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Inside the Shadowy Forum Trying (and Likely Failing) to Make Deep-Sea Mining Happen
The goal of an invitation-only event seemed to be to foster a shared belief among government officials and mining industry executives that deep-sea mining has a future. I’m not sure it worked.
Feb 06, 2026
In the chaotic aftermath of Snowmaggedon 2026, I snuck into the Offshore Critical Minerals Exploration and Development Forum at the famed Willard Hotel, known for hosting exclusive insider events and serving as a primary gathering spot for Washington DC’s “movers and shakers.” This event fit that mold—but with the growing secrecy of the deep-sea mining crowd added for extra flavor.
Hosted by the American Council for Capital Formation (ACCF), the goal of this invitation-only event seemed to be to foster a shared belief among government officials and mining industry executives that deep-sea mining has a future. I’m not sure it worked.
The Elephant Was Still in the Room
ACCF’s Michael Zehr set the tone early, making sure everyone understood that “we’re not here to discuss the ISA [International Seabed Authority] and UNCLOS [United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea].”
OK, look, I get it. I’m sure they had to promise that the agenda would steer clear of prickly issues of international law to get the Trump officials to show up. But it’s a bit delusional to assume that the US will just carry on with President Donald Trump’s plan to bypass the International Seabed Authority after Trump is gone, so avoiding this issue completely undermined the whole purpose of the gathering.
“This Is an Industry That Does Not Exist”
Not only does deep-sea mining not yet exist, as Ocean Minerals CEO Hans Smit pointed out, it is an industry that should not exist. Humanity does not have a very good track record when it comes to launching new extractive industries, as even the predictable consequences are often dwarfed by the impacts we didn’t fully see coming. But this was not the group of people who were going to pause for that kind of self-reflection.
Instead, the mining CEOs did their best to convince everyone that deep-sea mining is easy and definitely going to happen while simultaneously making excuses for why it might take a long time. The investors tried to politely raise some of their huge glaring concerns in a way that wouldn’t alarm the government officials. And the Trump administration officials waved away questions about whether future leaders are going to just pull the plug on Trump’s reckless approach. Throughout the day, speakers probably spent more time worrying about environmentalists than the environment, which I suppose was no surprise coming from this bunch.
“It Has Been Hard”
The speakers responsible for raising the capital to make DSM possible acknowledged that investors are not exactly jumping on this rusty bandwagon. Mining is right up there with tobacco, alcohol, pornography, and gambling for many investors, who categorically exclude financing industries that fail the vice clause screen. Even those who might be willing to overlook the environmental impacts or reputational risks have held back, apparently for two main reasons.
As someone who has worked closely with staff at NOAA, State, and other federal agencies for over 20 years, it was galling to see how completely captured these agencies have become by corporate interests.
First, deep-sea mining is fantastically expensive to get going, and so far no one is close to being ready to operate at commercial scale. No one wants to throw hundreds of millions of dollars into a venture that may well be headed for bankruptcy (again). Which is connected to the second big problem, which came up throughout the day: durability. This administration will be out of office well before commercial mining will be operational, and probably even before it can be permitted. Even Tim Petty, the assistant secretary of commerce, refused to speculate on whether the Trump administration could move fast enough to actually grant permits, looking visibly uncomfortable and just saying, “We’ll see.”
Sometimes, when they avoid the question, it is all the answer you need. Petty also ducked a question about the approach the administration will take to consultation with Pacific stakeholders, responding with a completely unrelated tangent. Then, when he was asked about a comment Rep. Ed Case (D-Hawaii) had just made at a congressional hearing, that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is in bed with The Metals Company, Petty preferred to recount that in his meeting with staffers, “None of the questions about the environment came up”—as if that was some sort of validation.
Open for Business
As someone who has worked closely with staff at NOAA, State, and other federal agencies for over 20 years, it was galling to see how completely captured these agencies have become by corporate interests. Don’t get me wrong, corporations have always had far too much influence over public policy, but hearing NOAA’s Deputy Assistant Secretary Erik Noble say repeatedly that “NOAA is open for business” does not exactly provide much assurance that the agency responsible for stewardship of our oceans is up to the task right now. The general message from NOAA and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) officials to mining execs was clear: We are on your side. Regulations and laws are flexible, money will flow, incentives are coming. Tell us what you need and we will make it happen. To drive the point home even harder, Megan Carr used the gathering as an opportunity to announce that BOEM was launching a new process to start paving the way for deep-sea mining on Alaska’s outer continental shelf.
The Echo Chamber
It was painful to sit through a day of delusional boosterism, especially from agencies that are responsible for protecting our oceans and America’s standing in the world. By the second half of the day, though, it was clear that there were hardly any “investors” in the room, and that the audience was mostly just made up of a rotating group of speakers talking to each other. Two-thirds of the seats were empty, and so, ultimately, was the promise of any real discussion when fundamental issues were off the table, speakers were unwilling to answer questions (from moderators only—no questions were ever taken from the audience), and people with other perspectives were not invited.
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Will Democrats Have the Courage to Blame Trump for Hurricane Deaths?
When a major hurricane kills hundreds or thousands of people made vulnerable by the Trump administration’s unprecedented assault on weather forecasting and disaster planning, Democrats shouldn’t hesitate to blame those casualties on Trump.
Aug 30, 2025
The United States dodged a bullet when Hurricane Erin veered away from its coastline. Put differently, we were lucky enough to survive another round in the game of Russian roulette that President Donald Trump is playing with our lives. But the next hurricane could be the loaded chamber. Or the one after that, and so on. On August 25, more than 180 Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) workers sounded the alarm, writing in an open letter that the Trump administration’s actions are putting us at risk of a Katrina-scale disaster. On August 26, dozens of those FEMA whistleblowers were placed on administrative leave.
When a major hurricane kills hundreds or thousands of people made vulnerable by the Trump administration’s unprecedented assault on weather forecasting and disaster planning, Democrats shouldn’t hesitate to blame those casualties on Trump, Elon Musk, and other Republican figures who are making preventable deaths inevitable. If they fail to hold Trump and his MAGA regime accountable, the president’s 2016 quip that he could “shoot somebody” and not “lose any voters” will sound even more prophetic than it already does. It sounded absurd when Trump first uttered it, and yet he keeps getting away with murder, in part due to Democrats’ self-defeating reluctance to punch fast, hard, and often.
Erin’s arrival served as a potent reminder, following a quiet June and July, that we’ve entered the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season. Meteorologists still expect a “slightly above-average probability” for major storms making landfall along the U.S. coastline and in the Caribbean for the remainder of the season, which lasts until the end of November. Just before Erin became this year’s first Atlantic hurricane, forecasters predicted 12 more named storms—including eight hurricanes, three of which were projected to be “major,” i.e., category 3 or higher—over the next few months. Historically, hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin picks up from August through mid-October. That’s the time frame when Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, Harvey, Irma, Maria, Ida, Ian, Helene, and Milton—and many more besides—struck.
Thankfully, Erin didn’t hit the U.S. mainland, though its passage through the Caribbean knocked out electricity for nearly 150,000 people in Puerto Rico. Even as Erin remained offshore, the powerful and remarkably wide hurricane generated life-threatening surf and rip currents along the entire Eastern Seaboard, prompting storm alerts of various kinds in 15 states, from Florida to Maine. Coastal flooding was particularly severe in North Carolina and New Jersey.
Erin transformed from a tropical storm into a Category 5 hurricane in roughly 24 hours—making it one of the most rapidly intensifying cyclones ever—before eventually weakening as it moved north and east. Erin exemplifies an increasingly common kind of storm—one turbocharged by two centuries of unmitigated planet-heating pollution driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. The hurricane’s rapid intensification was propelled by unusually warm ocean waters, which are a consequence of rising global greenhouse gas emissions. Through their ongoing war on climate research and clean energy, Trump and congressional Republicans—bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry—have ensured that more heat-trapping gasses will be pushed into the atmosphere while fewer scientists and regulators will be around to monitor, let alone mitigate, the impacts.
