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    Did National Weather Service cuts lead to the Texas flood disaster? We don’t know | Rebecca Solnit

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    Why exactly so many people drowned in the terrible Independence Day floods that swept through Texas’s Hill Country will probably have multiple explanations that take a while to obtain. But it’s 2025, and people want answers immediately, and lots of people seized on stories blaming the National Weather Service (NWS).There were two opposing reasons to blame this vital government service. For local and state authorities, blaming a branch of the federal government was a way of avoiding culpability themselves. And for a whole lot of people who deplore the Trump/Doge cuts to federal services, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service, the idea that the NWS failed served to underscore how destructive those cuts are.Many of them found confirmation in a New York Times story that ran with the sub-headline: “Some experts say staff shortages might have complicated forecasters’ ability to coordinate responses with local emergency management officials.” Might have is not did. Complicated is not failed. It’s a speculative piece easily mistaken for a report, and its opening sentence is: “Crucial positions at the local offices of the National Weather Service were unfilled as severe rainfall inundated parts of Central Texas on Friday morning, prompting some experts to question whether staffing shortages made it harder for the forecasting agency to coordinate with local emergency managers as floodwaters rose.”A casual reader could come away thinking that staffing shortages had had consequences. But if you give the airily innuendo-packed sentence more attention, you might want to ask who exactly the anonymous experts were and whether there’s an answer to their questions. Did it actually make it harder, and did they actually manage to do this thing even though it was harder, or not? Did they coordinate with local emergency managers?The piece continues: “The staffing shortages suggested a separate problem, those former officials said,” and “suggested” sounds like we’re getting an interpretation of what these anonymous sources think might have happened or been likely to happen, rather than what actually did. Suggestions are not facts. Likelihoods are not actualities. Eventually we get to a named source: “A spokeswoman for the National Weather Service, Erica Grow Cei, did not answer questions from The New York Times about the Texas vacancies, including how long those positions had been open and whether those vacancies had contributed to the damage caused by the flooding.”In other words, there’s no answer to the suggestions and questions and intimations. Nevertheless, a lot of readers gathered the impression that this was not speculation aired by unnamed experts but confirmation that the NWS had failed. One prominent public figure with three quarters of a million BlueSky followers shared the New York Times piece with this note: “The United States government is no longer able to protect us from real hazards, such as flash floods, because it’s shifting funds to fake hazards, such as a non-existent immigrant crime wave.”If you read down a couple of dozen paragraphs in this New York Times piece, you get to the former NWS director of Congressional Affairs saying “that the local Weather Service offices appeared to have sent out the correct warnings. He said the challenge was getting people to receive those warnings, and then take action.” Nevertheless, the idea the NWS failed became so widespread that Wired magazine published a report specifically to counter it: “Some local and state officials have said that insufficient forecasts from the National Weather Service caught the region off guard. That claim has been amplified by pundits across social media, who say that cuts to the NWS and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, its parent organization, inevitably led to the failure in Texas.”They link to the pundit with almost a million followers, who had posted on Twitter: “Now TX officials are blaming a faulty forecast by NWS for the deadly impact of a storm.” Those officials are, but why would we believe them? Wired continues: “But meteorologists who spoke to Wired say that the NWS accurately predicted the risk of flooding in Texas and could not have foreseen the extreme severity of the storm.” With that, we’re onto another piece of the picture: the difference between accurately predicting a risk and knowing exactly how severe it will be.Climate change, which some reports mentioned and others did not, is both a contributing factor for specific weather disasters and a reason why the future will not necessarily look like the past. For both fires and floods, the old rules about how fast they’ll move and how big they’ll get have expired. Hotter air holds more moisture, and that can and does lead to more torrential downpours and worse flooding. On the other hand, as local newspaper the Kerrville Daily Times reported, Kerr county has a history of extremely heavy rainfall leading to rapid river rise and devastating floods.The Washington Post had a better assessment of what went right and what went wrong: “But even as weather forecasts began to hint at the potential for heavy rain on Thursday, the response exposed a disconnect: few, including local authorities, prepared for anything but their normal Fourth of July. When the precipitation intensified in the early morning hours Friday, many people failed to receive or respond to flood warnings at riverside campsites and cabins that were known to be in the floodplain.” The county, in this report, did not send its first cell-phone alert until Sunday, while “most cellphone alerts were coming from the National Weather Service’s Austin/San Antonio station. But some alerts about life-threatening flooding didn’t come until the predawn hours, and to areas where cellular reception may have been spotty.”It seems like the National Weather Service did its duty despite the cuts, but more are coming. Fossil Free Memo reports: “Just days before the flood, Texas Senator Ted Cruz helped pass the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, a sweeping fossil fuel giveaway that also slashed $200 million from Noaa’s weather forecasting and public alert programs. The money was meant to improve early warnings for exactly the kind of fast-moving, deadly flooding that just hit his own state. The cuts weren’t in the House version. Cruz added them in the Senate, behind closed doors, as chair of the committee that oversees Noaa.” The impact of cuts to vital services is going to degrade everyday life and add to the dangers we face, and as far as politicians like Ted Cruz are concerned, that’s the plan. It will be important to connect cause and effect, when there is a connection.The desire to have an explanation, and the desire for that explanation to be tidy and aligned with one’s politics, easily becomes a willingness to accept what fits. But knowing we don’t know, knowing the answers are not yet in, or there are multiple causes, being careful even with the sources that tell us what we want to hear: all this equipment to survive the information onslaughts of this moment. We all need to be careful about how we get information and reach conclusions – both the practical information about climate catastrophes and weather disasters and the journalism that reports on it. Both the weather and the news require vigilance.

    Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Deadly floods could be new normal as Trump guts federal agencies, experts warn

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      The deadly Texas floods could signal a new norm in the US, as Donald Trump and his allies dismantle crucial federal agencies that help states prepare and respond to extreme weather and other hazards, experts warn.More than 100 are dead and dozens more remain missing after flash floods in the parched area known as Texas Hill Country swept away entire holiday camps and homes on Friday night – in what appears to have been another unremarkable storm that stalled before dumping huge quantities of rain over a short period of time, a phenomena that has becoming increasingly common as the planet warms.It remains unclear why the early warning system failed to result in the timely evacuation of Camp Mystic, where 700 girls were camped on a known flood plain on the Guadalupe River, but there is mounting concern that the chaos and cuts instigated by Trump and his billionaire donor Elon Musk at the National Weather Service (NWS) and Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) may have contributed to the death toll.“This is the exact kind of storm that meteorologists, climate scientists, emergency management experts have been talking about and warning about for decades at this point, and there’s absolutely no reason that this won’t happen in other parts of the country. This is what happens when you let climate change run unabated and break apart the emergency management system – without investing in that system at the local and state level,” said Samantha Montano, professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy.“It takes a lot of money, expertise and time to eliminate risk and make sure that agencies are prepared to respond when a flood situation like in Texas happens. And if you eliminate those preparedness efforts, if you fire the people who do that work, then the response will not be effective.”Fema was created in 1979 by Jimmy Carter – precisely because states were struggling to cope with major disasters – and works closely with state and local government agencies to provide resources, coordination, technical expertise, leadership and communication with the public when they cannot cope alone.Upon returning to the White House, Trump immediately began threatening to disband Fema, belittling the agency amid its ongoing efforts to help communities devastated by the Los Angeles wildfires and Hurricane Helene, the category 4 storm that left at least 230 people dead in southern Appalachia.The threats were followed by a pledge to dismantle Fema at the end of the 2025 hurricane season, without offering any clear plan about what would come next. The cuts are part of the administration’s unsubstantiated claims that the states and private enterprises are capable and best positioned to provide most federal services including weather forecasting, scientific research and emergency management.Reports suggest that more than a third of Fema’s permanent full-time workforce has been fired or accepted buyouts, including some of its most experienced and knowledgeable leaders who coordinate disaster responses – which can involve multiple federal agencies for months or years.Emergency management and the weather service work hand in hand. At the NWS, more than 600 people have already been laid off or taken early retirement, leading to offices across storm and flood-prone areas of the US to be short of meteorologists and round-the-clock staffing cover. The agency has also had to scale back routine weather monitoring.Two senior meteorologists at the San Antonio NWS office, which is responsible for forecasting in the Hill Country region, were among the casualties of Musk’s buyouts and layoffs. This included the warning coordination meteorologist, who is usually responsible for liaising with local emergency managers to help translate NWS forecasts into likely impacts that inform local actions such as warnings and evacuation orders.But Trump said it was unlikely the staff cuts to the NWS will be reversed, even in the wake of the Texas floods. “I would think not,” the president said on Sunday about a possible reversal. “This was a thing that happened in seconds. Nobody expected it. Nobody saw it. Very talented people are there, they didn’t see it.”Accuweather, the popular commercial weather forecasting services, relies on the NWS for much of its foundational meteorological data and forecasts. Fema often steps in to cover emergency accommodation and reconstruction costs for Americans without adequate insurance and/or the means to rebuild.Reports suggest NWS weather balloons, which assess storm risk by measuring wind speed, humidity, temperature and other conditions that satellites may not detect, have been canceled in recent weeks from Nebraska to Florida due to staff shortages. At the busiest time for storm predictions, deadly heatwaves and wildfires, weather service staffing is down by more than 10% and, for the first time in almost half a century, some forecasting offices no longer have 24/7 cover.In May, the NWS office in eastern Kentucky scrambled to cover the overnight forecast as severe storms moved through the region, triggering multiple tornadoes that eventually killed 28 people.Despite such threats, the Republican budget bill signed by Trump last week cuts $150m in funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) to help improve future weather forecasts and also shrinks the amount of money to the National Science Foundation, the premier federal agency supporting basic science and engineering research, by 56% next year.The 2026 budget makes significant cuts to Noaa including terminating the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which in essence could be the end of the efforts to improve warnings for events like the Texas floods, warned Alan Gerard, former head of the Warning Research and Development Division of the Noaa National Severe Storms Laboratory, speaking on DemocracyNow! on Monday.NSF funded research has played a pivotal role in developing early warning systems for all sorts of hazards, but more work is urgently needed to improve local accuracy and community acceptability amid the growing threats due to global heating. There is no other funding source capable of filling this gap.“The Hill Country is a desert area with big rivers which have had historic major floods and that are prone to flash flooding – but like most of rural America do not have gauge systems. Without gauges, the warnings don’t come early enough, and with flash floods every 15 minutes can save lives. This is something we can do better,” said Ryan Thigpen, a flood scientist trying to improve early warning systems in Appalachia .Texas senator Ted Cruz has called for “a better system of warnings to get kids out of harm’s way” in the wake of the disaster, even though he inserted language into the “big beautiful” bill to slash Noaa’s weather forecasting upgrades. Local officials, too, have sought to distract attention away from Trump’s cuts – and their support for his plans – but the lack of leadership at Fema is impossible to ignore especially as Trump plans to visit the area with the secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem, on Friday.David Richardson, the acting administrator of Fema, has not traveled to Texas. Richardson, a former US marine with no emergency management experience prior to his appointment in May, is most notable for his warning to agency staff to not oppose Trump’s plan for Fema or “I will run right over you.”“A lot of key people at Fema who worked there for years, decades in many cases, and hold the expertise that is needed to be able to actually move the resources of the agency, are gone. Fema is so depleted, it’s unclear if they are even capable of launching a huge response right now,” said Montano, author of Disasterology: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the Climate Crisis.“It’s not the same level as during [hurricane] Helene but there’s already a lot of inaccurate information out there, and Fema is no longer a trusted voice – we haven’t heard from the administrator, only secretary of homeland security Kristi Noem, which is very unusual. We’re almost at the point where we can say no one’s home at Fema… there is no trusted voice,” Montano added. The turmoil at the federal agencies tasked with predicting and responding to disaster comes as the threat from extreme weather grows due to the human-caused climate crisis. The Texas floods occurred in a warmer, more moisture-laden atmosphere than in the past, with one analysis finding that climate change has made conditions 7% wetter and 1.5C hotter than they would’ve been otherwise.“We have added a lot of carbon to the atmosphere, and that extra carbon traps energy in the climate system,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University. “Because of this extra energy, every weather event we see now carries some influence from climate change. The only question is how big that influence is.”Meanwhile on Monday the White House described the deadly Texas floods as “an act of God”. More

