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Is international cooperation or technological development the answer to an apocalyptic threat?
Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer is about the great military contest of the Second World War, but only in the background. It’s really about a clash of visions for a postwar world defined by the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer’s work at Los Alamos and beyond. The great power unleashed by the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki could be dwarfed by what knowledge of nuclear physics could produce in the coming years, risking a war more horrifying than the one that had just concluded.
Oppenheimer, and many of his fellow atomic scientists, would spend much of the postwar period arguing for international cooperation, scientific openness, and nuclear restriction. But there was another cadre of scientists, exemplified by a former colleague turned rival, Edward Teller, that sought to answer the threat of nuclear annihilation with new technology — including even bigger bombs.
As the urgency of the nuclear question declined with the end of the Cold War, the scientific community took up a new threat to global civilization: climate change. While the conflict mapped out in Oppenheimer was over nuclear weapons, the clash of visions, which ended up burying Oppenheimer and elevating Teller, also maps out to the great debate over global warming: Should we reach international agreements to cooperatively reduce carbon emissions or should we throw our — and specifically America’s — great resources into a headlong rush of technological development? Should we massively overhaul our energy system or make the sun a little less bright?
Oppenheimer’s dream of international cooperation to prevent a nuclear arms race was born even before the Manhattan Project culminated with the Trinity test. Oppenheimer and Danish physicist Niels Bohr “believed that an agreement between the wartime allies based upon the sharing of information, including the existence of the Manhattan Project, could prevent the surfacing of a nuclear-armed world,” writes Marco Borghi in a Wilson Institute working paper.
Oppenheimer even suggested that the Soviets be informed of the Manhattan Project’s efforts and, according to Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird’s American Prometheus, had “assumed that such forthright discussions were taking place at that very moment” at the conference in Potsdam where, Oppenheimer “was later appalled to learn” that Harry Truman had only vaguely mentioned the bomb to Joseph Stalin, scotching the first opportunity for international nuclear cooperation.
Oppenheimer continued to take up the cause of international cooperation, working as the lead advisor for Dean Acheson and David Lilienthal on their 1946 nuclear control proposal, which would never get accepted by the United Nations and, namely, the Soviet Union after it was amended by Truman’s appointed U.N. representative Bernard Baruch to be more favorable to the United States.
In view of the next 50 years of nuclear history — further proliferation, the development of thermonuclear weapons that could be mounted on missiles that were likely impossible to shoot down — the proposals Oppenheimer developed seem utopian: The U.N. would "bring under its complete control world supplies of uranium and thorium," including all mining, and would control all nuclear reactors. This scheme would also make the construction of new weapons impossible, lest other nations build their own.
By the end of 1946, the Baruch proposal had died along with any prospect of international control of nuclear power, all the while the Soviets were working intensely to disrupt America’s nuclear monopoly — with the help of information ferried out of Los Alamos — by successfully testing a weapon before the end of the decade.
With the failure of international arms control and the beginning of the arms race, Oppenheimer’s vision of a post-Trinity world would come to shambles. For Teller, however, it was a great opportunity.
While Oppenheimer planned to stave off nuclear annihilation through international cooperation, Teller was trying to build a bigger deterrent.
Since the early stages of the Manhattan Project, Teller had been dreaming of a fusion weapon many times more powerful than the first atomic bombs, what was then called the “Super.” When the atomic bomb was completed, he would again push for the creation of a thermonuclear bomb, but the efforts stalled thanks to technical and theoretical issues with Teller’s proposed design.
Nolan captures Teller’s early comprehension of just how powerful nuclear weapons can be. In a scene that’s pulled straight from accounts of the Trinity blast, most of the scientists who view the test are either in bunkers wearing welding goggles or following instructions to lie down, facing away from the blast. Not so for Teller. He lathers sunscreen on his face, straps on a pair of dark goggles, and views the explosion straight on, even pursing his lips as the explosion lights up the desert night brighter than the sun.
And it was that power — the sun’s — that Teller wanted to harness in pursuit of his “Super,” where a bomb’s power would be derived from fusing together hydrogen atoms, creating helium — and a great deal of energy. It would even use a fission bomb to help ignite the process.