We’re due for seven more hurricanes, including two big ones, over the next dozen weeks or so. That means Trump’s FEMA, which admitted internally in May that it was unprepared for hurricane season, is beefing up its disaster response capacities, right? No. Instead, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been forcibly reassigning FEMA employees to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in a bid to bolster Trump’s cruel push to terrorize, detain, and deport as many migrants as possible.
A federal judge recently ordered the closure of Trump’s sadistic immigration jail in the Everglades within 60 days (two cheers for environmental review!), but if a hurricane hits Florida before then, it would likely be a mass casualty event; one suspects that this is what Trump, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, White House adviser Stephen Miller, and other fascists want. Noem’s efforts to prevent disaster aid from reaching undocumented immigrants underscores why disaster experts have long advocated for reestablishing FEMA as an independent, Cabinet-level agency free from DHS interference.
Meanwhile, the National Weather Service (NWS) has been scrambling to hire back hundreds of workers pushed out months ago by Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). These developments—really just the tip of the iceberg—epitomize the Trump administration’s utter disregard for the lives of people who will be harmed by severe weather, which is destined to grow in frequency and intensity thanks to the GOP megabill signed into law by Trump, and other reactionary White House moves.
It’s incredibly fortunate that no hurricanes have made landfall in the U.S. so far this year. That’s because the Trump administration’s wide-ranging attacks on federal and state officials’ capacity to understand, prepare for, withstand, and recover from extreme weather events have dramatically increased the likelihood of mass harm. But this serendipity is all but guaranteed to end soon, and when it does, many people will die needlessly. When that happens, will Democrats have the guts to blame Trump and his Republican accomplices?
Congressional Progressive Chair Greg Casar (D-TX) probably will. Last month, he secured an independent investigation into how Trump’s gutting of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) may have undermined the response to deadly floods in central Texas that began on July 4. Last week, Casar and Rep. Joe Neguse (D-CO) introduced bills to reverse Trump’s gutting of FEMA and NOAA, respectively. Given that Republicans control both chambers of Congress and the White House, this legislation has a near-zero chance of being enacted. However, it does offer good messaging opportunities if a critical mass of Democrats consistently raise hell about Trump’s myopic cuts—before, during, and after potential calamities.
Casar is an exception. The Democratic Party’s generalized timidity in the wake of the Trump administration’s abysmal response to the Texas flooding disaster does not inspire confidence. Democratic leaders’ hesitancy to politicize disasters—that is, to hold relevant decision-makers accountable for creating the conditions for catastrophe—was also evident last fall in Kamala Harris and Tim Walz’s refusal to connect the dots between right-wing policymaking and the devastation of Helene and Milton. This is a dynamic that has to change; for the sake of our collective future, Trump’s critics must make Republicans loyal to Trump pay a political price for routinely putting Americans in harm’s way—and prematurely ending some of our lives.
It’s impossible to overstate how much damage Trump has done in just seven months. For an in-depth exploration of the lethal consequences of the administration’s war on NOAA and FEMA, see our new report, Trump’s Homicidal Hurricane Policy.
As hurricane season kicks into full gear, the adverse impacts of the Trump administration’s mutilation of NOAA are still coming into view, but we know they will be cumulative and devastating. Last month, in its first big test, Trump’s hollowed-out FEMA failed miserably. I’m referring, of course, to the administration’s inept response to the early July floods in Central Texas, which killed more than 130 people and provided tragic confirmation that dismantling the agency is a grave mistake.
During his July 23 testimony before a House committee, Acting FEMA Director David Richardson, who waited nine days to visit Texas, called the Trump administration’s response a “model of how disasters should be handled.” Richardson’s outlandishly positive interpretation of events is diametrically opposed to the candid assessment of an on-the-ground FEMA worker, who warned that “if this is how they are going to do a major hurricane response, people are fucked.”
Democrats Should Be Ready to Pounce
Today, August 29 marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall. Experts warned weeks ago that Trump and Musk’s war on NOAA and FEMA has left the United States ill-prepared for another storm of that magnitude. Scores of FEMA workers raised the alarm again on August 25 and were summarily disciplined.
Let’s imagine that, sometime in the next few months, the Gulf Coast or the Atlantic Coast is hit by one massive category 5 hurricane, or perhaps the country endures two big storms back-to-back. This isn’t hard to envision; last October, Milton hammered Florida just days after Helene rocked North Carolina. Last time Trump was in the White House, in 2017, Harvey, Irma, and Maria devastated Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico, respectively, in the span of a few weeks.
Now imagine if, as numerous communities are inundated in the wake of a hurricane, several new wildfires break out across the drought-stricken West, and another deadly heat wave envelops tens of millions of people around the country. Then the mortal consequences of ripping our already-threadbare disaster preparedness and response infrastructure to shreds will become even more painfully evident. As risks compound and failures cascade (e.g., hospitals flood and flames engulf toxic superfund sites), Trump’s madness will become even clearer. But this will only matter politically if people make a big deal of everything the Trump administration and Musk’s DOGE vandals are doing to increase the odds of preventable suffering and death.
The question is whether Democrats will capitalize on Trumpified disasters, in a way that echoes how FDR and his allies made Herbert Hoover infamous for his woefully inadequate response to the Great Depression. Sharp political rhetoric (e.g., Hoovervilles) and, more importantly, popular New Deal policies that improved people’s lives in sharp contrast to Republicans’ destructive market fundamentalist model, discredited the GOP and led to two generations of Keynesian hegemony. The task at hand requires going beyond one-off denunciations; it would entail months- or years-long campaigns to villainize specific officials and policies responsible for causing preventable suffering while offering just alternatives.
It’s worth noting that the worst-case scenario might not materialize this year. While the attacks I summarized in Trump’s Homicidal Hurricane Policy have already unleashed significant damage, the long-term consequences of his actions will become clearer over time; unfortunately, things are poised to get even worse moving forward.
Recall that Trump said he plans to “phase out” FEMA after this year’s hurricane season. An April 12 memo from then-Acting FEMA Administrator Charles Hamilton discussed how Trump could make it tougher for communities to qualify for federal disaster assistance. The memo suggested quadrupling the damage threshold a state would need to meet to qualify for public assistance, and it also recommended keeping the federal cost share for disaster recovery from surpassing 75 percent. An Urban Institute analysis found that if these proposed changes had been in effect, 71 percent of major disasters declared from 2008 to 2024 would not have qualified, and state and local governments would have missed out on $41 billion in aid. Hamilton’s “Abolish FEMA” memo, shared on March 25, outlined other ways to shrink the federal government’s role in disaster response.
Despite being directly responsible for delaying the response to the deadly Texas floods, Noem still had the gall to criticize FEMA for being “slow to respond at the federal level,” adding that “this entire agency needs to be eliminated as it exists today, and remade into a responsive agency.” But it appears that what the Trump administration has in mind is still a devolution of responsibility to state and local officials, even though only the federal government is capable of coordinating effective disaster mitigation and response efforts. It will be important to keep a close eye on the forthcoming recommendations from the FEMA review council, which is “doing Trump’s bidding” to dismantle the agency, according to Shana Udvardy, senior climate resilience policy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The Texas flooding disaster doesn’t appear to have changed Trump’s mind about gutting NOAA. In May, OMB Director Russell Vought requested a roughly 25 percent cut to NOAA’s budget for fiscal year 2026, which begins on October 1. The White House’s proposal would wipe out nearly all of the agency’s earth system science and shutter world-class climate research offices around the country. A more detailed proposal released at the end of June shed additional light on the catastrophic scale of the Trump administration’s plans.