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      Floods are swallowing their village. Trump’s EPA cut a major lifeline for them and others

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      This story was originally published by FloodlightAcre by acre, the village of Kipnuk is falling into the river.The small Alaska tribal village sits on permafrost, which is thawing fast as global temperatures rise. That’s left the banks of the Kugkaktlik River unstable – and more likely to collapse when floods hit, as they often do. Buildings, boardwalks, wind turbines and other critical infrastructure are at risk, according to Rayna Paul, the village’s environmental director.So when the village learned late last year that it had been awarded a $20m federal grant to protect the riverbank, tribal members breathed a sigh of relief.But that relief was short-lived. On 2 May, the US Environmental Protection Agency canceled the grant. Without that help, Paul says, residents may be forced to relocate their village.“In the future, so much land will be in the river,” Paul says.Kipnuk’s grant was one of more than 600 that the EPA has canceled since Donald Trump took office, according to data obtained by Floodlight through a Freedom of Information Act (Foia) request. Through 15 May, the cuts totalled more than $2.7bn.View image in fullscreenFloodlight’s analysis of the data shows:

      Environmental justice grants took by far the biggest hit, with more than $2.4bn in funding wiped out.

      The EPA has also canceled more than $120m in grants aimed at reducing the carbon footprint of cement, concrete and other construction materials. Floodlight reported in April that the cement industry’s carbon emissions rival those of some major countries – and that efforts to decarbonize the industry have lost momentum under the Trump administration.

      Blue states bore the brunt. Those states lost nearly $1.6bn in grant money – or about 57% of the funding cuts.

      The single largest grant canceled: A $95m award to the Research Triangle Institute, a North Carolina-based scientific research organization that had planned to distribute the money to underserved communities. RTI also lost five other EPA grants, totaling more than $36m.
      The EPA plans to cut even more grants, with the Washington Post reporting in late April on a court filing that showed it had targeted 781 grants issued under Biden.The Foia shows that the majority of these have now been canceled; more cuts could follow.Lawsuit challenges grant cancellationsLast month, a coalition of non-profits, tribes and local governments sued the EPA, alleging the Trump administration broke the law by canceling environmental and climate justice grants that Congress had already funded.“Terminating these grant programs caused widespread harm and disruption to on-the-ground projects that reduce pollution, increase community climate resilience and build community capacity to tackle environmental harms,” said Hana Vizcarra, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, one of the non-profits that filed the lawsuit. “We won’t let this stand.”The EPA declined to comment on the lawsuit. But in a written response to Floodlight, the agency said this about the grant cancellations: “The Biden-Harris Administration shouldn’t have forced their radical agenda of wasteful DEI programs and ‘environmental justice’ preferencing on the EPA’s core mission. The Trump EPA will continue to work with states, tribes, and communities to support projects that advance the agency’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment.”Congress created the Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grant program in 2022 when it enacted the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Joe Biden’s landmark climate bill. The program was designed to help the disadvantaged communities that are often hit hardest by pollution and climate change.But on 20 January, Trump’s first day back in office, he signed an executive order halting funding under the IRA, including money for environmental justice. Trump also cancelled Biden-era executive orders that federal agencies prioritize tackling environmental racism, and separately in his orders on diversity, equity and inclusion called for the closures of all environmental justice offices and positions in the federal government​.Underserved communities are often the most vulnerable to climate impacts such as heatwaves and flooding because they have fewer resources to prepare or recover, according to a 2021 analysis by the EPA.Inside the agency, not everyone agrees with the new direction. In a “declaration of dissent”, more than 200 current and former EPA employees spoke out against Trump administration policies, including the decision to dismantle the agency’s environmental justice program.“Canceling environmental justice programs is not cutting waste; it is failing to serve the American people,” they wrote.On Thursday, the EPA put 139 of the employees who signed the petition on administrative leave, Inside Climate News reported.From hope to heartbreak in TexasThe people at Downwinders at Risk, a small Texas non-profit that helps communities harmed by air pollution, thought they were finally getting a break.Last year, they learned that the EPA had awarded them a $500,000 grant – enough to install nine new air quality monitors in working-class neighborhoods near asphalt shingle plants, a gas well and a fracking operation in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The data would have helped residents avoid the worst air and plan their days around pollution spikes.View image in fullscreenBut on 1 May, the group’s three employees received the news they had been dreading: Their grant had been canceled.“It was a very bitter pill to swallow,” said Caleb Roberts, the group’s executive director.He and his team had devoted more than 100 hours to the application and compliance process.The non-profit’s annual budget is just over $250,000, and the federal funding would have allowed the group to expand its reach after years of scraping by. They had even paused fundraising for six months, confident the federal money was on the way.“We feel like we’re at ground zero again,” Roberts said. “And that’s just very unfortunate.”Floodlight is a non-profit newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action More

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      ‘This bill protects our precious waters’: how a Florida environmental group scored a win against big oil

