Gretchen Gehrke on the future of public climate science

The environmental right to know

R. Kriesel: EDGI was founded in 2016 in preparation for Trump’s first term. Can you tell us a bit about the motivation for starting it?

Gretchen Gehrke: We were a small group of mostly environmental sociologists, environmental anthropologists, environmental historians, and then me, an environmental chemist, and all of us were interested in the environmental right to know. And so we decided, as mostly academics, that what we could do to mitigate harm was to let people know what's changing. We're very skilled in documenting and analyzing, and so we set about to track how things are changed, how things would change under Trump.

We have three core areas. One is public data and how access might change. Second is public information, and how the federal portrayal of information might change. We saw huge amounts of changes to public information, and we were expecting more subtlety, and we ended up seeing a lot more just kind of brass removals of information. And then our third area is governance, understanding how environmental decisions are being made—how policies are being made inside of the EPA, other agencies too, but especially the EPA. We really set out to uncover what was happening and document it, analyze it, and get that word out so the public had knowledge of how things were changing.

You used to work for the EPA. How did your experience there inform the urgency behind EDGI’s founding?

I worked at the EPA for one year, 2011 to 2012. That was Obama. Even under Obama, it was way too bureaucratic for me.

My childhood dream had been to be an EPA Scientist. I majored in chemistry and earth sciences, and got a PhD in environmental geochemistry. It was toeing the line—a straight course to being an EPA Scientist. I had a pretty naive understanding of how federal bureaucracy works. It was hard to get things done. Things like a project that I was on as the aquatic chemist. It was started before I got there, and non-aquatic chemists made the budget and didn't include items for important things like water filters. I couldn't change the budget, I couldn't get water filters, so I basically couldn't do the project with any integrity.

The urgency came from—I mean Trump campaigned on cutting the EPA at its knees. Some of our co-founders are Canadian; they experienced the Harper administration where the government really did delete tons of data. So we wanted to make sure that we had records. We wanted to track how the federal government changes how it talks about these critical topics. Will that change public impressions of the urgency of the climate crisis? Will that change public understanding of the responsibility of the pesticide industry for our agricultural situation? Especially because of the kinds of gaslighting that Trump did during his campaign. We were concerned there would be a lot of gaslighting of the American public through the agencies.

Government information policies are inadequate

What changes to public climate data are expected in Trump’s second term?

It's obviously hard to say. We are absolutely expecting public information to change again. We're absolutely expecting wide-scale public information suppression. Unfortunately, throughout the four years of the Biden administration (which made great progress in a lot of areas like environmental justice) there wasn't any progress in our information policies. So the removal of public information is totally allowed. EPA.gov literally could go down on January 20th, there's nothing saying that it can't. There's been no policy movement to inhibit that behavior. As I said, last time we were expecting more subtle language changes, but we saw less subtlety than expected, and more broad deletions of access to information. We think that will happen again.

In our data preservation effort, we've been soliciting and receiving requests from a broad group, local and state level governments, folks from environmental justice partners, from other environmental advocacy groups that have specific interests. Some folks are really worried about FEMA data. Some are worried about DOT data. Access to transportation also means greater exposure to road pollutants, so the DOT has been collecting some really interesting environmental data and environmental justice data. So I'd say there's interesting data that could be at risk from a lot of different perspectives.

Last time around, we did not see widespread data deletion. I don't know if that's because they didn't realize data was important, or if it was because a couple of groups, especially the Sierra Club, did a large Freedom of Information Act campaign requesting federal databases to be preserved. There's a rule in FOIA that if more than three requesters request the exact same thing, it needs to be made publicly available, generally in a FOIA Reading Room. It’s conceivable that an agency could take down all its data, remove all public access, except for through a FOIA reading room or something, which can be hard to find. It's conceivable they could do that, but maybe they left them up because of the FOIAs. We really don't know why they left the data alone, but they did, largely. They did make it harder to access, but we did not see a broad data deletion. We don't know if that will happen this time around. We're preparing for it, in case it does happen.

We do expect that elective tools will probably be taken down. Things like the White House Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST)* which is a tool that environmental justice groups have used in their advocacy, basically looking at non-chemical stressors, or kinds of social burdens, alongside chemical stressors or environmental burdens, and the overlay of those. It's a mapping tool. The White House built that because of a Biden executive order. It was not congressionally mandated or anything, and we expect something like that to go down. I don't know if the data behind it will. It pulls from a lot of stable data sources like the census but the tool itself is how communities can actually use this data.

