This is the state equivalent of a human gouging out their own eyes to avoid dealing with the fact that a train is barrelling towards them instead of stepping off the tracks.
The data this satellite collects is used to promote climate regulation and legislation. The authors of the article can’t even come up with other ostensible uses for it. Farmers care about carbon dioxide levels? Good one.
The equivalent would be a democrat administration using government force to shut down data collection they don’t like because it will be used to promote policies they don’t want. Kind of like how the Biden admin’s FAA restricted drone use at the southern border during the migrant crisis.
I think the word you’re looking for is “like” instead of “equivalent”.
In the sense that restricting drone use does not destroy assets that were expensive to create and launch, and are currently generating significant value for the American taxpayer and the world. We already paid for them, and now we're maintaining them for next to nothing.
Also, note that the yearly maintainance cost is in the same order of magnitude as a single presidential golf trip. TBC, I'm not against presidential leisure, everyone needs a break sometimes - but the cost argument doesn't hold up.
Additionally, the migrant crisis is specific to current American political environment. Climate change is an issue which threatens humanity, and even if one is purely self-interested and doesn't care for famines in the third world, will directly cost the taxpayer trillions of dollars of the next century via extreme weather events and relocation/insurance bailouts, and indirectly cost hundreds of billions more via stunted productivity.
Restricting drone use for petty political reasons is not equivalent to pro-actively de-orbiting functional satellites that are working to mitigate existential risk.
Go talk to a farmer. They pay attention to a lot of metrics, but local carbon dioxide levels are not one of them.
Use your brain. If farmers actually found this data valuable, the author of that article would have found someone who was using it and interviewed them.
This is an instrument that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. More than half a billion considering the others in the program. It is still producing data. If you are arguing in favor of destroying this asset, then you have ulterior motive or terrible judgement.
Is the data gained from the programs described in the article worth the $15M per year cost? That’s the real question.
It’s entirely rational to think such an expense is unnecessary, especially if your politics inclines you to believe the data collected by these programs will be used to push for more stringent environmental regulation that you dislike.
Even granting that the data is valuable, is it worth $15M per year? Can it be collected privately? Why does the government need to fund it?
To answer your question, yes, people can defend this action rationally. You don’t even have to be MAGA to do it. We should all want more efficient government.
It’s not a good thing. The only somewhat okay reason to go down this path is if you know you have to cut spending and want to terminate missions safely rather than leaving junk. But this seems like a biased decision for obvious reasons.
Yea but you may lose the people, hardware, whatever to remove it from orbit easily. SpaceX designs their satellites to passively deorbit within 5 years to remove the space junk risk. But satellites in higher orbits take much longer.
Because it's a waste of money. You don't need satellites to measure CO2 levels. Ground based measurements work perfectly fine, which is where air is densest. These satellites are supplementary and are fairly imprecise in measuring CO2 as they look at reflected sunlight from the surface. Note that the satellite can't measure through clouds, which is 2/3 of the atmosphere at any given time.
This is a satellite you probably never heard about before but you were moved by an overemotional headline that a journo used to manipulate your pretenses.
There are many, but the most important one is Mauna Loa. CO2 is well mixed in the atmosphere. It has to be or plant life would suffocate and die (remember CO2 is their O2). Just like Oxygen is well mixed and evenly distributed around the planet. A ground measurement that is sufficiently isolated from forests or cities that could have localized effects is ideal. Muana is considered ideal because it sits out in the Pacific ocean on a remote island of Hawaii.
"In coordination with the requested terminations for Weather Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes (see OAR-10) and Ocean
Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes (see OAR-19), NOAA will close...Mauna Loa"
Hopefully China will invest even more into climate science to compensate for his madness. For a while I thought China might lose to America, but now it's clear we're living the age of Chinese golden age. They will win in all sciences, there's no question about it.
They can brute force their way out of it by sheer political will, the transformation to electrify China's traffic, the hyperscaling of PV production, the rollout of high-speed trains were all accomplished in timelines the USA won't ever see in our lifetime since it lacks any political will to do big things anymore.
