Climate

Algae blooms can be a problem for marine life and people but it’s not yet clear if warmer oceans and nutrient runoff are causing more of them

Confronting images of dead seadragons, fish and octopuses washed up on South Australian beaches – and disturbing reports of “more than 100” surfers and beachgoers experiencing flu-like symptoms after swimming or merely breathing in sea spray – attracted international concern last week.

Speculation about the likely cause ranged from pollution and algae to unusual bacterial infections or viruses. We can reveal the culprit was a tiny – but harmful – type of planktonic algae called Karenia mikimotoi.

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With the cost of feeding a family up by an estimated £2,290, consumers, like many across Europe, are taking direct action

Marcel Demir was not impressed. The Swedish student had been monitoring the price of chocolate and crisps and had noticed that both had gone up astronomically.

“Absolutely, prices have gone up,” he said, standing outside a branch of Sweden’s grocery store chain Coop in Stockholm Central train station. “I usually buy crisps and chocolate and they’ve gone up a lot. Chocolate recently. Crisps over the last year.”

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From our broken environmental laws to the role of gas, there are some big questions that remain unanswered by both major parties

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A national election campaign is days away and the focus in Canberra is on a federal budget that wasn’t going to happen until a tropical cyclone threatened southern Queensland a fortnight ago. The climate crisis and environment are expected to get passing mentions.

But there is a strong case that they should be at the forefront of debate over the next six weeks, understandable cost-of-living concerns notwithstanding.

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The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in the long-running case, known as Juliana, which helped spawn legal strategies widely adapted to other lawsuits over climate.

On February 27, 2025, over 1,000 employees at the National Weather Service (NWS) were illegally fired by the Trump Administration under the premise of “making the government more efficient,” even though the agency was already severely understaffed. That same day, due to the job losses, weather balloons were suspended at the NWS Office in Kotzubue, AK. But it didn’t end there. On March 7, Albany, NY and Grey, ME announced partial suspension of their weather balloon launches. And just last week, on March 20, NWS offices in Omaha, NE and Rapid City, SD announced the suspension of their weather balloons. Six other NWS offices in states like Nebraska and Wisconsin revealed a reduction in weather balloon launching capacity that same day. 

This might not sound like such a big deal, but as we’re gearing up for tornado season, which peaks between April and June, taking weather balloons offline in the Heartland of the United States, also known as Tornado Alley, will directly affect the NWS’s ability to predict severe weather, including tornado-producing thunderstorms. This could lead to more severe weather-related deaths that could have otherwise been avoided. 

The current coverage of weather balloon launches in the United States (not including one in Puerto Rico and other launch locations in the Pacific Ocean). The orange dots denote NWS Offices with less balloon launch capacity (one per day instead of two), and the red dots denote NWS offices with balloon launch suspensions. Figure used with permission from the creator, Chris Vagasky (@coweatherman.bsky.social).  Why do weather balloon observations matter? 

Weather balloons are a critical piece of the NWS’s observations infrastructure and have been for nearly a century. They carry radiosondes, instrument packages that report back temperature, pressure, wind, relative humidity, and GPS data to NWS offices, giving us a three-dimensional view of the atmosphere. In the United States, there are 92 NWS locations that release weather balloons, providing data to the NWS and their weather forecasting models. 

Weather models use data collected by weather balloons 

But why do we care about what’s going on in the upper atmosphere? Well, first of all, this data is invaluable for our weather forecasting models. As you may know, meteorologists use weather models to help predict what will happen to the atmosphere in the future. Models anticipate things like winter storms, severe weather outbreaks, flood-inducing rains, or conditions favorable for wildfire development. 

For a weather model to predict the future, it needs an accurate representation of what’s currently going on in the upper atmosphere. By suspending weather balloon launches at multiple locations, we lose data for the weather model, leading to a decrease in its predictability that negatively affects daily forecasts and outlooks for extreme weather events. 

In fact, out of eight types of observations by the NWS (including airplanes and station observations), weather balloons are the second most important in improving prediction of weather models. They also only cost about $10 million per year to launch (assuming each balloon is $200), compared with the total cost of GOES-R satellite—another critical piece of the NOAA observations infrastructure—of $350 million per year. Weather balloon launches are so useful for the prediction of severe weather events that NWS offices often launch more than the usual 2 balloons per day to better inform modeling of a potential tornado outbreak. 

Knowing what’s going on in the upper atmosphere could save lives 

Weather models aside, if we know what’s going on in the upper atmosphere, it makes weather forecasting in general a lot easier in the short-term. What goes on in the upper atmosphere is reflected by weather conditions at the surface. 

Imagine you live in central Oklahoma and wake up one morning in mid-May. For the past several days, the NWS and their weather models have been predicting the possibility of a tornado outbreak to the east of where you live. However, observations retrieved by a weather balloon launch that morning revealed favorable conditions for a tornado outbreak to start where you live, rather than to the east of you.  