As meteorologist Michael Lowry explained, Trump’s budget would eliminate “all federally funded meteorological, oceanographic, and climate labs and non-profit cooperative research institutes across America.” The proposed cuts would shut down “Miami’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory and its Hurricane Research Division, institutions responsible for most of the advancements in hurricane forecasting and science over the past 50 years,” Lowry lamented. “With the proposed shuttering of AOML, HRD, and their sister cooperative institutes starting in 2026, forecasters could lose all tools currently available to estimate and forecast hurricane intensity,” he added. “It’s a seismic blow to the arsenal of tools forecasters rely on to confidently deliver timely and accurate predictions of threatening hurricanes.”
Also on the chopping block is NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma. Jeff Masters pointed out that the closure of this lab, opened in 1964, would “significantly degrade our ability to improve flash flood forecasting,” meaning more calamities of the sort we saw recently in Texas.
To date, congressional appropriations committees have largely rejected the draconian cuts sought by Trump and Vought. The spending bill advanced by House lawmakers would still reduce NOAA’s budget by 6 percent, a detrimental and unnecessary blow, while the version advanced by the relevant Senate panel would fund NOAA at nearly the same level as 2025. Nevertheless, the Republican-led rescissions package that Trump signed into law last month included deleterious cuts. About $60 million in unspent money for atmospheric, climate, and weather research was rescinded at the request of the Senate Commerce Committee chaired by Ted Cruz (R-TX). In addition, thanks to GOP lawmakers, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting can no longer administer the $136 million Next Generation Warning System grant program, which helps public radio and TV stations improve their emergency alert systems to warn people of severe weather.
Moreover, the Trump administration is already achieving significant cuts by refusing to spend money that Congress approved for this fiscal year. As Science reported on August 25, “some $1 billion in spending for the current year may still be sitting on [Howard] Lutnick’s desk,” awaiting the Commerce Secretary’s approval. “The agency has no plans to spend all of that money by the fiscal year’s end on 30 September—if ever.” According to Science, the Trump administration is set to spend $100 million less on NOAA’s research arm this year than Congress intended, a 14 percent cut. Other divisions have seen similar cuts, especially those offices doing climate-related work. Meanwhile, the White House has begun canceling contracts for next-generation weather satellites that were supposed to launch next decade.
Frankly, any extreme weather disasters that happen in the foreseeable future will have Trump’s bloody fingerprints on them, so thorough and devastating has his dismantling of our disaster policy apparatus—from climate research to weather forecasting to emergency planning—been.
We live in an era of climate breakdown. Even if planet-heating pollution ceases tomorrow, the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases is so high that increasingly frequent and severe extreme weather is, to a certain extent, already locked-in. That said, every tenth of a degree of warming that we can avoid makes a positive difference, and so too do just adaptation initiatives. But rather than minimize hazards—through rapid decarbonization and robust investments in the social safety net, including green infrastructure—Republicans are actively aggravating an already-grim situation. Democrats aren’t talking enough about this. That’s a mistake.
This is a longstanding problem. Harris and Walz, for example, missed a golden opportunity after Helene and Milton, which occurred in the weeks leading up to the 2024 election. Trump, Musk, Hamilton, and other Republicans filled the void with lies about FEMA, sowing mistrust to gain buy-in for getting rid of the agency. We urged Harris to use the hurricanes to tell “a compelling story about the escalating and deeply intertwined climate, housing, and insurance crises that might resonate with voters of all stripes.”
That would necessarily entail denouncing fossil fuel-corrupted Republicans for obstructing a clean energy transition and thwarting investments in disaster risk reduction. It would also mean sketching, and committing to pursue, a humane agenda that prioritizes public well-being over private profit. Something like directly creating living wage jobs to achieve the universal provision of zero- or low-carbon public goods—including green social housing, clean energy, mass transit, and educational, recreational, and artistic infrastructure. That’s the kind of transformative vision that might begin to turn the tide.
Disasters offer untapped opportunities for political education and organizing. Survivors are in dire need of just responses, which includes intervening to prevent future harm. Those put off by the idea of politicking in the wake of disasters should consider that when someone like Trump White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt or Texas Gov. Abbott (R) says that assigning blame is inappropriate, they are emulating the NRA, which insists, after dozens of schoolchildren are mowed down by someone wielding an AR-15, that it’s not the “right time” to push for gun control. Now is the right time to advocate for change. If Democrats at all levels, including state and local officials, don’t connect the dots between fossil fuel expansion, attacks on weather forecasting, and avoidable deaths when a catastrophe is at the front of people’s minds, it will fade from view and the fatal insanity will continue.
We’re not dealing with strictly “natural disasters.” That phrase obscures all of the decisions that societies make—or don’t make—before, during, and after bouts of severe weather. It conveys, in an apolitical manner, that deadly storms are inevitable, or “acts of God.” To be clear, certain environmental phenomena are inescapable, though their frequency and intensity is another matter. Still, whether natural hazards generate catastrophic outcomes depends largely on political choices about how society is organized. The Trump administration makes clear the need to denaturalize disasters—to convey the political, economic, and social forces that produce them. Today’s unnatural disasters are inseparable from planet-heating pollution and the destruction of public good-oriented government. They are neoliberal climate disasters; our future hinges on our ability to politicize them.
As long as our society fails to confront and reverse the reckless policy choices that are increasing the likelihood, scale, and unequal impacts of every hurricane, heat wave, etc., things will only get worse. Today’s tragedies—they’re really crimes perpetuated by fossil fuel executives and magnified by those who attack public goods and elevate “personal responsibility” over social solidarity—will be repeated tomorrow.
In essence, rather than adapt to our climate-changed present and future, the Trump administration is choosing to exacerbate cataclysms. To win back the working class, Democrats could try explaining how Republican policies are endangering communities around the country while making life more expensive. Anger at elites is through the roof. If Democrats want to beat back right-wing authoritarianism, which is at odds with a livable future, they should embrace green economic populism. Green New Deal policies aimed at simultaneously lowering prices and planet-wrecking emissions (e.g., decommodifying and decarbonizing housing, transportation, and other essentials) remain popular. Trying something genuinely new—not the false promise of neo-neoliberalism being promoted by corporate-backed abundance advocates—is more than worthwhile; it’s an existential necessity.
Herein lies a big problem. Without equating the two major parties, it’s undeniable that a substantial chunk of contemporary Democrats remain wedded to an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy that ultimately privileges fossil fuels. And too many of them are committed, like their Republican counterparts, to advancing the interests of a minority of super-wealthy benefactors rather than the vast majority of working people. Thus, while even corporate Democrats may be willing to condemn attacks on clean energy and cuts to NOAA and FEMA, that doesn’t mean they’ll go to bat for the ambitious pollution- and inequality-slashing policies we actually need.
One downside to focusing so intently on the culpability of Trump and other Republicans is that it overlooks systemic sources of our unjust and precarious status quo, namely five decades of largely bipartisan neoliberalization. Neoliberals from both parties have inflicted widespread pain by attacking unions, corporate taxes, the welfare state, and myriad regulations—all of which has intensified inequality and left people vulnerable and ecosystems insufficiently protected. At the same time, Trump and DOGE represent the apotheosis of neoliberalism, understood as using state power to facilitate the upward transfer of wealth. Unlike Republicans, a growing but insufficient number of Democrats are supportive of organized labor and progressive taxation and critical of deregulation, austerity, and privatization. Our call to focus on the deadly effects of Trump’s extraordinarily aggressive assault on the federal workers who keep us safe is an invitation for Democrats to abandon the neoliberal project once and for all, and to embrace a pro-labor, pro-environment, and downwardly redistributive alternative.
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Roll up Your Sleeves for Climate Resilience Summer
These are efforts that we can all join in and support, becoming part of the solution and adding to the abundance in our own communities.
Aug 07, 2025
We are now in what we used to call the “dog days of summer”—the hottest, steamiest, sultriest days of the year. As a child, I looked forward to these days of playtime outdoors, eating what we called “cool pops” aka popsicles and watermelon, and catching fireflies at dusk. Now, I wake every day to look at alarming headlines of a planet at boiling point. And the worst part is that it takes square aim at Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color.