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      The giant and catastrophic Deepwater Horizon oil spill, also known as the BP oil spill, didn’t reach Apalachicola Bay in 2010, but the threat of oil reaching this beautiful and environmentally valuable stretch of northern Florida’s Gulf coast was still enough to devastate the region’s economy.The Florida state congressman Jason Shoaf remembers how the threat affected the bay.“It harmed our commercial fishing, aquaculture operations, and just the threat of oil kept tourists away for months,” Shoaf recalls. “Businesses were forced to close, jobs were lost, and the disaster reshaped our region forever.”Those memories were freshly triggered in April 2024, when the Florida department of environmental protection (DEP) granted a permit to Louisiana-based Clearwater Land and Minerals for exploratory oil drilling on the Apalachicola River basin. So area residents, along with environmental and business groups, formed a Kill the Drill coalition to oppose the permit.A year later, the coalition’s efforts and an administrative challenge to the DEP’s permit by the non-profit Apalachicola Riverkeepers prevailed when Judge Lawrence P Stevenson recommended the department deny the permit.In May, the DEP reversed course and denied the permit.But that was not enough to convince those seeking to preserve the region’s environment. Shoaf, who represents Florida’s north-eastern Gulf coast region, applauded the DEP’s decision but says the threat of oil exploration and drilling near north Florida’s inland waterways would only be ended by a permanent ban. So to prevent future threats and the DEP from issuing other oil exploratory drilling permits, Shoaf and state representative Allison Tant co-authored House Bill 1143.“While the permit to Clearwater Land and Minerals was denied, we can’t assume the next one will be,” Shoaf says. “HB 1143 protects our precious water resources and the ecosystems that depend on them by prohibiting drilling, exploration and production of oil, gas and other petroleum products within 10 miles of a national estuarine research reserve in counties designated as rural areas of opportunity. It also requires the Florida department of environmental protection to ensure natural resources are adequately protected in the event of an accident.”In April, the legislature overwhelmingly passed HB 1143 with only one dissenting vote in the Senate. It was presented to Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, on 18 June. And, despite a poor recent record on protecting the environment, DeSantis signed the bill last week – handing the coalition that lobbied for it a cheering victory.The area now saved from the oil industry is invaluable both to nature and the people who live there. The Apalachicola River, formed by the meeting of the Chattahoochee and Flint rivers, flows 160 miles (258km) to the Apalachicola Bay and the Gulf. Both the river and bay are critical to the region’s tourism and seafood production industries.For environmental campaigners, the success of their efforts might help lay to rest the ghosts of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion, which released nearly 3.19m barrels of oil into the gulf.“Oil from the BP spill didn’t reach our coasts, but the damage caused by the threat was enough,” Tant says. “We’ve seen what can happen. We’ve lived it. This is not theoretical. It was a perilous time for small businesses and for those who lived in the area. It stopped tourism and shuttered small businesses. So it defies logic to think it’s a good idea to drill for oil along the Apalachicola River.”Adrianne Johnson is executive director of the Florida Shellfish Aquaculture Association which represents more than 350 shellfish farmers in Florida. Johnson, an Apalachicola native, became involved in the Kill the Drill movement for personal and business reasons.“This region has a deep collective memory of how the Gulf oil spill devastated the regional economy and collapsed the oyster industry in Apalachicola Bay,” Johnson explains. “And that was just the threat of oil. The majority of the state’s oyster farms operate across Wakulla, Franklin and Gulf counties, and these areas downriver would be most impacted by oil drilling upriver (at the proposed site in Calhoun county). If there were to be a spill upriver because of drilling in the basin, it would have catastrophic environmental and economic impacts on the area that would be felt for generations.”Johnson also points to the region’s frequent weather-related natural disasters, such as hurricanes, as another reason why drilling had to be banned in the region.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Our shellfish farmers are still recovering from the multiple hurricanes of 2024,” she explains. “But the reality of being a Florida farmer is having to contend with these weather-related events. Hurricanes and natural disasters are outside of our control. Permitting oil drilling in ecologically sensitive areas is very much within our control and is an unnecessary threat to our industry.”Tant agrees.“We are a hurricane-prone state,” she says. “We can’t get away from that. It’s not a question of will we get hit by a hurricane because we know it’s going to happen. But an oil spill caused by a hurricane would make the disaster 100 times worse.”According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), the Deep Horizon oil spill caused the loss of 8.3 billion oysters, the deaths of nearly 105,400 sea birds, 7,600 adult and 160,000 juvenile sea turtles, and a 51% decrease in dolphins in Louisiana’s Barataria Bay.Craig Diamond, current board member and past president of Apalachicola Riverkeeper, says another factor behind the ban was the river system itself.“A spill would be highly impactful given the existing stresses in the system,” says Diamond, who has worked with the Northwest Florida Water Management District and taught graduate courses on water resources at Florida State University. “Apalachicola Bay Riverkeeper and its allies believe the long-term risks of fossil fuel exploitation in the floodplain or bay (or nearshore) far outweigh the short-term benefits.”Shoaf says he was inspired to write HB 1143 by the community’s grassroots efforts to defend the region’s natural resources.“This bill is essential to prevent unnecessary and irreparable harm to Apalachicola Bay, as well as the economies and ecosystems that depend on it,” he says.After DeSantis signed the bill into law, the threat of drilling has now receded into the distance for the foreseeable future. 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      The Bezos wedding was a study in disingenuous billionaire behavior | Katrina vanden Heuvel

