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national weather service
Don’t Let the GOP Run the Summer Camp
A well-run camp strikes me as a reasonable analogue for a well-run society, in that it attempts to maximize opportunity while minimizing risk. Those things are always in a certain amount of tension, and balancing that tension is a big reason why we form governments and adopt rules.
No honest person can deny there’s real danger from a heating climate, and real opportunity from clean, cheap renewable power.
So, for example, going for a swim is a slightly perilous thing—we’re not really water-evolved creatures, and drowning is surprisingly easy. But swimming and sailing and waterskiing are great fun, and so we’ve figured out ways to lower the risk: We teach kids how to swim, we assign them swim buddies, we have lifeguards. As we learn more, we change those rules—my mother, for instance, was a devout believer in the conventional wisdom that required waiting half an hour (not a second less) after eating before you could jump in the pool, but it turns out that actual data shows that’s unnecessary. On the other hand, we understand a lot more about why you shouldn’t go in a lake with blue-green algae, and so we both close down beaches and try to clean up the pollution that causes it.
Camp’s not a perfect analogy for society, of course. Most of us are adults, and at least theoretically better equipped to make our own decisions, and the thing we’re most bent on maximizing is not fun but wealth (probably a mistake, but there it is). Still, unless we’re true libertarians we acknowledge the need to address risk and opportunity in some sensible fashion. Which we’re not doing at the moment. The huge budget bill that finally passed last week is a perfect example.
The Republicans who passed it—and this was an entirely Republican operation, stem to stern—clearly wanted to maximize the wealth of rich people: the most affluent 1% of families will receive a trillion dollars in new income. (This is the camp equivalent of giving almost all the s’mores to one or two kids). In return they were willing to embrace a wide variety of risks: not just the risks posed by a higher deficit in a time when we’re not at war or in recession, but the risk that comes from $930 billion in cuts to Medicaid. That will cause rural hospitals to close, for instance, making healthcare much harder to access and in the process surely endangering large numbers of lives. Or the 20% reduction in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program funding for food assistance, which will clearly raise the risk of people going hungry.
The only risk they really seemed to care about was violent crime by immigrants—that was the justification for tripling the Immigration and Customs Enforcement budget so we can have a quantum increase in the number of guys with neck gaiters shoving people into vans. This is not just immoral, it’s statistically dumb, the equivalent of waiting half an hour to swim: Immigrants are highly unlikely to be violent criminals compared with native-born Americans. If violent crime was your concern, you’d be better off deporting lots and lots of Americans and filling the returning planes with generally more peaceable immigrants. (But let’s don’t do that either).
And of course they’ve chosen to ignore one huge category of risk entirely—the risk (really at this point more a guarantee) that we’re going to damage in extraordinary ways the climate that sustains us. Consider Chip Roy, the congressman whose district was so damaged in the floods. He has been vehement in his opposition to subsidies or mandates or anything else that might help clean energy, and he has voted for everything that might help the fossil fuel industry. Let’s assume he’s acting in good faith, and not responding to the more than $671,788 in campaign contributions from the hydrocarbon industry. (Not perhaps a wise assumption, but it’s a day for acting in good faith). He’s expressed himself on this exact question of comparative risk, in a 2018 article in the San Antonio paper when he made his first run for Congress.
He explained that, in essence, he wanted to maximize the wealth and fun that came with hydrocarbons:
What I know is that our lives are made so immeasurably better by the availability of affordable, abundant energy.
And he said that he thought the risk was low, at least relative to the benefits of fossil fuels.
My belief is that the net positive impact of energy production relative to whatever the question-mark impact is on CO2 (carbon dioxide), to me, comes out very much on the positive.
Again, let’s take him in good faith. So—since 2018 two things have changed.
One is that it’s become ever more clear exactly how dangerous climate change is: Just in the past few days we’ve had a new report from the United Nations on how drought is devastating unprecedented swaths of the planet (“this is not a dry spell. This is a slow-moving global catastrophe, the worst I’ve ever seen,” one of its authors explained), had new data from the Antarctic on how rising salinity in the Southern Ocean is melting yet more polar ice (“we may have passed a tipping point and entered a new state defined by persistent sea ice decline, sustained by a newly discovered feedback loop”), and had firsthand accounts of life in the broiling European heatwave (“like swimming in soup.”)
The second thing that’s changed is that it is now far cheaper to use renewable energy than fossil fuels—the price of solar and wind has dropped almost 90% since that 2018 interview, and batteries that make them round-the-clock fuels are now cheap too. You know who realizes this? Energy regulators in Texas, where renewables are growing faster than anywhere in the country.
The famously developer-friendly Lone Star State has struggled to add new gas power plants lately, even after offering up billions of taxpayer dollars for a dedicated loan program to private gas developers. Solar and battery additions since last March average about 1 gigawatt per month, based on ERCOT’s figures, Texas energy analyst Doug Lewin said. In 2024, Texas produced almost twice as much wind and solar electricity as California.
When weather conditions align, the state’s abundant clean-energy resources come alive—and those conditions aligned last week amid sunny, windy, warm weather. On March 2 at 2:40 pm CST, renewables collectively met a record 76% of ERCOT demand.
Then, on Wednesday evening, solar production started to dip with the setting sun. More than 23,000 megawatts of thermal power plants were missing in action. Most of those were offline for scheduled repairs, but ERCOT data show that nearly half of all recent outages have been “forced,” meaning unscheduled.
At 6:15 pm CST, batteries jumped in and delivered more than 10% of ERCOT’s electricity demand—the first time they’ve ever crossed that threshold in the state.