Each year, we’ve seen climate change produce hurricane and fire seasons that are more intense and less predictable. And this year, the government infrastructure that is supposed to help us prepare and respond to those impacts—including the Federal Emergency Management Agency and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—was hollowed out before the season even started.
Still, in all of this scarcity, I bring an abundance mindset to my work as the leader of The Solutions Project. We are a public foundation that works to solve the climate crisis by reallocating resources to grassroots communities. We believe that the people closest to the pain understand the problems the best. Thus, they are closer to the solutions. There is power at the front lines, and that power is abundant.
When I invoke “abundance,” I am coming from a Black, feminist, Southern perspective. My abundance eschews wealth inequality and materialism in favor of community, care, and interdependence. It rejects competition and thrives in collaboration. In this abundance, we recognize, celebrate, and tend to the bounty of the Earth just as we care for each other. In this abundance, there is no need to hoard resources and no need to “other” anyone because there is room for everyone.
None of us can survive this alone, but we can thrive together.
It’s the abundance that I learned from my grandmother in Mississippi who grew collard and mustard greens, the largest red tomatoes, juicy melons, crunchy cucumbers, and more. When it was time to harvest her crops, she shared with families in her community. I learned it from our church potlucks where everyone brought a dish—like macaroni and cheese, pound cake, or potato salad—and everyone went home with full bellies and leftovers. I learned it when I overheard Mr. Jones tell Mr. Williams, “I’ll do your taxes, if you fix my car.” Or when I saw neighbors carpooling to the grocery store or driving each other’s kids to school. Abundance was everywhere.
Even though the climate crisis creates real limits on resources, I see this abundance at work every day through The Solutions Project’s grantees. To date, we’ve supported over 350 grassroots organizations across the country, with a segment of them cultivating “resilience hubs” in their communities. These are trusted spaces that are a part of the existing local infrastructure such as churches, community centers, and libraries—and they work together to support the community before, during, and after climate disasters. These folks are pushing forward with this work even in the midst of drastic federal funding cuts and manufactured chaos.
For example, West Street Recovery’s hub house in Houston and The SMILE Trust’s hub house in Miami have proven invaluable in the face of storms that have become more intense and unpredictable due to climate change. These homes provide food, shelter, and backup generators in the face of devastating storms or power outages and facilitate neighbors meeting and helping each other out.
Resilience hubs are a collective response, representing a groundswell of people and organizations and businesses working together. They are also hyperlocal, which allows them to adjust to the local context and needs. What works in a large city in California, for example, might not work in rural South Carolina. That collective response is what creates a vibrant, thriving, energized culture in each individual community. This is the “abundance” approach that will help us thrive and take care of each other through this crisis.
These are efforts that we can all join in and support, becoming part of the solution and adding to the abundance in our own communities. Whatever your skills and talents are—growing, cooking, fixing, creating—they are needed in your community now. It’s important that we get off our screens and into our streets because local solutions are often the most powerful. None of us can survive this alone, but we can thrive together.
This builds on the type of support systems that my ancestors created in the wake of Emancipation and into Reconstruction. They organized themselves and pooled their resources to help one another survive the horrors this country inflicted on them. Even in the teeth of such violent oppression, they believed in interdependence, interconnection, relationship, and community. Abundance, for communities of color, is a tradition.
This August, I’ll be spending time at my altar, as I often do to commemorate days of Black and Indigenous resistance and celebration. I will say a prayer and light a candle. I will pour libations and put out offerings of fruit to honor my ancestors. I will thank them for their fortitude, their sacrifices, and, of course, their vision and practice of abundance.
I invite Black, Indigenous, other communities of color, and all frontline communities to share the traditions that are important to you and your families, as part of our Stronger Together campaign. We encourage us all to go back to our elders and recover generational wisdom and rituals that may be at risk of getting lost. It can be something as simple as planting trees or maintaining a phone tree (even if you didn’t call it that.) The more that we share, the stronger we become.
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'Graveyard of Corals': Bleaching Led to Great Barrier Reef's Worst Die-Off on Record
"We will ultimately get to a tipping point where coral cover can't bounce back," warned one researcher. "We have to mitigate the root causes of the problem and reduce emissions and stabilize temperatures."
Aug 06, 2025
After last year's climate-fueled bleaching in Australia's famed Great Barrier Reef, large swaths of the GBR suffered the worst coral die-off since records began, a government report revealed Wednesday, prompting renewed calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions as well as reef conservation and restoration.
The GBR "experienced unprecedented levels of heat stress, which caused the most spatially extensive and severe bleaching recorded to date," the Australian Institute of Marine Science's (AIMS) annual report states.
AIMS studied the health of 124 coral reefs between August 2024 and May 2025 and found that northern and southern branches of the approximately 1,400-mile (2,300 km) GBR suffered the "largest annual decline in coral cover" ever recorded since monitoring began nearly 40 years ago.
Data collected last year from aerial surveys showed that 75% of the GBR had been bleached amid record heat driven by the worsening climate emergency. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warned in March 2024 that the bleaching would likely be the worst the world had ever seen.
The new report confirmed that "the 2024 event had the largest spatial footprint ever recorded on the GBR, with high to extreme bleaching prevalence observed across all three regions" of the GBR.
According to AIMS:
In 2025, hard coral cover declined substantially across the GBR, although considerable coral cover remains in all three regions. Regional declines ranged between 14% and 30% compared to 2024 levels, with some individual reefs experiencing coral declines of up to 70.8%. These declines are primarily attributed to coral mortality from the 2024 mass coral bleaching event, compounded by the cumulative impacts of two cyclones in December 2023 and January 2024, freshwater inundation, and some crown-of-thorns starfish activity.
In 2025, 48% of surveyed reefs underwent a decline in percentage coral cover, 42% showed no net change, and only 10% had an increase. Reefs with stable or increasing coral cover were predominantly located in the central GBR.
Scientists described the resulting seascape as a "graveyard of corals."
AIMS research lead Mike Emslie told Agence France-Presse that the "number one cause" of GBR coral decline "is climate change."
"There is no doubt about that," Emslie added.
The problem is by no means limited to the GBR. A mass global bleaching event has devastated more than 80% of the world's coral reefs over the past two years, affecting 82 countries and territories.
Prior to the current die-off, the last major GBR bleaching event occurred in 2014-17, when scientists said nearly one-third of its coral died and approximately 15% of all reefs worldwide experienced major coral deaths.
"These impacts we are seeing are serious and substantial and the bleaching events are coming closer and closer together," Emslie said in a separate interview with The Guardian.
"We will ultimately get to a tipping point where coral cover can't bounce back because disturbances come so quickly that there's no time left for recovery," he warned. "We have to mitigate the root causes of the problem and reduce emissions and stabilize temperatures."
AIMS called for greater global efforts to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions fueling planetary heating, "continued good local management," and more interventions "to help corals adapt and recover."
Larissa Waters, leader of the Australian Greens and a federal senator representing Queensland, on Monday urged the governing Labor Party to "follow the science, set 2035 targets at net-zero, stop new coal and gas, or risk losing our reef, its immense biodiversity, and the 60,000 jobs it sustains."
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Trump's Big New Law Is a Disaster for the Big Blue Sea
A policy expert explains why the budget reconciliation bill will harm the ocean and attempts to protect and understand it.
Jul 31, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump is not a fan of sharks or the ocean. From gutting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, to seeking the expansion of offshore oil drilling and deep-sea mining while attacking wind energy, his view of our public seas is that they'll make a good gas station and garbage dump. And, this view is reflected in his major legacy bill recently passed into law by the MAGA majority in Congress.
But there's been little discussion about how this bill will impact our public seas. So, we (Vicki Nichols Goldman and myself) spoke with George Leonard, former chief scientist with the Ocean Conservancy and an ocean policy consultant about what's going on:
George Leonard (GL): I am a marine scientist by training. I got a master's in marine science and then a PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology and have for 25 years worked on the interface between science and policy. I think many of the moves made by the Trump administration are counter to good public policy and put the ocean at great risk.