Oppenheimer and several scientific luminaries, including Manhattan Project scientists Enrico Fermi and Isidor Rabi, opposed the bomb, issuing in their official report on their positions advising the Atomic Energy Commission in 1949 statements that the hydrogen bomb was infeasible, strategically useless, and potentially a weapon of “genocide.”
But by 1950, thanks in part to Teller and the advocacy of Lewis Strauss, a financier turned government official and the approximate villain of Nolan’s film, Harry Truman would sign off on a hydrogen bomb project, resulting in the 1952 “Ivy Mike” test where a bomb using a design from Teller and mathematician Stan Ulam would vaporize the Pacific Island Elugelab with a blast about 700 times more powerful than the one that destroyed Hiroshima.
The success of the project re-ignited doubts around Oppenheimer’s well-known left-wing political associations in the years before the war and, thanks to scheming by Strauss, he was denied a renewed security clearance.
While several Manhattan Project scientists testified on his behalf, Teller did not, saying, “I thoroughly disagreed with him in numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated.”
It was the end of Oppenheimer’s public career. The New Deal Democrat had been eclipsed by Teller, who would become the scientific avatar of the Reagan Republicans.
For the next few decades, Teller would stay close to politicians, the military, and the media, exercising a great deal of influence over arms policy for several decades from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which he helped found, and his academic perch at the University of California.
He pooh-poohed the dangers of radiation, supported the building of more and bigger bombs that could be delivered by longer and longer range missiles, and opposed prohibitions on testing. When Dwight Eisenhower was considering a negotiated nuclear test ban, Teller faced off against future Nobel laureate and Manhattan Project alumnus Hans Bethe over whether nuclear tests could be hidden from detection by conducting them underground in a massive hole; the eventual 1963 test ban treaty would exempt underground testing.
As the Cold War settled into a nuclear standoff with both the United States and the Soviet Union possessing enough missiles and nuclear weapons to wipe out the other, Teller didn’t look to treaties, limitations, and cooperation to solve the problem of nuclear brinksmanship, but instead to space: He wanted to neutralize the threat of a Soviet first strike using x-ray lasers from space powered by nuclear explosions (he was again opposed by Bethe and the x-ray lasers never came to fruition).
He also notoriously dreamed up Project Plowshare, the civilian nuclear project which would get close to nuking out a new harbor in Northern Alaska and actually did attempt to extract gas in New Mexico and Colorado using nuclear explosions.
Yet, in perhaps the strangest turn of all, Teller also became something of a key figure in the history of climate change research, both in his relatively early awareness of the problem and the conceptual gigantism he brought to proposing to solve it.
While publicly skeptical of climate change later in his life, Teller was starting to think about climate change, decades before James Hansen’s seminal 1988 Congressional testimony.
The researcher and climate litigator Benajmin Franta made the startling archival discovery that Teller had given a speech at an oil industry event in 1959 where he warned “energy resources will run short as we use more and more of the fossil fuels,” and, after explaining the greenhouse effect, he said that “it has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 percent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York … I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.”
Teller was also engaged with issues around energy and other “peaceful” uses of nuclear power. In response to concerns about the dangers of nuclear reactors, he in the 1960s began advocating putting them underground, and by the early 1990s proposed running said underground nuclear reactors automatically in order to avoid the human error he blamed for the disasters at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.
While Teller was always happy to find some collaborators to almost throw off an ingenious-if-extreme solution to a problem, there is a strain of “Tellerism,” both institutionally and conceptually, that persists to this day in climate science and energy policy.
Nuclear science and climate science had long been intertwined, Stanford historian Paul Edwards writes, including that the “earliest global climate models relied on numerical methods very similar to those developed by nuclear weapons designers for solving the fluid dynamics equations needed to analyze shock waves produced in nuclear explosions.”
Where Teller comes in is in the role that Lawrence Livermore played in both its energy research and climate modeling. “With the Cold War over and research on nuclear weapons in decline, the national laboratories faced a quandary: What would justify their continued existence?” Edwards writes. The answer in many cases would be climate change, due to these labs’ ample collection of computing power, “expertise in numerical modeling of fluid dynamics, and their skills in managing very large data sets.”