Immediately, the NWS issues a tornado watch for your area, and you and your neighbors prepare for a potential tornado later that day. So, yes, the models were slightly wrong, but at least the NWS was able to provide some prep-time given the observations collected by the weather balloon that morning. If the NWS didn’t release a weather balloon, they may have missed the impending tornado outbreak, and you and your neighbors would have been caught completely off guard. 

Ok, it sounds like I’m exaggerating, right? Actually, not at all. On October 3, 1979, a devastating F4 tornado struck Windsor Locks, CT with no warning. According to a study in 1987, the lack of warning was determined to be due to a lack of upper atmospheric data (no nearby, timely weather balloon launches), which led to an underestimation of the strength of the thunderstorm that produced the tornado.  

Three people lost their lives in that tornado. It’s not science fiction to say that more people could lose their lives in the future given a lack of observation of the upper atmosphere. Because of this, and especially as we head into peak tornado season, it is critical for the NWS to remain fully staffed and fully funded. American lives are on the line.

A new report illustrates a concerning dynamic: Record heat last year pushed countries to use more planet-warming fossil fuels to cool things down.

A carbon crime or bright new future? For nearly four years, a fierce debate raged over demolishing the site’s high-rise flats

For nearly four years, a fierce debate raged over the future of the Wyndford estate in Glasgow, dividing residents and sparking wider national controversy. Was the demolition of its high-rises an environmental travesty or the first step toward much-needed regeneration?

The dispute began in November 2021, days after the city hosted the UN climate conference Cop26, at which politicians and businesses promised to curb wasteful building destruction. Yet residents of Wyndford soon found leaflets on their doorsteps heralding a “bright new dawn” – one that involved the demolition of all four high-rise blocks on the estate. The decision set off years of protests, legal challenges and community divisions.

The four high-rise blocks of the Wyndford estate one week before demolition. Three blocks were demolished by controlled explosion on 23 March – the block on the left will be brought down floor by floor because of its proximity to other homes on the estate

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Neither Lee Zeldin, nor Elon Musk, nor President Trump could possibly look Brian Kelly in the eye to tell him to his face that he is lazy.

They cannot tell Kayla Butler she is crooked.

They dare not accuse Luis Antonio Flores or Colin Kramer of lollygagging on the golf course. 

If Zeldin, Musk, or Trump knew a scintilla about them, they would dare not froth at the mouth with their toxic stereotypes about federal civil servants. All four work in Region 5 of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), responsible for pollution monitoring, cleanups, community engagement, and emergency hazardous waste response for Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

The Midwest is historically so saturated with manufacturing that just those six states generated a quarter of the nation’s hazardous waste back in the 1970s, and it is still today home to a quarter of the nation’s facilities reporting to the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory Program. When I recently visited Region 5’s main office in Chicago, one enforcement officer, who did not give her name because of the sensitivity of her job, told me there are still toxic sites where “we show up [and] neither the state nor the EPA has ever been [there] to check.”

With irony, I visited the office the same week the Trump administration and Zeldin, President Trump’s new EPA administrator, announced they planned to cut 65% of the agency’s budget. Zeldin has since then dropped even more bombshells in a brazen attempt to gut the nation’s first line of defense against the poisoning of people, the polluting of the environment, and the proliferation of global warming gases.

Zeldin announced on March 12th more than 30 actions he plans to undertake to weaken or cripple air, water, wastewater, and chemical standards, including eliminating the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights and getting the EPA out of the business of curbing the carbon dioxide and methane gases fueling global warming. Despite record production that has the United States atop the world for oil, Zeldin said he was throttling down on regulations because they are “throttling the oil and gas industry.”

Last week, the New York Times reported the EPA is considering firing half to three-quarters of its scientists (770 to 1,155 out of 1,540) and closing the Office of Research and Development, the agency’s scientific research office. Zeldin justifies this in part by deriding many EPA programs as “left-wing ideological projects.” He violently brags that he is “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.”  

Impact of cuts at EPA felt deeply, broadly

Kelly, Butler, Flores, Kramer, and many others I talked with in Region 5 said all these plans are actually a bayonet ripping out the heart and soul of their mission. They all spoke to me on the condition that they were talking as members of their union, Local 704 of the American Federation of Government Employees. Nicole Cantello, union president and an EPA attorney, said the attacks on her members are unlike anything she’s seen in her more than 30 years with the agency. As much as prior conservative administrations may have criticized the agency, there’s never been one—until now—that tried to “fire everybody.”

Flores, a chemist who analyzes air, water, and soil samples for everything from lead to PCBs, said a decimated EPA means less scrutiny for another Flint water crisis, less eyeballs on Superfund sites, and limited ability to investigate toxic contamination after train derailments, such as the incident two years ago in East Palestine, Ohio. He added, “And we have a Great Lakes research vessel that tests the water across all the lakes. It’s important for drinking water, tourism, and fishing. If we get crippled, all that goes into question.”

