Officials at USDA’s land stewardship agency told employees to use the phrase “weather extremes” rather than “climate change” as the Trump administration settled into office, says The Guardian, based on emails it obtained that showed the new administration “has had a stark impact on the language used by some federal employees.”
The Natural Resources Conservation Service disputed the report. “There was no direction from USDA headquarters or the administration to modify the agency’s communications on climate change,” said a NRCS spokesman. The USDA said it issued interim operating procedures on Jan. 23 “to ensure the new policy team has an opportunity to review policy-related statements, legislation, budgets and regulations prior to issuance,” but it did not apply to data and scientific publications.
All the same, NRCS officials wrote emails suggesting that “resilience to weather” be used in place of “climate change adaptation” and that “build soil organic matter” was a better phrase than “sequester carbon.” In one email, an NRCS official said, “We won’t change the modeling, just how we talk about it — there are lots of benefits to putting carbon back in the soil, climate mitigation is just one of them.”
Another official wrote in an email to senior employees that the new administration did not place the same priority on climate change as the Obama administration. “Please visit with your staff and make them aware of this shift in perspective within the executive branch,” said the email, according to The Guardian.