vulnerable to manipulation for political purposes, for instance to justify industrial projects or use of new chemicals or drugs.
One organization leading data-saving efforts is the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), an international network of thousands of volunteers from many disciplines based at Canadian and U.S. institutions, including the University of Toronto, University of Michigan, Northwestern, Harvard, and MIT.
Another important effort is DataRefuge, which works “to identify vulnerable datasets and connect scientists to the effort,” says Michael Halpern, deputy director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The idea isn’t just to collect data, but also to “tell stories of how government data save lives,” Halpern says, through “everything from NASA data to designing better streets, to [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] data to predict outbreaks and pandemics.” These efforts have “opened up several lines of communication between the Union of Concerned Scientists and federal employees.”
The idea isn’t just to collect data, but also to tell stories of how government data save lives.
EDGI has documented Trump Administration changes to websites for wind power, vehicles, and the risks of oil and gas drilling, among other matters. The term “clean energy” has been removed from some websites, for example, while other sites have been changed to emphasize economic benefits over environmental impact. In an Orwellian turn, the word “science” has been removed from the mission statement of the EPA’s Office of Science and Technology. EDGI monitors are “able to see when pages disappear,” says Murphy, or when information is altered on an existing page.
When pages discussing climate change were removed from the EPA website, the City of Chicago posted those deleted pages, a notable victory for continued access. Activists hope to draw in other partners to keep crucial information alive and accessible.
The hard work of the DataRefuge Project and the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, among other organizations, has paid off, for the time being at least. During the transition from Obama to Trump “ten times more matter” was archived “than had been done in other end-of term-projects,” explains Murphy.
While the danger to existing data has been alleviated, long-term threats remain to the ability of U.S. government scientists to speak to the public and to crucial funding for scientific research.
EPA scientists have been forbidden to talk to news outlets and banned from using social media. Just a few weeks ago, half of the scientists were removed from the EPA’s Board of Scientific Counselors. They will likely be replaced by industry representatives. In the United States, industry has already been working to influence agencies meant to oversee it, but this trend has been hyper-charged under Trump. The muzzling of U.S. government scientists appears to be underway.
The gutting of future research funding may be an even bigger problem. Trump’s proposed budget cuts reduce the budget for the National Institutes of Health by one fifth, kill carbon monitoring, and slash the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy by a staggering 69 percent, among other cuts.
If enacted, this budget “would greatly reduce the ability of government to collect basic information relevant to climate change, air pollution monitoring, the health of rivers, countless other environmental and public health issues,” says Halpern. While unlikely to pass in its current form, this budget proposal still portends deep cuts.
In Canada, the defense of science was crucial to the downfall of the Harper administration. A mass mobilization for open, unhampered science began with a “Death of Evidence” march in 2012 and continued through Justin Trudeau’s 2015 victory. Post-election polls showed that more than a quarter of Canadians placed muzzling of science as a top issue, according to Daviau.
In Canada, the defense of science was crucial to the downfall of the Harper administration.
The mobilization for science has changed the political atmosphere in Canada going forward. In the 2016 campaign, “scientific integrity and the use of science in government really became central to the pledge to restore public faith in government,” explains Halpern.
“This is a pessimistic moment, but also a moment to imagine better ways of doing environmental science and regulation,” says Murphy. She hopes that the idea of public access to the information which, after all is funded by taxpayers, will become a deeper political value.
In North America and throughout the world, there is potential to push back against powerful interests trying to block access to crucial information. Fortunately, scores of scientists, often quietly and unacknowledged, are working to push our politics toward openness.