Butler is a community involvement coordinator who works through Superfund legislation to inform communities about remediation efforts. She was deeply concerned that urban neighborhoods and rural communities will be denied the scientific resources to tell the full story of environmental injustice. Superfund sites, the legacy of toxic chemicals used in manufacturing, military operations, mining and landfills, are so poisonous, they can have cumulative, compound effects on affected communities, triggering many diseases. A 2023 EPA Inspector General report said the agency needed stronger policies, guidance, and performance measures to “assess and address cumulative impacts and disproportionate health effects on overburdened communities.”

Butler is deeply concerned cumulative impact assessments will not happen with cuts to the EPA, denying urban neighborhoods and rural communities the scientific resources to fully expose the horror of environmental injustice. “It’s a clear story that they’re trying to erase.” Butler said of the new administration.

For Kelly, an on-site emergency coordinator based out of Michigan, the rollbacks and the erasing of the story of environmental harms have an obvious conclusion. “People will die,” he said. “There will be additional deaths if we roll back these protections.”

What these workers also fear is the slow death of spirit amongst themselves to be civil servants.

Start with Kelly.

I actually talked to him from Chicago by telephone because he was out in Los Angeles County, deployed to assist with the cleanup of the devastating Eaton Fire that killed 17 people and destroyed more than 9,400 structures.

Between the Eaton Fire and the Palisades Fire, which took another 12 lives and destroyed another 6,800 buildings, the EPA conducted what it said was the largest wildfire hazardous materials cleanup in the history of the agency, and likely the most voluminous lithium battery removal in world history—primarily from the electric and hybrid vehicles and home battery storage people were forced to leave behind as they fled.

During a break, Kelly talked about how nimble he and his colleagues must be. He has worked cleanups of monster storms Katrina, Sandy, and Maria, and the East Palestine trail derailment. Based normally out of Michigan, he recalled a day he was working in the Upper Peninsula on a cleanup of an old abandoned mine processing site. He received a call from a state environmental emergency official asking him to drop what he was doing because 20 minutes away a gasoline tanker truck had flipped over, spilling about 6,000 gallons of gasoline onto the roads and down through the storm sewer into local waterways.

When he arrived, Kelly asked the fire chief how he could help. He was asked to set up air monitoring. But then he noticed anxious contractors who were wondering if they were going to get paid for their work. “They’re ordering supplies, they’re putting dirt down to contain this gasoline from getting any further,” Kelly said. “But they’re like, ‘Are we going to get paid for this?’”

“I found the truck driver who was talking to their insurance company. So I get on the phone with the insurance company and say, ‘Hey. This is who I am. This is what’s happening here. You need to come to terms and conditions with these contractors right now or EPA’s going to have to start taking this cleanup over!’”

The insurance was covered. Kelly said he could not have been so assertive with the insurance company without a robust EPA behind him.

“It’s one thing to be able go out and respond to these emergencies, but you have to have attorneys on your side,” Kelly said. “You’ve got to have enforcement specialists behind you. You’ve got to have people who are experts in drinking water and air. You can’t just have one person out there on an island by themselves.”

“Cruel for the sake of being cruel”

Butler wonders if whole communities will become remote islands, surrounded by rising tides of pollution. The very morning of our interview, she was informed she was one of the thousands of federal workers across the nation who had their government purchase cards frozen by Elon Musk, the world’s richest human and President Trump’s destroyer of federal agencies. In launching the freeze, Musk claimed with no evidence, “A lot of shady expenditures happening.”

Butler threw shade on that, saying the purchase system is virtually foolproof with multiple layers of vetting and proof of purchase. She uses her purchase card to buy ads and place public notices in newspapers to keep communities informed about remediation of Superfund sites.

She has also used her card to piece together equipment to fit in a van for a mobile air monitor. The monitor assists with compliance, enforcement, and giving communities a read on possible toxic emissions and dust from nearby industrial operations.

“I literally bought the nuts and bolts that feed into this van that allow the scientists to measure all the chemicals, all the air pollution,” Butler said. “I remember seeing the van for the first time after I bought so many things for years. And I was like ‘Wow this is real!’”

Not only was the van real, but air monitoring in general, along with soil monitoring— particularly in places like heavily polluted Southeast Chicago—has been a critical tool of environmental justice to get rid of mountains of petcoke dust and detect neurotoxic manganese dust in the air and lead in backyards.

“Air monitoring created so much momentum for the community and community members to say, ‘this is what we need,’” Butler said.

Kramer is a chemist in quality assurance, working with project planners to devise the most accurate ways of testing for toxic materials, such as for cleanups of sites covered in PFAS—aka ‘forever chemicals’—from fire retardants, or at old industrial sites saturated with PCBs from churning out electrical equipment, insulation, paints, plastics, or adhesives. His job is mostly behind the scenes, but he understood the meaning of his work from one visit to a site to audit the procedures of the Illinois EPA.

The site had a small local museum dedicated to the Native tribes that first occupied the land. “The curator or director told us how the sampling work was going to bring native insects back to the area and different wildlife back to the streams,” Kramer said. “It was kind of a quick offhand conversation, but it gave me a quick snapshot of the work that’s being done.”

