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Multiple researchers who received grants from the US Department of Energy (DOE) have been asked to remove references to “climate change” and “global warming” from the descriptions of their projects. (emphasis added)
In one case, a lab official at the DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Washington, asked an ecologist to elide references to climate change from her grant proposal in order to satisfy US President Donald Trump’s “budget language restrictions”. The scientist, Jennifer Bowen of Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, posted an e-mail from the lab official to Facebook on 24 August.
“I have been asked to contact you to update the wording in your proposal abstract to remove words such as ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change,’” the official, Ashley Gilbert, a project coordinator at PNNL’s Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory. Bowen’s project will examine how environmental stressors, such as climate change, affect the ecology of saltwater marshes.
Gilbert’s office told Nature that she was unavailable for comment, and a PNNL spokesperson referred questions to DOE headquarters in Washington DC. Department spokeswoman Shaylyn Hynes declined to answer questions about the situation but said “there is no […]
I’m thankful for the efforts of so many civil servants who have protected and stored years of scientific data. The current administration may deny science, but it cannot eliminate it nor hide from it.