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science
Trump Energy Dept. Under Fire for Banning 'Climate Change' and Related Terms
"It's like they're trying to cover up a homicide," said the Environmental Voter Project.
Sep 29, 2025
President Donald Trump's administration has faced a flood of criticism since Politico reported Sunday that the US Department of Energy has added "climate change" and other related terms to its "list of words to avoid" at a key office.
According to a Friday email obtained by the news outlet, other banned words at the DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy include carbon/CO2 "footprint," clean, decarbonization, "dirty" energy, emissions, energy transition, green, sustainability/sustainable, and tax breaks/tax credits/subsidies.
“Please ensure that every member of your team is aware that this is the latest list of words to avoid—and continue to be conscientious about avoiding any terminology that you know to be misaligned with the administration's perspectives and priorities," Rachel Overbey, acting director of external affairs, reportedly wrote.
While the DOE did not respond to Politico's request for comment, critics were quick to blast the administration for yet another anti-science move.
"Censorship can't erase facts: The climate crisis is real, it's human-made, and deadly."
"Welcome to the Donald Trump post-truth world," Dr. Ali Khan, a retired US assistant surgeon general, responded on social media.
Since returning to power in January—after raking in campaign cash from Big Oil by promising to "drill, baby, drill"—Trump has also ditched the Paris Agreement (again), declared an "energy emergency" to benefit the fossil fuel industry, and claimed during his speech to the United Nations General Assembly last week that scientists' predictions about the climate crisis were "wrong" and "made by stupid people."
Trump also nominated climate liar and former fracking CEO Chris Wright as energy secretary. Under his leadership, the department has celebrated planet-wrecking coal on social media while spreading disinformation about solar and wind energy. It also published a July climate report that independent experts said is "biased, full of errors, and not fit to inform policymaking."
The department crafted that report as part of the Environmental Protection Agency's effort to scrap the "endangerment finding," the 2009 legal opinion that greenhouse gases endanger public health and the welfare of the American people, which underpins federal climate policy.
Responding to the DOE's newly revealed directive on banned words, the Environmental Voter Project charged, "It's like they're trying to cover up a homicide."
Paul Dorfman, chair of the Nuclear Consulting Group and a Bennett scholar at the University of Sussex, said, "Death cult does its thing."
Climate Rights International's advocacy director, Lotte Leicht, declared: "Ridiculous! Banning words won't change reality... Censorship can't erase facts: The climate crisis is real, it's human-made, and deadly. Silencing science = endangering lives."
Rakesh Bhandari, associate director of interdisciplinary studies at the University of California, Berkeley, warned of the likely impacts of the DOE's banned words.
"This will not only affect research and policy directly, it will also affect what we see and don't see and what we say and don't say. The state has this power in virtue of its legitimate and cognitive authority," Bhandari said. "Note that the Democrats are pretty silent about what matters most to the GOP: The protection of fossil fuels."
Nodding to the Trump administration's broad assault on First Amendment rights, Ross Seidman, senior counsel for a Democratic state senator in Maryland, said, "More 'banned words' from the party of free speech."
The New York Times in March compiled a list of nearly 200 terms that agencies' leaders have told staff to limit or avoid as part of Trump's purge of "woke" initiatives. They range from clean energy, climate crisis, and climate science to activism, disability, diversity, gender, hate speech, mental health, pregnant people, sexuality, racism, stereotypes, and victim.
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The Pesticide Industry’s Fingerprints Are All Over the MAHA Commission’s Strategy Report
Instead of delivering real change, the strategy appears to be just another example of the Trump administration putting the financial interests of polluting industries above people’s health.
Sep 10, 2025
When it comes to pesticides, the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, Commission has a serious problem: The Commission's newly released strategy for addressing childhood chronic disease is better for the pesticide industry than for people. Ignoring growing public calls for action, the strategy lays out a milquetoast approach that would protect industry profits at the expense of children’s health.
Back in May, a first report from the MAHA Commission correctly identified exposure to pesticides and other toxic chemicals as one driver of the childhood chronic disease epidemic. The US currently uses over a billion pounds of pesticides annually on our crops, about one-third of which is chemicals that have been banned in other countries. Many have been linked to serious health problems from cancer to infertility to birth defects. Those pesticides contaminate our air, our water, and our bodies. One cancer-linked pesticide, glyphosate, is now found in 80% of adults and 87% of children.