In order to really work with census data, you have to have experience in data science. These tools and applications that help people interact with data in a more user-friendly way—those could be on the chopping block.

They're also really hard to recreate. The Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool is a beautiful example of an open source tool. We not only have all the data backed up, we also have the code backed up. If Trump were to take it down on the 20th, we could stand it right back up. We've got all we need to do that. Unfortunately, other tools that aren't open source would require a huge amount of developer time to build it again ourselves. But at least the CEJST tool we’ve got because it's open source. I'm very glad for that.

What I anticipate is that tools that demonstrate things the Trump administration doesn't want to see would be, if not taken down, then not maintained at the very least. Like the disproportionate burdens on people of color, disproportionate burdens on low income folks. Things about the climate crisis, things that make it easy to point out inconvenient truths.

We don't have a solution for this problem: we’re concerned that with the kind of drastic staffing reductions and budget cuts Trump and Elon Musk are proposing, that there won't be the federal workforce to collect, curate, or manage the data. That's a whole other issue, because civil society doesn't have the capacity to run satellites. I'm not concerned about NOAA not continuing to make tide charts because you can't have international shipping without that. It will continue to do wind roses because you can't fly airplanes without that. I think there are some things that are not at risk. But then again, if Elon Musk has his way, and we have a federal workforce one-third the size it is now—will NOAA even have the capacity to do that? I don't know.

Wholesale cutting vs. restructuring

If we could engage with the reasoning behind cutting the EPA for a second: is there some credence to the idea that these agencies are bloated and should be trimmed down?

It’s such a hard thing, talking about government being mired in bureaucracy. That's the argument of the right, and you're not supposed to say that. Like, I left [the EPA] because it was extremely difficult to get anything done. And the reason it was difficult was the levels of bureaucracy, and a constant fear of EPA being sued and having to provide documentation. Do I think things could run a lot more effectively? Absolutely. But do I want to say that right now? I think what could be said is we are absolutely in need of restructuring government. But what Trump, and Musk, and the authors of Project 2025 are proposing is not the way to do it. It will harm the functioning of government, and it will harm the American public.

But should we rethink the approach to environmental protection? Yes, we need a total reframe. The EPA’s mission is to protect environmental and human health. But the regulations are written in terms of limiting emissions. The only ones that are written explicitly with ambient air concentrations in mind rather than emission concentration—so you're actually thinking about exposure as opposed to emissions—are regulations for the six “criteria pollutants.” Other than that, it really is only an emissions based regulatory system, and one where you need to demonstrate that something is harmful in order to regulate the emissions. As though industry should have the freedom to pollute absolutely until we regulate them, and we need 20 years of data on how this is harmful to health. That's so backwards. Yeah, we totally need to shift that paradigm to not treat protecting people’s health like it is infringing on companies’ “right” to pollute.

Building trust

What is EDGI’s relationship and reputation with agencies like the EPA, NOAA, NASA. Do you have much communication?

So, it kind of depends. Our relationship under the Trump administration and the Biden administration were different. Mostly, we engage with EPA. In the first Trump administration we did maybe 150 interviews with current and former EPA staff, people that were still at the agency, or who chose to retire or leave the agency. We had that connection, but it wasn't something official. But through that, and also through our advocacy, we've gotten to really know some folks in different parts of the agency.

Under the Trump administration, there was actually some antagonism. We wrote a report about declining enforcement numbers, and they called us out in a speech, basically saying how wrong we were. But our report was based on the data that they provided, so the fact that they provided incomplete data is their issue. There also was an Inside EPA article where somebody anonymously was quoted as saying something about “be careful, because there are those people that are monitoring all the web pages.” So I know at some level they weren't pleased with us being a thorn in their side.

In the last four years we've had some productive conversations and collaborated on a couple of things, and I think we're pretty well respected. They seek out our input. We've done some tool testing for several tools now. They've provided us with a beta version, and we've tested it, provided feedback on accessibility and utility and all that, and tried to help them improve their public-facing tools. They’ve also been receptive to some of our feedback on issues we’ve reached out to them about.

Rational information policy for the digital age

We were talking about Biden and the progress his administration made, but the EPA’s digital archives were removed from public access during his presidency. Do you see the disposal of public climate data as a larger trend, bigger than just Trump?

