Arctic researcher says White House is deleting her citations
*Story update: Since our interview with Victoria Hermann aired, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) site, has republished the data that had previously gone missing.
It's been a rocky week for the fight against climate change in the U.S.
China called the U.S. "selfish" for the direction the White House is taking with regard to its climate change policy. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to dismantle Obama-era policies on global warming, including lifting a moratorium on federal coal leasing, undoing rules to curb methane emissions from oil and gas production, and directed the EPA - the Environmental Protection Agency - to review Obama's Clean Power Plan.
But it's not just climate change policy that's changing under the Trump administration. So, too, is the information available online to the public.
This week the news outlet, The Guardian, published an opinion piece from the managing director of The Arctic Institute. It's titled, "I am an Arctic researcher. Donald Trump is deleting my citations." In it, Victoria Herrmann says since the inauguration, links to important Arctic policies, reports, and data have been disappearing.
While all the information that used to be on Obama's White House website has been archived, Ms. Herrmann says information is also disappearing (as of April 17, 2017, the data has been republished) from publicly funded government agency sites, such as the U.S. Department of Energy's EIA (Energy Information Administration.)
The Arctic Institute is currently working with other institutes to try and document the information that's now extremely difficult to find or has going missing.