Kramer wonders how many more scientists will follow in his footsteps to see that the work keeps getting done. He remembered a painful day recently when a directive came down that he could not talk to contractors, even those who happen to work in the same building as he does.

“I see them every day,” Kramer said. “They come say hi to me. They know my child’s name. Being told that I couldn’t respond if they came to my desk, looked me in the face, and said, ‘good morning,’ is just such an unnecessary wrench into our system that just feels cruel for the sake of being cruel.”

Staff stifled, heartbroken

The culture of fear is particularly stifling for one staffer who did not want to give her name because she is a liaison to elected officials. Before Zeldin took over, she would get an email from an elected official asking if funding for a project was still on track and “30 seconds later,” as she said, the question would be answered.

Her job “is all about relationships,” keeping officials informed about projects. Now, she said just about everything she depends on to do her job has basically come to a halt. “Everyone’s afraid to say anything, answer emails, put anything in writing without getting approval. Just mass chaos all the way to the top.”

Relationships are being upset left and right according to other staffers. One set of my interviews was with three EPA community health workers who feel they are betraying the communities they serve because their contact with them has fluctuated in the first months of the Trump administration. They’ve had to shift from silence to delicately dancing around any conversation that mentions environmental justice or diversity, equity, and inclusion.

They did not want to be named because they did not want to jeopardize the opportunity to still find ways to serve communities historically dumped on with toxic pollution for decades because of racism and classism.

“Literally since January 20, my entire division has been on edge,” said one of the three. “We kind of feel like we’re in the hot seat. A lot of people working on climate are afraid. If you’re working with [people with] lower to moderate income or [places] more populated by people of color, you’re afraid because you don’t want to send off any flags to the administration.”

The tiptoeing is heartbreaking to them because they see firsthand the poisoning of families from chemicals the EPA has regulated. One of the health workers has painful memories of seeing the “devastated” look on mothers’ faces when giving them the results of child lead tests that were well above the hazardous limit. “I feel like I made a promise to them that I would be there for what they needed,” she said. “And I feel like I’ve been forced to go back on that promise.”

Remembering their mission boosts morale

Despite that, and despite President Trump’s baseless ranting, which included saying during the campaign that “crooked” and “dishonest” federal workers were “destroying this country,” these EPA staffers are far from caving in. Nationally, current and former EPA staff last week published an open letter to the nation that said, “We cannot stand by and allow” the assault on environmental justice programs.

Locally in Region 5, the workers’ union has been trying to keep morale from tanking with town halls, trivia nights, lunch learning sessions, and happy hours. In a day of quiet defiance, many of the 1,000 staffers wore stickers in support of the probationary employees that said, “Don’t Fire New Hires.” Several of the people I interviewed said that if Zeldin and the Trump administration really cared about waste and inefficiency, they would not try to fire tens of thousands of probationary workers across the federal system. 

One of them noted how the onboarding process, just to begin her probationary year, took five months. “It wastes all this money onboarding them and then eliminating them,” she said. “That’s totally abusing taxpayer dollars if you ask me. It’s hard enough to get people to work here. We’re powered by smart people who went to school for a long time and could make a lot of money elsewhere.” Federal staffers with advanced degrees make 29% less, on average, than counterparts in the private sector, according to a report last year from the Congressional Budget Office.

Individually, several said they maintained their morale by remembering why they came to the EPA in the first place. Flores, whose public service was embedded into him growing up in a military family, said, “I didn’t want to make the next shampoo,” with his chemistry degrees. “I didn’t want to make a better adhesive for a box…the tangible mission of human health and environmental health is very important me.”

The enforcement officer who wanted to remain anonymous talked about a case where she worked with the state to monitor lead in a fenceline community near a toxic industry. Several children were discovered to have elevated levels of lead in their blood.

“People’ lives are in my hands,” she said. “When we realized how dire the circumstance was, we were able to really speed up our process by working with the company, working with the state and getting a settlement done quick. And now all those fixes are in place. The lead monitoring has returned back to safe levels, and we know that there aren’t going to be any more kids impacted by this facility.”

One of the community health workers I interviewed said her mission means so much to her because at nine years old she lost her mother to breast cancer after exposure to the solvent trichloroethylene (TCE). That carcinogen is used in home, furniture, and automotive cleaning products. The Biden administration banned TCE in its final weeks, but the Trump administration has delayed implementation.

“The loss of her rippled throughout our community,” the worker said of her mother. “She was active in our church, teaching immigrants in our city how to read. The loss of her had such a large impact.” She said if the EPA were gutted, so many people like her mother would be lost too soon. “We play critical roles beyond just laws and regulations,” she said. “We do serve vital functions for communities based on where the need is the most.”

The same worker worried that if an agency as critical to community health as the EPA can be slashed to a shell of itself, there is no telling what is in store next for the nation. “I know people don’t have a lot of sympathy for bureaucrats,” she said. “But I think what is happening to us is a precursor to what happens to the rest of the country. We’re supposed to be this nonpartisan force that’s working for the American people, and attacks to that is a direct attack on the American people.”

