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One labor leader called it "another clear example of retaliation against federal employee union members who have bravely stood up against his anti-worker, anti-American plan to dismantle the federal government."
In the lead-up to Labor Day in the United States, President Donald Trump on Thursday escalated his attack on the union rights of federal employees at a list of agencies with an executive order that claims to "enhance" national security.
Trump previously issued an order intended to strip the collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of government employees in March, provoking an ongoing court fight. A federal judge blocked the president's edict—but then earlier this month, a panel from the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit allowed the administration to proceed.
Government agencies were directed not to terminate any collective bargaining agreements while the litigation over Trump's March order continued, but some have begun to do so, according to Government Executive. On Monday, the 9th Circuit said in a filing that it would vote on whether the full court will rehear the case.
Amid that court fight, Trump issued Thursday's order, which calls for an end to collective bargaining for unionized workers at the Bureau of Reclamation's hydropower units; National Aeronautics and Space Administration; National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service; National Weather Service; Patent and Trademark Office; and US Agency for Global Media.
Like the earlier order, this one cites the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. As Government Executive reported Thursday:
Matt Biggs, national president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, whose union represents a portion of NASA's workforce along with the American Federation of Government Employees, suggested that the administration's targeting of NASA—IFPTE's largest union—was in retaliation for its own lawsuit challenging the spring iteration of the executive order, filed last month.
"It's not surprising, sadly," Biggs said. "What is surprising is that on the eve of Labor Day weekend, when workers are to be celebrated, the Trump administration has doubled down on being the most anti-labor, anti-worker administration in US history. We will continue to fight in the courts, on the Hill, and at the grassroots levels against this."
Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which also sued over the March order, said that "President Trump's decision to issue a Labor Day proclamation shortly after stripping union rights from thousands of civil servants, a third of whom are veterans, should show American workers what he really thinks about them."
"This latest executive order is another clear example of retaliation against federal employee union members who have bravely stood up against his anti-worker, anti-American plan to dismantle the federal government," Kelley declared, taking aim at the president's so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
"Several agencies including NASA and the National Weather Service have already been hollowed out by reckless DOGE cuts, so for the administration to further disenfranchise the remaining workers in the name of 'efficiency' is immoral and abhorrent," the union leader said. "AFGE is preparing an immediate response and will continue to fight relentlessly to protect the rights of our members, federal employees, and their union."
"The villains of this escalating tragedy are also clear, with wealthy nations, the duplicitous fossil fuel industry, and spineless policymakers topping the list," said one climate scientist.
As catastrophic fires ravaged Southern California on Friday, U.S. government scientists confirmed that—as anticipated—2024 was the hottest year on record and the country endured 27 weather and climate disasters with losses exceeding $1 billion.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) found that after 15 straight months of new records from June 2023 through August 2024, global temperatures last year were 2.3°F (1.28°C) above the agency's 20th-century baseline from 1951-1980 and about 2.65°F (1.47°C) higher than the mid-19th century average from 1850-1900.
"Between record-breaking temperatures and wildfires currently threatening our centers and workforce in California, it has never been more important to understand our changing planet."
"Once again, the temperature record has been shattered—2024 was the hottest year since recordkeeping began in 1880," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in a statement. "Between record-breaking temperatures and wildfires currently threatening our centers and workforce in California, it has never been more important to understand our changing planet."
Other experts, at NASA and beyond, also responded to the findings by emphasizing that the climate emergency was created by humanity extracting and burning fossil fuels—and continuing to do so, despite scientists' warnings and initiatives including the 2015 Paris agreement, which was intended to limit global temperature rise this century to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels.
"To put that in perspective, temperatures during the warm periods on Earth three million years ago—when sea levels were dozens of feet higher than today—were only around 3°C warmer than preindustrial levels," explained Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "We are halfway to Pliocene-level warmth in just 150 years."
"Not every year is going to break records, but the long-term trend is clear," said Schmidt, acknowledging natural fluctuations such as El Niño and La Niña. "We're already seeing the impact in extreme rainfall, heatwaves, and increased flood risk, which are going to keep getting worse as long as emissions continue."
