The “Climate and Energy Resources for State, Local, and Tribal Governments” website (left) was replaced with the “Energy Resources for State, Local, and Tribal Governments” website (right), which omitted all climate information. Welcome! This post is part of the EDGI Website Monitoring Team’s “Change of the Week” blog series. The purpose of this series is […]
On the left, image shows the EPA’s Clean Power Plan website homepage as seen on April 27, 2017. On the right, the entire Clean Power Plan website began redirecting to EPA’s Energy Independence webpage on April 28, 2017. Welcome! This post is part of the EDGI Website Monitoring Team’s “Change of the Week” blog series. […]
New Reports Analyze Compliance and Enforcement Under Trump’s EPA CONTACT: Report authors are available for interview. To set up media interviews or for other inquiries, please contact Shannan Lenke Stoll, ShannanStoll.edgi@gmail.com. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Seventy-six congressional report cards released by Environmental Data & Governance Initiative’s Environmental Enforcement Watch on October 22, 2020, show a decline […]
Blog written by Alejandro Paz Lead image shows the HTML source code comparison for two versions of the same page, on which “greenhouse gas emissions and carbon footprint” was changed to “environmental footprint.” Making a Public Dataset For the past three and a half years, EDGI has been monitoring U.S. federal agency environmental webpages and […]
Welcome! This post is part of the EDGI Website Monitoring Team’s “Change of the Week” blog series. The purpose of this series is to highlight interesting changes we have observed in the language used on, or access to, federal websites. We want to share these changes to encourage public engagement with and discussion of their […]
Welcome! This post is part of the EDGI Website Monitoring Team’s “Change of the Week” blog series. The purpose of this series is to highlight interesting changes we have observed in the language used on, or access to, federal websites. We want to share these changes to encourage public engagement with and discussion of their […]
This week’s change was made in spring 2020 and features the removal of all past years’ budget documents on DOI’s “Budget Justifications” webpage. For more information about this and related changes, please see our report, “Department of the Interior Deletes Budget Documents from Website.”
The blaze at Bio-Lab following Hurricane Laura was not the first release of toxic chlorine from the facility, EDGI’s research into available federal data finds.
As Hurricane Laura tore through Louisiana on the morning of August 27th, a chemical manufacturing facility called Bio-Lab, located in Westlake, caught fire. The facility manufactures chlorine for swimming pools and other cleaning agents. A chlorine leak ignited, setting the facility ablaze. Massive clouds of chlorine gas plumed over Westlake for more than 24 hours, prompting the governor of Louisiana, John Bel Edwards, to implement a shelter-in-place order for residents living in the vicinity.
This week’s change was made in June 2017 and features the removal of the only sentences about climate change on the U.S. Forest Service’s Wildland Fire webpage. What happened? In the middle of wildfire season, June 2017, the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) deleted the only sentence on its “Wildland Fire” webpage that mentioned the reasons that fire seasons have become longer and more intense, “This is due to a variety of factors, including climate change, buildups of flammable vegetation, insect and disease infestations, nonnative species invasions, and increasing numbers of homes and communities in the WUI…”
Last Thursday 20+ organizers, students, activists and academics gathered for the second of four online workshops to practice our right to know about environmental hazards together by making congressional district report cards on industry compliance with and EPA enforcement of environmental laws. Building on EDGI’s findings that enforcement of environmental laws dropped precipitously under the Trump administration, we are developing report cards for each member of Congress involved in the House and Senate Committees responsible for EPA oversight (the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee). These Environmental Enforcement Watch or “EEW” Report Cards provide members of Congress and their constituents with data on violations of environmental laws, facility inspections, and enforcement actions in their districts since 2001. As the EPA is mandated by Congress to enforce environmental laws, we aim to provide legislators with an informative analysis based on EPA’s own data of compliance with and enforcement of environmental laws in the districts they serve.