NEWS

A key player in the campaign to stop the effort to hold fossil fuel companies financially accountable for damages is Christopher Horner, "the nation’s most prolific user of FOIA and its state equivalents to go after anyone fighting climate change who works for a public entity,” said Michael Gerrard, an expert in climate law at Columbia University.

"They're using different words. Extreme weather instead of climate change, for example, which isn't a politically charged word. And they're starting to archive their research results out of government hands."

A former Trump official who alarmed scientists years ago when he attempted to meddle with a congressionally mandated climate report has returned to the White House in a role that’s expected to heavily influence the next version of the assessment.

This digital coup also, and above all, enables a tight control of power over the conduct of science and the production of knowledge, which is nothing like what the first Trump administration (2017-2021) had implemented.

Donald Trump's first term in the White House left a bitter taste in the mouths of the scientific community. Created in November 2016, the Silencing Science Tracker site continues to meticulously record attacks on science.

"Of course, we haven't yet seen the full extent of what they have in store," says Kurtz. At the moment, however, one can observe how attempts to fire researchers are already being made "much more aggressively."

“These are irreplaceable repositories of important climate information,” says Lauren Kurtz, CSLDF executive director. “So fiddling with them or deleting them means the irreplaceable loss of critical information. It’s really quite tragic.”