They are installing more solar than the rest of the world combined, other renewables as well. China doesn't have oil, they don't want to depend on oil or fossil fuels, and the CCP needs to keep some kind of social cohesion by showing off to their citizens that "things are being done".
Air quality over Chinese big cities has improved massively the past 10-15 years, they will only continue doing so, it was popular.
China emits 3x more than the United States and growing. It emmitted 1M more kilotons of CO2 in 2023 than in 2022. You are falling for some crazy propaganda. The U.S. emits less today than it did in 1990 despite the population being significantly larger.
China doesn't care about climate change. As you mentioned, they don't have oil, so they're simply exploiting the resources they do have to generate energy in all forms: solar AND coal AND nuclear AND whatever else they can get. This is rational from a purely economic standpoint, not from a standpoint of believing that climate change is an existential crisis.
And, measuring the emissions of China on its own is a pretty useless thing given they're the world's factory. A flattening of emissions increase is an absolutely huge deal.
Here's a fantastic chance for a tech mega-billionaire or company to step up to the plate and take on the $15M p.a. commitment to keep the satellite orbiting.
For example, for Google $15M is probably less than they spend on stocking their fridges with fizzy drinks. The PR benefits would be huge and they could probably sell the data to the current users of that info.
I'm starting to think that the most effective form of protest might be to make it clear to the billionaires that we know about their bunkers and they won't be safe in them following a climate cataclysm.
By large armies of trained soldiers who invariably suffered disproportionate casualties. Fortifications are very effective for this specific application.
The billionaire with a doomsday bunker probably has enough rations to outlast you. It's best not to wait until the doomsday bunker stage to do something about the situation.
That's true. However, the smarter(esque) billionaires built their doomsday prepper bunkers in NZ, AU, Hawaii, and probably elsewhere secret and far away from most civilization they want to avoid.
It’s a pretty tough incentive alignment issue. You need the families of the guards to live in the bunker… but then , why wouldn’t one of them just take over?
Yet, when Al Gore created _An Inconvenient Truth_ back in 2006 everybody was ready to mock his private jet.
I think billionaires are a distraction. MAGA had no problem talking about "coastal liberals" with their billionaire connections and how they're going to "drain the swamp," and look where it led us.
Not one of OPs, but it's become common knowledge these days that a real class war has been ongoing for decades, with the final blow likely delivered by Thatcher and Reagan.
The social contract, between the effective ruling and representative classes and the populations they are supposed to serve, seems to have been completely broken.
So you could say everything not pivoting to this point is basically a distraction.
It is _wild_ seeing how the US is deliberately reducing state capacity in every area that would result in improvements to everyone, even the capitalist class it would be supposedly benefiting.
The American Dream looks more and more like being a temperate, humid petrostate.
By increasing the gap between have and have-not, and making most things shittier (and escape from the shit more costly), the privilege of money increases. Amazing that everyone is so peaceful. One group just takes it all.
You are drastically underestimating how incompetent this government is compared to all others that preceded it and how deep the loss of expertise hits. You do not recover from lost bureaucratic competence for decades.
Eroded public trust in government is however a good thing. Our biggest mistake as a supposedly free country was trusting centralized entities to forever act in accordance with the will of the majority.
As a society we need to stop asking for permission to fix potholes. Just go fix them and dare them to fine you for it which would be catnip for journalists to call more attention to the dysfunctional government.
NASA should crowdfund the weather satellites, with tax deductible donations, like right now. I would support them staying in the sky.
They will sit there in front of a data center like in hitchhikers and will get an answer (maybe it's 43) they don't like or don't understand and the solution will be to build an even bigger machine.
This is the state equivalent of a human gouging out their own eyes to avoid dealing with the fact that a train is barrelling towards them instead of stepping off the tracks.
Death cults be like...
The data this satellite collects is used to promote climate regulation and legislation. The authors of the article can’t even come up with other ostensible uses for it. Farmers care about carbon dioxide levels? Good one.
The equivalent would be a democrat administration using government force to shut down data collection they don’t like because it will be used to promote policies they don’t want. Kind of like how the Biden admin’s FAA restricted drone use at the southern border during the migrant crisis.
