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A former head of the American Meteorological Society on whether the weather agency will wither under Trump.
There is a lot of uncertainty in the federal government right now. Some functions of critical agencies like the Army Corps of Engineers are paused, or maybe they’re not. Tariffs are on and then off again. Other government agencies are shutting down most of their operations at the direction of Elon Musk’s Efficiency Department, even if such moves are technically unconstitutional.
Amid all this uncertainty stands the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which Musk’s team breached earlier this week and which Project 2025 has targeted for breakup. Per Thomas F. Gilman, who wrote the chapter on reforms for the Department of Commerce, NOAA is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry,” and its National Weather Service ought to be “fully commercialize[d]” since “Americans rely on weather forecasts and warnings provided by … private companies.”
Created during the Nixon administration, NOAA was designed to bring together disparate scientific agencies to release coordinated emergency weather alerts and responses. Today, it employs almost 7,000 scientists and engineers, although Musk’s team reportedly wants to cut that by 50%. In addition to hosting a trove of valuable climate science, NOAA remains responsible for issuing emergency alerts through its divisions such as the NWS and the National Hurricane Center. If you’re among the 99% of the American population who experienced some form of extreme weather last summer, you’ve likely interacted with NOAA in some small way.
To make sense of the plan to break up NOAA and what it would mean to “privatize” weather forecasting in the United States, I spoke to Keith Seitter, the former executive director of the American Meteorological Society and a current professor at the College of the Holy Cross. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
What is the argument for privatizing weather reporting? Why do folks at places like the Heritage Foundation think this is a good idea?
That’s a really good question — because it’s not. Weather services are provided to the nation through a wonderful cooperative process in which the government and the private sector work collaboratively to provide the best possible services to the people. It is all well thought out, with the National Weather Service and other parts of the government getting observations, running the numerical models, and providing warning services. Then the private sector takes the output from those government projects or processes and creates tailored, value-added forecasts and information that can be provided to commercial organizations in different sectors of the economy.
All of this is done with each component knowing what the other is doing, supporting the other, and tailoring their processes to the maximum efficiency. That’s one of the reasons that the U.S. has the best provision of weather services to the nation — and to the nation’s economy — of any country.
So the National Weather Service and NOAA are the ones with the actual monitors out there gathering the data, and then they give that information to the people who, let’s say, make the apps on your phone. What would it mean to “privatize” weather forecasting, then? What would that entail?
It’s not exactly clear what it would look like. Project 2025 suggests that the government should keep taking all the observations and essentially do nothing else. But the government is also quality-controlling its observations and assimilating them into numerical models. This process requires vast resources and must be completed before you can make the best use of that data.
You’d have to do everything the National Weather Service is doing now before the private sector could take over and tailor it for others. It’s unclear how you could move that line between what the government does and what the private sector does any further toward the private sector without impeding its ability to actually do a good job.
What would privatizing weather mean on the business side? What challenges would the private sector face in trying to make up the gap left by NOAA?
It would be very hard for them to make up that gap. There may be a few large private sector companies like The Weather Company, which has a lot of resources, and maybe AccuWeather — they could probably invest more in computer resources and do some of that stuff themselves, but it’s not an efficient way to get it done. I think the people at those companies would say that’s not the direction they want to move in. [Privatizing weather forecasting is] a solution being proposed where there isn’t a problem because almost anything you do to change the current balance will make weather forecasting less efficient and provide less service to the country.
So it’s not like private weather companies are agitating for this change?
Oh, gosh, no. They’re looking to get even more of that data and content from the government. Part of what happens is the observations and the numerical models — all those things that the government does — are provided to the country for free. The more of that information that the private sector can pull into their systems at no cost, the more products they can create and disseminate in ways that make them more money than if they had to do any of that work themselves. That cost would now fall on them. They clearly don’t want to be in a position where they have to do a lot of the [collection and data processing] that is currently being given to them for free.
What would this mean for users? Is there a risk that people will no longer receive extreme weather warnings?
The warnings are a big issue. Right now, the government is responsible for protecting life and property. The warnings from the National Weather Service are only possible because it’s doing all of the other processes of gathering the data and processing it and running forecasts.
You don’t want 10 different private companies trying to offer warnings to people and deciding who’s going to evacuate and who isn’t — that puts those companies in a position of liability if they make the decision incorrectly. It is a fundamental government responsibility to protect the people, so warnings are intrinsically something that has to come from the government. There’s no other way to get that done without incurring a lot of legal liability.
What frightens you the most about the potential for privatization of weather forecasting in the U.S.?
The loss of the balance that we have now. Almost any aspect that you mess with will make things work less well. There is also the potential for serious problems with the warnings many people depend on in life-or-death situations. We need to ensure that those are preserved and that we are doing the things that protect people and businesses.
What may seem like a way to save a few bucks in the federal government’s budget could lead to the loss of life, property, and business capacity. These could have very large downstream impacts for a relatively small amount of financial savings in the budget.
Is there anything keeping you optimistic?
