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big oil
By Gutting NOAA, Musk and Trump Are Destroying a Public Good to Aid Big Oil
The fossil fuel industry is committing an ongoing crime against the planet; this is an effort to paint over the lens of the security camera that’s been recording its trespasses.
Mar 01, 2025
The news came late Thursday afternoon that the Musk tornado had reached NOAA, the government agency responsible for, among many other things, warning us about actual tornadoes. Ten percent of the staff was instantly given pink slips, and an hour to leave; with thousands more firings expected imminently. The wording on the termination letters seems to have been uniform; the work these people were doing was not considered “in the public interest.”
I want to bear a little witness to the people fired from NOAA and so many other places—and even more to the long and careful tradition of which they were a part. For the moment I don’t know what we can do to protect those people or that tradition—there will be court battles, and we should support them; general defense against President Donald Trump’s absurd and illegal destruction is ongoing at places like Third Act and Indivisible and you should join in. But for now, I simply want to explain what’s being destroyed.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was founded in 1970, but its roots go back to 1807, when Thomas Jefferson formed the “Survey of the Coast,” noting the importance of “waterborne commerce” to the new nation. Over the following decades it produced the first nautical maps, and then early tide tables, and then began to figure out how to locate and map underwater obstructions. Though I now live in landlocked Vermont, I was a Sea Scout when I was a boy and I remember navigating with those blue and tan charts, walking the parallel rules across the chart, always with an eye to the compass rose at the bottom, all painstakingly marked with hazards and aids to navigation.
Musk is an impulsive child who has been handed an intricate toy, and whose only impulse is to break it, for the pure satisfaction of the crash.
It became the Coast and Geodetic Survey later in the 19th century—geodesy was the “science of accurately measuring and understanding the Earth's geometric shape, orientation in space, and gravity field,” and if like me you are a hiker you have doubtless encountered their brass markers on the summits of mountains. Other agencies—the Weather Bureau chief among them—grew up over the first two centuries of the republic to track the hazards of the continent. By 1970, in the wake of the first Earth Day, then-Republican President Richard Nixon combined all of them in this new National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency.
Nixon was not an honest or good man, but he was an intelligent one, in an intelligent era. Here’s how he described the rationale for this new agency:
The oceans and atmosphere are interacting parts of the total environmental system upon which we depend, not only for the quality of our lives, but for life itself. We face immediate and compelling needs for better protection of life and property from natural hazards, and for a better understanding of the total environment—an understanding which will enable us more effectively to monitor and predict its actions, and ultimately, perhaps to exercise some degree of control over them.
If that was true then, then it’s triply true now. It’s NOAA that keeps track of the rapid heating of our planet, with all its attendant dangers. And now it will be reduced to a shadow of itself, just as Project 2025 promised. Why would any rational person do this? Over two centuries it worked to understand the world around us, and that understanding was, among other things, key to our prosperity.
Because it committed the sin of helping to figure out the greatest danger to that prosperity: It was NOAA, after all, that maintained the world’s most important scientific instrument, the carbon dioxide monitor on the flank of Mauna Loa that first disclosed that carbon dioxide was accumulating in the atmosphere as we combusted coal and gas and oil. And it’s maintained the network of weather stations, satellites, and marine buoys that have shown that that carbon is driving a pervasive shift in our climate, one that is melting the poles. This is the very definition of “the public interest,” but it cuts against the private interest of the fossil fuel industry, and so it must be neutered. Elon Musk can insist all he wants that he’s doing it to save the taxpayers money, but the agency in total costs barely $6 billion a year—or one-sixth the cost of the federal government’s contracts with Musk’s agencies, which The Washington Postdetailed in an important investigation Wednesday.
Once this agency is broken, it won’t be rebuilt. Its centuries of institutional memory will be slowly forgotten. (There are good histories of NOAA on its website, here and here; if they’re of interest, download them right now). Musk is an impulsive child who has been handed an intricate toy, and whose only impulse is to break it, for the pure satisfaction of the crash. And so he can get a tax cut, and yet more money, whatever that even means to someone approaching the half-trillion dollar mark.