I think the word you’re looking for is “like” instead of “equivalent”.
No, these are not equivalent scenarios. Not even a little bit similar.
In both scenarios the government is using their power to prevent data collection they don’t like.
How are they not equivalent?
In the sense that restricting drone use does not destroy assets that were expensive to create and launch, and are currently generating significant value for the American taxpayer and the world. We already paid for them, and now we're maintaining them for next to nothing.
Also, note that the yearly maintainance cost is in the same order of magnitude as a single presidential golf trip. TBC, I'm not against presidential leisure, everyone needs a break sometimes - but the cost argument doesn't hold up.
Additionally, the migrant crisis is specific to current American political environment. Climate change is an issue which threatens humanity, and even if one is purely self-interested and doesn't care for famines in the third world, will directly cost the taxpayer trillions of dollars of the next century via extreme weather events and relocation/insurance bailouts, and indirectly cost hundreds of billions more via stunted productivity.
Restricting drone use for petty political reasons is not equivalent to pro-actively de-orbiting functional satellites that are working to mitigate existential risk.
> Farmers care about carbon dioxide levels?
But I thought it was good for plants? You appear to have some cognitive dissonance at play.
Go talk to a farmer. They pay attention to a lot of metrics, but local carbon dioxide levels are not one of them.
Use your brain. If farmers actually found this data valuable, the author of that article would have found someone who was using it and interviewed them.
That they did not tells you all you need to know.
You mean the TFR that was temporary and had exceptions for Fox News? https://www.foxnews.com/politics/bidens-faa-places-temporary...
Yes totally stopped gathering data.
Whether or not they were successful in preventing that data from being collected is irrelevant. That set the precedent for this kind of behavior.
There is an assumption of intent happening here that the Biden admin did this to prevent collection of data.
That's not something I've seen actually proven tbh.
There is an assumption of intent happening here that the Trump admin is downing this satellite to prevent the collection of climate change data.
That’s not something I’ve seen actually proven, either.
But don’t take my word for it though. From the article itself:
“We can only speculate as to why the Trump administration wants to end the missions.”
Stop being a pedant. You and I both know why Biden restricted those drone flights and why Trump wants this satellite destroyed.
This is an instrument that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. More than half a billion considering the others in the program. It is still producing data. If you are arguing in favor of destroying this asset, then you have ulterior motive or terrible judgement.
I am noticing a distinct lack of maga apologists in this thread. I know you are reading. Please, explain why this is a good thing.
Calling out political opponents to defend every move of their party, so you can clown on them on the internet? Why bother?
No need to clown them. I just want to know if people exist that are willing to even attempt to defend this rationally.
Is the data gained from the programs described in the article worth the $15M per year cost? That’s the real question.
It’s entirely rational to think such an expense is unnecessary, especially if your politics inclines you to believe the data collected by these programs will be used to push for more stringent environmental regulation that you dislike.
Even granting that the data is valuable, is it worth $15M per year? Can it be collected privately? Why does the government need to fund it?
To answer your question, yes, people can defend this action rationally. You don’t even have to be MAGA to do it. We should all want more efficient government.
$15M per year is a rounding error in the military budget.
Wasting money is fine as long as it’s less than $15M per year? What are you trying to say?
It’s not a good thing. The only somewhat okay reason to go down this path is if you know you have to cut spending and want to terminate missions safely rather than leaving junk. But this seems like a biased decision for obvious reasons.
That's not even an okay reason. We know where it is, it's in one piece, it'll last for years even if we do nothing with it.
Destroying it is insane, inexcusable Stalin-esque behavior.
Yea but you may lose the people, hardware, whatever to remove it from orbit easily. SpaceX designs their satellites to passively deorbit within 5 years to remove the space junk risk. But satellites in higher orbits take much longer.
[dead]
Because it's a waste of money. You don't need satellites to measure CO2 levels. Ground based measurements work perfectly fine, which is where air is densest. These satellites are supplementary and are fairly imprecise in measuring CO2 as they look at reflected sunlight from the surface. Note that the satellite can't measure through clouds, which is 2/3 of the atmosphere at any given time.