One of her co-workers seconded her by saying, “We’re fighting for the American people and we are the American people. We all began this job for a reason. We all have our ‘why.’ And that hasn’t changed just because the administration has changed, because there’s some backlash or people coming after us. Just grounding yourself with people whose ‘why’ is the same as yours helps a lot.” 

Handbook outlines practical ways faith organisations can ‘speak truth to power’ to help protect planet

Christians around the world are being encouraged to take legal action against polluters and those who finance them.

In a new climate justice handbook, the World Council of Churches sets out practical ways faith organisations can help protect young people and future generations from the climate crisis.

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All bags are not created equal when it comes to the environment. And paper might not be as green as you think.

Harold Hamm, President Trump’s energy mentor, wants to take us back to the 1990s.

Scientists say widespread damage to both world heritage-listed reefs is ‘heartbreaking’ as WA reef accumulates highest amount of heat stress on record

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Australia’s two world heritage-listed reefs – Ningaloo on the west coast and the Great Barrier Reef on the east – have been hit simultaneously by coral bleaching that reef experts have called “heartbreaking” and “a profoundly distressing moment”.

Teams of scientists on both coasts have been monitoring and tracking the heat stress and bleaching extending across thousands of kilometres of marine habitat, which is likely to have been driven by global heating.

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Gene banks are like a survivalist cache: our nation’s safeguard against all future challenges to growing the food we need.

The agency will no longer shut down “any stage of energy production,” absent an imminent threat, a new memo says, and will curtail efforts to cut pollution in poorer areas.

In the March 19th verdict in Energy Transfer v Greenpeace, a North Dakota county jury awarded more than $660 million to “one of the largest… energy companies in North America” because Greenpeace supported the efforts of Indigenous Water Protectors in their protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline.  

This verdict is an outrage because it undermines Tribal leadership and sovereignty. As Natali Segovia, of the Water Protector Legal Collective, said in the New York Times: “At its core, it’s a proxy war against Indigenous sovereignty using an international environmental organization.”  

This verdict is an outrage because it threatens First Amendment rights, including the right to free speech. 

This verdict is an outrage because it rewards a SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation), an egregious tactic of silencing and intimidation outlawed in 33 states but not in North Dakota.  

It’s an outrage that jurors’ conflicts of interest did not disqualify them from service in this trial. It’s a further outrage that one of Energy Transfer’s examples of defamation was Greenpeace’s statement that the Dakota Access Pipeline leaked. The court would not allow an expert witness to testify that the pipeline did, in fact, leak. 

Even if Greenpeace wins its appeal, the fact that this suit was allowed to proceed at all is an outrage. This verdict is yet another example of the fossil fuel industry’s agenda being enacted by multiple levels and branches of government. This is more than an outrage. It is a crime that will harm all people and species for generations to come.  

We must stand together to overturn this unjust and outrageous verdict. Here at the Union of Concerned Scientists, we’re resisting through Protect the Protest anti-SLAPP taskforce—and by organizing a climate accountability campaign targeting the fossil fuel industry. 

I’m imagining a few headlines that might have appeared over the past century if social movements had been SLAPPed for successful campaigns against powerful adversaries. 

City of Montgomery Wins Bus Boycott Suit, Awarded Damages

What if you’d opened your newspaper in 1957, one year after the Montgomery Bus Boycott had ended and seen this headline. Would you have been outraged? 

In reality, the Montgomery Bus Boycott ended in triumph when the City of Montgomery ended racial segregation on its buses. It was coordinated by Dr. Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Improvement Association, with the involvement of key civil rights leaders from Ella Baker to Bayard Rustin. It lasted for 381 days and cost the city approximately $3,000 per day in 1956 dollars—more than $13 million today. 

If the city had successfully sued the boycott organizers, would there then have been a Southern Christian Leadership Conference? A Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee? A March on Washington where Dr. King would deliver the speech from which many of our public officials conveniently cherry-pick one quote and one quote only: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character?”  

There might well not have been. And that would have been an outrage. 

Temperance Movement Owes US Lost Revenue, Enforcement Costs During Prohibition

How about this for a 1934 headline? The 1920 enactment of the 18th constitutional amendment banning the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcohol followed years of activism and lobbying by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League, a powerful coalition that included the International Workers of the World and John D. Rockefeller, the NAACP and the Ku Klux Klan. 

The Prohibition era lasted for 13 years. In today’s dollars the total cost to the US government in lost revenue alone would be approximately $222.7 billion. 

The consequences of Prohibition went far beyond the cost to federal coffers: among other ill effects, it yielded enormous benefits for organized crime. Do we think today that the broad coalition of Prohibition activists should be held liable for the federal government’s loss of revenue after it enacted their policy demands, or for the tremendous societal costs of strengthened crime syndicates? Or do we think that organizing according to our consciences and beliefs is a fundamental right we must continue to enjoy? 

