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Portland Joins Effort To Publish Removed EPA Climate Change Website

The city of Portland is joining a national effort to post climate change data that was removed from the website of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Visit the EPA’s current website, and you can find pages for topics including lead, pesticides and even bedbugs. But the main climate change page was taken down in April.

Instead, there’s a message that says the page is being updated “to reflect the EPA’s priorities under the leadership of President (Donald) Trump and Administrator (Scott) Pruitt.”

The message also includes a link to an archived snapshot of the same climate change website on Jan. 19.

The Washington Post reportedthat the information taken down was not limited to policy statements and included research and basic educational information about climate change that had been published on the site in some form for two decades.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who served in President Barack Obama's administration, responded by using his city’s website to republish the page that the Trump administration had taken down. It includes information on the ways greenhouse gas emissions affect weather.

Now, Portland has joined Chicago and published a copy of the climate change page on the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability site.

In a press release, the bureau notes that Portland was the first city in the United States to craft its own carbon emissions reduction plan, in 1993.

"Any vision for the future of our city needs to acknowledge climate change. It isn't just our planet that's at stake, it's our very existence," said Mayor Ted Wheeler.

Other cities re-posting the data include Seattle, Houston, Atlanta and Boston.

The Chicago Department of Innovation and Technology has uploaded the information to an open-sourced site and is offering it to other cities and universities that want it.

Copyright 2020 EarthFix. To see more, visit .

Amelia Templeton is a multimedia reporter and producer for Oregon Public Broadcasting, covering Portland city hall, justice and local news. She was previously a reporter for EarthFix, an award-winning public media project covering the environment in the Northwest.