This is a satellite you probably never heard about before but you were moved by an overemotional headline that a journo used to manipulate your pretenses.
So... how many ground based CO2 stations are there?
And do they have the same coverage as a satellite?
Also, why do we need weather satellites when ground wx stations work perfectly fine?
There are many, but the most important one is Mauna Loa. CO2 is well mixed in the atmosphere. It has to be or plant life would suffocate and die (remember CO2 is their O2). Just like Oxygen is well mixed and evenly distributed around the planet. A ground measurement that is sufficiently isolated from forests or cities that could have localized effects is ideal. Muana is considered ideal because it sits out in the Pacific ocean on a remote island of Hawaii.
https://www.co2.earth/22-co2-now/121-mauna-loa-co2
For list of stations besides Mauna Loa: https://gml.noaa.gov/dv/site/
Page 185 - https://www.commerce.gov/sites/default/files/2025-06/NOAA-FY...
"In coordination with the requested terminations for Weather Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes (see OAR-10) and Ocean Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes (see OAR-19), NOAA will close...Mauna Loa"
Hopefully China will invest even more into climate science to compensate for his madness. For a while I thought China might lose to America, but now it's clear we're living the age of Chinese golden age. They will win in all sciences, there's no question about it.
This is sensationalist and ridiculous. China consumes more coal than (at a minimum) the next 25 nations combined: https://www.worldometers.info/coal/coal-consumption-by-count...
They don't give a flying care about emissions they are strategically focused on economic expansion and power projection.
China is the only reason I’m not a climate doomer anymore.
Why is that? They emit more than any other country on the planet and they are absolutely bottom tier for air quality in global rankings.
https://www.worldometers.info/coal/coal-consumption-by-count...
Answered below in the thread. Raw emissions are a single metric, and not a very useful one at that.
The first and second order derivatives are a lot more interesting here. Also, the impact they're having on the emissions of the global south.
They can brute force their way out of it by sheer political will, the transformation to electrify China's traffic, the hyperscaling of PV production, the rollout of high-speed trains were all accomplished in timelines the USA won't ever see in our lifetime since it lacks any political will to do big things anymore.
They are installing more solar than the rest of the world combined, other renewables as well. China doesn't have oil, they don't want to depend on oil or fossil fuels, and the CCP needs to keep some kind of social cohesion by showing off to their citizens that "things are being done".
Air quality over Chinese big cities has improved massively the past 10-15 years, they will only continue doing so, it was popular.
> https://www.worldometers.info/coal/coal-consumption-by-count...
Well, well, well: https://www.worldometers.info/oil/oil-consumption-by-country...
You probably have never visited China to be able to compare how it was in the 2010s to now, right?
China emits 3x more than the United States and growing. It emmitted 1M more kilotons of CO2 in 2023 than in 2022. You are falling for some crazy propaganda. The U.S. emits less today than it did in 1990 despite the population being significantly larger.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenho...
China doesn't care about climate change. As you mentioned, they don't have oil, so they're simply exploiting the resources they do have to generate energy in all forms: solar AND coal AND nuclear AND whatever else they can get. This is rational from a purely economic standpoint, not from a standpoint of believing that climate change is an existential crisis.
https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/
I don't need to visit China to understand the data. They rank 168th in air quality, absolutely rock bottom tier:
https://epi.yale.edu/measure/2024/AIR
What China is doing is enabling the global south to leapfrog fossil fuels and jump to renewables.
It's expected that China is going to plateau in emissions soon: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gdd6jdm42o
Air quality is something China is actively working on and has had massive improvements: https://www.cfr.org/blog/chinas-battle-against-air-pollution...
And, measuring the emissions of China on its own is a pretty useless thing given they're the world's factory. A flattening of emissions increase is an absolutely huge deal.
[dead]
Here's a fantastic chance for a tech mega-billionaire or company to step up to the plate and take on the $15M p.a. commitment to keep the satellite orbiting.
For example, for Google $15M is probably less than they spend on stocking their fridges with fizzy drinks. The PR benefits would be huge and they could probably sell the data to the current users of that info.
I'm starting to think that the most effective form of protest might be to make it clear to the billionaires that we know about their bunkers and they won't be safe in them following a climate cataclysm.
