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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 a late-night House vote, Tesla’s slump, and carbon credits
Current conditions: Tropical storm Chantal has a 40% chance of developing this weekend and may threaten Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas • French far-right leader Marine Le Pen is campaigning on a “grand plan for air conditioning” amid the ongoing record-breaking heatwave in Europe • Great fireworks-watching weather is in store tomorrow for much of the East and West Coasts.
The House moved closer to a final vote on President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after passing a key procedural vote around 3 a.m. ET on Thursday morning. “We have the votes,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters after the rule vote, adding, “We’re still going to meet” Trump’s self-imposed July 4 deadline to pass the megabill. A floor vote on the legislation is expected as soon as Thursday morning.
GOP leadership had worked through the evening to convince holdouts, with my colleagues Katie Brigham and Jael Holzman reporting last night that House Freedom Caucus member Ralph Norman of North Carolina said he planned to advance the legislation after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits, particularly for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version phases out more slowly than House Republicans wanted. “It’s not entirely clear what the president could do to unilaterally ‘deal with’ tax credits already codified into law,” Brigham and Holzman write, although another Republican holdout, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, made similar allusions to reporters on Wednesday.
Tesla delivered just 384,122 cars in the second quarter of 2025, a 13.5% slump from the 444,000 delivered in the same quarter of 2024, marking the worst quarterly decline in the company’s history, Barron’s reports. The slump follows a similarly disappointing Q1, down 13% year-over-year, after the company’s sales had “flatlined for the first time in over a decade” in 2024, InsideEVs adds.
Despite the drop, Tesla stock rose 5% on Wednesday, with Wedbush analyst Dan Ives calling the Q2 results better than some had expected. “Fireworks came early for Tesla,” he wrote, although Barron’s notes that “estimates for the second quarter of 2025 started at about 500,000 vehicles. They started to drop precipitously after first-quarter deliveries fell 13% year over year, missing Wall Street estimates by some 40,000 vehicles.”
The European Commission proposed its 2040 climate target on Wednesday, which, for the first time, would allow some countries to use carbon credits to meet their emissions goals. EU Commissioner for Climate, Net Zero, and Clean Growth Wopke Hoekstra defended the decision during an appearance on Euronews on Wednesday, saying the plan — which allows developing nations to meet a limited portion of their emissions goals with the credits — was a chance to “build bridges” with countries in Africa and Latin America. “The planet doesn’t care about where we take emissions out of the air,” he separately told The Guardian. “You need to take action everywhere.” Green groups, which are critical of the use of carbon credits, slammed the proposal, which “if agreed [to] by member states and passed by the EU parliament … is then supposed to be translated into an international target,” The Guardian writes.
Around half of oil executives say they expect to drill fewer wells in 2025 than they’d planned for at the start of the year, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas survey. Of the respondents at firms producing more than 10,000 barrels a day, 42% said they expected a “significant decrease in the number of wells drilled,” Bloomberg adds. The survey further indicates that Republican policy has been at odds with President Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” rhetoric, as tariffs have increased the cost of completing a new well by more than 4%. “It’s hard to imagine how much worse policies and D.C. rhetoric could have been for U.S. E&P companies,” one anonymous executive said in the report. “We were promised by the administration a better environment for producers, but were delivered a world that has benefited OPEC to the detriment of our domestic industry.”
Fine-particulate air pollution is strongly associated with lung cancer-causing DNA mutations that are more traditionally linked to smoking tobacco, a new study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and the National Cancer Institute has found. The researchers looked at the genetic code of 871 non-smokers’ lung tumors in 28 regions across Europe, Africa, and Asia and found that higher levels of local air pollution correlated with more cancer-driving mutations in the respective tumors.
Surprisingly, the researchers did not find a similar genetic correlation among non-smokers exposed to secondhand smoke. George Thurston, a professor of medicine and population health at New York University, told Inside Climate News that a potential reason for this result is that fine-particulate air pollution — which is emitted by cars, industrial activities, and wildfires — is more widespread than exposure to secondhand smoke. “We are engulfed in fossil-fuel-burning pollution every single day of our lives, all day long, night and day,” he said, adding, “I feel like I’m in the Matrix, and I’m the only one that took the red pill. I know what’s going on, and everybody else is walking around thinking, ‘This stuff isn’t bad for your health.’” Today, non-smokers account for up to 25% of lung cancer cases globally, with the worst air quality pollution in the United States primarily concentrated in the Southwest.
