EPA’s New Website: *Now Featuring “Volcanoes Did It”
Ben Cable (Originally posted on Substack Dec 21, 2025)
Last week, I was gasping for air, I was fighting every breath in fear I would not live. I was frantically playing charades to communicate since I could not speak. My throat was getting tighter. My asthma is triggered by air quality outside or indoors. I am not alone. There are twenty-eight million children and adults who suffer from Asthma in the United States. Now, Donald Trump wants to dump millions of particles from multiple industries into our air, and his administration is covering up science and the facts.
There are cover-ups, there are propaganda campaigns, and then there’s the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency quietly turning its own website into a climate denial pamphlet with a government logo.
In the past few weeks, the Trump EPA has deleted and rewritten public-facing science pages so thoroughly that the agency’s online “education” now reads like it was workshopped by a fossil fuel focus group: human-caused climate change? Missing. Links to science and indicators? Gone. Health impacts on kids and low-income communities? Wiped.
And here’s the rub: this isn’t just “messaging.” When EPA scrubs the basics of climate science from the public record, it’s not merely insulting scientists; it’s sabotaging the country’s ability to understand risk.
“The EPA’s new ‘climate causes’ page reads like a bedtime story for oil executives: No people, no pollution, no problem.”
The “Causes of Climate Change” Page Got a Makeover—Reality Didn’t Survive It
Multiple reports document the EPA’s edits: where the agency previously acknowledged the scientific consensus that human activity is driving modern warming, the revised pages now steer readers toward natural explanations—Earth’s orbit, solar variation, volcanoes while removing human causes from the main narrative.
E&E News reported the agency also removed entire subsections (including “Climate Change Indicators” and “Climate Change Impacts and Analysis”) and deleted links to scientific data and information.
The Washington Post reported that the EPA deleted or scrubbed FAQs that directly addressed the scientific consensus and how climate change affects health, then replaced them with a framing centered on “natural variability.”
This isn’t “streamlining.” This is state-branded confusion.
“When the EPA tells the public ‘it’s complicated,’ polluters hear ‘it’s payday.’”
“Protecting Health” by Deleting Health Information
The administration’s line—repeated by EPA spokespeople in coverage- is that they’re focused on “protecting human health” and rejecting “political agendas.”
But if you’re protecting health, you don’t delete health pages.
The Post reported that pages describing climate impacts on children’s health and low-income populations were among those removed.
Beyond climate pages, watchdog reporting has flagged broader website and policy shifts—such as removing references to the EPA’s new scientific integrity policy from EPA pages, raising alarms about political interference in science.
Clean Energy Under Attack, Special Interests Get a Red Carpet
The website edits don’t exist in a vacuum. They’re part of a broader posture: deregulate, delay, delete, deny.
The White House’s early “Unleashing American Energy” action explicitly frames policy around maximizing “affordable and reliable energy and natural resources,” signaling that the administration wants the federal apparatus aligned with fossil-fuel priorities.
At EPA, that posture shows up as major deregulatory pushes, including proposals the agency itself has celebrated as historic rollbacks, like repealing greenhouse gas standards for vehicles (per an EPA news release touting “largest deregulatory action” language).
And when the public-facing science disappears, it becomes much easier to persuade the public that rolling back protections is harmless, or even helpful.
“Step 1: erase the evidence. Step 2: repeal the rules. Step 3: call it ‘freedom.’”
The Human Cost: Asthma Isn’t a Talking Point
Let’s talk about what this looks like off the webpage and inside real lungs.
Air pollution is a known trigger for asthma attacks; stronger clean air rules reduce pollution and reduce harm. That’s not ideology—it’s public health. The American Lung Association warned that rolling back clean air protections would lead to more pollution, more illness, and more asthma attacks, especially for children.
Harvard public health experts have also warned that rolling back air-quality and greenhouse gas protections risks undoing gains in cleaner air, lower mortality, improved respiratory health, and fewer asthma cases and attacks.
And media reporting has directly connected the administration’s rollback push to worsening asthma burdens, particularly among children, by increasing exposure to ozone and soot linked to fossil fuel combustion.
This is where “website misinformation” stops being a communications scandal and becomes something uglier:
If people are told the threat isn’t real, they won’t fight for protections.
And if protections vanish, the ER fills up.
“Asthma doesn’t care what EPA’s website says. Your child’s airway isn’t comforted by a ‘natural variability’ FAQ.”
What You Can Do This Week
- Screenshot and archive changed EPA pages (use the Internet Archive’s “Save Page Now”). The record matters when agencies rewrite history.
- Call your members of Congress and demand oversight hearings on scientific integrity and public information removal at EPA.
- Support local clean-air enforcement (state agencies, monitoring groups, asthma coalitions). When federal guardrails weaken, local defenses matter more.
Because when the EPA starts acting like a public-relations arm for pollution, your lungs become the fact-checkers.
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