NASA noted that independent analyses from Berkeley Earth, Europe's Copernicus Climate Change Service, the United Kingdom's Met Office, and the United States' National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) also concluded that "global surface temperatures for 2024 were the highest since modern record-keeping began," though some of the figures differ slightly due their to various methodologies and models.
For example, NOAA, which also released its 2024 conclusions on Friday, found that the global surface temperature was 2.32°F (1.29°C) above the 20th-century average and exceeded the 1850-1900 average by 2.63°F (1.46°C). The agency also found that the annual average for the contiguous United States was 55.5°F—3.5°F above average and the warmest in the 130-year record.
NOAA also put out findings on extreme weather events that are becoming more common and devastating due to fossil fuel-driven global heating. The agency identified 27 disasters across the country—a drought, a flooding event, a wildfire, two winter storms, five tropical cyclones, and 17 severe storms—with losses topping $1 billion each. They collectively cost $182.7 billion and killed at least 568 people.
Over a third of those deaths—219—were tied to Hurricane Helene, last year's costliest event at $78.7 billion. The Category 4 storm made landfall in Florida's Big Bend region and left a trail of destruction up to North Carolina and Tennessee. NOAA said that it "was the deadliest Atlantic hurricane since Maria (2017) and the deadliest to strike the U.S. mainland since Katrina (2005)."
The United States has faced 403 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters over the past 45 years, and 2024 had the second-highest count, after 28 events in 2023. The annual average for 1980-2024 is just nine, compared with 23 for the past five years.
(Image: NOAA)
"Last year's record-breaking heat and billion-dollar disasters are an alarming harbinger of what's to come if the nation fails to invest in a climate-resilient economy and do its part to sharply cut global heat-trapping emissions," said Rachel Cleetus, policy director and lead economist at the Union of Concerned Scientists' (UCS) Climate and Energy Program, in a statement. "It's time for decision-makers at all levels of government and across the economy to acknowledge the staggering financial costs and human toll of burning fossil fuels and commit to building a stronger, safer economy powered by clean energy."
Cleetus also called out the fossil fuel companies that "seem intent on burning down the planet to protect their profits" and the "policymakers in their thrall." Her UCS colleague Astrid Caldas, a senior climate scientist for community resilience, similarly stressed the urgent need to act while blasting Big Oil and its allies in politics.
"As a scientist exhausted from sounding the alarm hottest year after hottest year, I'm no longer just concerned about the climate crisis and its impacts on vulnerable communities but incensed at world leaders for their grossly inadequate climate action to date," Caldas declared. "NOAA and NASA confirmed that the last 11 years have been the 11 hottest on record. Will it take another 11 years for policymakers to heed the irrefutable science and address the devastation being experienced in the United States and around the world largely due to fossil-fuel driven global warming?"
As Californians faced what experts fear will be the costliest fire disaster in U.S. history, Caldas said that "deadly and costly climate impacts, including accelerating sea-level rise and record-breaking heatwaves, droughts, storms, and wildfires, are mounting, and yet politicians stand by while heat-trapping emissions continue to rise globally. The science is indisputable: Transformative and comprehensive global climate action, including a speedy and just transition away from fossil fuels and increased investments in climate resilience, is paramount to protect people now and foster prosperity for generations to come."
"The villains of this escalating tragedy are also clear, with wealthy nations, the duplicitous fossil fuel industry, and spineless policymakers topping the list of those bearing primary responsibility for past and current global warming emissions and climate inaction," she added. "The biggest injustice is that the most vulnerable communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis have much to lose despite contributing the least to this problem."
What you can now quite easily see from space is the failure humanity is achieving down here on the ground.
What’s happening right now in Los Angeles is almost too painful to write about. I’ve spent much of the day writing and calling back and forth with friends and colleagues. All report: horror. And since it’s playing out against the most familiar backdrop on earth, the scene of more movies and tv shows than any place on our planet, I think it will be as iconic as Pompeii in our collective imagination. If, you know, people in Pompeii had had smartphones.