The Commission’s strategy to address pesticide exposure has thus been eagerly awaited by health-conscious moms, environmental advocates, rural Americans like me, and many others. But instead of delivering real change, the strategy appears to be just another example of the Trump administration putting the financial interests of polluting industries above people’s health.
One of the most outrageous elements is a goal to “ensure that the public has awareness and confidence in EPA’s [the Environmental Protection Agency] robust pesticide review procedures.” This is like committing to convince the public that the sky is green—but more dangerous. It’s committing public dollars to a corporate cover-up campaign.
If the EPA’s review process was “robust,” the use of cancer-linked pesticides wouldn’t be increasing in the US; we wouldn’t still be using 85 toxic pesticides that are banned in other countries; and pesticides wouldn’t be green-lit based on “safety” data provided by the very companies seeking approval for their chemicals. In reality, the EPA’s pesticide approval process is notoriously industry-friendly, in large part due to the revolving door between the agency and the industries it’s supposed to regulate. The Trump administration, for example, just appointed a former pro-pesticide lobbyist from the American Soybean Association, Kyle Kunkler, to one of the top positions regulating pesticides at the EPA.
Industry influence has led the EPA to prioritize the approval of new pesticide products at the expense of human health for decades. As one EPA toxicologist explained, “It is the unwritten rule that to get promotions, all pesticides need to pass.” The EPA also regularly uses dangerous loopholes—called conditional registration and emergency exemptions—to allow pesticide products on the market without ever putting them through a full safety review process.
Rather than trying to sell the public industry-friendly myths about the EPA, the MAHA Commission should aim to fix the EPA’s flawed pesticide approval process.
The result is that the US lags behind the rest of the world when it comes to protecting people from pesticides. One of the pesticides most widely used in the US, atrazine, is banned in all 27 countries of the European Union. The chemical is infamous for disrupting hormonal functioning and decreasing fertility. Because the US uses over 70 million pounds a year, atrazine contaminates the drinking water of an estimated 40 million Americans.
Rather than trying to sell the public industry-friendly myths about the EPA, the MAHA Commission should aim to fix the EPA’s flawed pesticide approval process. It should propose sensible, much-needed reforms like prioritizing independent science over industry-backed studies, closing the conditional registration and emergency exemption loopholes, and outlining a plan to close the revolving door once and for all.
Another disappointment in the strategy? It barely mentions organic farming, despite the fact that organic is the clearest pathway to transforming our food system into one that is healthy and nontoxic. The US Department of Agriculture organic seal prohibits more than 900 synthetic pesticides allowed in conventional agriculture. Just one week on an organic diet can reduce pesticide levels in our bodies up to 95%. Synthetic food dyes—a key issue for the MAHA movement—are all prohibited by the organic seal, along with hundreds of other food additives and drugs otherwise allowed in livestock production. Research also shows that organic food can be higher in some nutrients.
Expanding organic farming in the US would be a clear home run for making America healthier. But aside from one lackluster recommendation about “streamlining” the organic certification process, the Commission’s strategy ignores organic. Instead, it leans into promoting industry-friendly “precision agriculture”—the use of AI, machine learning, and digital tools on farms to optimize inputs—which primarily benefits corporate giants like Bayer. To make America’s children healthy, we need better than precision agriculture. We need increased organic research, technical and financial assistance for farmers to transition to organic, the development of new markets and processing infrastructure for organic products, and more.
In short, the strategy is deeply disappointing for the Americans across the political spectrum—including members of the MAHA movement, and including many rural Americans like myself—who have been clamoring for real change. It serves Trump’s pro-industry agenda instead of America’s children. Those of use who care about pesticides are left wondering if the MAHA Commission will ever walk the walk and put our health ahead of the profits of the chemical industry.
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Trump’s ‘Shock-and-Awe’ Approach to Governing Is as Deluded as W’s Iraq War
When this nightmare ends we will be left with a mess of rubble and a monumental task of rebuilding.