Boeing Gets $2 Billion in Damages from Machinists Union After 2008 Strike

No, this didn’t happen. What did: the International Association of Machinists (IAM) struck airplane manufacturer Boeing for eight weeks in 2008, with $1.2 billion in net income lost ($1.48 billion today). 

The union struck Boeing again in 2024. Estimated costs for that 53-day action cost Boeing and its suppliers: $9.66 billion. 

These are considerable losses for Boeing and the aircraft industry. But the power to strike is the ultimate power of the labor movement. Yes, a prolonged strike costs union members dearly in lost wages and the risk of losing their jobs entirely, but it costs employers dearly too. It’s a game of chicken, and without the ability to strike, the union isn’t driving a car—it’s a pedestrian. 

So far, industrial actions such as those taken by the IAM are not subject to the increased power of business to sue for damages. But in an environment where business interests often outweigh the interests of workers, public health and safety, and in the case of climate change, future generations, it’s important to watch closely how juries and courts are thinking about these issues. Because a lot of their thinking is outrageous. 

Whose Selfish Agenda Again?

Energy Transfer’s lawyer told the court that Greenpeace had exploited the Dakota Access Pipeline to “promote its own selfish agenda.” I find it hard to contain my outrage. 

Greenpeace’s “agenda” is “to ensure the ability of Earth to nurture life in all its diversity.” This is a public-serving mission. Here I speak as one who knows: the Union of Concerned Scientists is a generous employer, but no one is getting into the top1% of wealth fighting the insatiable greed of the fossil fuel industry.  

Energy Transfer’s agenda is “to safely and reliably deliver the energy that makes our lives possible,” as long as that energy comes from transporting, refining, and ultimately burning the fossil fuels that are wreaking climate destruction now and far into the future. This is a profit-seeking mission. Fossil fuel moguls, from the Rockefellers to the Koch Brothers, have made themselves fabulously rich feeding, and feeding off, its insatiable greed.  

The confusion of public and private interests, of what’s good for a company versus what’s good for a sovereign Tribal nation, or for all inhabitants of our planet—I can’t find words. 

Apart from outrage. 

A new prize recognises the power of storytelling to address the biggest issue of our time

No novelist should ignore the climate emergency, Paul Murray, author of the bestselling novel The Bee Sting, told the Observer last year: “It is the unavoidable background for being alive in the 21st century.” In recognition of the vital role of literature in responding to the Anthropocene moment, this week the inaugural shortlist was announced for the Climate Fiction prize.

The five novels include Orbital by Samantha Harvey, set during one day on the International Space Station and the winner of last year’s Booker prize; time-travelling romcom The Ministry of Time from debut novelist Kaliane Bradley; eco-thriller Briefly Very Beautiful by Roz Dineen; And So I Roar, about a young girl in Nigeria, by Abi Daré; and a story of migrants in an abandoned city in Téa Obreht’s The Morningside. All the shortlisted authors are women.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

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PM’s spokesman says more meetings will take place in London next week to ‘accelerate’ planning to enforce any future peace deal

Elections will take place in 23 councils across England on 1 May 2025.

Six mayors will also be elected on 1 May in the West of England, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, North Tyneside, Doncaster and – for the first time – in Greater Lincolnshire and Hull and East Yorkshire.

Contests for seats in 14 county councils will take place in Cambridgeshire, Derbyshire, Devon, Gloucestershire, Hertfordshire, Kent, Lancashire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire. Council elections are also taking place in the Isles of Scilly.

There will be eight contests for seats in unitary authorities, including Buckinghamshire, Cornwall, County Durham, North Northamptonshire, Northumberland, Shropshire, West Northamptonshire and Wiltshire, as well as one metropolitan district in Doncaster.

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As Trump pushes ‘drill, baby, drill’ agenda, Greenpeace verdict offers startling outlook for environmental activism

A pipeline company’s victory in court over Greenpeace, and the huge damages it now faces, will encourage other oil and gas companies to legally pursue environmental protesters at a time when Donald Trump’s energy agenda is in ascendancy, experts have warned.

On Wednesday a North Dakota jury ruled that three Greenpeace entities collectively must pay Energy Transfer, which was co-founded by a prominent Trump donor, more than $660m, deciding that the organizations were liable for defamation and other claims after a five-week trial in Mandan, near where the Dakota Access pipeline protests occurred in 2016 and 2017.

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It’s only going to get hotter

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This week, as wildfires break out across Texas, life-saving alerts are being issued by the National Weather Service (NWS), informing evacuations ahead of the advancing threat. On the ground, firefighters are using National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites for wildfire monitoring in real time. This is just one of dozens of emergencies our first responders rely on NOAA and NWS data for on any given week. Simply put: NOAA and the NWS save lives and must be defended against the Trump administration’s ongoing assault.

We are witnessing the vanishing of our own US assets which taxpayers have funded and built over generations to serve the public good. We need those assets and will suffer in their absence. And we may be forced to pay the private sector to dole them back out to us, piecemeal. We need to call the theft, harm and grift what it is—and stop it. 

