climate change

And here is another open-and-shut case. Trump promised oil industry fat cats awhile ago that if they gave him a shit ton of money, he would do whatever they wanted. He got the money. One item on their wish list was to deemphasize climate change. How to do that? How about pulling up all the ocean-based equipment that sends massive amounts of data to climate researchers? No info on wave action; no info on warming oceans; no data on how much CO2 is escaping from the ocean floor. And the fossil fuel industry can go along its merry way knowing that scientists will be less able to argue that the climate is changing if they have little to no data. Win, win, especially for Trump, who doesn't give a fuck about much of anything except his own pocket. 

EarthJustice

They said no. Twice. It didn’t matter.

Congress said no to gutting ocean monitoring in 2025. They restored the funding. The Trump administration tried again in 2026. Congress restored it again.

So the Trump administration didn’t go through Congress. They went around it. They control who runs the National Science Foundation. So they simply directed the NSF to start pulling the equipment out of the water anyway — no vote, no approval, no debate.

This week, ships are physically removing a $368 million deep-ocean monitoring network that took decades to build. 900 buoys and instruments — tracking fisheries, weather, tsunami warnings, and ocean currents — pulled from the Pacific Northwest, the Atlantic, Greenland, the Southern Ocean. The system was expected to keep collecting data for another 15 years. Gone.

By the time any lawsuit works through the courts, the buoys will already be gone. Instruments that took decades to build and place, retrieved in a matter of weeks. That’s not an accident. That’s the strategy. Move fast enough that the law can’t catch you.

The official reason? Saving $48 million a year.

But here’s what the Trump administration won’t tell you: what does it cost to remove it?

They are deploying ships globally for 15 months to physically retrieve equipment from the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, North Carolina, Greenland, and the Southern Ocean. Each buoy alone is worth $1.5 million. They’ll tell you what they’re saving. They won’t tell you what the removal costs.

And here’s the part that I believe they really don’t want you to know: this was written into Project 2025 before Trump even took office.

The architects of this administration explicitly named NOAA’s ocean and climate research office as “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism” and called for its research to be “disbanded.” This isn’t budget math. This is a hit list.

No monitors means no data. No data means no accountability. No accountability means the Trump administration and its fossil fuel donors can drill, dump, and extract — and there’s no paper trail.

And it’s not just the oceans.

The Trump administration’s proposed 2027 budget zeroes out Forest Service research entirely — all $309 million, gone. At least 57 of the agency’s 77 research stations are on the chopping block across 31 states. Scientists in Baltimore have spent years planting white oak saplings that take three decades to mature. You can’t FedEx a forest to Colorado. You can’t manage a Hawaiian ecosystem from a cubicle in Utah. Researchers have told NPR they’ll quit before they relocate — which may be exactly the point.

The “fiscal responsibility” pitch falls apart the moment you look at the numbers. The research station in Hilo, Hawaii sits on 30,000 acres locked in until 2067 — for a one-time fee of one dollar. The Fort Collins office where the Trump administration wants to move everyone? One million dollars a year in rent.

They’re closing dollar leases to expand a million-dollar one. (That seems fiscally wasteful.)

Meanwhile Trump has pledged to ramp up logging on federal land. Gut the scientists who document the damage, and there’s no one left to sound the alarm when ancient forests get clear-cut for profit.

The forests. The oceans. The scientists. The Trump administration is methodically dismantling every system that could document what it’s doing to this planet.

That is not incompetence. That is strategy.

The forests don’t belong to Trump. The oceans don’t belong to his donors. They belong to every American who has ever stood quiet under a hundred-year-old tree, or watched the sun go down over open water, and understood that some things are not for sale.

Congress said no. It didn’t matter — yet. It could matter if enough of us are loud enough.

And to wrap this up:

“Trump said he has nothing to do with Project 2025,” said by someone very close to me a couple years ago. But here we are. It is playing out in rapid time before our eyes (in hundreds of ways beyond the topic of this article) — it can’t be denied if we are paying attention. These actions are not to benefit the whole or the planet that support life. Follow the money trail and those who will massively benefit at the expense of all of us.

Don’t take my word for it. Read it yourself. Share it. Then act.

• Ocean monitoring: http://cnn.com/.../ocean-monitoring-system-amoc-trump...

• Forest Service: search “Forest Service closing offices costs” at npr.org

• Sign Earthjustice’s forest petition: http://earthjustice.org/.../protect-forests-from-massive...

• Call Congress — works for every American: 202-224-3121 — give them your zip code, they’ll connect you. Sixty seconds. They tally every call.