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      If last week was the best of times for Zohran Mamdani and the working people of New York City, it was the worst of times for the billionaires who spent a small fortune trying to stop him from securing the city’s Democratic mayoral nomination. The media mogul Barry Diller, to name just one, donated a cool $250,000 to Andrew Cuomo’s campaign, only to see the disgraced former governor lose by a decisive margin.But Diller would soon be able to drown his disappointment in Great Gatsby-themed cocktails as he joined Tom Brady, Ivanka Trump and at least three Kardashians for the cheeriest event on this season’s oligarchic social calendar: the Venetian wedding of the former TV journalist Lauren Sánchez and the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.It was a juxtaposition that even CNN questioned, as the network cut from an interview with Mamdani to coverage of the gilded spectacle. The reportedly $50m affair booked all nine of Venice’s yacht ports, closed parts of the city to the public and forced the relocation of hotel guests to make room for the happy couple. It all served as a stark if sumptuous reminder that there is no expense the megarich won’t pay to secure their own comfort – except, of course, the toll their extravagance takes on the communities from whom they extract their wealth.The lovebirds’ choice of Venice alone demonstrates their carelessness. Because the city comprises more than 100 islands in the Adriatic Sea, it’s uniquely vulnerable to rising sea levels driven by warming global temperatures. Though Sánchez claims to be “dedicated to fighting climate change”, and Bezos has called the issue “the biggest threat to our planet”, their guests arrived in the City of Bridges via 96 private jets, the most carbon-intensive mode of transportation. Bezos has made splashy commitments to fighting climate change, like pledging $10bn to his Bezos Earth Fund, while Amazon has promised to become carbon neutral by 2040. But emissions from Amazon’s delivery fleet soared from 2019 to 2023, and its newest data center will guzzle millions of gallons of water and the energy equivalent of one million homes every year.This disingenuousness is as much a business strategy for Bezos as Prime’s two-day delivery, enabling him to launder his reputation without hurting his bottom line. The pattern played out last year with his ownership of the Washington Post – where, as soon as he felt threatened by an ascendant Donald Trump, journalistic integrity fell overboard more quickly than an inebriated wedding guest on a luxury gondola.As I covered in a column earlier this year, Bezos killed the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, directed the editorial board to publish op-eds that only support “personal liberties and free markets” and oversaw the exodus of more than 20 reporters and editors. Pamela Weymouth, granddaughter of trailblazing Post publisher Katharine Graham, described this capitulation in a recent piece for the Nation as endangering “the very thing that makes America a democracy”.In fairness to Bezos, though, charity-washing is an occupational hazard for billionaires. Mark Zuckerberg initially donated to organizations fighting the California housing crisis that he helped exacerbate, before quietly ending his funding this year. The Gates Foundation gives 90% of its funding to non-profits in wealthy countries rather than the impoverished ones whose GDPs are smaller than its namesake’s net worth. The magnanimity of the uber-wealthy tends to produce what the journalist Anand Giridharadas has called “fake change”, or efforts that stop short of systemic change because those systems underpin the benefactors’ vast wealth.That’s why any vision of progressive change cannot rely on Bezos or his celebrity wedding guests to operate against their self-interest. (No, not even Oprah.) A Green New Deal will not come from oligarchical guilt, but from mass movements. Like the one that deployed almost 30,000 door knockers and pooled funds from 27,000 donors to share Mamdani’s message of genuine economic empowerment.Mamdani’s victory on Tuesday added to a growing body of proof that even billionaires don’t always get what they want. Last year, Elon Musk spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars electing Republicans, but no amount of money could save him from Donald Trump’s mercurial temper. Nor did his wealth sway the voters of Wisconsin, where he contributed $21m to a state supreme court candidate who ended up losing by 10 points.Voters’ growing skepticism of the 1% is no doubt being stoked by grassroots activism. Like in Venice, where local protesters threatened to fill canals with inflatable crocodiles, forcing the wedding of the century to relocate to the city’s outskirts. Back stateside, progressives Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez continue to draw record crowds across the country on their Fighting Oligarchy tour. At a recent stop in Oklahoma – a state Trump won by 33 points – Sanders spoke to a standing-room only crowd.Might a billionaire backlash be building, just in time for next year’s midterms? More

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      Key climate change reports removed from US government websites

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      Legally mandated US national climate assessments seem to have disappeared from the federal websites built to display them, making it harder for state and local governments and the public to learn what to expect in their back yards from a warming world.Scientists said the peer-reviewed authoritative reports save money and lives. Websites for the national assessments and the US Global Change Research Program were down Monday and Tuesday with no links, notes or referrals elsewhere. The White House, which was responsible for the assessments, said the information will be housed within Nasa to comply with the law, but gave no further details.Searches for the assessments on Nasa websites did not turn them up. Nasa did not respond to requests for information. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which coordinated the information in the assessments, did not respond to repeated inquiries.“It’s critical for decision-makers across the country to know what the science in the National Climate Assessment is. That is the most reliable and well-reviewed source of information about climate that exists for the United States,” said Kathy Jacobs, a University of Arizona climate scientist, who coordinated the 2014 version of the report.“It’s a sad day for the United States if it is true that the National Climate Assessment is no longer available,” Jacobs added. “This is evidence of serious tampering with the facts and with people’s access to information, and it actually may increase the risk of people being harmed by climate-related impacts.”Harvard climate scientist John Holdren, who was Barack Obama’s science adviser and whose office directed the assessments, said that after the 2014 edition, he visited governors, mayors and other local officials who told him how useful the 841-page report had been. It helped them decide whether to raise roads, build seawalls and even move hospital generators from basements to roofs, he said.“This is a government resource paid for by the taxpayer to provide the information that really is the primary source of information for any city, state or federal agency who’s trying to prepare for the impacts of a changing climate,” said Texas Tech climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, who has been a volunteer author for several editions of the report.Copies of past reports are still squirreled away in Noaa’s library. Nasa’s open science data repository includes dead links to the assessment site.The most recent report, issued in 2023, includes an interactive atlas that zooms down to the county level. It found that climate change is affecting people’s security, health and livelihoods in every corner of the country in different ways, with minority and Native American communities often disproportionately at risk.The 1990 Global Change Research Act requires a national climate assessment every four years and directs the president to establish an interagency United States Global Change Research Program. In the spring, the Trump administration told the volunteer authors of the next climate assessment that their services weren’t needed and ended the contract with the private firm that helps coordinate the website and report.Additionally, Noaa’s main climate.gov website was recently forwarded to a different Noaa website. Social media and blogs at Noaa and Nasa about climate impacts for the general public were cut or eliminated.“It’s part of a horrifying big picture,” Holdren said. “It’s just an appalling whole demolition of science infrastructure.”The national assessments are more useful than international climate reports put out by the UN every seven or so years because they are more localized and more detailed, Hayhoe and Jacobs said.The national reports are not only peer-reviewed by other scientists, but examined for accuracy by the National Academy of Sciences, federal agencies, the staff and the public.Hiding the reports would be censoring science, Jacobs said.It’s also dangerous for the country, Hayhoe said, comparing it to steering a car on a curving road by only looking through the rearview mirror: “And now, more than ever, we need to be looking ahead to do everything it takes to make it around that curve safely. It’s like our windshield’s being painted over.” More

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      This national monument is ‘part of the true history of the USA’. Will it survive Trump 2.0?