Sep 09, 2025
Nothing good will come of the chaos that has already been created by the Trump administration. In just a few months, it’s taken a wrecking ball to institutions, agencies, and programs.
The administration has taken dramatic steps to: gut the federal work force; withhold billions of dollars in research grants intended to address health and a range of other scientific concerns; eliminate foreign aid programs and the entities that deliver them; dismantle governmental health institutions; slash programs that provide healthcare and food to the poor and disabled; wreak havoc in international trade relations by imposing, then withdrawing, then reimposing tariffs based on whim or personal vendetta; and create fear and panic in cities across the country with the dramatic expansion of immigration enforcement that has included the hiring thousands of unvetted individuals, many of whom have an ideological bent and are eager to get a gun and badge to carry out their agenda. And this is only a partial list of the Trump administration’s destruction.
A case can easily be made that reform was needed in many of these areas. It must be acknowledged that waste or redundancy is somewhat inevitable in programs or agencies that have been in existence for decades or more. And there can be hesitancy to terminate programs that have either outlived their usefulness or never had their intended impact. But needed reforms are always best done with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.
By using the latter approach, the administration has not only done significant damage to government, but has also eroded the public’s trust. The wholesale gutting of staff, cutting of research grants, elimination of programs, and exaggerated claims made in denigrating these programs cannot easily be remedied by the next administration. Expertise has been lost, unmet needs will only multiply, and some elected officials will be hesitant to reestablish or provide funding for programs that this administration has convinced a sizable number of voters are wasteful.
Look at what has been lost. By attempting to discredit the effectiveness of vaccines and shaking the public’s confidence in their importance, we may now see the resurgence of childhood diseases that had largely been eradicated. In eliminating programs that provide food benefits to the poor, not only will they suffer, but America’s farmers who were also often direct beneficiaries of these efforts will be hurt. Tariffs will make imported goods more expensive for American consumers and contribute to an erosion of trust in the US as a reliable trading partner. The resulting loss of US standing in many regions of the world has already led to governments to increasingly look to China. Losses are evident too in setbacks in scientific research, the ability to predict weather conditions and patterns, and the damage done to efforts to meet climate change goals.
When this nightmare ends we will be left with a mess of rubble and a monumental task of rebuilding.
While US President Donald Trump’s disruptive and destructive impact has been mainly felt domestically, it calls to mind the approach President George W. Bush used in the Middle East. In the aftermath of the nightmare of the 9-11 terror attacks, the Bush administration lost control of its policymaking to a collection of neoconservative ideologues both inside and outside of the administration. Convinced that reforming or tweaking the problems that existed in the Middle East would never get to the root of the problems, they chose to apply the wrecking ball to the region. They were going to blow it up and then rebuild “the new Middle East.”
We are now almost eight months into the “constructive chaos” engineered by this administration. The damage they have done is enormous, and will take a generation or more to rebuild.
The Bush policy was based on ideology, not reality. They were going to remove Saddam Hussein, install a government that met US criteria, and, as they so poetically put it, “serve as a beacon of democracy that would light the entire Middle East.” When it became clear that none of this worked, they latched onto the term “constructive chaos” to explain the “logic” behind their Middle East foreign policy. It was an effort to convince us that the mess they had created was intentional and necessary and that the growing violence and instability that followed were merely the “birth pangs” of the “new Middle East” they were helping to usher into existence. But there was no “logic,” and nothing “constructive” about the “chaos.” The spawn of the “birth pangs” were ISIS, an emboldened Iran, and weakened Arab “Republics” that destabilized the region.
We are now almost eight months into the “constructive chaos” engineered by this administration. The damage they have done is enormous, and will take a generation or more to rebuild. At this point, the Trump crowd hasn’t felt the need to fashion a clever explanation for what they’ve done. In part that’s because the impact of the damage is just beginning to be felt and much of Trump’s base are still under his sway and continue to believe that the mess they see isn’t real or will easily be fixed in short order.
But as was the case in the Bush years, reality will ultimately rear its head; questions will be asked and fingers will be pointed. Then the process of rebuilding can begin. It will take time to reconstruct what has been destroyed and to regain the trust that has been lost. But it can be done.
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