America is slashing its climate research
Hear no science, see no science, speak no science
The Global Change Research Act of 1990 requires the American government to regularly produce “National Climate Assessments"—weighty scientific tomes that detail the impacts of climate change and the ways in which people and businesses throughout the nation might best adapt to them. John Holdren, who was Barack Obama’s science and technology adviser, recalls that, when he visited the offices of “mayors and city planners and governors [they would] ask me to sign their copies of the document, because they found it so useful".
Unsurprisingly, President Donald Trump’s administration has stopped all work on the current (sixth) assessment. It has fired some of the federal employees who would work on it and terminated its contract with the consultancy which would have produced it. But this is not enough. The past assessments are being disappeared. In July the government website hosting the reports was taken down. A spokesperson for NASA promised that they would be put up on the agency’s site instead; NASA now says that is not going to happen.
“Project 2025", a blueprint for the second Trump administration published by the Heritage Foundation, a hard-right think-tank, called for a “whole-of-government unwinding" of previous “climate fanaticism". The unwinding is being undertaken with both zeal and an impressively petty attention to detail.
The White House’s proposed budget for 2026 would reduce funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a federal agency which oversees atmospheric science and a lot of environmental monitoring, by $2.2bn (27%), functionally dissolving its research arm. Hefty cuts to staff and programmes at other agencies—including the National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and NASA—would do away with the bulk of federally funded climate science, including one effort as iconic as it is vital.
The EPA is also disavowing its past research. On July 29th Lee Zeldin, its boss, said the agency was going to rescind the “endangerment finding" which underpins its powers as a greenhouse-gas regulator because the science behind it had been “warped".
Congress is resisting some of this; its members are particularly opposed to cutting the budget of the National Weather Service, which NOAA runs. The warnings it issues ahead of disasters like hurricanes or the deadly floods that recently hit Texas are not the sort of thing you want to have defunded if climate change turns round and bites your constituents. But let it not be said that the administration lacks a rationale for its actions. Recent cuts to a climate-modelling programme at Princeton were justified on the basis that it increased young people’s “climate anxiety".
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