One of those labs was Livermore, the institution founded by Teller, a leading center of climate and energy modeling and research since the late 1980s. “[Teller] was very enthusiastic about weather control,” early climate modeler Cecil “Chuck” Leith told Edwards in an oral history.
The Department of Energy writ large, which inherited much of the responsibilities of the Atomic Energy Commission, is now one of the lead agencies on climate change policy and energy research.
Which brings us to fusion.
It was Teller’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that earlier this year successfully got more power out of a controlled fusion reaction than it put in — and it was Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm who announced it, calling it the “holy grail” of clean energy development.
Teller’s journey with fusion is familiar to its history: early cautious optimism followed by a realization that it would likely not be achieved soon. As early as 1958, he said in a speech that he had been discussing “controlled fusion” at Los Alamos and that “thermonuclear energy generation is possible,” although he admitted that “the problem is not quite easy” and by 1987 had given up on seeing it realized during his lifetime.
Still, what controlled fusion we do have at Livermore’s National Ignition Facility owes something to Teller and the technology he pioneered in the hydrogen bomb, according to physicist NJ Fisch.
While fusion is one infamous technological fix for the problem of clean and cheap energy production, Teller and the Livermore cadres were also a major influence on the development of solar geoengineering, the idea that global warming could be averted not by reducing the emissions of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, but by making the sun less intense.
In a mildly trolling column for the Wall Street Journal in January 1998, Teller professed agnosticism on climate change (despite giving that speech to oil executives three decades prior) but proposed an alternative policy that would be “far less burdensome than even a system of market-allocated emissions permits”: solar geoengineering with “fine particles.”
The op-ed placed in the conservative pages of the Wall Street Journal was almost certainly an effort to oppose the recently signed Kyoto Protocol, but the ideas have persisted among thinkers and scientists whose engagement with environmental issues went far beyond their own opinion about Al Gore and by extension the environmental movement as a whole (Teller’s feelings about both were negative).
But his proposal would be familiar to the climate debates of today: particle emissions that would scatter sunlight and thus lower atmospheric temperatures. If climate change had to be addressed, Teller argued, “let us play to our uniquely American strengths in innovation and technology to offset any global warming by the least costly means possible.”
A paper he wrote with two colleagues that was an early call for spraying sulfates in the stratosphere also proposed “deploying electrically-conducting sheeting, either in the stratosphere or in low Earth orbit.” These were “literally diaphanous shattering screens,” that could scatter enough sunlight in order to reduce global warming — one calculation Teller made concludes that 46 million square miles, or about 1 percent of the surface area of the Earth, of these screens would be necessary.
The climate scientist and Livermore alumnus Ken Caldeira has attributed his own initial interest in solar geoengineering to Lowell Wood, a Livermore researcher and Teller protégé. While often seen as a centrist or even a right wing idea in order to avoid the more restrictionist policies on carbon emissions, solar geoengineering has sparked some interest on the left, including in socialist science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, which envisions India unilaterally pumping sulfates into the atmosphere in response to a devastating heat wave.
The White House even quietly released a congressionally-mandated report on solar geoengineering earlier this spring, outlining avenues for further research.
While the more than 30 years since the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the beginnings of Kyoto Protocol have emphasized international cooperation on both science and policymaking through agreed upon goals in emissions reductions, the technological temptation is always present.
And here we can perhaps see that the split between the moralized scientists and their pleas for addressing the problems of the arms race through scientific openness and international cooperation and those of the hawkish technicians, who wanted to press the United States’ technical advantage in order to win the nuclear standoff and ultimately the Cold War through deterrence.
With the IPCC and the United Nations Climate Conference, through which emerged the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, we see a version of what the postwar scientists wanted applied to the problem of climate change. Nations come together and agree on targets for controlling something that may benefit any one of them but risks global calamity. The process is informed by scientists working with substantial resources across national borders who play a major role in formulating and verifying the policy mechanisms used to achieve these goals.
But for almost as long as climate change has been an issue of international concern, the Tellerian path has been tempting. While Teller’s dreams of massive sun-scattering sheets, nuclear earth engineering, and automated underground reactors are unlikely to be realized soon, if at all, you can be sure there are scientists and engineers looking straight into the light. And they may one day drag us into it, whether we want to or not.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article misstated the name of a climate modeler. It’s been corrected. We regret the error.
