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White House plan to break up iconic U.S. climate lab moves forward
- soared 7mo agoBoulder is not a town you generally want to upset, I would expect this to have an outsized inverse impact compared to what the White House expects over the long term.
- throwaway6734 7mo agoWhy? When I think of boulder I do not think of “people that resonate with the American public”
- shrubble 7mo agoThere’s a lot of different reasons that have nothing to do with this particular situation that has led to the saying that Boulder is “nine square miles surrounded by reality”…
- nomel 7mo agoCould you expand on this a bit?
- Balgair 7mo agoVery rich, very liberal, very loud, has a lot of free time too. Elon raised his first set of kids there for a reason. Folks there tend to have a lot of hooks in a lot of places.
- dboreham 7mo ago[flagged]
- petcat 7mo agoNASCAR is awesome. Don't diss NASCAR.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- s5300 7mo ago[dead]
- Kapura 7mo agoYou're mistaking the stereotype for the people in charge of the policy. If you want to destroy GOP institutions, start with country clubs and sinking private yachts. nationalize car dealerships. break up the megacorps.
- ribosometronome 7mo ago>nationalize car dealerships Or just allow direct sales.
- croes 7mo agoBut the people of the stereotype helped those idiots to come to power.
- eastbound 7mo ago> destroy GOP institutions, start with country clubs and sinking private (…) Wouldn’t that validate the rhetoric that Democrats have the same methods as the Nazis: Threats, destruction, (racial preference), and social censorship?
- jauntywundrkind 7mo agoAnd breakup Paramount+ CBS CNN Showtime HBO Warner Bros TNT TBS MTV DC Studios Nickelodeon Comedy Central Cartoon Network. And the other media empires!
- selectodude 7mo agoThey’re all so upset that they have nothing worth saving and they take it out on everybody else with wanton destruction.
- sashank_1509 7mo agoCrypto should be first on the chopping block. Then they should designate A16Z a national security risk just like they did with Anthropic.
- technothrasher 7mo agoYeah, or, hear me out, we could stop with the stupid culture war crap and get back to running the country like adults?
- pupppet 7mo agoTecho bros control everything now and they want us in our silos.
- harimau777 7mo agoIt takes two to tango. Every progressive I know would be thrilled to stop with the culture war BS. However, MAGA refuses to just let people live their lives the way they want.
- gottorf 7mo ago> Every progressive I know would be thrilled to stop with the culture war BS. However, MAGA refuses to just let people live their lives the way they want. Are you using some nonstandard definition of "progressive" and "MAGA", or do you genuinely have the belief that the left wing is closer to the center majority of this country in "culture war" matters than the right wing?
- mindslight 7mo agoSpoken like a true culture warrior! It's not a matter of who is "closer", rather it's a matter of which party leans into politicizing the policing of cultural choices in the first place.
- Qwertious 7mo agoPACs.
- deafpolygon 7mo agoDemocracy won’t be restored until we increase the number of political parties in this country and fix how our officials are elected. I wish I had the answer on how to solve this, but alas… I’ll defer to people who are smarter than me.
- nomel 7mo agoNo hope even with that, as long as Citizens United is still alive and kicking.
- gottorf 7mo ago> Democracy won’t be restored until we increase the number of political parties in this country Parliamentary systems with many parties run into a different kind of dysfunction. Belgium didn't have a government for like two years relatively recently because they couldn't form a big enough coalition. In a democracy, there is no magic bullet that does not involve the quality of the demos. What is your idea of democracy that needs to be restored in this country?
- deafpolygon 7mo agoMore power to voters; make their votes count. Encourage run-off voting, etc. We don’t need to turn the US into a parliamentary government. Those are different matters. Things like ranked-choice voting, proportional representation, multi-member districts, electoral college reforms. We don’t necessarily need a large number of parties… At this point, the political parties are incentivized to suppress votes and/or redistrict things to make voting favorable for their party. Negative partisanship becomes a too-effective political strategy. There are other issues such as focusing on swing state politics (rather than representing their constitutents) and primary capture of ideologically committed voters (reinforcing and/or encouraging extremism). I agree, there is no magic bullet... but a two-party system has a tendency to devolve into a winner-takes-all mentality. It also increases polarity in every country where a two-party system has ever existed (primarily US, UK, Canada). What happens when the two party no longer represents the majority of Americans and American interests?