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      It’s easy to get lost in the Sáttítla Highlands in remote north-eastern California. There are miles of rolling lava fields, untouched forest and obsidian mountains. At night, the darkness and silence stretch on indefinitely.This is one of America’s newest national monuments. It’s also one of the most threatened.In January, the Pit River Tribe celebrated a victory decades in the making when Joe Biden granted federal protection to nearly 230,000 acres of forested lands with the creation of the Sáttítla Highlands national monument.“The awe-inspiring geological wonders collectively described here as the Sáttítla Highlands have framed the homelands of Indigenous communities and cultures for millennia,” the proclamation reads, recognizing the area as “profoundly sacred”.The tribe, along with environmental groups, had fought for years to safeguard the land from industrial energy development. The area just north of Mount Shasta, popular for recreation and some of the darkest nighttime skies in the US, is the site of the tribe’s creation story and regularly used for ceremonies.“This is a healing place for our people. It’s really tied to our traditional health,” said Brandy McDaniels, a member of the Pit River Tribe. “We’ve spent a lifetime trying to defend this area.”The designation ensures no future energy development and mineral extraction can occur on the land while keeping it available for public recreation.But then in March, Donald Trump said he would undo Biden’s action and roll back protections for Sáttítla and Chuckwalla national monument, which he argued “lock up vast amounts of land from economic development and energy production”.Although legal experts say there is no clear mechanism for a president to rescind monument protections – only to shrink them – the justice department argued in a recent memo that it is in fact within Trump’s authority to “alter a prior declaration”, suggesting the administration will move forward with efforts to remove national monument designations for hundreds of thousands of acres of wilderness.View image in fullscreenNow, as the tribe tries to move forward after years of pushing with limited resources, pro bono attorneys and “scraping up every cent” to get to court hearings and protests, another battle could be on the horizon.‘Almost like you’re in another world’Located five hours north-east of the California state capitol in a sparsely populated region, Sáttítla is far off the beaten path.“You’re not trying to get somewhere else if you’re going there. It’s very dark, it’s very quiet, there’s no cellphone reception,” said Nick Joslin, the policy and advocacy director with the Mount Shasta Bioregional Ecology Center, an area environmental advocacy group. “It’s very easy to get lost.”The monument’s 224,676 acres include portions of the Modoc, Shasta-Trinity and Klamath national forests, are home to endangered and rare flora and fauna, massive underground volcanic aquifers that supply water to millions of people and store as much water as 200 of California’s largest surface reservoirs combined. Due to heavy snow, it’s largely only accessible by car for a few months of the year.The landscape, with its islands of old-growth pine forests, snow covered mountainsides and scattered lakes, is stunning and otherworldly. It is filled with unique geological features such as ice caves, lava tubes and lava flows, Joslin said. Then there is the half-million-year-old dormant volcano, roughly 10 times the size of Mount St Helens, within the monument. Locals routinely camp, hike the hundreds of miles of trails or take boats out on Medicine Lake.“It’s a place that’s known for its high quality of silence that you can’t experience in any other place, and also its night skies,” McDaniels said. “Depending on where you’re at, people describe it as it’s almost like you’re in another world, like you’re on another planet.”There are markers of human disruption. Checkerboard swaths of forest where trees have been clear cut, and large stretches of land with second-growth trees that look like toothpicks from the air.View image in fullscreenFor Indigenous people, this area is sacred as the place of the creation narrative of the Pit River Tribe. The tribe holds important ceremonies there and collects staple foods such as berries from manzanita and currant plants, sugar pine seeds, and plants used in medicinal capacities.“The landscape of the area literally tells the history of our people. In that way, it is part of the true history of the United States of America,” McDaniels said.An undeveloped landscape under threatThe tribe fought to protect the area for nearly three decades, she added, challenging geothermal development and large-scale logging.Because Sáttítla is a volcanic area, there was speculation that there might be enough heat to develop geothermal resources, and in the 1980s the federal government awarded leases on thousands of acres to private energy companies, said Deborah A Sivas, the director of the Environmental Law Clinic at Stanford.The Environmental Law Clinic represented the tribe in a series of litigation challenging the extension of some leases and proposed projects, arguing the federal government had failed to consult the tribe, Sivas said. Industrial energy development would have required a dramatic transformation of the landscape to achieve and the tribe was opposed to such an intrusion on sacred land, and feared the hydraulic fracturing used to generate geothermal energy could pollute the aquifers.Ultimately there wasn’t the resource potential initially thought, Sivas said. The final settlement with Calpine, the last remaining company with control over the land, was signed just two days after the monument declaration.While there has been broad community support for a monument, Joslin noted, some elected officials in the conservative region have been more tepid.Doug LaMalfa, a congressperson whose district includes Sáttítla, described Biden’s action as “executive overreach” and argued it would “create unnecessary challenges for land management, particularly in wildfire prevention and maintaining usage for local residents”.But there has been no organized opposition against the monument.Presidents have the authority to give protected status to land with cultural, scientific or historic resources of national significance, and Biden and other presidents have typically used it for conservation and to support tribes.In the case of Sáttítla, the designation protects against industrial energy development, but does not prevent recreation, Sivas said, or bar the US Forest Service from doing wildfire management work.But Trump has taken a combative stance on national monuments as part of his pro-energy agenda, slashing the size of Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase national monuments during his first term (a move that was later reversed by Biden). Earlier this month, the Department of Justice issued a memorandum opinion arguing that Trump has the authority to not only shrink but entirely abolish national monuments created by his predecessor.View image in fullscreenBut the legal argument for that position appears tenuous. Sivas said the Antiquities Act, the statute under which national monuments are designated, does not give the president the authority to do so.“There’s no language in there that suggests that he could de-designate or roll back what prior presidents have done,” Sivas said. She added that the recent argument made by the administration was not particularly persuasive.Given the lack of opposition to Sáttítla, the move seems designed to instead test the limits of the president’s power, Sivas said. If the administration does proceed with a rollback, legal action will follow, she added, which she expects will make its way to the supreme court.“We will be filing litigation if that happens. This is a kind of a canary in the coal mine.”McDaniels described the efforts to rollback protections as “perplexing”. She pointed to the interior secretary Doug Burgum’s address to the National Congress of American Indians in which he indicated he didn’t believe the nation’s “most precious places”, such as parks and monuments, should be targeted for development.But the tribe is focused on celebrating the monument, informing the public about the significance of these lands and ensuring it continues to serve as a healing place for the Indigenous people who have endured a long history of genocidal acts and injustices, McDaniels said.“Truth and healing cannot begin if we’re constantly fighting to protect our sacred lands,” McDaniels said.“That’s what we don’t want for our kids, our grandkids and all future generations. Everybody deserves the right to experience the gifts that this land makes available for people.” More

