USDA office staff have been instructed to drop the term “climate change” from their published writings and correspondence and use the term “weather extremes” instead, The Guardian reported exclusively Monday.
The February email from Director of Soil Health Bianca Moebius-Clune detailing the change contained a list of terms that staff should avoid going forward, as well as suggestions for what to say instead.
Instead of saying “climate change adaptation,” U.S. Department of Agriculture staff were requested to use “resilience to weather extremes,” and “reduce greenhouse gases” was replaced by “build soil organic matter” or “increase nutrient use efficiency,” The Guardian reported.
According to the newspaper, Moebius-Clune said in the memo that “we won’t change the modeling, just how we talk about it.” She also wrote that she thought references to economic growth, new business opportunities, and agro-tourism were positive developments that staff should appreciate or at least tolerate.
The memo is further evidence of the Trump administration’s shift away from climate change as a focus. The Environmental Protection Agency removed the climate change page from its website in April, and the White House also deleted its page about the U.S.’s work on climate change.
The appointment of Sam Clovis as the USDA’s chief scientist is another part of that movement; Clovis said he is “extremely skeptical” of climate change and claimed that “a lot of the science is junk science,” The Hill reported.
President Donald Trump has said since his campaign that he does not believe climate change is man-made and has backtracked on the previous administration’s moves, including the Paris Agreement and the Keystone pipeline ban.
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