Those bunkers are already defended. Think of them less as a schizo bug-out bunker and more of the castles of the new feudalism.
Their purpose is solely to protect the land/the lord from people with ideas such as yours following the collapse of the empire.
Even castles have been stormed.
By large armies of trained soldiers who invariably suffered disproportionate casualties. Fortifications are very effective for this specific application.
Dozers would be very easy to armor up and teleoperate. Send 10 just for good measure.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
Salt the land and wait for the rations to run out.
The billionaire with a doomsday bunker probably has enough rations to outlast you. It's best not to wait until the doomsday bunker stage to do something about the situation.
That's true. However, the smarter(esque) billionaires built their doomsday prepper bunkers in NZ, AU, Hawaii, and probably elsewhere secret and far away from most civilization they want to avoid.
Breathing is nice.
best bring out the bunker busters then
You have a lot of those in the back of the garage, do you?
I wonder how the billionaires are going to prevent their security staff from dispatching them and living in the bunkers themselves.
It’s a pretty tough incentive alignment issue. You need the families of the guards to live in the bunker… but then , why wouldn’t one of them just take over?
Yet, when Al Gore created _An Inconvenient Truth_ back in 2006 everybody was ready to mock his private jet.
I think billionaires are a distraction. MAGA had no problem talking about "coastal liberals" with their billionaire connections and how they're going to "drain the swamp," and look where it led us.
Distraction from what?
Not one of OPs, but it's become common knowledge these days that a real class war has been ongoing for decades, with the final blow likely delivered by Thatcher and Reagan.
The social contract, between the effective ruling and representative classes and the populations they are supposed to serve, seems to have been completely broken.
So you could say everything not pivoting to this point is basically a distraction.
Distraction from the fact that there's not going to be a perfect solution that solves the climate without inconveniencing us "common folks."
By advocating for a perfect solution that sticks it to the bad guys, one can put off talking about concrete, actionable plans. Very convenient.
Don't Look Up
Source: https://www.npr.org/2025/08/04/nx-s1-5453731/nasa-carbon-dio... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44796597)
the stupidity will continue until morale improves
Now with complimentary beatings.
They should at least try to sell it. Fine line, though, between leverage and extortion.
What a deeply pathetic path for humanity to end on
China is going to save us from this stupidity.
Most of. That’s the point. Most of.
"If I lie to the administration about disabling the satellite I won't have to worry about how this'll play out at Nuremberg."
Terrible, but predictable, as part of a continued assault on data.
It is _wild_ seeing how the US is deliberately reducing state capacity in every area that would result in improvements to everyone, even the capitalist class it would be supposedly benefiting.
The American Dream looks more and more like being a temperate, humid petrostate.
By increasing the gap between have and have-not, and making most things shittier (and escape from the shit more costly), the privilege of money increases. Amazing that everyone is so peaceful. One group just takes it all.
Thanks Marc, Peter, Elon, Jeff, Mark!
People have been declaring the American dream dead before any of us were born.
We're suffering from unusually poor governance, but it'll hardly be the first time.
We will do a 180 and start walking the other way in 3 years. And then 4 years after that will be back here again. As is tradition.
America never dies, it just walks in circles aimlessly while others march ahead in a mostly straight line laughing at us.
You are drastically underestimating how incompetent this government is compared to all others that preceded it and how deep the loss of expertise hits. You do not recover from lost bureaucratic competence for decades.
Eroded public trust in government is however a good thing. Our biggest mistake as a supposedly free country was trusting centralized entities to forever act in accordance with the will of the majority.
As a society we need to stop asking for permission to fix potholes. Just go fix them and dare them to fine you for it which would be catnip for journalists to call more attention to the dysfunctional government.
NASA should crowdfund the weather satellites, with tax deductible donations, like right now. I would support them staying in the sky.
These people genuinely believe that superintelligent AI will solve all the problems and all this climate noise is impeding progress.
They will sit there in front of a data center like in hitchhikers and will get an answer (maybe it's 43) they don't like or don't understand and the solution will be to build an even bigger machine.