David Helvarg (DH): George, during the first Trump administration, his focus seemed to be on opening it up for offshore drilling.
GL: Yeah, I think that's right. Now, on the one hand, it (the Trump administration's new ocean policy) feels disjointed, unorganized, and without a broader strategy. And yet if you then actually try to focus in on what's happening, it seems to be quite deliberate. The attacks on science and knowledge seem to be comprehensive and unrelenting. And that's really troubling, right? It's troubling for a whole generation of upcoming scientists, undergraduates, graduate students, you know, postdocs, people who are just getting started and having the legs cut out from underneath them. And then you combine that with a real disdain for anything related to renewable energy. Obviously, the ocean has a huge role to play in renewable energy.
Vicki Nichols Goldstein (VNG): I'm looking at the bill, and it's astounding that he is proposing a $2.2 billion reduction in NOAA's overall funding.
GL: By one account that I've seen there's 18 different line items, program areas that NOAA focuses on, and 11 of the 18 aren't just cut, they're terminated, like 100% reduction. The remaining (programs) experience a cut of between 20-60%. I mean, there's a lot of narrative around efficiency and (cutting) fraud and waste. But I have yet to see anything that supports these levels of cuts, certainly not in the NOAA space.
DH: And now they're doing major changes to the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which has gotten America close to sustainable commercial fishing in federal waters. Fishermen can't be happy with that. Also, abolishing the Coastal Zone Management Act? That's every coastal state working in coordination with the feds to do good planning. What are some of the other really egregious things you saw coming out of this quote "Big Beautiful Bill"?
GL: I kept calling it the reconciliation bill because I refuse to call it the "big beautiful bill." Some I've heard call it the "big ugly bill." But look, the first thing that I think is really troubling is (getting rid of) the Ocean Observatories Initiative, right? That's a bunch of basic research and scientists working on a whole range of ocean-related science. Climate obviously is a big part of that, but also understanding the role of habitats and the importance of biodiversity and fisheries. That's entirely slated to be cut. I don't know how you pursue any kind of science-based work if you're going to reduce that to zero.
DH: That includes 10 laboratories working on climate and weather.
GL: That's right: 10 individual facilities that are to be closed. But the other big science-related piece for NOAA that many folks probably don't know they have is a big ocean observing system where there are literally high-tech buoys and devices deployed both in coastal waters and in offshore waters. They take the temperature, the pulse if you will, of the ocean and by my latest look, this is also slated for termination.
DH: And one of those ocean observing impacts is that it warns people when there are harmful algal blooms, when red tides are coming into Florida for example, when the beaches are going to be shut down. That warning system is gone. The public's being told, "Go swim at your own risk."
VNG: Or eat shellfish without knowing…
GL: Yes, harmful algal blooms can make water unfit to swim in. But they also have big impacts on the shellfish that we eat. And I know shellfish poisoning is nothing to laugh at. It can be extremely dangerous.
DH: I once interviewed a fisheries enforcement agent who demonstrated the effects of paralytic shellfish poisoning. He grabbed his throat and swelled up his tongue in his mouth and started gagging and flopping around on his desk very realistically. That guy's probably been laid off under this plan.
GL: Probably. You know there are other specific aspects of NOAA that are likewise being hobbled here. One is their ocean acidification program. You know burning fossil fuels is doing two things to the ocean. It's making the ocean hotter, and it's making the ocean more acidic. About 90% of the heat generated by climate change from burning fossil fuels ends up in the ocean and along with warming, it's also making the ocean more acidic. And that's simply because CO2 dissolves in water, and NOAA has spearheaded that work and done a lot of work with coastal shellfish farmers and others to address this issue, and that work (with the aquaculture industry) is being cut as well.
VNG: You think about acidification, what's so important is that you need those calcium carbonate ions, and with acidification, they're being reduced. And so, when you think about oysters and muscles and crabs and clams needing that material as basic building blocks, we're looking at enormous hits to the ocean's productivity.
DH: And people's livelihoods. The shellfish industry has become the indicator species for ocean acidification.
GL: And some of the biggest champions to address the broader issue of climate change and how it relates to ocean acidification have been shellfish farmers, particularly shellfish farmers on the West Coast and in the Pacific Northwest.
DH: Now Trump's pushing deep-sea mining, and yet they've terminated NOAA's Ocean Exploration and Research division, which is all about exploring the deep ocean and understanding the places where they want to go and exploit it.
GL: There's all kinds of things like that that don't make sense. There was an executive order (from Trump) a while back about promoting U.S. aquaculture, and yet there's a cut to the (NOAA) aquaculture program in the reconciliation bill. So, what is that? Do we want to support aquaculture or do we want to undermine it? There doesn't seem to be a lot of consistency there.
VNG: It just seems so challenging to follow the logic with this budget.
DH: It's almost vindictive, without logic, taking a chainsaw to places that may need scalpels or may in fact need to be expanded. Most people hearing about the bill are only hearing about it in terms of, "It'll add $3 or $4 trillion to the budget deficit" or "It will take Medicaid away from 12 million people and give tax benefits to the rich." But there's much more there. Like it will also impact our public seas in these many different ways that we're talking about. The Ocean used to be a bipartisan issue.
GL: Yeah, and there've been great examples of bipartisan work in the U.S. on oceans and fisheries and other issues. But when you look at the voting on this bill, it's pretty astounding. I mean, it's hard to ignore the fact that all the Democrats voted against it, and pretty much all the Republicans with a handful of exceptions, voted for it (passing it into law).
VNG: Well, I think we really need to engage with people who care about these issues. When people start linking up national, federal decisions with their own livelihoods, I think that's when people will start realizing, "Hmm, maybe there's an opportunity in the next election cycle to change what's happening."
GL: And of course, the great irony here is that NOAA had an Office of Education, which also is fully terminated. So whatever education and outreach and conversation is going to happen (around the ocean), it doesn't look like it's going to be led by NOAA, at least in the short term.
DH: No, and look at what we're seeing in other frontline agencies. I mean, the Environmental Protection Agency under Trump, they're pushing to shift the market away from a clean energy transition and back to fossil fuels. They are promoting keeping coal-fired power plants open, which is a major source of mercury in tuna. Mercury out of the smoke stacks that precipitates onto the ocean and into the food web. It's crazy. We're literally at a point where market forces favor a transition to cleaner, cheaper energy, including offshore wind, and they're trying to use their political power to shift that balance back to offshore oil and the burning of coal while denying climate science.
If climate change and pollution and biodiversity loss are the big things that we as a society need to be worried about, both here in the U.S. and around the world, the question is, does this bill make any of those better or worse?
I mean democracies don't guarantee environmental improvement, but that never happens under dictatorships. You need to have democracy in order to have good environmental policy. And so, there's this larger issue: Are we moving away from democracy and is that why we're seeing these irrational power- and vengeance-driven attacks on our public seas?
GL: That's the $64,000 question, David. I don't have a great answer for that one. I'm really just a lowly marine scientist by training, but I do think those are important questions for us to ask and it certainly seems like the evidence, at least now, is pointing in that direction. You know, you were talking about renewable energy versus fossil fuels. Maybe we should acknowledge one very small win in the legislative process here. There was part of the bill that was going to put additional taxes on offshore wind and other renewable technologies that was stripped out of the final version of the bill. And what remains is the tax incentives that are the remainder of the Inflation reduction Act from the Biden administration that will not expire until 2027.
It's a minor win, but one I think that was hard fought for and all of these minor improvements that made the big bad bill less bad is because of advocates and public leaders in Congress and folks like yourselves who are bringing these issues to everybody's attention.
VNG: I want to go back to our national marine sanctuaries program, something that's vital for protecting critical habitats and species and yet they're cutting this program by 60%. And that also includes our national monuments (in the ocean). And you are living adjacent to the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, so how do you feel these impacts are going to affect recovery?