EPA
National TV news networks aired a combined 4 hours and 20 minutes of coverage about the record-breaking late-June temperatures in the Midwest and East Coast — but only 4% of those segments mentioned the heat dome’s connection to climate change, a new report by Media Matters found.
“We had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them.”
A member of the House Freedom Caucus said Wednesday that he voted to advance President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits – raising the specter that Trump could try to go further than the megabill to stop usage of the credits.
Representative Ralph Norman, a Republican of North Carolina, said that while IRA tax credits were once a sticking point for him, after meeting with Trump “we had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them in his own way,” he told Eric Garcia, the Washington bureau chief of The Independent. Norman specifically cited tax credits for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version would phase out more slowly than House Republicans had wanted.
It’s not entirely clear what the president could do to unilaterally “deal with” tax credits already codified into law. Norman declined to answer direct questions from reporters about whether GOP holdouts like himself were seeking an executive order on the matter. But another Republican holdout on the bill, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, told reporters Wednesday that his vote was also conditional on blocking IRA “subsidies.”
“If the subsidies will flow, we’re not gonna be able to get there. If the subsidies are not gonna flow, then there might be a path," he said, according to Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News.
As of publication, Roy has still not voted on the rule that would allow the bill to proceed to the floor — one of only eight Republicans yet to formally weigh in. House Speaker Mike Johnson says he’ll, “keep the vote open for as long as it takes,” as President Trump aims to sign the giant tax package by the July 4th holiday. Norman voted to let the bill proceed to debate, and will reportedly now vote yes on it too.
Earlier Wednesday, Norman said he was “getting a handle on” whether his various misgivings could be handled by Trump via executive orders or through promises of future legislation. According to CNN, the congressman later said, “We got clarification on what’s going to be enforced. We got clarification on how the IRAs were going to be dealt with. We got clarification on the tax cuts — and still we’ll be meeting tomorrow on the specifics of it.”
Neither Norman nor Roy’s press offices responded to a request for comment.
The foreign entities of concern rules in the One Big Beautiful Bill would place gigantic new burdens on developers.
Trump campaigned on cutting red tape for energy development. At the start of his second term, he signed an executive order titled, “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation,” promising to kill 10 regulations for each new one he enacted.
The order deems federal regulations an “ever-expanding morass” that “imposes massive costs on the lives of millions of Americans, creates a substantial restraint on our economic growth and ability to build and innovate, and hampers our global competitiveness.” It goes on to say that these regulations “are often difficult for the average person or business to understand,” that they are so complicated that they ultimately increase the cost of compliance, as well as the risks of non-compliance.
Reading this now, the passage echoes the comments I’ve heard from industry groups and tax law experts describing the incredibly complex foreign entities of concern rules that Congress — with the full-throated backing of the Trump administration — is about to impose on clean energy projects and manufacturers. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, wind and solar, as well as utility-scale energy storage, geothermal, nuclear, and all kinds of manufacturing projects will have to abide by restrictions on their Chinese material inputs and contractual or financial ties with Chinese entities in order to qualify for tax credits.
“Foreign entity of concern” is a U.S. government term referring to entities that are “owned by, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of” any of four countries — Russia, Iran, North Korea, and most importantly for clean energy technology, China.
Trump’s tax bill requires companies to meet increasingly strict limits on the amount of material from China they use in their projects and products. A battery factory starting production next year, for example, would have to ensure that 60% of the value of the materials that make up its products have no connection to China. By 2030, the threshold would rise to 85%. The bill lays out similar benchmarks and timelines for clean electricity projects, as well as other kinds of manufacturing.
But how companies should calculate these percentages is not self-evident. The bill also forbids companies from collecting the tax credits if they have business relationships with “specified foreign entities” or “foreign-influenced entities,” terms with complicated definitions that will likely require guidance from the Treasury for companies to be sure they pass the test.