So let me pull back a minute and tell a broader story. Though I’ve spent most of my life in the mountains of the East, my early boyhood was in California—my earliest recollections are of our house in Altadena, the neighborhood currently being consumed by the Eaton fire. And the sharpest memories of those are of climbing the fire road to the observatory at Mt. Wilson, which you could see from our backyard. I guess those must have been the first hikes in a lifetime of hikes, the first time to see the world spread out below.
I didn’t know it at the time—I was five—but the telescopes at the observatory at the top of the road were the place where humankind first really saw the universe spread out above. Edwin Hubble, using the 100-inch Hooker telescope, then the largest in the world, made a series of pivotal discoveries in the 1920s. First he showed that the Andromeda nebula was outside our galaxy, taking the universe past the Milky Way. And then, a few years later with Milton Humason, he demonstrated that those distant galaxies were receding from ours—that the universe was expanding. This was the crucial groundwork for the Big Bang theory.
The last time I was up there, you could press a button on a display and the reassuring voice of Hugh Downs would explain that “Hubble’s discoveries were the last great step in the Copernican revolution of thought concerning man’s place in the cosmos. Hubble showed that our galaxy is not the center of the universe. There is no center.”
These discoveries were of a piece with the other great revelations of the 20th century—things like the invention of the solar cell at Bell Labs in 1954, or Jim Hansen’s pathbreaking climate science at NASA’s labs in the 1980s. They were the product of the human instinct for observation, nurtured in America’s unprecedented complex of university, government, and commercial labs. Scripps Oceanographic, MIT, Caltech, JPL, on and on. These were the kind of institutions that took us to the moon, and that indeed just last month shot a spacecraft closer to the sun than ever before.
And it’s this kind of science that lets us understand what’s happening in LA today; the descendants of Hubble and Hansen have continued the kind of painstaking research that make clear the result when a climate-induced drought (it’s only rained 0.16 inches in LA since May) and climate-induced heatwaves (the LA basin had some of its hottest stretches ever this past summer) and perhaps the climate-induced increase in the intensity of Santa Ana winds combine to created a firestorm unlike any other. It’s both simple and complicated: here’s a remarkable paper from Nature explaining how the melt of Arctic sea ice, by affecting the jetstream, is making West Coast fires worse.
In some ways, all this human intelligence is still being put to good use. Sammy Roth has written powerful recent accounts of Los Angeles’s push to build solar farms on all its margins, en route to becoming one of the world’s most renewably powered cities.
But in other ways that legacy of highly developed human intelligence is starting to disappear. It’s not just the polio vaccine (RFK Jr. told reporters yesterday, by the way, that he was “very worried” about his LA mansion). It’s the web of climate science targeted by Project 2025, which envisions an end to federal support even for the web of thermometers that measures our descent into something like hell. That’s because they understand (correctly) that this science is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” As Marc Morano, perhaps the country’s most inedfatigable climate denier, put it on Fox yesterday when asked about climate researchers
You have to cut the funding. You have to cut the program. You have to fire the employees, or at the very least, since it is hard to fire people, reassign them.
And yesterday the incoming president published a particularly memorable rant on his Truth Social platform
Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way. He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!), but didn’t care about the people of California. Now the ultimate price is being paid. I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is the blame for this. On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, not firefighting planes. A true disaster!
That this is all nonsense should by now be taken for granted. His reference is to some effort half a decade ago to allot yet more water to California’s big corporate farms; there is no river of water that the governor could somehow have diverted to Los Angeles to fight the fires. (And if you look at the videos it’s painfully absurd to imagine that a phalanx of firemen with hoses were going to beat down this maelstrom). Elsewhere on social media MAGA aficonados (and U.S. Senators) have taken turns blaming DEI initiatives, the war in Ukraine, and so on.
The great casualties in California today are people and animals and buildings—homes, synagogues, schools, libraries. The great casualty in the month’s ahead may be the insurance system of the world’s fifth biggest economy, which is going to buckle under the strain of these losses. But the steady loss of intelligence in our nation and our world worries me the most. Even as the stakes grow higher, we’re losing our hard-won ability to understand the world around us.
One of the mysteries of Hubble’s universe is why we haven’t found other intelligent species. One explanation is that most civilizations do themselves in before they can reach out into space.