“There are no secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men.”
J. Robert Oppenheimer
NASA is known for looking outward and upward, exploring the solar system and learning about the origins of the universe. While NASA’s original directive was to explore space–from the sun to the moon to exoplanets to black holes–arguably its most important function at this moment is monitoring climate change from Earth orbit. Over the decades, NASA has pioneered a fleet of remote sensing satellites, satellites that point down towards Earth to gather and transmit crucial information: raw images documenting deforestation, infrared snapshots of wildfires, gravitational ranging measurements of shrinking glaciers, radar beams tracking sea level rise. Yet now NASA Earth Science is under attack from within by a reckless and ignorant White House.
Until now, administration after administration has funded this series of technological feats, which has us well poised to monitor climate change as we mitigate it on the ground. But the Trump 2.0 administration intends to throw all that work away to consolidate executive power and spread climate ignorance to the masses. Their recent proposal is to cut NASA by 20% overall, including 50% cuts to Earth Science. They despise science and refuse to let NASA stand as a shining example of an efficient government agency staffed by passionate experts.
Private companies can’t pick up the slack. While it’s true that over the past decade corporations like Planet Labs and Spire have put up many remote sensing satellites and provide useful data, without NASA to direct funding to new startups and allocate contracts to bigger companies, the remote sensing industry will grow stale and falter. Sure, a few billionaires will get richer as NASA is forced to abdicate the climate space, but of course much of what NASA does cannot be picked up by companies, because research and development often is not profitable.
In a sense, Trump’s motives are the same as they always have been: power and greed. With old age though, his actions are now twisted by a senility and irrationality that we have not seen before. Whatever is going on in his selfish and mushy brain, the outcomes of his actions have been dire across government, and climate science at NASA is no exception. Perhaps at one time, denying climate change was a “move” or “political play” for him, but at this point he has almost certainly poisoned himself with his own Kool-Aid and does not think climate change is real. Regardless, he does not have the will or the ability to understand NASA’s importance to our future.
This is an administration that is pro-ignorance, closing its eyes and covering its ears to global warming as the industries which put them power–oil, coal, aviation–continue to burn and emit and pollute. Trump and Vance and Stephen Miler don’t care about our preeminence in space science or our global leadership in space exploration. If an action gains them power and hurts their enemies, they will do it. And that includes slashing the NASA Earth Science budget while global temperature rise continues to accelerate. What they are of course ignoring, is that whether we closely inspect Earth from space or not, we will continue to feel the increasing heat of man-made climate change on our neck. And that heat will be all the more powerful if we are not actively monitoring and fighting the fire we started.
“It is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so.”
J. Robert Oppenheimer
The Trump administration is literally the nightmare scenario for climate scientists and therefore also for the population of the world. However, as we continue to stymie them at every step we can–politically, socially, economically–we can look forward to their fall from power and our corresponding opportunity to rebuild this country with a system in place that does not financially incentivize the demolition of our planetary home. Would building that system have been a possibility even before this nightmare scenario? Yes. But our job now is to mitigate harm and then, once we’re back in power, building and rebuilding the technological systems, like NASA’s remote science program, that will allow us to prevent the worst climate change scenarios from becoming reality.
Leave a comment