The theft

Since 1849, when the Smithsonian Institution began furnishing telegraph offices with weather instruments, meteorological data have been continuously and systematically collected in the United States. In 1870, Congress established within the US Army’s Signal Service the very 19th-century named Division of Telegrams and Reports for the Benefit of Commerce and tasked it with issuing weather forecasts and warnings.

Later, the service became a civilian agency when Congress transferred its meteorological responsibilities to the US Weather Bureau under the Department of Agriculture. Today, those duties are carried out by the National Weather Service (NWS), housed at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) under the Department of Commerce. And thanks to the progression of recognizing the value of investing in weather forecasts and warnings, the American people own the NWS, a public service that is paid for with your tax dollars. That investment totals about $1.3 billion dollars annually—or about $7 per person in the United States—and it puts much more than this back into the US national economy.

The NWS’ own assessment in 2017 found that private businesses can derive up to $13 billion dollars in economic value from weather knowledge, and that its freely-available data powers a $7 billion-dollar market that creates tailored weather products for business and people. Economy-wide, the value of weather and climate information to the US economy exceeds $100 billion annually, which is roughly 10 times the investment made by taxpayers through federal agencies such as NOAA, involved in weather-related science and services. 

That weather app on your phone, or the weather report on TV? How about the storm forecast that the airports you fly in or out of receive every three hours for the next 36 hours and are the basis for rerouting or grounding planes? That’s critical for safe air travel, and yes, that was paid by taxpayers and also belongs to you. The 418 people who were rescued last year from incidents over water, land, and in downed aircraft? That was possible because the Coast Guard and the military had access to NOAA’s search and rescue-aided satellites. All of it is powered by NOAA’s free and public data that are available for public safety or business operations.

At UCS, we know full well how valuable the data are—we power our own Danger Season extreme weather tracker using the NWS’s daily-updated data (another free service!)  

But the valuable data and information that we obtain from NWS is at risk of being stolen. The Trump administration, Elon Musk, and DOGE—the black-box entity that has no actual legal authority to dismantle agencies created by Congress—have signaled as much by illegally invading NOAA headquarters, firing thousands of its staff, and canceling leases on some of its key buildings.

Here we are in the era of presidential overreach, where a Republican-controlled Congress is allowing the executive branch to usurp its powers, and a Democratic minority leadership is unwilling to use its remaining power to block these illegal actions. And that overreach has slipped into the judicial branch, where the Trump administration is openly ignoring judges’ decisions and orders to reverse course on illegal executive action. 

But why? The Trump government wants to dismantle the climate and weather science conducted by NOAA because evidence of a warming world resulting from burning their products is a pesky reality for the fossil fuel industry that gave millions to his campaign. In addition, he would like to put behind a paywall those parts that they will not be able to completely eliminate—the NWS. This is not speculation. Just read the chapter on the Department of Commerce in the Trump government’s blueprint for dismantlement, Project 2025.  Or if you can’t stomach the lunacy of the nearly 900-page document, read my blogpost readout of the plan for NOAA and NWS. This is very, very harmful. 

The harm

Where is the harm in dismantling—or even simply compromising—NWS and its parent office, NOAA? Without accurate, updated, and free weather information, we lose the ability to prepare ourselves for potentially lethal extreme weather such as hurricanes, heat waves, floods, and snowstorms.

Travel by air becomes an uncertain activity that could kill you (think of the Age of Exploration, when galleons departed with very little certainty of arriving safely on the other side of the world, much less coming back!), as airports will not have reliable and updated storm forecasts. The national economy suffers because weather events account for impactful fluctuations in the country’s GDP and affect the ability of all sectors to provide goods and services. Planning for weather-related risks requires information that can help reduce uncertainty that is costly for business; its absence hampers emergency managers and first responders.  

As it turns out, we lose quite a bit of life-saving alert information. I took a look at the number of times that the NWS issued an alert that impacted a county (or county-equivalents in the territories) each day between 2010 and 2024, a metric I call county-alert days. I use this metric rather than the raw number of alerts because NWS alerts often span multiple counties, so the raw number does not quite communicate the spread of alerts in counties.

NWS keeps track of nearly 70 different types of extreme weather, so I grouped them into thirteen categories. I am sure meteorologists may disagree with some of my grouping choices, but I think this serves to illustrate my point: Between 2010 and 2024, NWS issued extreme weather alerts that impacted all 3,144 counties (and equivalents) a whopping 3.7 million times.

I also grouped the alerts geographically according to the Fourth National Climate Assessment regions to show how different regions of the country face different kinds of extreme weather. Wildfires in the Great Plains, the Southwest, and the Northwest have prompted thousands of fire weather (also called “red flag”) alerts by the NWS; historically, alerts in the Southeast and the Northeast are mostly related to flood, cold, heat, and wind. The US Caribbean (that’s Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands) have faced floods, dangerous ocean weather and currents, and in the previous two years, extreme heat alerts that were not common before. Note that the small number of storms does not reflect their devastating impact, such as Hurricane María’s in 2017. Finally, Hawai’i and the Pacific Islands have faced much flooding and storms, and in the last few years have seen red flag weather alerts for wildfires such as the terrible Maui fires of 2023. 

