Trump team deletes 'climate change' from White House website

  • 21/01/2017
The White House (Getty)
The White House (Getty)

US President Donald Trump is committed to eliminating Barack Obama's Climate Action Plan and other environmental initiatives, according to the recently updated White House website.

The former reality TV star took the oath at 6am Saturday (NZ time).

Mentions of climate change have been replaced by Mr Trump's "America First Energy Plan".

He is "committed to eliminating harmful and unnecessary policies" such as Barack Obama's Climate Action Plan, the White House website now reads.

"Lifting these restrictions will greatly help American workers, increasing wages by more than US$30 billion over the next seven years."

The White House website's climate change section under Obama (whitehouse.gov)
The White House website's climate change section under Obama (whitehouse.gov)

Obama's climate plan proposed cuts to US carbon dioxide emissions, in part by preserving forests and encouraging increased use of cleaner renewable fuels.

Mr Trump's efforts to boost the US oil and gas sector will help increase government revenues to "rebuild our roads, schools, bridges and public infrastructure", the website claims.

Searching the phrase 'climate change' on the White House site now brings up only one result, a biography of Mamie Geneva Doud Eisenhower, who served as First Lady in the 1950s - and that's only because it mentions the Colorado native regularly visited relatives in the "milder climate of San Antonio" during winter.

The White House website's climate change search results under Trump (whitehouse.gov)
The White House website's climate change search results under Trump (whitehouse.gov)

In the weeks leading up to Mr Trump's inauguration, scientists scrambled to download as much publicly funded scientific information as they could, fearing his administration would not just restrict access to it, but delete it altogether.

Mr Trump is a climate change skeptic, once calling it a hoax "created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive".

Scientists beg to differ, recently announcing 2016 was the hottest year ever recorded.

Antarctic ice is also at a record low, well below every other year in the past 40.

The Department of Labor's report on LGBT people in the workplace was also removed from the website.

Newshub.