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      Sudden loss of key US satellite data could send hurricane forecasting back ‘decades’

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      A critical US atmospheric data collection program will be halted by Monday, giving weather forecasters just days to prepare, according to a public notice sent this week. Scientists that the Guardian spoke with say the change could set hurricane forecasting back “decades”, just as this year’s season ramps up.In a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) message sent on Wednesday to its scientists, the agency said that “due to recent service changes” the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) will “discontinue ingest, processing and distribution of all DMSP data no later than June 30, 2025”.Due to their unique characteristics and ability to map the entire world twice a day with extremely high resolution, the three DMSP satellites are a primary source of information for scientists to monitor Arctic sea ice and hurricane development. The DMSP partners with Noaa to make weather data collected from the satellites publicly available.The reasons for the changes, and which agency was driving them, were not immediately clear. Noaa said they would not affect the quality of forecasting.However, the Guardian spoke with several scientists inside and outside of the US government whose work depends on the DMSP, and all said there are no other US programs that can form an adequate replacement for its data.“We’re a bit blind now,” said Allison Wing, a hurricane researcher at Florida State University. Wing said the DMSP satellites are the only ones that let scientists see inside the clouds of developing hurricanes, giving them a critical edge in forecasting that now may be jeopardized.“Before these types of satellites were present, there would often be situations where you’d wake up in the morning and have a big surprise about what the hurricane looked like,” said Wing. “Given increases in hurricane intensity and increasing prevalence towards rapid intensification in recent years, it’s not a good time to have less information.”The satellites also formed a unique source of data for tracking changes to the Arctic and Antarctic, and had been tracking changes to polar sea ice continuously for more than 40 years.“These are some of the regions that are changing the fastest around the planet,” said Carlos Moffat, an oceanographer at the University of Delaware who had been working on a research project in Antarctica that depended on DMSP data. “This new announcement about the sea ice data really amounts to blinding ourselves and preventing us from observing these critical systems.”Researchers say the satellites themselves are operating normally and do not appear to have suffered any errors that would physically prevent the data from continuing to be collected and distributed, so the abrupt data halt might have been an intentional decision.“It’s pretty shocking,” Moffat said. “It’s hard to imagine what would be the logic of removing access now and in such a sudden manner that it’s just impossible to plan for. I certainly don’t know of any other previous cases where we’re taking away data that is being collected, and we’re just removing it from public access.”The loss of DMSP comes as Noaa’s weather and climate monitoring services have become critically understaffed this year as Donald Trump’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) initiative has instilled draconian cuts to federal environmental programs.A current Noaa scientist who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation said that the action to halt the DMSP, when taken in context with other recent moves by the Trump administration, amounted to “a systematic destruction of science”.The researcher also confirmed that federal hurricane forecasters were left unprepared for the sudden change with only a few days of notice.“It’s an instant loss of roughly half of our capabilities,” said the scientist. “You can’t expect us to make accurate forecasts and warnings when you take the useful tools away. It frankly is an embarrassment for the government to pursue a course with less data and just pretend everything will be OK.”Scientists said the decision to halt the DMSP will result in immediately degraded hurricane forecasts during what is expected to be an above-average season as well as a gap in monitoring sea ice – just as Arctic sea ice is hitting new record lows.“This is a huge hit to our forecasting capabilities this season and beyond, especially our ability to predict rapid intensification or estimate the strength of storms in the absence of hurricane hunters,” said Michael Lowry, a meteorologist who has worked at Noaa’s National Hurricane Center and with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “The permanent discontinuation of data from these satellites is senseless, reckless and puts at risk the lives of tens of millions of Americans living in hurricane alley.”The DMSP dates back to 1963, when the Department of Defense determined a need for high-resolution cloud forecasts to help them plan spy missions. The program, which had been the longest-running weather satellite initiative in the federal government, has since evolved into a critical source of information not just on the inner workings of hurricanes, but also on polar sea ice, wildfires, solar flares and the aurora.In recent years, the DMSP had struggled to maintain consistent funding and priority within the Department of Defense as it transitioned away from its cold war mission. The only other nation with similar satellite capability is Japan, and messages posted earlier in June indicate that scientists had already been considering a switch to the Japanese data in case of a DMSP outage – though that transition will take time.Neither Noaa nor the Department of Defense specified exactly which service changes may have prompted such a critical program to be so abruptly halted.In a statement to the Guardian, Noaa’s communications director, Kim Doster, said: “The DMSP is a single dataset in a robust suite of hurricane forecasting and modeling tools in the National Weather Service portfolio. This routine process of data rotation and replacement would go unnoticed in past administrations, but the media is insistent on criticizing the great work that Noaa and its dedicated scientists perform every day.“Noaa’s data sources are fully capable of providing a complete suite of cutting-edge data and models that ensure the gold-standard weather forecasting the American people deserve.”One Noaa source the Guardian spoke to said the loss of DMSP’s high-resolution data could not be replaced by any other existing Noaa tool.A statement from an official at US space force, which is part of the Department of Defense, said: “The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) operates the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) for the DoD on behalf of the US Space Force, who has satellite control authority.”The official went on to say that Noaa receives the data from the US navy’s Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center (FNMOC) and added: “While the Space Force does provide DMSP data and processing software to DoD users, to include the US Navy, questions about the reasons for FNMOC’s changes to DMSP data processing should be directed to the Navy.“Even as FNMOC is making a change on their end, the posture on sharing DMSP data has not changed. Noaa has been making this DMSP data publicly available, and many non-DoD entities use this data that is originally processed by FNMOC.“DMSP satellites and instruments are still functional. The data provided to FNMOC is just one way the DoD uses DMSP data. DoD users (including the Navy) will continue to receive and operationally use DMSP data sent to weather satellite direct readout terminals across the DoD.”The Guardian is approaching the US navy for comment. More