NWS alerting us to potential harm: Between 2010 and 2024, NWS issued extreme weather alerts that impacted all 3,144 counties and county-equivalents in the US 3.7 million times. 

Let’s say you live in a coastal community along the Gulf of Mexico. Would you like to know how much storm surge or wind speed you need to prepare for in the face of an incoming hurricane, or when you need to evacuate to higher ground? Well, you could have this information if NOAA could fly their hurricane hunters, those very cool aircraft flown by very brave pilots who soar into hurricanes to collect data that are fed into storm track models to refine projections of intensity, speed, and landfall as hurricanes form, evolve, and intensify rapidly from one day to the next (a hallmark behavior of storms in the climate change era).

But guess what? There is no certainty we will have such information this hurricane season. In February, flight directors and other pilots were fired, but news media reported that some were rehired in March. No clear information is coming through from the administration, so it’s anybody’s guess if there will in fact be planes, pilots, and a flight plan ready to go if and when hurricanes threaten populated areas in the Gulf of Mexico. 

For other types of extreme weather worsened by climate change, harm will follow as well: farmers will lose drought monitoring that they rely on to plan and prepare for the season; forest managers and wildfire first responders will lose seasonal and monthly wildfire risk outlooks. Alerts about rapid-onset events such as extreme heat domes and flooding are also at risk of being lost.  

Hurricane season and the time of the year when climate change makes extreme weather more likely (we call it Danger Season) are right around the corner. Without our hurricane hunters and their pilots, weather balloons, and forecasters, we are going impaired into seasonal climate and extreme weather dangers that we already know are destroying lives and property.  

The presidential grift of what’s ours

So… <deep breath>. Let’s take Project 2025 seriously about its goal of privatizing NWS—which we definitely should take seriously, since in the first two long months of the Trump administration it has reliably been its modus operandi. According to pages 674-677, it appears that the theft and the harm will be followed by the further crime of privatizing what we own and pay for already.

What we already own and pay for is giving back dividends in lives and property saved, increasing prosperity, reducing uncertainty about extreme weather impacts, and providing the scientific bedrock of knowledge that can inform how to safeguard us from a climate-changed world. And the unilateral and illegal actions of the administration intend to put this service behind a paywall to make us pay again for it?

Public services exist to provide parity in access to all people in society without regard to their ability to individually fork out money for such a service—so those unable to pay will end up paying twice: once with their tax dollars, and once with their wellbeing or with their lives. Paywalled weather alerts will deprive individuals, households, or towns with lower incomes of access to life-saving services.

And there are early indications of the privatization to come. The private company WindBorne Systems has offered to backfill atmospheric data no longer collected by weather balloons in Alaska after the Juneau local NWS office lost 10% of its staff due to downsizing. While this may look like good corporate citizen action from a technically-savvy and well-resourced private company, businesses exist to make money, so it is a bit hard to see how WindBorne will be willing or able to permanently fill the gap in data collection in Alaska without compensation.  

Is this the wasteful spending that President Trump and Musk pledged to root out? Are we supposed to accept the demolition of the jobs, the infrastructure, and the data that saves lives and property and increases prosperity, under the pretense of rooting out a federal workforce that is falsely vilified as being lazy, leeching the system, and wasting taxpayers’ money?

There is a perverse psychology of revenge at play here. In dismantling the federal workforce, the administration’s goal has been, in the words of director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought (and architect of Project 2025), for “the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.” This vengeful discourse has been embraced by a significant part of the country who gleefully watch the administration’s actions inflicting pain on the federal workforce across the board.

Year after year, billion-dollar disasters, many of them worsened by climate, destroy and displace communities across the country. And as Danger Season and the heat waves, hurricanes, floods, and wildfires it brings loom over us, people across the country and territories—regardless of political persuasion—will suffer under extreme weather disasters without life-saving information, and without adequately-funded and staffed emergency management, recovery, and reconstruction services.

The life- and property-saving value that federal workers bring to the people of this country is on the line, and I fear that the consequences of dismantling the country’s weather and climate forecasting enterprise as well as disaster assistance and recovery agencies will strike a blow to communities still reeling from previous years’ extreme weather in addition to this year’s worsening economic challenges related to market uncertainties and cost of living increases.  

The Trump administration is dismantling institutions, firing expert staff, and stealing data paid for out of our own pockets. Such theft will lead to harm as we lose the information that saves lives, protects property, and enables prosperity across many aspects of daily life in the US.  It will also change how the US has regarded science and the NWS as a beloved and public good.

The country has invested in, and innovated through, this scientific public service for over a century, not for selling it to the highest bidder, but for the common good. Dismantling NOAA and the National Weather Service is a presidential grift that we must oppose. 

When we save science, we save lives. Take action to tell the Trump administration to stop its all-out war on our science and our scientists.