Any fool can break things

Elon Musk is vandalizing America's greatest treasures

A mapmaker at the Coast and Geodetic Survey compiling a chart, circa 1940.

The news came late yesterday afternoon that the Musk tornado had reached NOAA, the government agency responsible for, among many other things, warning us about actual tornadoes. Ten percent of the staff was instantly given pink slips, and an hour to leave; with thousands more firings expected imminently. The wording on the termination letters seems to have been uniform; the work these people were doing was not considered “in the public interest.”

This, I’m afraid, is not going to be a particularly constructive issue of this newsletter, for which I apologize in advance. I’ll attempt to resume normal programming soon. But I want to bear a little witness to the people fired from NOAA and so many other places—and even more to the long and careful tradition of which they were a part. For the moment I don’t know what we can do to protect those people or that tradition—there will be court battles, and we should support them; general defense against Trump’s absurd and illegal destruction is ongoing at places like Third Act and Indivisible and you should join in. But for now, I simply want to explain what’s being destroyed.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was founded in 1970, but its roots go back to 1807, when Thomas Jefferson formed the “Survey of the Coast,” noting the importance of “waterborne commerce” to the new nation. Over the following decades it produced the first nautical maps, and then early tide tables, and then began to figure out how to locate and map underwater obstructions. Though I now live in landlocked Vermont, I was a Sea Scout when I was a boy and I remember navigating with those blue and tan charts, walking the parallel rules across the chart, always with an eye to the compass rose at the bottom, all painstakingly marked with hazards and aids to navigation.

It became the Coast and Geodetic Survey later in the nineteenth century—geodesy was the “science of accurately measuring and understanding the Earth's geometric shape, orientation in space, and gravity field,” and if like me you are a hiker you have doubtless encountered their brass markers on the summits of mountains. Other agencies—the Weather Bureau chief among them—grew up over the first two centuries of the republic to track the hazards of the continent. By 1970, in the wake of the first Earth Day, Republican president Richard Nixon combined all of them in this new National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency.

Nixon was not an honest or good man, but he was an intelligent one, in an intelligent era. Here’s how he described the rationale for this new agency:

"The oceans and atmosphere are interacting parts of the total environmental system upon which we depend, not only for the quality of our lives, but for life itself. We face immediate and compelling needs for better protection of life and property from natural hazards, and for a better understanding of the total environment — an understanding which will enable us more effectively to monitor and predict its actions, and ultimately, perhaps to exercise some degree of control over them.”

If that was true then, then it’s triply true now. It’s NOAA that keeps track of the rapid heating of our planet, with all its attendant dangers. And now it will be reduced to a shadow of itself, just as Project 2025 promised. Why would any rational person do this? Over two centuries it worked to understand the world around us, and that understanding was, among other things, key to our prosperity.

Because it committed the sin of helping to figure out the greatest danger to that prosperity: it was NOAA, after all, that maintained the world’s most important scientific instrument, the carbon dioxide monitor on the flank of Mauna Loa that first disclosed that co2 was accumulating in the atmosphere as we combusted coal and gas and oil. And it’s maintained the network of weather stations, satellites, and marine buoys that have shown that that carbon is driving a pervasive shift in our climate, one that is melting the poles. This is the very definition of “the public interest,” but it cuts against the private interest of the fossil fuel industry, and so it must be neutered. Elon Musk can insist all he wants that he’s doing it to save the taxpayers money, but the agency in total costs barely $6 billion a year—or one-sixth the cost of the federal government’s contracts with Musk’s agencies, which the Washington Post detailed in an important investigation yesterday.

Once this agency is broken, it won’t be rebuilt. Its centuries of institutional memory will be slowly forgotten. (There are good histories of NOAA on its website, here and here; if they’re of interest, download them right now). Musk is an impulsive child who has been handed an intricate toy, and whose only impulse is to break it, for the pure satisfaction of the crash. And so he can get a tax cut, and yet more money, whatever that even means to someone approaching the half-trillion dollar mark.

If you want just one tiny example of what he is destroying, look through the Bluesky feed of Zack Labe, a young climate scientist laid off Thursday afternoon. He was not just good at his job, he was good at explaining it: day after day he would lay out the latest news from the cryosphere, explaining in careful detail what was happening on the frozen portions of this earth. On Wednesday, for interest, he’d explained that Arctic sea ice was setting new lows for this date; on Monday he’d produced a graphic showing the steady loss of ice in glaciers around the world. He is our chronicler of thaw, of melt—and what could be more important, since that thaw and melt raises sea levels, disrupts the jet stream and the Gulf stream. He wasn’t an activist or an advocate, unless you count charting, say, the increased methane in the atmosphere as activism. Clearly the oil industry does; Project 2025 had promised to gut NOAA precisely because, as it put it in a moment of complete candor, those measurements are “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.”