If you want just one tiny example of what he is destroying, look through the Bluesky feed of Zack Labe, a young climate scientist laid off Thursday afternoon. He was not just good at his job, he was good at explaining it: Day after day he would lay out the latest news from the cryosphere, explaining in careful detail what was happening on the frozen portions of this Earth. On Wednesday, for interest, he’d explained that Arctic sea ice was setting new lows for this date; on Monday he’d produced a graphic showing the steady loss of ice in glaciers around the world. He is our chronicler of thaw, of melt—and what could be more important, since that thaw and melt raises sea levels, disrupts the jet stream and the Gulf stream. He wasn’t an activist or an advocate, unless you count charting, say, the increased methane in the atmosphere as activism. Clearly the oil industry does; Project 2025 had promised to gut NOAA precisely because, as it put it in a moment of complete candor, those measurements are “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.”
In other words, Big Oil is trying to wrap a blindfold around the eyes of the nation, so it won’t see what’s happening. I confess to feeling a quiet rage at this vandalism (some of which is almost literal—the administration is disconnecting EV chargers, already bought and paid for, from federal parking lots). It won’t work, not in the long run—people will notice when their neighborhoods burn and flood. But it will make it harder to understand what’s going on, and to pin the blame where it belongs. The fossil fuel industry is committing an ongoing crime against the planet; this is an effort to paint over the lens of the security camera that’s been recording its trespasses.
At least as of this morning the vandals at DOGE hadn’t managed to sack the NOAA website. It was still reporting on the hottest January in history, and offering guides to “building climate resilience in your community.” As they had for 218 years the people in this enterprise were serving their fellow citizens with the information they needed to survive and to thrive. Take a look at it if it’s still there, just to remind yourself what good things humans are capable of. It will inspire you to fight harder against the bad things humans—in this case Musk and Trump—are capable of.
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'When Big Oil Says Jump, Republicans Ask How High?' GOP Sends Climate-Killing Bill to Trump's Desk
"It's a sorry testament to the influence of Big Oil on Capitol Hill that one of the top priorities of Congress is a blatant handout to the worst actors in the fossil fuel industry," said one critic.
Feb 28, 2025
Climate advocates are blasting congressional Republicans this week for their latest gift to fossil fuel industry: sending a resolution to kill the federal Methane Emissions Reduction Program to the desk of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Big Oil-backed Trump is expected to sign the Congressional Review Act resolution, which senators passed along party lines on Thursday. That followed a Wednesday vote in the House of Representatives, where Democratic Reps. Henry Cuellar (Texas), Jared Golden (Maine), Vincente Gonzalez (Texas), Adam Gray (Calif.), Kristen Donald Rivet (Mich.), and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Wash.) supported the measure alongside all Republicans present except Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania.
Methane has more than 80 times as much warming power as carbon dioxide during its first two decades in the atmosphere. The pollution program was established by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and finalized by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last November. The Associated Press reported Thursday that "most major oil and gas companies do not release enough methane to trigger the fee, which is $900 per ton, an amount that would increase to $1,500 by 2026."
The GOP resolution will end the program, but not the mandate from the 2022 law. Mahyar Sorour, Sierra Club's director of beyond fossil fuels policy, declared that "this attack on EPA's implementation of the methane waste emissions charge is short-sighted and harmful. It remains a legal requirement for EPA to hold the biggest methane polluters accountable for their negligence."
"Forcing the agency to implement the charge some other way after conducting a thorough, well-researched process is as wasteful of taxpayer resources as these oil and gas operators are wasteful of harmful methane," Sorour argued. "Technology to monitor and stop leaks is readily available and easy to implement, so only wasteful, careless corporations will face a fee for excessive methane pollution. Despite this setback, Sierra Club will not stop fighting to make polluters pay for their egregious actions."
The resolution hit Trump's desk just over a month after his return to office. Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen's Energy Program, said that "it's a sorry testament to the influence of Big Oil on Capitol Hill that one of the top priorities of Congress is a blatant handout to the worst actors in the fossil fuel industry. Congress is showing its hypocrisy by claiming to seek to rein in government spending, while voting to repeal a revenue-raising fee that only applies to wasteful oil and gas companies."
"The methane fee was paired with a $1.5 billion government spending program to help oil and gas companies reduce harmful emissions," noted Slocum, who then took aim at Trump and billionaire Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency. "Voting to repeal the fee while allowing profitable corporations to pocket hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars is an affront to the millions of working Americans disrupted by indiscriminate DOGE cost-cutting."
