Table 1.
List of US federal agencies with environmental mandates, and whether they develop and enforce regulations, have a research mission, and/or are Cabinet-level.
We considered agencies within Cabinet departments (e.g. the Bureau of Land Management within the Department of the Interior) to be non-Cabinet agencies, whereas the departments themselves are Cabinet-level. We also considered the White House to be Cabinet-level.
Fig 1.
An example of how we scraped webpages for our term analysis.
We excluded information in navigation menus and in footers (red blocks) and included mentions anywhere else on the page (yellow boxes).
Fig 2.
Network graph of epa.gov pages.
For clarity, nodes with less than a total of 35 incoming and outgoing links are not shown.
Fig 3.
Increases and decreases in the use of “climate change” across 2,085 federal agency webpages.
For example, the right-most red bar on the graph shows that there was one page that mentioned the term “climate change” 34 times in 2016 and all 34 of them were removed by 2020. The right-most blue bar on the graph shows that there was a page that had 30 mentions of “climate change” in 2016 and, by 2020, 18 more mentions of “climate change” had been added to that page. Not shown: pages with no change (n = 834) and pages with 2016 counts beyond 35.
Fig 4.
a-d. Pages that saw changes to counts of both “resilience” (y-axis) and “climate change” (x-axis). Arrows indicate the directionality of change between 2016 and 2020. (a) shows pages on which “climate change” decreased and “resilience” increased; (d) shows pages on which “climate change” and “resilience” both decreased.
Fig 5.
The per page use of the term “climate change” for each agency in 2016 and 2020.
The trend line represents no change (x = y). The x and y axes are square root scaled. Not shown: agencies that never used the term. See Table 1 for acronyms.
Fig 6.
Average change per page on Cabinet vs non-Cabinet agency websites.
Terms are ordered left to right by our empirically driven expectations of decreases or increases in usage.
Fig 7.
Distribution of changes to climate-related terms on Cabinet and non-Cabinet agency websites.
Terms are ordered left to right by our empirically-driven expectations of decreases or increases in usage.
Fig 8.
Percent change in the use of key terms by page visibility.
More opaque bars represent more visible pages; more transparent bars represent less visible ones. Blue indicates additions; red represents removals.
Fig 9.
Percent change in the use of “climate change” by agency and page visibility.
Not included: pages where “climate change” was not mentioned during the Obama era. Not shown: agencies with fewer than 15 pages where “climate change” was mentioned, as well as the “Other” category of agencies.