In other words, Big Oil is trying to wrap a blindfold around the eyes of the nation, so it won’t see what’s happening. I confess to feeling a quiet rage at this vandalism (some of which is almost literal—the administration is disconnecting EV chargers, already bought and paid for, from federal parking lots). It won’t work, not in the long run—people will notice when their neighborhoods burn and flood. But it will make it harder to understand what’s going on, and to pin the blame where it belongs. The fossil fuel industry is committing an ongoing crime against the planet; this is an effort to paint over the lens of the security camera that’s been recording its trespasses.

At least as of this morning the vandals at DOGE hadn’t managed to sack the NOAA website. It was still reporting on the hottest January in history, and offering guides to “building climate resilience in your community.” As they had for 218 years the people in this enterprise were serving their fellow citizens with the information they needed to survive and to thrive. Take a look at it if it’s still there, just to remind yourself what good things humans are capable of. It will inspire you to fight harder against the bad things humans—in this case Musk and Trump—are capable of.

In other energy and climate news:

+The Trump administration is not confining itself to vandalism; it’s also telling straight up lies. Here’s my account in the New Yorker of Wednesday’s news that the EPA, led by failed New York gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin, will no longer consider carbon to be dangerous

Again, no one should be surprised by Wednesday’s announcement. But, set against the historical context, it’s the clearest potential sign I know of America’s decline. We learned the truth once, and now we are actively renouncing that truth. The word came down from the mountain—in this case, Mauna Loa—and now we may smash the tablets because their message asks too much of us. The Keeling Curve goes precipitously up; the curve of basic national responsibility is curving sharply down now. It’s hard to imagine a bottom deeper than this, but, if there is one, then men like Lee Zeldin will surely work hard to find it. It may be the last remaining research project.

Meanwhile, word comes from Mother Jones magazine that RFK Jr. has killed the climate change research efforts at the National Institutes of Health

A recent fact sheet prepared by the program notes that it has funded projects that study the long-term health impacts of wildfires; develop strategies for combating malaria (an increasing threat in the United States as temperatures rise); assess plans for addressing children’s asthma following hurricanes (which cause the spread of mold and mildew, exacerbating the disease); examine how common medications can make older adults more sensitive to heat; research how best to deal with gastrointestinal injury caused by heat-related algae blooms; and explore the the connection between heart health risks and drought. It has also sponsored projects that seek to predict the spread of Lyme disease, reduce the exposure of schoolchildren to wildfire smoke, and use urban planning to make cities more flood resistant.

+Word also came this week that the Make My Money Matter campaign in the UK was closing shop, unable to find the philanthropic money necessary to keep its remarkable work going. Over five years it has produced some of the best content the climate movement has ever seen, all designed to help people understand that their banks and insurance companies and pension funds were driving the climate crisis. They’re going out in style: check out, for instance, this wonderful video with the award-winning British actress Ambika Mod

+American officials have been absent from international climate meetings since Trump’s inauguration, the Guardian reports.

Meetings missed by US officials in recent weeks include that of a UNFCCC climate finance committee. The US Department of State official who sits on the committee does not appear to have attended a meeting last week, according to a livestream of the event, despite US representatives attending throughout Trump’s first term, meeting reports show. Meanwhile, an official from USAid missed a meeting last week of an expert group which helps poor countries develop plans to tackle the climate crisis, according to a person with knowledge of the meeting.

Despite the relatively low profile nature of the meetings US officials have skipped over the past month, their absence raises questions about the extent to which the Trump administration will engage in international climate talks during his second term. The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said earlier this month that he would skip the G20 summit because it was being used to “promote … DEI and climate change”.

The Guardian quotes worried diplomats; I confess I think this may turn out to be one of the few blessings of the Trump years, since our presence would only hamper international efforts. Let others—China, most obviously—emerge as leaders; they can’t do worse than we would.

+Since we’re getting the bad news out of the way, the National Archives is apparently also canceling talks and book events related to climate change—Mike Tidwell’s important new volume, The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue, was supposed to be the basis for a discussion at the Carter Library but the event has been cancelled. As the Times reports

The cancellations at the Carter Library come amid broader turmoil at the National Archives, as President Trump works to remake the federal government through budget cuts and seeks retribution against perceived foes.