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On Lee Zeldin’s announcement, coal’s decline, and Trump’s Tesla promo
Current conditions: Alaska just had its third-warmest winter on record • Spain’s four-year drought is nearing an end • Another atmospheric river is bearing down on the West Coast, triggering evacuation warnings around Los Angeles’ burn scars.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said yesterday he had terminated $20 billion in congressionally-approved climate change and clean energy grants “following a comprehensive review and consistent with multiple ongoing independent federal investigations into programmatic fraud, waste, abuse and conflicts of interest.”
The grants were issued to a handful of nonprofits through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion program that was the single largest and most flexible program in the Inflation Reduction Act. Zeldin has been targeting the funds since taking office, suggesting they were awarded hastily and without proper oversight. Citibank, where the funds were being held, has frozen the accounts without offering grantees an explanation, prompting lawsuits from three of the nonprofit groups. The EPA’s latest move will no doubt escalate the legal battles. As Politicoexplained, the EPA can cancel the grant contracts if it can point to specific and “legally defined examples of waste, fraud, and abuse by the grantees,” but it hasn’t done that. House Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee launched an investigation yesterday into the EPA’s freezing of the funds and Zeldin’s “false and misleading statements” about the GGRF program.
In other EPA news, the agency reportedly plans to eliminate its environmental justice offices, a move that “effectively ends three decades of work at the EPA to try to ease the pollution that burdens poor and minority communities,” as The New York Timesexplained.
President Trump’s 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports came into effect today. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo has explained, the move could work against Trump’s plans of making America a leader in energy and artificial intelligence. “The reason has to do with a crucial piece of electrical equipment for expanding the grid,” Pontecorvo wrote. “They’re called transformers, and they’re in critically short supply.” Transformers are made using a specific type of steel called grain oriented electrical steel, or GOES. There’s only one domestic producer of GOES — Cleveland Cliffs — and at full capacity it cannot meet even half of the demand from domestic transformer manufacturers. On a consumer level, the tariffs are likely to raise costs on all kinds of things, from cars to construction materials and even canned goods.
The European Union quickly hit back with plans to impose duties on up to $28.3 billion worth of American goods. Trump had threatened to slap an extra 25% duty on Canadian steel and aluminum in retaliation for Ontario’s 25% surcharge on electricity (which was a response to Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods, including a 10% tariff on Canadian energy resources), but held off after the surcharge was paused and the countries agreed to trade talks.
Wind and solar surpassed coal for power generation in the U.S. in 2024 for the first time, even as electricity demand rose, according to energy think tank Ember. Coal power peaked in 2007 but has since fallen to an all-time low, accounting for 15% of total U.S. electricity generation last year, while combined solar and wind generation rose to 17%.
Gas generation also grew by 3.3% last year, however, now accounting for 43% of the U.S. energy mix and resulting in an overall rise in power-sector emissions. But solar grew by 27%, remaining the nation’s fastest-growing power source and rising to 7% of the mix. Wind saw a more modest 7% rise, but still still accounted for 10% of total U.S. electricity generation.
Ember
“Despite growing emissions, the carbon intensity of electricity continued to decline,” according to the report. “The rise in power demand was much faster than the rise in power sector CO2 emissions, making each unit of electricity likely the cleanest it has ever been.” The report emphasizes that the rise of batteries “will ensure that solar can grow cheaper and faster than gas.”
A group of major companies including tech giants Amazon, Google, and Meta, as well as Occidental Petroleum, have pledged to support a target of tripling global nuclear capacity by 2050 “to help achieve global goals for enhanced energy resiliency and security, and continuous firm clean energy supply.” The pledge, facilitated by the World Nuclear Association, came together on the sidelines of the energy industry’s annual CERAWeek conference in Houston. According to a press release, “this is the first time major businesses beyond the nuclear sector have come together to publicly back an extensive and concerted expansion of nuclear power to meet increasing global energy demand.”
