Update on Puerto Rico

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Mr. Trump’s Paper Towels Aren’t Helping Puerto Rico

Two months after Puerto Rico was devastated by Hurricane Maria, a sense of desperation seems to be yielding to resignation at best. More than half of the island is still without power, and hundreds of thousands of residents are fleeing to the American mainland in an extraordinary exodus.

It has been weeks since President Trump visited to jovially toss rolls of paper towels to needy fellow Americans and brag about how successful the recovery effort was. But true evidence of progress has been hard to come by. Even the simplest symbols of government, like traffic lights, remain useless. Most of the Pentagon’s emergency troops have begun pulling out, except for those working on the island’s shattered power grid.

EDF Rescues Climate Data from EPA

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The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) has received information from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), after filing Freedom of Information requests. See Environmental Defense Fund Obtains Information on Over 1,900 Climate-Related Items Removed from or Modified on EPA Website.

[Update: here is more info from the Environment Data and Governance Initiative.]

It is a sad commentary about the current EPA Administrator that the important information is no longer available on the agency’s website.

Here is an account of the fundamental problem, from the N.Y. Times: Censoring Climate Change

The Trump administration is making it harder to find government information about climate change on the web. If you searched Google for the words “climate change” a little over six months ago, one of the first hits would have been the Environmental Protection Agency’s website.

But that was before April 28, when the agency began systematically dismantling its climate change website, which had survived Democratic and Republican administrations and was a leading source of information on a global problem that the president, as a candidate, labeled “a hoax.”