Go ahead and think the EPA has done lots of good, I'm sure it has. Go ahead and disagree with what he is doing. To call what Trump is doing "censorship" is completely asinine and not at all what it is.
At best, shaping messaging of policy, at worst, propaganda. He isn't preventing any scientists from publishing anything. Even if he did scrub a term from the entire site personally, that isn't censorship. It isn't illegal to talk about Climate Change.
I agree it's more equilant to the astroturfing done by the Chinese net hoards than censorship. They are changing the message if the it was real censorship this article itself would not be readable
Hacker News readers really are here to learn, and comments need to be substantive and informative so we can do that. Could you please increase the signal a bit?
Perhaps I should have kept my comment to myself. However I don't see any need to rebut such a ridiculous notion as the Trump administration not prominently using a term, being the comparable to Chinese censorship of Tiananmen Square. Can no one talk about Climate Change in the US? It is a completely ludicrous comparison that should be obvious to anyone on its face.
The author of this article makes no attempt to connect the two, or show how what Trump is doing might lead to Chinese level censorship. This opinion piece is complete tripe. In my opinion, the article should be what is flagged here as there is no kind of intellectual honesty in it. It is simply a political piece with nothing interesting to say except make an outrageous claim that it makes no effort to back up.
When building our house we learned about the EPA's formaldehyde limits. It's funny that for manufactured homes the levels are higher because poor people don't want to pay for "healthy" houses directly (higher cost of construction). So the manufactured housing companies lobbied for lower standards to keep costs low.
I'm not able to find the original EPA guidelines due to the changes on the website now about the new pressed-wood rulings on formaldehyde.
It's covered in the index, along with 7 different sub topics: https://www.epa.gov/environmental-topics/z-index#C Alternatively, searching for "climate change" using the EPA site search yields 5,290 surprisingly well presented results.
I'd agree that it should be listed as one of the main topics on the front page given its relevance. Trump's appointee doesn't because of his own personal biases. That's pretty much the end of it. Drawing an analog between it being removed from the front page drop down and China censoring Tiananmen Square is needlessly hyperbolic and sensationalistic.
Apart from language cleansing on an ideological basis (which is still significant and disturbing), has any hosted data or research on climate change been affected? Are they poised to be affected?
There was an HN news item about climate scientists backing up government data on climate change before the new administration took office and it would be interesting to follow up on the discussions that took place. Maybe that follow-up has already happened.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 41.8 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The author of this article makes no attempt to connect the two, or show how what Trump is doing might lead to Chinese level censorship. This opinion piece is complete tripe. In my opinion, the article should be what is flagged here as there is no kind of intellectual honesty in it. It is simply a political piece with nothing interesting to say except make an outrageous claim that it makes no effort to back up.
I'm not able to find the original EPA guidelines due to the changes on the website now about the new pressed-wood rulings on formaldehyde.
I'd agree that it should be listed as one of the main topics on the front page given its relevance. Trump's appointee doesn't because of his own personal biases. That's pretty much the end of it. Drawing an analog between it being removed from the front page drop down and China censoring Tiananmen Square is needlessly hyperbolic and sensationalistic.
There was an HN news item about climate scientists backing up government data on climate change before the new administration took office and it would be interesting to follow up on the discussions that took place. Maybe that follow-up has already happened.