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      Trump’s tax bill seeks to prevent AI regulations. Experts fear a heavy toll on the planet

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      US Republicans are pushing to pass a major spending bill that includes provisions to prevent states from enacting regulations on artificial intelligence. Such untamed growth in AI will take a heavy toll upon the world’s dangerously overheating climate, experts have warned.About 1bn tons of planet-heating carbon dioxide are set to be emitted in the US just from AI over the next decade if no restraints are placed on the industry’s enormous electricity consumption, according to estimates by researchers at Harvard University and provided to the Guardian.This 10-year timeframe, a period of time in which Republicans want a “pause” of state-level regulations upon AI, will see so much electricity use in data centers for AI purposes that the US will add more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than Japan does annually, or three times the yearly total from the UK.The exact amount of emissions will depend on power plant efficiency and how much clean energy will be used in the coming years, but the blocking of regulations will also be a factor, said Gianluca Guidi, visiting scholar at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.“By limiting oversight, it could slow the transition away from fossil fuels and reduce incentives for more energy-efficient AI energy reliance,” Guidi said.“We talk a lot about what AI can do for us, but not nearly enough about what it’s doing to the planet. If we’re serious about using AI to improve human wellbeing, we can’t ignore the growing toll it’s taking on climate stability and public health.”Donald Trump has vowed that the US will become “the world capital of artificial intelligence and crypto” and has set about sweeping aside guardrails around AI development and demolishing rules limiting greenhouse gas pollution.The “big beautiful” reconciliation bill passed by Republicans in the House of Representatives would bar states from adding their own regulations upon AI and the GOP-controlled Senate is poised to pass its own version doing likewise.Unrestricted AI use is set to deal a sizable blow to efforts to tackle the climate crisis, though, by causing surging electricity use from a US grid still heavily reliant upon fossil fuels such as gas and coal. AI is particularly energy-hungry – one ChatGPT query needs about 10 times as much electricity as a Google search query.Carbon emissions from data centers in the US have tripled since 2018, with an upcoming Harvard research paper finding that the largest “hyperscale” centers now account for 2% of all US electricity use.“AI is going to change our world,” Manu Asthana, chief executive of the PJM Interconnection, the US largest grid, has predicted. Asthana estimated that almost all future increase in electricity demand will come from data centers, adding the equivalent of 20m new homes to the grid in the next five years.The explosive growth of AI has, meanwhile, worsened the recent erosion in climate commitments made by big tech companies. Last year, Google admitted that its greenhouse gas emissions have grown by 48% since 2019 due to its own foray into AI, meaning that “reducing emissions may be challenging” as AI further takes hold.Proponents of AI, and some researchers, have argued that advances in AI will aid the climate fight by increasing efficiencies in grid management and other improvements. Others are more skeptical. “That is just a greenwashing maneuver, quite transparently,” said Alex Hanna, director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute. “There have been some absolutely nonsense things said about this. Big tech is mortgaging the present for a future that will never come.”While no state has yet placed specific green rules upon AI, they may look to do so given cuts to federal environmental regulations, with state lawmakers urging Congress to rethink the ban. “If we were expecting any rule-making at the federal level around data centers it’s surely off the table now,” said Hanna. “It’s all been quite alarming to see.”Republican lawmakers are undeterred, however. The proposed moratorium cleared a major hurdle over the weekend when the Senate parliamentarian decided that the proposed ban on state and local regulation of AI can remain in Trump’s tax and spending mega-bill. The Texas senator Ted Cruz, the Republican who chairs the Senate committee on commerce, science and transportation, changed the language to comply with the Byrd Rule, which prohibits “extraneous matters” from being included in such spending bills.The provision now refers to a “temporary pause” on regulation instead of a moratorium. It also includes a $500m addition to a grant program to expand access to broadband internet across the country, preventing states from receiving those funds if they attempt to regulate AI.The proposed AI regulation pause has provoked widespread concern from Democrats. The Massachusetts senator Ed Markey, a climate hawk, says he has prepared an amendment to strip the “dangerous” provision from the bill.“The rapid development of artificial intelligence is already impacting our environment, raising energy prices for consumers, straining our grid’s ability to keep the lights on, draining local water supplies, spewing toxic pollution in communities, and increasing climate emissions,” Markey told the Guardian.“However, instead of allowing states to protect the public and our planet, Republicans want to ban them from regulating AI for 10 years. It is shortsighted and irresponsible.”The Massachusetts congressman Jake Auchincloss has also called the proposal “a terrible idea and an unpopular idea”.“I think we have to realize that AI is going to suffuse in rapid order many dimensions of healthcare, media, entertainment, education, and to just proscribe any regulation of AI in any use case for the next decade is unbelievably reckless,” he said.Some Republicans have also come out against the provision, including the Tennessee senator Marsha Blackburn and the Missouri senator Josh Hawley. An amendment to remove the pause from the bill would require the support of at least four Republican senators to pass.Hawley is said to be willing to introduce an amendment to remove the provision later this week if it is not eliminated beforehand.Earlier this month, the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene admitted she had missed the provision in the House version of the bill, and that she would not have backed the legislation if she had seen it. The far-right House Freedom caucus, of which Greene is a member, has also come out against the AI regulation pause. More