GL: It's super disheartening. It's the underwater equivalent of our national park system, right? America's greatest idea, but underwater. You know, I grew up in Massachusetts and I remember seeing little sea urchins and teeny little plants and a couple of small fish, and I just thought this was the coolest thing. Then I came to California and flopped into a kelp forest out here, and it just blew my mind away. And I was spellbound, right? And, I realized pretty quickly that that kelp forest was just an example of what was in the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, which was a testament to just the incredible biodiversity and the amazing habitats that we have here.
So, it's really tough to think about what might be the future of that with a sanctuary office that's going to lose its superintendent and employees and people that I went to graduate school with who have made this their life, protecting the coastal ocean here. I've heard, you know, that they're only going to maintain the buoys in the sanctuaries through this bill and cease all on-water operations, which I'm still not sure what that means. I assume that means any kind of research, and they've also made a statement that they're no longer going to consider any new sanctuaries.
Now the National Marine Sanctuaries Act (the law) has a whole process by which new sanctuaries can be nominated and debated. And they're going to shut the door on any future sanctuaries? I think that's a real disservice to the legislation and to the public's ability to identify places that they want to see protected.
DH: So, George, in terms of looking at what the administration is doing with this new bill, what are the two or three ocean impacts that you think the marine conservation community should be focusing on and educating the public around?
GL: If we kind of step way back for a second, why is this a problem for the ocean? It's important to recognize what are the three big threats right now to ocean health.
In very simplistic terms, what's happening is that we're putting too much stuff into the ocean and we're taking too much stuff out of the ocean. So, we're putting in too much carbon, we're putting in too much plastic, we're putting in too many other pollutants, and we're basically taking out too many fish because there is still a global overfishing crisis.
And so, the United Nations has framed this up as sort of a triple planetary crisis where we have climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss as three separate but connected problems. And they need to be individually addressed, but they also need to be addressed in an integrative way because the ocean is one big connected system.
If climate change and pollution and biodiversity loss are the big things that we as a society need to be worried about, both here in the U.S. and around the world, the question is, does this bill make any of those better or worse? And I think it's not hard to make the argument that for all three of those problems, this bill makes them worse.
DH: And I'd just add that if you love the ocean, you have to love democracy too. And you have to fight like hell to turn the tide here.
GL: Absolutely. This is not a time to give up. I just saw a headline this morning that some of the Republicans have already started to push back a bit on some of the NOAA impacts largely because of advocacy from members of the public. So, you know, while the bill passed and was signed on July 4, we are still, I think, in the early days of what this is actually going to mean on the water. And we need to keep focused on that.
VNG: Looking for more opportunities for the public to get our voices out there and to make sure that we go out and vote and keep the ocean as a priority.
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The Texas Floods Are an Object Lesson in Why We Need Well-Funded Public Services
Public services can prevent and mitigate disasters, but they’re being prevented from doing so by politicians like President Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.
Jul 16, 2025
Growing up in Texas, many of my summers were spent at summer church camps just like Camp Mystic, where 27 girls died in the recent flash floods. Over 130 people in central Texas have been confirmed dead overall.
Had I been just a few years younger, it’s hard not to feel like I could’ve been one of those girls tragically lost. But this tragedy was no “natural” disaster—it was political.
Texans have gotten used to “unprecedented” natural disasters. When I was growing up, we practically never got snow; now winter storms have become the norm. Hurricanes and extreme heat have become more frequent and more dangerous. And intense rain, which causes flash floods, is worsening.
The evidence is overwhelming: These trends are all happening because of climate change, caused by human pollution. And to stay safe, we need to constantly study the climate to predict these disasters and prevent the worst from happening.
While they cry that there’s no money to fully fund and staff environmental agencies, they don’t think twice about passing a Pentagon budget that’s now over $1 trillion a year, or extending trillions of dollars worth of tax cuts for the wealthy.
Better warning systems may or may not have been effective for such an unexpected flood. Yet it seems unthinkable that better funding could not have helped prevent this tragedy. For one, the Guadalupe River is prone to flooding, but state officials have blocked efforts for years to use Federal Emergency Management Agency funds to install early warning systems along it.
Unfortunately, many of our politicians are outright hostile to funding the agencies that do this vital work—or any kind of public service. Just a few months ago, the Trump administration made sweeping cuts to both the National Weather Service (NWS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
As I write, 6 out of 27 positions at the NWS Austin-San Antonio office, which covers the affected Kerr County, are listed as vacant, including the position for warning coordination meteorologist. (The previous coordinator took the Department of Government Efficiency’s offer of early retirement.) At NOAA, the cuts have affected hundreds of scientists and reduced the agency’s ability to launch weather balloons to more accurately analyze weather patterns.
Texas Republicans are still defending these cuts. Before all the bodies had even been discovered, state Rep. Briscoe Cain (R-128) tweeted, “We must not allow this great tragedy to be used to grow government.” And Sen. Ted Cruz personally eliminated $150 million for NOAA’s climate change research in the GOP budget (the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill”).
Part of the problem is that public goods like the National Weather Service are “invisible”—that is, you don’t notice them when they’re working well. This makes them uniquely vulnerable to calls for budget cuts, because who’s going to notice understaffing at the NWS?
But when these cuts go through—and understaffed agencies fail to serve their purpose—people say the services don’t work. And there are calls for more budget cuts.
The Trump administration’s proposed 2026 budget for NOAA, for example, cuts the agency’s budget by 26%. And despite widespread complaints that FEMA wasn’t answering calls from Texans during the disaster, the administration has proposed eliminating the agency or devolving it to the states.
Public services are caught in a lose-lose situation: Regardless of their performance, they face calls for budget cuts.
But the politicians that spew this rhetoric often aren’t interested in having efficient public services or reducing the federal debt. While they cry that there’s no money to fully fund and staff environmental agencies, they don’t think twice about passing a Pentagon budget that’s now over $1 trillion a year, or extending trillions of dollars worth of tax cuts for the wealthy.
Attending summer camps are some of my fondest memories from growing up. But for hundreds of families in Texas, that experience has become a nightmare. It didn’t have to be this way—and we can still change course.
Public services can prevent and mitigate disasters, but they’re being prevented from doing so by politicians like President Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, who’d rather fund tax breaks for the wealthy and the war machine.
We need to change the rhetoric around public services in this country, and shine a light on all the good “invisible” services do.
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Dems Call for Investigation Into Trump NWS-FEMA Cuts After Texas Flood
"There are some serious questions about the impact of President Trump's assault on NOAA, the National Weather Service, and FEMA, and whether it made these floods more deadly," said Sen. Chris Murphy.
Jul 09, 2025
With at least 111 people confirmed dead and more than 150 still missing in Texas' catastrophic flooding as of Wednesday, Democrats in Congress are demanding answers about whether the Trump administration's cuts to federal weather monitoring and emergency management agencies may have hampered the response.
Since President Donald Trump retook office, his administration has unilaterally introduced cuts that have substantially reduced the number of employees at the National Weather Service (NWS) and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which forecast weather and collect environmental data. It has done the same to the Federal Emergency Management System (FEMA), which coordinates responses to natural disasters.
And following the passage of the GOP budget reconciliation package last week, further cuts to these agencies are in the works.
As the death count has climbed, Democrats in both the House and Senate have issued calls to investigate whether these cuts may have played a role in making the horrific situation in Texas worse.
"There are some serious questions about the impact of President Trump's assault on NOAA, the National Weather Service, and FEMA, and whether it made these floods more deadly," said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) in a video posted to X Tuesday night. "We aren't doing our job if we aren't seeking answers to these questions."
Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cut NOAA staff by 11% through a combination of terminations and buyouts. According to The Associated Press, this included "hundreds of jobs at NWS, with staffing down by at least 20% at nearly half of the 122 NWS field offices nationally and at least a half dozen no longer staffed 24 hours a day."