“Batteries just don’t need the kind of maintenance windows that thermal plants do,” said Lewin, who authors The Texas Energy and Power Newsletter. “The fleet of thermal plants is pretty rickety and old at this point, so having the batteries on there, it’s not just a summertime thing or winter morning peak, they can bail us out in the spring, too.”
In other words, right there in Texas renewable power is the cheapest and most reliable way to have what Roy calls the “affordable, abundant energy” that makes our “lives so immeasurably better.” For me, these sets of facts should be enough. No honest person can deny there’s real danger from a heating climate, and real opportunity from clean, cheap renewable power (the rest of the world has clearly figured this out).
But either Roy hasn’t been paying attention to the new landscape, or those campaign contributions are too sweet, or the grip of ideology too strong. Roy not only voted to end all support for what he called, in a press release, the “Green New scam,” he also voted to close down the various programs of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service that even try to monitor the effects of climate change and warn us about emergencies like the weekend’s floods. (A good Times story reiterated something we talked about a few weeks ago in this newsletter: Many of the necessary posts at the relevant NWS offices were vacant). In summer camp terms, he and his colleagues fired the lifeguards and pulled in the buoy ropes that mark the safe place to swim, while declaring the buddy system to be socialism. Sink or swim on your own—even after the floods he called for “fewer bureaucrats” as the best response to the nightmare.
If an experience like this close to home won’t open his eyes, then we have to organize to make sure that people like him aren’t returned to office—both in an effort to help slow global warming, and, at this point, in an effort to help us survive what we can no longer avoid—an effort that will require solidarity, not the selfish solipsism that is the mark of MAGA.
Earth Day in 1970 turned into a (highly successful) drive six months later to defeat a ‘dirty dozen’ Congressmen. Hopefully the energy that comes out of SunDay in September will have something of the same effect. Our new poster came out today. Join in the effort at sunday.earth
Trump and Texas Republicans Show How Not to Prepare for the Climate Crisis
However, NWS provided accurate forecasts and warnings despite everything that Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE wrecking crew have been doing to impair the agency.
We sorely need a return to the Rooseveltian ideal of big government that works for working people, including by phasing out the fossil fuel industry and protecting us from increasingly frequent and severe storms, heatwaves, and wildfires.
That’s not to suggest that the Trump administration’s ill-advised cuts to the federal forecasting apparatus couldn’t have contributed to lethal havoc on the ground. Local NWS offices were missing key officials, which may have undermined swift and cohesive coordination between forecasters and local emergency managers.
Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization (the union representing NWS workers), told The New York Times that the agency’s San Angelo office, which covers many of the hardest-hit areas, was missing a senior hydrologist, staff forecaster, and a meteorologist-in-charge.
The nearby NWS office in San Antonio “also had significant vacancies, including a warning coordination meteorologist and science officer,” the Times reported. “Staff members in those positions are meant to work with local emergency managers to plan for floods, including when and how to warn local residents and help them evacuate.” The warning coordination meteorologist reportedly left on April 30, accepting the Trump administration’s early retirement offer. This runs counter to Trump’s weekend claim that his policies didn’t lead to vacancies.
In early May, CNN reported that 30 of NWS’ 122 weather forecast offices around the country were missing a meteorologist-in-charge. Former and current agency personnel made clear that the absence of chief meteorologists and other leaders could jeopardize timely communications between forecasters, the media, and local emergency managers.
Texas Officials Compounded Trump’s Recklessness
Making matters worse, Texas lawmakers earlier this year refused to pass a bill that would have improved local disaster warning systems. Rob Kelly, the top elected official in Kerr County, the flood-prone jurisdiction where most of the deaths have occurred, said that officials considered installing a warning system years ago but declined due to the purportedly high cost.
In the aftermath of increasingly common climate disasters, it becomes clear why, when someone asserts that investments in risk reduction are “expensive,” the response should be, “compared with what?”
According to The Guardian, “Questions are also being asked” about whether Kerr County officials “had approved development along the river bank that may have skirted rules issued by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that control where homes may be built in areas vulnerable to flooding.”
It should be noted here that advocates of the so-called abundance agenda, which we have warned is an attempt to launder unpopular neoliberal policies, have repeatedly held up Texas as a model to be emulated, implying that circumventing environmental regulations to build more housing is sound policy.
Similar Disasters Are Coming. Trump Must Be Held Accountable
Amid the flooding on July 4, Trump signed into law the GOP’s budget reconciliation bill, which will curtail clean energy and expand the fossil fuel combustion that supercharges extreme weather. A few days earlier, the Trump administration submitted a budget request to Congress that would eliminate all climate research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the parent agency of NWS.
On July 5, Trump approved Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) request for a major disaster declaration. While it remains to be seen, the federal response could be hobbled due to Trump and Musk’s ongoing war on FEMA.
In short, the Trump administration is simultaneously exacerbating climate change and eroding society’s ability to understand, prepare for, and respond to it. This is precisely the opposite of what should be happening right now.
The deadly Texas floods will not be the last manifestation of extreme weather turbocharged by fossil fuel pollution. In an era of escalating climate threats, we need a stronger public sector with more resources to mitigate risks, help people weather storms, and adapt for the future.
For too long, neoliberal Democrats have joined Republicans in bashing the government and calling for deregulation, austerity, and privatization. In February, Matthew Yglesias went so far as to encourage Democrats to “channel their inner DOGE,” portraying party elites’ abandonment of FDR’s New Deal politics—from Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton to Barack Obama—as a step in the right direction.
In fact, we sorely need a return to the Rooseveltian ideal of big government that works for working people, including by phasing out the fossil fuel industry and protecting us from increasingly frequent and severe storms, heatwaves, and wildfires.
In the meantime, congressional Democrats must not neglect their oversight duties. They ought to launch investigations and ruthlessly question the Trump administration’s culpability in the Texas flooding disaster.
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