They were planning on removing it (the EPA archive). We ran a campaign to tell them not to, and they ended up not removing it. Yet. It's still slated for being removed, and they stopped people from contributing to it. So it has not received any new deposits in two years, but it is still publicly accessible at the moment.

Basically, even though we are in the year 2025 now, I don't think that we are prepared for the digital age, from a policy perspective. I think that's why we're in this whole situation with misinformation and disinformation.

We are not ready for how people are engaging with information, including websites. It's thought of as disposable information. That's actually the way people receive information now, they’re not looking at bulletin boards, literal bulletin boards at agencies, to understand what rules are coming out. No one's looking at the hard copy reports or fliers. People are engaging with information through websites and apps, and yet our digital information is not protected and it's thought of as disposable, because the internet is supposed to up-to-date, and things get outdated.

Without a policy in place to kind of—this is actually adding bureaucracy, which I was earlier saying that there's too much of it— but I think that there needs to be some level to understand, for example, when something is out of date, why it’s out of date. Was there a new scientific finding that altered the consensus on what is true about something? Or what is known about a chemical or its health effects? Is it out of date because a new policy was passed or that regulation was rescinded? Or, is someone is trying to take information down that isn't out of date, but is just inconvenient?

I think we need policies in place to deal with non-static digital content. We have lots of rules about what we can do about paper products and paper records, tons of them, and yet we really have very few policies in place about digital information and digital access to information and data. Even though we're a quarter of the way through this century, and people have been mostly engaging electronically with the government since, you know, 2000, we're still not ready for that.

The EPA’s director of web communications and I were in a conversation, and I was trying to convince him to not take down the archive. He said, “but we have these snapshots.” Yes, you have a snapshot from January 19, 2017 and you have a snapshot from January 19, 2021. And those are really helpful. But in the full EPA online archive I can find policies from Clinton, I can see George W. Bush’s Clear Skies initiative. There are things that existed before 2017. And without that, we don't have these records of failed climate policies, or of things that maybe we should reinstate.

There is a lot of lost history there if we continue to think of digital information as disposable. And it would be a disservice to the ability of the Internet to consider it as something static, because it's obviously not. One of its beauties is that it is not. But we need to realize that we're losing history. We're losing an understanding of how we are in this political landscape, in this environmental and regulatory landscape, how we got here, why we're here, what the problems are. We're losing a lot of that information if we just dispose of our digital information.

And we risk revisionist history. Like Scott Pruitt, the first EPA Administrator under Trump, tried to have this whole Back to Basics campaign about getting the EPA back to its roots. But what he was saying had absolutely no understanding of the basics of the EPA: “Back to basics—we're getting things back to states.” No, actually, the EPA was literally created because regulating the environment at the state level wasn't working. That’s literally the purpose of the EPA.

If you take away data, you can’t make new policies

What do you think is the most effective way to make the case for climate data preservation to the public?

One thing that is true is we cannot address issues that we can't measure. We need to be able to measure them, and then we can address them. If you remove information you interfere with the ability to identify a problem, and if you can’t identify it, you certainly can’t measure it.

Some of the language changes we saw under the first Trump administration— the removal of more specific language around carbon and methane replaced with more general terms like “air quality” and “emissions”— if you're removing the specific you really interfere with the ability to identify the problem and then to take the next step of measuring it, and build data from which to build a plan of how to address it.

That’s why Project 2025 calls for tinkering with race in the census, because if you limit the use of race away as a category, you can no longer talk about disproportionate burdens on people of color. Which we know to be true. But especially with the 2018 Evidence-based Policymaking Act, you need to show the data. Don’t get me wrong, the Evidence Act is a really good thing, but also, if you take away that data, then you cannot make new policies. Double edged sword there.

I think that could be an effective way of explaining why it's necessary.

Pro science network is ready

Is the scientific community united, or united enough, to push back against Trump and the right?

I think so. There was some good work done on scientific integrity policies. There was a lot of good progress made within agencies. Also, I think the scientific community is, especially after seeing the suppression of science under the first Trump administration —you know, there are resources. A couple of different whistle-blower protection groups are specifically for federal scientists. There's PEER, there's the Government Accountability Project. They’re great.