The Secretary of Commerce that was approved, Howard Lutnick, said in the Senate hearings that he has no intention of breaking up NOAA, and that he’s not going to implement some of those ideas that were part of the Project 2025 handbook. I’m optimistic that as long as he lives up to what he said in those hearings, that’s a better place for us to be.
The other thing is, the nominee for the new NOAA administrator, Neil Jacobs, was the acting administrator in the first Trump administration, and he’s a very good person. He’s very knowledgeable and understands these things well; he’s a well-qualified individual to be put in charge of NOAA. If the Senate confirms him, I feel that he understands these issues and will do everything he can to ensure that NOAA lives up to its mission requirements and fulfills its goals of protecting life and property for the country.
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On the environmental reviews, Microsoft’s emissions, and solar on farmland
Current conditions: Enormous wildfires in Manitoba, Canada, will send smoke into the Midwestern U.S. and Great Plains this weekend • Northwest England is officially experiencing a drought after receiving its third lowest rainfall since 1871 • Thunderstorms are brewing in Washington, D.C., where the Federal Court of Appeals paused an earlier ruling throwing out much of Trump’s tariff agenda.
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that courts should show more deference to agencies when hearing lawsuits over environmental reviews.
The case concerned a proposed 88-mile train line in Utah that would connect its Uinta Basin (and its oil resources) with the national rail network. Environmental groups and local governments claimed that the environmental impact statement submitted by the federal Surface Transportation Board did not pay enough attention to the effects of increased oil drilling and refining that the rail line could induce. The D.C. Circuit agreed, vacating the EIS; the Supreme Court did not, overturning the D.C. Circuit in an 8-0 decision.
The National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, requires the federal government to study the environmental impact of its actions. The D.C. Circuit “failed to afford the Board the substantial judicial deference required in NEPA cases and incorrectly interpreted NEPA to require the Board to consider the environmental effects of upstream and downstream projects that are separate in time or place,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court.
The court’s decision could sharply limit the ability of the judicial branch to question environmental reviews by agencies under NEPA, and could pave the way for more certain and faster approvals for infrastructure projects.
At least, that’s what Kavanaugh hopes. The current NEPA process, he writes, foists “delay upon delay” on developers and agencies, so “fewer projects make it to the finish line. Indeed, fewer projects make it to the starting line.”
Map of the approved railway route.Source: Uinta Basin Railway Final Environmental Impact Statement
The Department of Agriculture is planning to retool a popular financing program, Rural Energy for America, to discourage solar development on agricultural land, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman exclusively reported.
“Farmland should be for agricultural production, not solar production,” a USDA spokesperson told Heatmap. The comments echoed a USDA report released last week criticizing the use of solar on agricultural land. The report said that the USDA will “disincentivize the use of federal funding at USDA for solar panels to be installed on productive farmland through prioritization points and regulatory action.” The USDA will also “call on state and local governments to work alongside USDA on local solutions.”
The daughter of a woman who died during the Pacific Northwest “Heat Dome” in 2021 sued seven oil and companies for wrongful death in Washington state court, The New York Times reported Thursday.
“The suit alleges that they failed to warn the public of the dangers of the planet-warming emissions produced by their products and that they funded decades-long campaigns to obscure the scientific consensus on global warming,” according to Times reporter David Gelles.
Several cities and states have brought suits making similar claims that oil and gas companies misled the public about the threat of climate change. Earlier this week, a German court threw out a suit from a Peruvian farmer against a German utility, which claimed that the utility’s commissions helped put his town at risk from glacial flooding.
The seven companies named in the lawsuit are Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, and Olympic Pipeline Company, a subsidiary managed by BP. None of them commented on the suit.
Tech giant Microsoft disclosed in its annual sustainability report that its carbon emissions have grown by 23.4% since 2020, even as the company has a goal to become “carbon negative” by 2030. The upside to the figures is that the growth in emissions was due to a much larger increase in energy use and business activity, not from using dirtier energy. In that same time period, Microsoft’s revenue has grown 71%, and its energy use has grown 168%.
“It has become clear that our journey towards being carbon negative is a marathon,” the report read. The company said it had contracted 34 gigawatts of non-emitting power generation and had agreements to procure 30 million metric tons of carbon removal.
The company has set out to reduce its indirect Scope 3 emissions “by more than half” by 2030 from the 11.5 million metric tons it reported in 2020, as its Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions fall to close to zero. It will become “carbon negative,” it hopes, by purchasing carbon removal.
Microsoft attempts to reduce emissions in its supply chain by procuring low- or no-carbon fuels and construction materials. Last week the tech giant signed a purchasing agreement with Sublime Systems for 600,000 tons of low-carbon cement.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced it had approved a 77-megawatt small modular reactor design. This is the second SMR design approved by the NRC, following approval of a smaller design in 2020. Both are products of the SMR company NuScale, and neither has yet been deployed. A project to build the earlier design in Idaho was abandoned in 2023.
