Forest Service censors itself on climate in order to boost Big Oil in Texas

In an effort to open public forests and grasslands in Texas to oil and gas drilling, the U.S. Forest Service decided to remove references to climate change and greenhouse gases from initial documents in the project’s environmental review process. How convenient. According to records obtained by the Center for Biological Diversity, the agency accidentally released two versions of the same document, announcing its intent to conduct an environmental impact statement. The first version mentioned climate impacts—as any project promoting dirty fossil fuels should—and in the second, posted a day later after the first was taken down, there was nary a mention of climate change. Internal emails revealed that administration officials requested that the Forest Service scrub the first document of pesky climate details. Unfortunately, ignoring climate change does not stop the real-world consequences of planet-warming emissions, or the projects that fuel them.