In case you missed it: Toyota plans to roll out an electric truck for the masses by 2026. At least, that’s what can be gleaned from a presentation the company gave last week in Brussels. Details haven’t been released, but Patrick George at InsideEVsspeculates it could be an electric Tacoma, or something more akin to the 2023 EPU Concept truck, but we’ll see. “While Toyota officials stressed that the cars revealed in Belgium last week were for the European market specifically, we all know Europe doesn't love trucks the way Americans love trucks,” George wrote. “And if Toyota is serious about getting into the EV truck game alongside Chevy, Ford, Ram, Rivian and even Tesla, it could be a game-changer.”
President Trump and Elon Musk showed off Tesla vehicles on the White House lawn yesterday, with Trump (who doesn’t drive) pledging to buy one and to label violence against Tesla dealerships as domestic terrorism. Tesla shares rose slightly, but are still down more than 30% for the month.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
And how ordinary Americans will pay the price.
No one seems to know exactly how many employees have been laid off from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — or, for that matter, what offices those employees worked at, what jobs they held, or what regions of the country will be impacted by their absence. We do know that it was a lot of people; about 10% of the roughly 13,000 people who worked at the agency have left since Donald Trump took office, either because they were among the 800 or so probationary employees to be fired late last month or because they resigned.
“I don’t have the specifics as to which offices, or how many people from specific geographic areas, but I will reiterate that every one of the six [NOAA] line offices and 11 of the staff offices — think of the General Counsel’s Office or the Legislative Affairs Office — all 11 of those staff offices have suffered terminations,” Rick Spinrad, who served as the NOAA administrator under President Joe Biden, told reporters in a late February press call. (At least a few of the NOAA employees who were laid off have since been brought back.)
Democratic Representative Jared Huffman of California, the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, said in recent comments about the NOAA layoffs, “This is going to have profound negative consequences on the day-to-day lives of Americans.” He added, “This is something that [Elon Musk’s government efficiency team] just doesn’t even understand. They simply have no idea what they are doing and how it’s hurting people.”
There is the direct harm to hard-working employees who have lost their jobs, of course. But there is also a more existential problem: Part of what is driving the layoffs is a belief by those in power that the agency is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry,” according to the Project 2025 playbook. As one recently fired NOAA employee put it, “the goal is destruction,” and climate science is one of the explicit targets.
NOAA is a multifaceted organization, and monitoring climate change is far from its only responsibility. The agency researches, protects, and restores America’s fisheries, including through an enforcement arm that combats poaching; it explores the deep ocean and governs seabed mining; and its Commissioned Officer Corps is one of the eight uniformed services of the United States, alongside the Army, Marines Corps, and Coast Guard. But many of its well-known responsibilities almost inevitably touch climate change, from the National Hurricane Center’s forecasts and warnings to drought tools for farmers to heat forecasts from the National Weather Service issued on hot summer days. Cutting climate science out of NOAA would have immediate — and in some cases, deadly — impacts on regular Americans.
And it’s likely this is only the beginning of the purge. Project 2025 calls for the complete disbanding of NOAA. Current agency employees have reportedly been told to brace for “a 50% reduction in staff” as part of Elon Musk’s government efficiency campaign. Another 1,000 terminations are expected this week, bringing the total loss at NOAA to around 20% of its staff.
Here are just a few of the ways those layoffs are already impacting climate science.
NOAA collects more than 20 terabytes of environmental data from Earth and space daily, and through its paleoclimatology arm, it has reconstructed climate data going back 100 million years. Not even Project 2025 calls for the U.S. to halt its weather measurements entirely; in fact, Congress requires the collection of a lot of standard climate data.
But the NOAA layoffs are hampering those data collection efforts, introducing gaps and inconsistencies. For example, staffing shortages have resulted in the National Weather Service suspending weather balloon launches from Kotzebue, Alaska — and elsewhere — “indefinitely.” The Trump administration is also considering shuttering a number of government offices, including several of NOAA’s weather monitoring stations. Repairs of monitors and sensors could also be delayed by staff cuts and funding shortfalls — or not done at all.
Flawed and incomplete data results in degraded and imprecise forecasts. In an era of extreme weather, the difference of a few miles or degrees can be a matter of life or death.
In the case of climate science specifically, which looks at changes over much longer timescales than meteorology, “I think you could do science with the data we have now, if we can preserve it,” Flavio Lehner, a climate scientist at Cornell University who uses NOAA data in his research, told me.