Regulatory uncertainty could stifle development until further guidance is released, but how long that takes will depend on if and when the Trump administration prioritizes getting it done. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains a lot of other new tax-related provisions that were central to the Trump campaign, including a tax exemption for tips, which are likely much higher on the department’s to-do list.
Tax credit implementation was a top priority for the Biden administration, and even with much higher staffing levels than the department currently has, it took the Treasury 18 months to publish initial guidance on foreign entities of concern rules for the Inflation Reduction Act’s electric vehicle tax credit. “These things are so unbelievably complicated,” Rachel McCleery, a former senior advisor at the Treasury under Biden, told me.
McCleery questioned whether larger, publicly-owned companies would be able to proceed with major investments in things like battery manufacturing plants until that guidance is out. She gave the example of a company planning to pump out 100,000 batteries per year and claim the per-kilowatt-hour advanced manufacturing tax credit. “That’s going to look like a pretty big number in claims, so you have to be able to confidently and assuredly tell your shareholder, Yep, we’re good, we qualify, and that requires a certification” by a tax counsel, she said. To McCleery, there’s an open question as to whether any tax counsel “would even provide a tax opinion for publicly-traded companies to claim credits of this size without guidance.”
John Cornwell, the director of policy at the Good Energy Collective, which conducts research and advocacy for nuclear power, echoed McCleery’s concerns. “Without very clear guidelines from the Treasury and IRS, until those guidelines are in place, that is going to restrict financing and investment,” Cornwell told me.
Understanding what the law requires will be the first challenge. But following it will involve tracking down supply chain data that may not exist, finding alternative suppliers that may not be able to fill the demand, and establishing extensive documentation of the origins of components sourced through webs of suppliers, sub-suppliers, and materials processors.
The Good Energy Collective put out an issue brief this week describing the myriad hurdles nuclear developers will face in trying to adhere to the tax credit rules. Nuclear plants contain thousands of components, and documenting the origin of everything from “steam generators to smaller items like specialized fasteners, gaskets, and electronic components will introduce substantial and costly administrative burdens,” it says. Additionally the critical minerals used in nuclear projects “often pass through multiple processing stages across different countries before final assembly,” and there are no established industry standards for supply chain documentation.
Beyond the documentation headache, even just finding the materials could be an issue. China dominates the market for specialized nuclear-grade materials manufacturing and precision component fabrication, the report says, and alternative suppliers are likely to charge premiums. Establishing new supply chains will take years, but Trump’s bill will begin enforcing the sourcing rules in 2026. The rules will prove even more difficult for companies trying to build first-of-a-kind advanced nuclear projects, as those rely on more highly specialized supply chains dominated by China.
These challenges may be surmountable, but that will depend, again, on what the Treasury decides, and when. The Department’s guidance could limit the types of components companies have to account for and simplify the documentation process, or it could not. But while companies wait for certainty, they may also be racking up interest. “The longer there are delays, that can have a substantial risk of project success,” Cornwell said.
And companies don’t have forever. Each of the credits comes with a phase-out schedule. Wind manufacturers can only claim the credits until 2028. Other manufacturers have until 2030. Credits for clean power projects will start to phase down in 2034. “Given the fact that a lot of these credits start lapsing in the next few years, there’s a very good chance that, because guidance has not yet come out, you’re actually looking at a much smaller time frame than than what is listed in the bill,” Skip Estes, the government affairs director for Securing America’s Energy Future, or SAFE, told me.
Another issue SAFE has raised is that the way these rules are set up, the foreign sourcing requirements will get more expensive and difficult to comply with as the value of the tax credits goes down. “Our concern is that that’s going to encourage companies to forego the credit altogether and just continue buying from the lowest common denominator, which is typically a Chinese state-owned or -influenced monopoly,” Estes said.
McCleery had another prediction — the regulations will be so burdensome that companies will simply set up shop elsewhere. “I think every industry will certainly be rethinking their future U.S. investments, right? They’ll go overseas, they’ll go to Canada, which dumped a ton of carrots and sticks into industry after we passed the IRA,” she said.
“The irony is that Republicans have historically been the party of deregulation, creating business friendly environments. This is completely opposite, right?”