FEMA, meanwhile has shed around 2,000 permanent employees, around a third of its permanent workforce.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson dismissed what she called "false claims" that Trump's cuts affected Texas' disaster response. Jackson said the National Weather Service "did their job, even issuing a flood watch more than 12 hours in advance." Jason Runyen, a meteorologist with the NWS, also told the AP that the NWS handling Austin and San Antonio had more forecasters on duty than normal.
However, questions still remain about how cuts may have affected other parts of the emergency response.
According to former NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad, who spoke to CNN on Tuesday, the problem was not the NWS forecasting, but the failure to disseminate warnings about the floods to the public.
"We need to understand why that last mile is where the problem was in terms of getting alerts out," Spinrad said.
According to the AP, the NWS office for Austin-San Antonio had six vacancies, including "a key manager responsible for issuing warnings and coordinating with local emergency management officials." That official, who'd held the position for 17 years, left in April after one of DOGE's mass emails urging federal workers to take early retirements.
In a Monday letter to Roderick Anderson, the Commerce Department's acting inspector general, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) noted reporting from The New York Times Saturday, which quoted several former NWS officials who said the response suffered from "the loss of experienced people who would typically have helped communicate with local authorities in the hours after flash flood warnings were issued overnight."
"The roles left unfilled are not marginal, they're critical," Schumer said. "These are the experts responsible for modeling storm impacts, monitoring rising water levels, issuing flood warnings, and coordinating directly with local emergency managers about when to warn the public and issue evacuation orders."
Schumer called on the inspector general to begin investigating why these positions were vacant and whether it affected the emergency response or forecasting.
In an interview with CNN's Dana Bash, Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) urged against jumping to hasty conclusions with the search for victims still on, but agreed there should be an investigation.
"When you have flash flooding, there's a risk that you won't have the personnel to make that—do that analysis, do the predictions in the best way," Castro said. "And it could lead to tragedy. So, I don’t want to sit here and say conclusively that that was the case, but I do think that it should be investigated."
Other Democrats have raised the possibility that cuts to FEMA may have played a role. Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, which has jurisdiction over FEMA, called for hearings on the agency's capacity to respond.
He noted that Trump has said he wants to eliminate FEMA altogether and "bring it down to the state level," a decision Thompson said is more dangerous than ever as climate change makes extreme weather more frequent.
DOGE also canceled $880 million worth of funding for FEMA's BRIC program, which focused on pre-disaster planning. In Kerr County, one of the hardest hit by the storm, the flood system has been described as "antiquated," lacking "basic components like sirens and river gauges." The county applied for pre-disaster mitigation funding from FEMA to upgrade their system in 2017 and 2018, during the first Trump administration, but was denied.
"This administration cannot pretend that disasters like this are happening in a vacuum. They cannot ignore the fact that natural disasters are becoming more severe and more frequent due to climate change," Thompson said.
On the storm response, he added: "The federal government—as well as state and local governments—all have a role to play. We must also determine if any budget cuts or staffing shortages at the federal level—of any kind—made matters worse."
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As Flood Deaths Rise, Texas Officials Blast Faulty Forecast by DOGE-Gutted National Weather Service
"Experts warned for months that drastic and sudden cuts at the National Weather Service by Trump could impair their forecasting ability and endanger lives during the storm season," said one critic.
Jul 05, 2025
As catastrophic flooding left scores of people dead and missing in Texas Hill Country and President Donald Trump celebrated signing legislation that will eviscerate every aspect of federal efforts to address the climate emergency, officials in the Lone Star State blasted the National Weather Service—one of many agencies gutted by the Department of Government Efficiency—for issuing what they said were faulty forecasts that some observers blamed for the flood's high death toll.
The Associated Press reported Saturday that flooding caused by a powerful storm killed at least 27 people, with dozens more—including as many as 25 girls from a summer camp along the Guadalupe River in Kerr County—missing after fast-moving floodwaters rose 26 feet (8 meters) in less than an hour before dawn on Friday, sweeping away people and pets along with homes, vehicles, farm and wild animals, and property.
"Everybody got the forecast from the National Weather Service... It did not predict the amount of rain that we saw."
"The camp was completely destroyed," Elinor Lester, 13, one of hundreds of campers at Camp Mystic, told the AP. "A helicopter landed and started taking people away. It was really scary."
Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said during a press conference in Kerrville late Friday that 24 people were confirmed dead, including children. Other officials said that 240 people had been rescued.
Although the National Weather Service on Thursday issued a broad flood watch for the area, Texas Division of Emergency Management Chief Nim Kidd—noting that the NWS predicted 3-6 inches of rain for the Concho Valley and 4-8 inches for the Hill Country—told reporters during a press conference earlier Friday that "the amount of rain that fell in this specific location was never in any of those forecasts."
After media reports & experts warned for months that drastic & sudden cuts at the Nat Weather Service by Trump could impair their forecasting ability & endanger lives during the storm season, TX officials blame an inaccurate forecast by NWS for the deadly results of the flood.
[image or embed]
— Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) July 5, 2025 at 3:19 AM
"Listen, everybody got the forecast from the National Weather Service," Kidd reiterated. "You all got it; you're all in media. You got that forecast. It did not predict the amount of rain that we saw."
Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice also said during the press conference that the storm "dumped more rain than what was forecasted" into two forks of the Guadalupe River.
Kerr County judge Rob Kelly told CBS News: "We had no reason to believe that this was gonna be anything like what's happened here. None whatsoever."
Since January, the NWS—a branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—has reduced its workforce by nearly 600 people as a direct result of staffing cuts ordered by the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, as part of Trump's mission to eviscerate numerous federal agencies.
This policy is in line with Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led blueprint for a far-right overhaul of the federal government that calls for "dismantling" NOAA. Trump has also called for the elimination of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, arguing that states should shoulder most of the burden of extreme weather preparation and response. Shutting down FEMA would require an act of Congress.
Many of the fired NWS staffers were specialized climate scientists and weather forecasters. At the time of the firings, Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, was among those who warned of the cuts' deadly consequences.
"People nationwide depend on NOAA for free, accurate forecasts, severe weather alerts, and emergency information," Huffman said. "Purging the government of scientists, experts, and career civil servants and slashing fundamental programs will cost lives."
Writing for the Texas Observer, Henry D. Jacoby—co-director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change—warned that "crucial data gathering systems are at risk."
"Federal ability to warn the public is being degraded," he added, "and it is a public service no state can replace."
On Friday, Trump put presidential pen to congressional Republicans' so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a $4 trillion tax and spending package that effectively erases the landmark climate and clean energy provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act signed by then-President Joe Biden in 2022.
As Inside Climate News noted of the new law:
It stomps out incentives for purchasing electric vehicles and efficient appliances. It phases out tax credits for wind and solar energy. It opens up federal land and water for oil and gas drilling and increases its profitability, while creating new federal support for coal. It ends the historic investment in poor and minority communities that bear a disproportionate pollution burden—money that the Trump administration was already refusing to spend. It wipes out any spending on greening the federal government.
Furthermore, as MeidasNews editor-in-chief Ron Filipkowski noted Saturday, "rural areas hit hardest by catastrophic storms are the same areas now in danger of losing their hospitals after Trump's Medicaid cuts just passed" as part of the budget reconciliation package.
At least one congressional Republican is ready to take action in the face of increasing extreme weather events. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.)—who once attributed California wildfires to Jewish-controlled space lasers—announced Saturday that she is "introducing a bill that prohibits the injection, release, or dispersion of chemicals or substances into the atmosphere for the express purpose of altering weather, temperature, climate, or sunlight intensity."
"It will be a felony offense," she explained. "We must end the dangerous and deadly practice of weather modification and geoengineering."
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In 'Disservice to the Public', Trump Fires Content Team for Climate.Gov
"Hiding the impacts of climate change won't stop it from happening, it will just make us far less prepared when it does," one fired contractor said.
Jun 11, 2025
In its latest attack on climate science, the Trump administration has fired everyone who produced content for Climate.gov, the public-facing website for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Program Office.