EDGI is part of a pro-science network, and that network is ready. We've seen the last time Trump was in office, that he tried to take academics off agency science advisory boards. He tried to make a policy that there's a conflict of interest if you had ever received a grant from, you know, like the NIH or NSF. Well, of course academics are going to go after those grants. Those grants are what work. So, we've seen those tactics. We're anticipating them. I think the scientific community is ready to advocate.

One of my key concerns is the shift in the composition of the federal judiciary, not just at the Supreme Court, but also at the appellate level. There was a huge influx of Trump-appointed federal judges, and so the whole appellate level has shifted. Obviously the Supreme Court has shifted into the conservative super-majority, and now that Trump's in again, I wouldn't be surprised if Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito stepped down and were replaced. Then five of the nine Supreme Court justices would be Trump appointees. Trump appointees alone could be a majority of the Supreme Court for 30 or 40 years!

One of the things we can do to resist Trump’s policies is bring lawsuits, but the effectiveness of those lawsuits may change based on the composition of the courts that has been very much influenced from Trump's first administration. I'm not saying don't bring lawsuits, but it's just a concern that they may not be as effective.

How journalists can talk to scientists

When I was researching for the EOT project, I tried to reach out to federally-employed scientists, but I was turned away every time because, I was told, federal employees cannot talk to journalists [which is false]. Do you have any advice for journalists looking to make connections with scientists, or form networks with the scientific community, especially if government data becomes less reliable?

That's a tough one, especially with folks being extra careful for fear of retribution. I've also been turned away a bunch and, well, I've just not wanted to reach out, because I'm not wanting to leave a paper trail, an email trail, that could be used against some somebody down the line. Yeah, I think it's really tough, because people are worried about losing their jobs.

I have a friend who basically said, “Don't email me. Just don't.” He's like, “I don't care if you're asking me for a bike ride. Don't email me right now, okay?” The whole part of the agency that he worked in was coming under scrutiny, and he had previously been kind of vocal about environmental justice and community engagement and matters like that. So he was likely going to be scrutinized.

There are a lot of public-private partnerships. For example, a lot of NASA scientists work with Caltech, and there's a lot of those kind of projects. If you approach the academic, then you can probably get in touch with the agency person from there more easily than you could by cold-calling a federal agency scientist. That would be one approach I might take. And the other is maybe providing your information to some of these whistle-blower groups so that someone can get in touch with you, rather than you getting in touch with them. Because people want their stories to be told, if they're going to whistle-blow, they want that story to be told. PEER, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, they're great, and the Government Accountability Project. Both of those groups have been around a long time and are well respected; a place to start.

Society’s role in preserving access to critical data

Do you see any advantages to moving and storing climate data off these government sites?

The federal data landscape is massive, and we’re not going to back up all of it, but we are selecting key databases to prioritize. For those, I think that civil society, without some of the constraints of the federal bureaucracy, could make really good progress. I do think that there could be an advantage. 

It can be very challenging to integrate data from different agencies, or even from different offices within agencies. Looking at a really complex challenge, like understanding cumulative impacts, is difficult. There's not going to be any progress made at the agency level on that over the next four years. That’s unfortunate, because the Biden administration did really start to make progress. But with us capturing all of that data with EOT, we can make progress. We’re hoping to develop blueprints for how you can make these data more interoperable. Four years from now we can give that to the government saying, “Here, try this.” We can prototype.

I'm hoping that civil society can really take the reins for the next four years, and when we have a more receptive administration, we can give them what we found, and they can try to implement it.

The other thing is it's really important to us to contextualize data, to make sense of what is there and why, and to explore what data is not there, the data from communities that is not included right now. You know— why industry estimates are taken as truth, and yet any sort of monitoring that communities do is discarded.

There are things that we can do looking at data quality—are there ways we can make this data interoperable, in order to incorporate new or different data, especially data that is reflective of what communities are experiencing? Can we demonstrate prototype dashboards that communities can use to better understand or show what they're facing, and how to adjust their exposure, or adjust their advocacy strategies? Can we provide that? I think we can make data more interoperable and more accessible to people.

I'm a former athlete, so I often think about offensive and defensive approaches. As we shift into more of a defensive mode, we can still play offense. And there's actually a great opportunity in this particular endeavor that includes EOT. We're not going to make policy progress, but we can make prototypes, and we can demonstrate solutions.

_{Published January 22, 2025}