alternative energies … not

The new German government has deleted several documents from the website of the Ministry For Environment, which was in the hands of the SPD in the last legislative period and is now governed by the Christian Conservatives.

One example is a brochure which was widely used as study material in German schools, showing the difficulties and potential dangers of nuclear energy (the UNESCO awarded a price to the booklet in 2007); another example is the publication “Nuclear Energy – An Expensive Meander – The Myths of the Nuclear Power Industry“, authored by Sigmar Gabriel (SPD), the Minister for the Environment of the last legislative period.

These documents were silently removed with the simple reason of lobbyism. I hope one day society will acknowledge the importance of us “internet people” who carefully watch these things and ask questions.

When the Ministry was asked to comment on this, they didn’t even bother to come up with proper reasons.

The first reason (1) which was given – stating that all materials authored by ex-ministers are removed as standard procedure – is proven wrong, since there are still bazillion of publications of ex-ministers on websites of Ministries; the second reason (2), stating that online brochures are removed as soon as there aren’t any offline brochures available is not only completely insane (why would you remove free digital information when the same information is not available anymore in a paper version?), but also untrue (several brochures on websites of Ministries are declared to be unavailable as paper version, and it is therefor encouraged on those very sites to download them for free).

Unbelievable.

Update:
One day later the Ministry for the Environment realized that their plan to clandestinely remove critical papers towards nuclear energy failed – the news of the removal spread on the internet.
The answer: a polite “thank you” by the press office, followed by uploading the documents in question again – (1) and (2).

(Source: Netzpolitik.de)