A former contractor who asked to be anonymous told The Guardian that their entire team had been let go from their government contract on May 31, the outlet reported Wednesday.
"It's targeted, I think it's clear," Tom Di Liberto, a former NOAA spokesperson who was fired earlier in the year, told The Guardian. "They only fired a handful of people, and it just so happened to be the entire content team for Climate.gov. I mean, that's a clear signal."
"I would hate to see it turn into a propaganda website for this administration, because that's not at all what it was."
The site's former program manager Rebecca Lindsey, who lost her job in the Trump administration's mass firing of probationary employees, agreed.
"It was a very deliberate, targeted attack," Lindsey told The Guardian, explaining that her former boss had told her that the orders came "from above" to cut the team's funding from a larger NOAA contract slated for renewal in May.
Climate.gov is currently well-respected for providing accurate, accessible information about the causes and consequences of the climate emergency.
"We were an extremely well-trusted source for climate information, misinformation, and disinformation because we actually, legitimately would answer misinformation questions," the anonymous contractor said. "We'd answer reader emails and try to combat disinformation on social media."
Oliver Milman, an environmental correspondent for The Guardian U.S. who did not break the news, described it as "one of world's leading sources of information on climate change."
Now, its ultimate fate is uncertain. The contractor said that a few pre-written pieces were scheduled to be posted on the site during June, but after that, it is unclear whether the site would continue to update or remain visible to the public.
There is also what Lindsey termed a more "sinister possibility": that the administration would use the site to publish false or misleading information dismissing the reality and risks of the climate emergency.
"I would hate to see it turn into a propaganda website for this administration, because that's not at all what it was," the contractor said.
The administration did keep two web developers on staff, which means it is possible it intends to keep the website running with new content.
In either case, however, the firing of the content team builds on a pattern in which President Donald Trump and his administration are making it harder for the public to access accurate scientific information, thereby impeding people from making informed decisions. It follows moves such as the dismissal of all of the scientists working on the National Climate Assessment and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy's purging of a panel of vaccine experts.
"To me, climate is more broad than just climate change. It's also climate patterns like El Niño and La Niña," the contractor said. "Halting factual climate information is a disservice to the public. Hiding the impacts of climate change won't stop it from happening, it will just make us far less prepared when it does."
Outside scientists responded to the news with dismay.
"Sigh," wrote Robert Rohde, the chief scientist at Berkeley Earth.
Eliot Jacobson, a retired professor of mathematics and computer science, called the firings "your 'moment of kakistocracy' for today," referring to government by the least qualified.
The move comes amid other attacks on Americans' ability to prepare for and respond to the climate emergency and the many extreme weather events—from heatwaves to more extreme hurricanes—that it fuels.
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) warned on Tuesday that the Trump administration's firings of heat experts at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and the National Integrated Heat Health Information System would make it harder to respond to heatwaves—the deadliest type of extreme weather in the U.S.—as summer intersects with global heating to increase risk.
"Instead of investing in keeping people safe as temperatures spike, the Trump administration's staff and budget cuts to NOAA have left local weather service offices serving millions of people in hundreds of U.S. counties without the experienced leadership of meteorologists in charge. And firing federal heat health experts will further jeopardize protections for people," Juan Declet-Barreto, a bilingual senior social scientist for climate vulnerability at UCS, said in a statement.
"The president's proposed budget calls for more massive cuts to agencies like NOAA doing lifesaving work," Declet-Barreto continued. "And its regulatory rollbacks and cuts to climate and clean energy funding are aimed at increasing the use of fossil fuels, which are largely responsible for these rising temperatures. So, while the country suffers in what could be record-breaking temperatures, especially outdoor workers and vulnerable populations, fossil fuel executives will sit back in their air-conditioned offices watching President Trump do their bidding and grow their profits."
Meanwhile, Trump on Tuesday offered a timeline for winding down the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)—which he has long threatened to eliminate.
"I'd say after the hurricane season we'll start phasing it out," Trump said, as NBC News reported. In the future, Trump said, more responsibility would fall with the states, any federal disaster relief would be dispersed directly from the president's office, and less money would be offered.
However, a FEMA higher-up told CNN that the president's proposal was unrealistic.
"This is a complete misunderstanding of the role of the federal government in emergency management and disaster response and recovery, and it's an abdication of that role when a state is overwhelmed," they said. "It is clear from the president's remarks that their plan is to limp through hurricane season and then dismantle the agency."
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Despite Trump-Musk Feud, CO2 Milestone Is the 'Important News of the Day'
Scientists said that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations peaked above 430 parts per million for the first time in perhaps 30 million years.
Jun 06, 2025
The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere peaked above 430 parts per million in 2025—the highest it has been in millions of years—according to data released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego on Thursday.
The news was overshadowed by the explosive feud between U.S. President Donald Trump and his erstwhile backer Elon Musk, but climate activist Bill McKibben argued that it was ultimately more consequential.
"In the long run, this is actually going to be the important news of the day—CO2 in the atmosphere passes another grim milestone," McKibben wrote on social media.
In the long run, this is actually going to be the important news of the day--co2 in the atmosphere passes another grim milestone
[image or embed]
— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben.bsky.social) June 5, 2025 at 4:33 PM
Carbon dioxide has been accumulating in the atmosphere due primarily to the human burning of fossil fuels, as well as by the clearing of forests and other natural carbon sinks. There, it acts as a greenhouse gas, trapping heat from the Earth, and is the primary gas responsible for the rise of global temperatures by approximately 1.1°C from the 1850 -1900 average. This warming has already had a host of dramatic impacts, from extreme weather events to sea-level rise to polar ice melt, and scientists warn these impacts will only accelerate under current energy policies, which put the world on track for around 3°C of warming by 2100.
The last time that atmospheric CO2 concentrations topped 430 ppm was most likely more than 30 million years ago, Ralph Keeling, who directs the Scripps CO2 Program, told NBC News.
"It's changing so fast," he said. "If humans had evolved in such a high-CO2 world, there would probably be places where we wouldn't be living now. We probably could have adapted to such a world, but we built our society and a civilization around yesterday's climate."
"While largely symbolic, passing 430 ppm should be a wake-up call."
Scripps and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration both measure carbon dioxide levels from NOAA's Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, where Charles Keeling began taking measurements in 1958. As CO2 levels rise over time, they also follow a seasonal cycle—peaking in May before falling in the Northern Hemisphere summer and rising again in the fall.
This May, Scripps Oceanography calculated an average of 430.2 ppm for 2025, which is 3.5 ppm over the average for May 2024. NOAA's Global Monitoring Laboratory, meanwhile, calculated a monthly average of 430.5 ppm, a 3.6 ppm jump from the year before and the second-steepest yearly climb since 1958.
"Another year, another record," Keeling said in a statement. "It's sad."
The news comes two months after Mauna Loa daily measurements surpassed 430 ppm for the first time in March, which Plymouth Marine Laboratory professor Helen Findlay called "extremely disappointing and worrying."
"While largely symbolic, passing 430 ppm should be a wake-up call, especially given the accelerated response we are seeing of glaciers and ice sheets to current warming," Dr. James Kirkham, chief scientist of the Ambition on Melting Ice coalition of governments, said at the time.
"This upward trajectory is a direct result of continued fossil fuel use, likely exacerbated by emissions from extreme wildfires last year, methane leaks from fossil fuel extraction and possibly greater permafrost emissions, alongside decreased ability of very warm oceans to absorb CO2," Kirkham said.
The monthly record also comes a little more than a week after a United Nations report warned that there was a small chance global temperatures could surpass 2°C in at least 1 of the next 5 years, only a decade after world leaders pledged in the Paris agreement to keep global temperatures "well-below" that level.
"Carbon emissions are still rising, and the atmosphere is going to keep heating further until greenhouse gas concentrations stabilize," Matt Kean, who chairs Australia's Climate Change Authority, wrote in response to the Scripps and NOAA figures. "What sort of climate do we want to leave our children and those who come after them?"
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