But therein lies the next problem: the threat that the government could take NOAA climate data down entirely.
Though data collection is in many cases mandated by Congress, Congress does not require that the public have access to that data. Though NOAA’s climate page is still live, the Environmental Protection Agency has already removed from its website the Keeling Curve tracker, the daily global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration measurement that Drilled notes is “one of the longest-running data projects in climate science.” Many other government websites that reference climate change have also gone dark. Solutions are complicated — “downloading” NOAA to preserve it, for example, would cost an estimated $500,000 in storage per month for an institution to host it.
“At the end of the day, if you’re a municipality or a community and you realize that some of these extreme weather events are becoming more frequent, you’ll want to adapt to it, whether you think it’s because of climate change or not,” Lehner said. “People want to have the best available science to adapt, and I think that applies to Republicans and Democrats and all kinds of communities across the country.” But if the Trump administration deletes NOAA websites, or the existing measurements it’s putting out are of poor quality, “it’s not going to be the best possible science to adapt moving forward,” Lehner added.
I wouldn’t want to be a NOAA scientist with the word “climate” attached to my title or work. The Trump administration has shown itself to be ruthless in eliminating references to words or concepts it opposes, including flagging pictures of the Enola Gay WWII airplane for removal from the Defense Department’s website in an effort to cut all references to the LGBT community from the agency.
“Climate science” is another Trump administration boogey-word, but the NOAA scientists who remain employed by the agency after the layoffs will still have to deal with the realities of a world warmed by the burning of fossil fuels. “Ultimately, what we’re dealing with are changes in our environment that impact ecosystems and humans, and whether you think these changes are driven by humans or not, it’s something that can now be seen in data,” Lehner told me. “From that perspective, I find it hard to believe that this is not something that people [in the government] are interested in researching.”
Government scientists who want to track things like drought or the rapid intensification of hurricanes going forward will likely have to do so without using the word “climate.” Lehner, for example, recalled submitting a proposal to work with the Bureau of Reclamation on the climate change effects on the Colorado River during the first Trump administration and being advised to replace words like “climate change” with more politically neutral language. His team did, and the project ultimately got funded, though Lehner couldn’t say if that was only because of the semantics. It seems likely, though, that Trump 2.0 will be even stricter in CTRL + F’ing “climate” at NOAA and elsewhere.
Climate research will continue in some form at NOAA, if only because that’s the reality of working with data of a warming planet. But scientists who don’t lose their jobs in the layoffs will likely find themselves wasting time on careful doublespeak so as not to attract unwanted attention.
Another major concern with the NOAA layoffs is the loss of expert knowledge. Many NOAA offices were already lean and understaffed, and only one or two employees likely knew how to perform certain tasks or use certain programs. If those experts subsequently lose their jobs, decades of NOAA know-how will be lost entirely.
As one example, late last year, NOAA updated its system to process grants, causing delays as its staff learned how to use the new program. Given the new round of layoffs, the odds are that some of the employees who may have finally figured out how to navigate the new procedure may have been let go. The problem gets even worse when it comes to specialized knowledge.
“Some of the expertise in processing [NOAA’s] data has been abruptly lost,” Lehner told me. “The people who are still there are scrambling to pick up and learn how to process that data so that it can then be used again.”
The worst outcome of the NOAA layoffs, though, is the extensive damage it does to the institution’s future. Some of the brightest, most enthusiastic Americans at NOAA — the probationary employees with under a year of work — are already gone. What’s more, there aren’t likely to be many new openings at the agency for the next generation of talent coming up in high school and college right now.
“We have an atmospheric science program [at Cornell University] where students have secured NOAA internships for this summer and were hoping to have productive careers, for example, at the National Weather Service, and so forth,” Lehner said. “Now, all of this is in question.”
That is hugely detrimental to NOAA’s ability to preserve the institutional knowledge of outgoing or retiring employees, or to build and advance a workforce of the future. It’s impossible to measure how many people ultimately leave the field or decide to pursue a different career because of the changes at NOAA — damage that will not be easily reversed under a new administration. “It’s going to take years for NOAA to recover the trust of the next generation of brilliant environmental scientists and policymakers,” Spinrad, the former NOAA administrator, said.
