Plan to break up Noaa claims its research is ‘climate alarmism’ and calls for commercializing forecasts, weakening forecasts
Climate experts fear Donald Trump will follow a blueprint created by his allies to gut the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), disbanding its work on climate science and tailoring its operations to business interests.
Joe Biden’s presidency has increased theprofile of the science-based federal agency but its future has been put in doubt if Trump wins a second term and at a time when climate impacts continue to worsen.
The plan to “break up Noaa is laid out in the Project 2025 document written by more than 350 rightwingers and helmed by the Heritage Foundation. Called the Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, it is meant to guide the first 180 days of presidency for an incoming Republican president.
The document bears the fingerprints of Trump allies, including Johnny McEntee, who was one of Trump’s closest aides and is a senior adviser to Project 2025. “The National Oceanographic [sic] and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories,” the proposal says.
That’s a sign that the far right has “no interest in climate truth”, said Chris Gloninger, who last year left his job as a meteorologist in Iowa after receiving death threats over his spotlighting of global warming.
This is old school Grover Norquist
bureaucratic abolitionism.
Please. This isn’t about small gummint, those fucking asshole traitors could fuck off out of our private lives and doctors’ offices. They’re perfectly happy to expand gummint reach when it serves to oppress Americans.
Norquist was an absolutist, and would have probably been very happy if every aspect of the state - from the Post Office to the Pentagon - was run by a corporate entity.
There are definitely different interpretations of his anti-government philosophy. But if you were going to name a Russian who has influenced the current state of affairs, I’d point to Ayn Rand long before I called out Vladimir.