On Feb. 7, President Trump, who has tangled with the archives over his reluctance to return classified documents after leaving office in 2021, abruptly fired Colleen J. Shogan, the national archivist.

+Here’s an interesting paper on the possible use of a maritime shipping levy as a possible backdoor carbon tax. And here’s an interesting account from Ian Edwards on the latest developments in ESG law—with an interesting recommendation that the winning side in the case appeal its victory.

+Beautiful Santa Barbara California plays an important role in environmental history—a massive oil spill there helped trigger the first Earth Day. Now plans for an oil pipeline there are once again rousing local residents

During the nearly seven-hour public comment period, community members voiced strong opinions. One activist stated, "I cannot sit by and watch another injustice like the Refugio oil spill happen again." Another warned, "This is the moment before tragedy happens. This is the moment we'll all look back on and say, did we make the right decision back then?"

Over on the Atlantic, Irish academics are urging their government to find some spine and stand up to the Trump administration’s extortion attempts (essentially the White House has been telling foreign governments to buy more liquefied natural gas or face tariffs).

They dispute the idea that LNG would provide greater energy security, citing research by the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland and the Climate Change Advisory Council.

It shows demand for gas will fall between 2030 and 2040 as more wind, solar, battery storage and other clean-energy infrastructure comes on line. Allowing LNG could “further entrench fossil fuel dependence and risk forfeiting a tremendous opportunity to transition towards a cleaner, more secure energy system”.

“The vision of ending our dependence on costly and polluting imported energy to secure our energy supply and meet our international climate change commitments is attainable with your leadership,” the experts wrote.

+Alexandra Tempus, in the Guardian, has a fine account of why you should probably stop worrying about finding a safe ‘climate haven.’ (Spoiler: because there aren’t any). As she recounts

In June of 2022, Asheville made a list of 10 cities reported by CNBC as “possible climate havens”. In the 13-minute TV segment, the Tulane University real estate professor Jesse Keenan listed 10 cities with “strengths” to “onboard climate migrants”. In 2023, USA Today reported on a different list of 12 cities Keenan and his team have developed “that could be best bets”, on which Asheville again appeared. Those communities were selected, the outlet paraphrased Keenan, “because of some combination of their geographies, economies and what they’ve done to get ready for the changes that lie ahead”.

+I am determined to end with slightly less dour news. First, here’s a loving profile of a tree ring expert (dendochronologist) named David Stahle. I include it because his work has been important in figuring out the planet’s recent temperature history, because he’s been funded for four decades by the National Science Foundation and its a perfect example of what we’re now wrecking, and mostly because it brings back fond memories of paddling the swamps of North Carolina’s Black River with him, looking at the grove of bald cypresses that, at 2,600 years, were the oldest living trees in eastern North America. (It’s a good moment to think about endurance). Anyway, I enjoyed this answer from the Q and A section:

When I have an hour of free time, how do you spend it: “Walking in the woods, of course.”

+And here’s some good news from Other Countries, which will likely be the places most good work gets done in the years ahead. First, new data from the Rocky Mountain Institute found that solar and windpower is growing twice as fast in the developing world as in the global north. Check out this chart of investment in clean and dirty energy

But don’t give up on the rich nations either. Britain—where, after all, we first learned to use fossil fuels—has a reasonably responsible new Labor government, and its Climate Change Committee uttered an important truth this week: getting to net zero is getting ever-cheaper. This fact is of course what scares the oil industry so much—and explains much of the current Trumpian spasm. But it can’t be easily hidden.

In a report published on Wednesday, it said the UK can reach net-zero emissions by 2050 while spending as little as 0.2% of the country’s gross domestic product or about £4.3 billion ($5.4 billion) each year on average. That’s a 75% reduction from the committee’s previous estimate in 2020 of net costs of £16.1 billion each year between 2025 and 2050.

What happened? “Technology has continued to innovate between the last time we issued advice to the government and today,” said Emma Pinchbeck, CCC’s chief executive. The biggest reductions in cost come in the form of cheaper renewables and electric cars.

This view is backed up by others tracking clean energy markets. Since 2010, researcher BloombergNEF finds the price of solar and batteries has fallen by more than 90%, whereas wind turbines have become 59% cheaper.

The CCC sees the country needing to invest £26 billion per year between 2025 and 2025 mostly toward the electrification of the economy, and as a result saving about £22 billion in operating costs. The committee’s plan for decarbonization is one that can apply to other mature industrial economies…

+And the sun of the week comes from Nina Simons, doubtless preparing even now for next month’s Bioneers conference in the Bay Area. Remember to draw your own at sunday.earth, as we move towards the official launch of Sun Day