Climate change is a global problem, and NOAA has historically worked with partner agencies around the world to better understand the impacts of the warming planet. Now, however, the Trump administration has ordered NOAA employees to stop their international work, and employees who held roles that involved collaboration with partners abroad could potentially become targets of Musk’s layoffs. Firing those employees would also mean severing their relationships with scientists in international offices — offices that very well could have been in positions to help protect U.S. citizens with their research and data.
As the U.S. continues to isolate itself and the NOAA layoffs continue, there will be cascading consequences for climate science, which is inherently a collaborative field. “When the United States doesn’t lead [on climate science], two things happen,” Craig McLean, a former assistant administrator of NOAA for research, recently told the press. “Other nations relax their own spending in these areas, and the world’s level of understanding starts to decline,” and “countries who we may not have as collegial an understanding with,” such as China, could ostensibly step in and “replace the United States and its leadership.”
That leaves NOAA increasingly alone, and Americans of all political stripes will suffer as a result. “The strategy to erase data and research, to pull the rug from under activism — it’s time-tested,” Lehner, the Cornell climate scientist, said. “But that’s where it’s very infuriating because NOAA’s data is bipartisanly useful.”
Rob and Jesse talk with Heatmap senior reporter Jael Holzman.
Donald Trump’s second term has now entered its second month. His administration is doing much to slow down renewables, and everything it can to slow down offshore wind. Jael Holzman is a senior reporter at Heatmap and the author of our newsletter, “The Fight,” about local battles over renewable permitting around the country.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk to Jael about the bleak outlook for offshore wind, the use of presidential authority to impede energy development, and why solar has been spared — so far. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: It seems like there’s a mix here of, you know, some projects are now facing active legal trouble because they still had major permits to secure and the Trump administration is now denying those permits. But some projects, as you were saying, seemed safe, but now they’re not. They’re worried about getting these kind of iterative findings from the government that you need to conduct any major work in federal waters.
How much of the chill that we’re seeing is about active permitting denials, versus how much of it is developers being like, we don’t want to risk getting a permit denied, or asking for something that would be very normal to get a normal approval in the course of normal business operations, getting it rejected and then just being stuck. And so we’d rather just pause, not ask for anything for four years, and then come back and start asking again?
Jael Holzman: Offshore wind industry executives won’t say this on the record, but they have anonymously told me, in many words, that they view what is happening to them in the federal permitting system as not only a barometer check for where the energy transition is, but even broader, it is a risk, it is a challenge, it is a threat to integrity.
With respect to our federal permitting processes, generally what we’re seeing here is, I’ve had some folks in conservative energy circles compare it to the Keystone XL-ification of the energy sector, where the political party that doesn’t like a particular technology weaponizes the permitting system against one particular sector. Now, obviously, it’s politically advantageous for conservatives to describe it this way, but I actually find it to be very useful because what it means is as the politics becomes more fraught for the party in power around a technology, there’s increasingly a willingness to step beyond the realm of what the permitting system is legally supposed to do. And that’s a danger if it’s weaponized against an entire sector.
You know, Keystone pipeline, that was one project. It was exemplary — there was a lot of fervor around that one project — that is not an entire sector having the thumb put on its scale by political officials to derail it, especially one that had been a decade-plus in the works and is required for the energy grids to remain stable in various parts of our country. You know, what we’re seeing here is federal officials not even being willing to schedule meetings for permitting processes that are legally required under the law.
For example, my reporting indicated that at least one project that was prioritized under a permitting reform law to have at least an idea public and put out there for when they would expect to get all their permits — this was the Blue Point Wind offshore wind proposal off the coast of New England and New Jersey, New York. And what we’re seeing here is essentially the obscuring of even what permitting reform ostensibly was supposed to do, right?
There was this conversation in D.C. before Trump took office that maybe if you couple statutory reforms that streamline the processes that currently exist, and you put some sort of timetable into the statute, and you combine that with some gimmes to the oil and gas people, right, at least you could grease the skids enough to have everyone benefit. But my reporting on what’s happened to offshore wind has truly revealed that in many respects, “all of the above” is really a Lucy-with-the-football moment for many proponents of an energy transition.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.