"It should not be too much to ask fossil fuel producers to do the bare minimum to capture leaking methane," he added. "Any child knows that when you make a mess, you should clean it up. The fee was intended to be a key part of enforcing standards on an industry that has repeatedly cut corners in its endless drive to extract more fossil fuels."
Critics highlighted how the rollback is expected to affect not only the warming planet but also public health. Moms Clean Air Force national field director Patrice Tomcik said that "as a mother living with oil and gas operations in my neighborhood, I have concerns about the impact of oil and gas pollution on the health of my children and neighbors."
"Polling shows that support for stronger standards on oil and gas operations is widespread across the country, including in oil and gas states, such as Pennsylvania, where my family lives," Tomcik pointed out. "Protecting the air our children breathe and combating the global heating fueling extreme weather should be nonnegotiable."
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Case That Could Inflict 'Financial Ruin' on Greenpeace Heads to Trial
"This fight is bigger than Greenpeace. This lawsuit is a blatant attempt to silence critics and hide destructive practices," said the campaign director of Greenpeace USA.
Feb 20, 2025
With a high-stakes court trial between the environmental organization Greenpeace and the developer of the Dakota Access Pipeline, Energy Transfer, set to begin Monday, the green group earlier this month lit up multiple locations in both Dallas and Washington, D.C. with giant projections that displayed messages such as, "You Can't Put a Movement on Trial" and, "Big Oil Is Suing Greenpeace."
The Dallas-based oil and gas company Energy Transfer—whose executive chairman Warren Kelcy is a donor to U.S President Donald Trump, according to the The Guardian—has accused Greenpeace and other activists of inciting protests that took place against the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016 and 2017, as well as spreading misinformation about and vandalizing the project.
The lawsuit names Greenpeace International and two U.S. Greenpeace entities. Greenpeace maintains that the protests were directed by Indigenous leaders, not Greenpeace.
The Standing Rock Sioux tribe and its allies said the pipeline, which has been in operation since 2017 and carries crude oil from the Brakken oil fields in North Dakota to Illinois, would endanger the water supply for the reservation and violate the tribe's right to its land.
If successful, the $300 million lawsuit could inflict "financial ruin" on the group, according to Greenpeace. This would have a chilling effect on the organization's work, but leaders within the group have also cast it as an attack on the environmental movement and free speech more broadly.
"This fight is bigger than Greenpeace. This lawsuit is a blatant attempt to silence critics and hide destructive practices," said Rolf Skar, the campaign director of Greenpeace USA, in a Tuesday statement.
Of the projections in D.C. and Dallas, Skar said they "are a testament to that resilience, shining a light on the truth and reminding everyone fighting for a just and livable future that we will not back down."
In a similar vein, Deepa Padmanabha, Greenpeace's deputy general counsel, toldThe Guardian that "Energy Transfer and the fossil fuel industry do not understand the difference between entities and movements. You can't bankrupt the movement. You can't silence the movement. There will be a backlash and a price to pay when you pursue these kinds of tactics."
"People power is more powerful," she added.
The case has also been decried as an example of what are known as "Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation"—or "SLAPP" lawsuits, meritless cases whose goal it to bankrupt civil society groups and nonprofits with years of litigation and legal fees.
Greenpeace International, which is based in Amsterdam, has been the first group to initiate a lawsuit under the European Union's new anti-SLAPP directive. The group has sued in a Dutch court to recoup losses it has incurred as a result of its legal fight with Energy Transfer.
Of its bid under the anti-SLAPP directive, Daniel Simons, senior legal counsel at Greenpeace International, said in early February that "if we prevail, it will send a message to corporate bullies that the age of impunity is ending. That would be a boost for civil society in the E.U., and point to solutions for those battling the SLAPP phenomenon elsewhere."
There is no federal anti-SLAPP law on the books in the United States.
There has also been intrigue surrounding the circumstances of the upcoming trial in North Dakota. Greenpeace unsuccessfully sought to have the case moved to a different court over concerns of potential jury bias. The Guardian and the local outlet the North Dakota Monitor have reported on mysterious mailers that were sent to local residents that contain written material slanted against Dakota Access Pipeline protestors and in favor of Energy Transfer.
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