The NRC review was set to be completed in July of this year. Coming in ahead of scheduled demonstrates “the agency’s commitment to safely and efficiently enable new, advanced reactor technology,” the Commission said in a press release.
Congress and the Biden and Trump administrations have pushed the NRC to move faster and to encourage the development of small modular reactors. No SMR has been built in the United States, nor is there any current plan to do so that has been publicly disclosed. NuScale’s chief executive told Bloomberg that he hopes to have a deal signed by the end of the year and an operational plant by the end of the decade.
Tesla veteran Drew Baglino’s Heron Power raised a $38 million round of Series A funding for a new product designed to replace “legacy transformers and power converters by directly connecting rapidly growing megawatt-scale solar, batteries, and AI data centers to medium voltage transmission,” Baglino wrote on X.
A conversation with Mike Hall of Anza.
This week’s conversation is with Mike Hall, CEO of the solar and battery storage data company Anza. I rang him because, in my book, the more insights into the ways renewables companies are responding to the war on the Inflation Reduction Act, the better.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s jump in!
How much do we know about developers’ reactions to the anti-IRA bill that was passed out of the House last week?
So it’s only been a few days. What I can tell you is there’s a lot of surprise about what came out of the House. Industries mobilized in trying to improve the bill from here and I think a lot of the industry is hopeful because, for many reasons, the bill doesn’t seem to make sense for the country. Not just the renewable energy industry. There’s hope that the voices in Congress — House members and senators — who already understand the impact of this on the economy will in the coming weeks understand how bad this is.
I spoke to a tax attorney last week that her clients had been preparing for a worst case scenario like this and preparing contingency plans of some kind. Have you seen anything so far to indicate people have been preparing for a worst case scenario?
Yeah. There’s a subset of the market that has prepared and already executed plans.
In Q4 [of 2024] and Q1 [of this year] with a number of companies to procure material from projects in order to safe harbor those projects. What that means is, typically if you commence construction by a certain date, the date on which you commence construction is the date you lock in tax credit eligibility, and we worked with companies to help them meet that criteria. It hedged them on a number of fronts. I don’t think most of them thought we’d get what came out of the House but there were a lot of concerns about stepdowns for the credit.
After Trump was elected, there were also companies who wanted to hedge against tariffs so they bought equipment ahead of that, too. We were helping companies do deals the night before Liberation Day. There was a lot of activity.
We saw less after April 2nd because the trade landscape has been changing so quickly that it’s been hard for people to act but now we’re seeing people act again to try and hit that commencement milestone.
It’s not lost on me that there’s an irony here – the attempts to erode these credits might lead to a rush of projects moving faster, actually. Is that your sense?
There’s a slug of projects that would get accelerated and in fact just having this bill come out of the House is already going to accelerate a number of projects. But there’s limits to what you can do there. The bill also has a placed-in-service criteria and really problematic language with regard to the “foreign entity of concern” provisions.
Are you seeing any increase in opposition against solar projects? And is that the biggest hurdle you see to meeting that “placed-in-service” requirement?
What I have here is qualitative, not quantitative, but I was in the development business for 20 years, and what I have seen qualitatively is that it is increasingly harder to develop projects. Local opposition is one of the headwinds. Interconnection is another really big one and that’s the biggest concern I have with regards to the “placed-in-service” requirement. Most of these large projects, even if you overcome the NIMBY issues, and you get your permitting, and you do everything else you need to do, you get your permits and construction… In the end if you’re talking about projects at scale, there is a requirement that utilities do work. And there’s no requirement that utilities do that work on time [to meet that deadline]. This is a risk they need to manage.
And more of the week’s top news in renewable energy conflicts.
1. Columbia County, New York – A Hecate Energy solar project in upstate New York blessed by Governor Kathy Hochul is now getting local blowback.
2. Sussex County, Delaware – The battle between a Bethany Beach landowner and a major offshore wind project came to a head earlier this week after Delaware regulators decided to comply with a massive government records request.
3. Fayette County, Pennsylvania – A Bollinger Solar project in rural Pennsylvania that was approved last year now faces fresh local opposition.
4. Cleveland County, North Carolina – Brookcliff Solar has settled with a county that was legally challenging the developer over the validity of its permits, reaching what by all appearances is an amicable resolution.
5. Adams County, Illinois – The solar project in Quincy, Illinois, we told you about last week has been rejected by the city’s planning commission.
6. Pierce County, Wisconsin – AES’ Isabelle Creek solar project is facing new issues as the developer seeks to actually talk more to residents on the ground.
7. Austin County, Texas – We have a couple of fresh battery storage wars to report this week, including a danger alert in this rural Texas county west of Houston.
8. Esmeralda County, Nevada – The Trump administration this week approved the final proposed plan for NV Energy’s Greenlink North, a massive transmission line that will help the state expand its renewable energy capacity.
9. Merced County, California – The Moss Landing battery fire is having aftershocks in Merced County as residents seek to undo progress made on Longroad’s Zeta battery project south of Los Banos.