The EPA this week proposed that the roughly 8,000 power plants, oil refineries, mills, and industrial facilities that for the past 15 years reported their greenhouse gas emissions under the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program would no longer have to do so, calling the requirement “burdensome.” 

The news came after reports last week that the Trump administration is also calling for NASA to take offline two of its multi-million dollar satellites that monitor carbon dioxide levels around the world.

Much of this follows an executive order Trump signed in May signed stating his administration is committed to “restoring a gold standard for science to ensure that federally funded research is transparent, rigorous, and impactful.” But the deletion of data has been building since Trump took office. First came cuts to offices, then jobs, then programs, and now an end to some climate data collection in general. And we are learning, this disappearing of troublesome data isn’t reserved just for climate facts.

Since January, the Trump administration:

● Dismissed the authors of the annual National Climate Assessment

● Eliminated a Center for Disease Control office that tracks asthma rates, which are largely impacted by air pollution

● Removed a map operated by the EPA that showed where climate-vulnerable communities of color live

● Archived the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool that identified disadvantaged communities for federal investment

● Shut down the globalchange.gov website, which made available more than 200 publications related to climate science

● Ended NOAA’s Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database

Climate change has always been an inconvenient reality for conservatives. But the White House’s recent efforts denote a clear strategy shift.

“There’s a very conscious effort to destroy as much as they can that’s related to climate, and that goes from the science through to the regulatory process,” David Doniger, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, tells me. “The lesson they learned from Trump’s [first term] is that by just trying to change regulations, they didn’t do enough damage to the cause. It’s a combination of destroying scientific infrastructure, destroying data collection, and destroying the regulatory capacity of the agencies … It’s just kind of an all-out war.”

Doniger worries that the loss of data—and the systems and jobs that gather and parse it—will ultimately make it harder to rebuild under another administration. He added that no longer forcing polluters to measure their own carbon emissions disincentivizes companies from wanting to do better: Their carbon footprint is out of sight and therefore out of mind.

All of these cuts seem to set the stage for a key question: If there’s no data showing otherwise, does a climate problem really exist?

Peter Gleick, a California water and climate scientist and co-author of the first National Climate Assessment in 2000, likened the July removal of the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s website globalchange.gov to a move in the dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451. 

“This is the modern version of book burning,” he told the Los Angeles Times, “They’re public documents. It’s scientific censorship at its worst.”

Experts paying attention to the White House’s changing strategy liken it to the disappearance of data under dictators or wartime leaders. First, data is deleted; then it’s manipulated to rewrite reality. And there are already echoes of that within the Trump Administration.

Take the Energy Information Administration, a government clearinghouse for federal energy information. It’s a critical source for scientists, industry leaders, and policy makers. Trump nominated Tristan Abbey to oversee it, a man who has long argued, along with the fossil fuel industry, that the government should stop tracking and releasing data on “peak oil,” a term for the projected year that oil consumption will peak before declining. That’s because Abbey believes oil demand isn’t going anywhere, so he wants to end the measurement altogether. The EIA currently estimates that global oil consumption will peak by 2027.  

The Senate moved earlier this week to proceed with a vote to confirm Abbey, making him one step closer to taking on the role.

Anna Massoglia, the former lead of the editorial and investigations team at OpenSecrets, wrote in an op-ed for The Hill, “The consequences of data manipulation extend far beyond politics. When those in power control the flow of information, they can dictate collective truth. Governments that manipulate information are not just rewriting statistics—they are rewriting history.”

These changes could have resounding consequences for how the country adapts to a warming world.

The most worrisome indicator to scientists is arguably the administration’s recent attempt to overturn what’s known as the EPA’s Endangerment Finding, a 2009 determination that greenhouse gases contribute to air pollution that adversely affects public health, which underpins the agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases. The argument? That the EPA lacks the legal authority for such regulation. 

The administration bolstered that position in July by releasing a Department of Energy report claiming, “Carbon dioxide (CO2) -induced warming appears to be less damaging economically than commonly believed.” The report, it turns out, was written by a handpicked group of five “independent scientists” assembled by none other than Energy Secretary Chris Wright himself.