- groundzeros2015 7mo agoCasual racism.
- solid_fuel 7mo agoSpaceX should be nationalized to restore the capabilities that were lost when DOGE and Musk gutted our national science agencies.
- frogperson 7mo agoFascism, plain and simple. This is caving to corporate interests at the expense of the public.
- baggy_trough 7mo agoFascism is when research labs are reorganized?
- virgil_disgr4ce 7mo ago"reorganized"
- baggy_trough 7mo agoYes, as described in the article.
- Invictus0 7mo ago[flagged]
- Kapura 7mo agoI grew up in Colorado, and a visit to NCAR was part of my elementary school education. I think it is so critically important to not only employ working scientists, but also share that science with the public. The republican machine vehemently disagrees, I guess. I deeply wish the democrats had run a better campaign in 2024.
- mort96 7mo agoYeah... "I would do nothing different from Biden"[1] probably wasn't the right message at the peak of Biden's unpopularity. I wonder who came up with that, or if it was genuine. [1]: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/08/harris-biden-the-view-00182883 https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/08/harris-biden-the-vi...
- elif 7mo agoI don't think there was as much pushback about his policy as much as there was discontent with an economic slowdown and a somewhat ironic (considering where we find ourselves) frustration with his age.
- mort96 7mo agoWell there was a lot of people, especially on the dem side of the spectrum, who weren't a fan of his public unwavering support of the genocide of the Palestinian people. Internal investigations within the party allegedly agree with this analysis. But yes, people dislike Biden for a lot of things he didn't deserve to be disliked for, such as inflation which was caused by COVID and Trump and which Biden did a fantastic job of controlling, but which parts of the public simply perceived as "inflation went wild under Biden". Still, even though it's not fair, the message "I will do nothing different from (unpopular incumbent)" isn't great campaign strategy, in my opinion.
- elif 7mo agoPeople who did not like the situation in the middle east did not vote for trump thinking it would improve things. Because we have a true dichotomy I don't think it's reasonable to assume that trump had any sort of "policy" win there
- scwoodal 7mo ago> NCAR’s climate research may not be the only thing driving the White House attack. It is widely believed to also be part of a campaign of political retribution waged against Colorado for its conviction and imprisonment of Tina Peters, a former county clerk who breached election security systems in a scheme to find proof of fraud in the 2020 presidential election. The state has included the attack on NCAR in a lawsuit against the Trump administration. Federal policy by wounded ego is still wounded ego.
- tzs 7mo agoIt's also widely believed that is a big part of why he vetoed a bill to fund the Arkansas River Valley water pipeline in Colorado, to bring much needed clean drinking water to rural communities in southeastern Colorado (communities that overwhelming voted for Trump all three times). Another reason widely believed to be a significant factor is that it would benefit Lauren Boebert's district, and Trump wanted to punish her for siding with Democrats in the House on releasing the Epstein files. The pipeline funding bill had been very bipartisan. It had passed the House by unanimous consent, and whatever the equivalent procedure is in the Senate. There was an attempt to override the veto. The House vote was 248-177, which failed because a veto override requires 2/3 of the votes. It would have needed 283. All Democrats voted to override. It would have taken 71 Republicans to push it over, which would have been 1/3 of Republicans present. It only got 35, 1/6th of the Republicans.
- jacquesm 7mo agoHumpty Dumpty sat on a wall Humpty Dumpty had a great fall All the king's horses and all the king's men Couldn't put Humpty together again -- It's going to take a lot of glue to try to put the United States together again. Breaking things is easy, and the Trump administration absolutely excels at it. The White House, some buildings (some occupied) in Iran, the economy, the cohesion in so far as there still was any left in the country, the scientific community and the reputation of the United States as a dependable ally. But once broken they are not so easily restored.
- Tadpole9181 7mo agoI'm not convinced Humpty will come together again at all. The US population doesn't seem to care nearly enough to effectuate change while the regime talks about brown shirts at polling stations, delayed elections, Fed oversight of ballots, and preventing married women from voting. Our relationships have crumbled and there's no reason to trust us: friend or foe. We're ramping up debt harder than ever, we've made tourists scared, we killed our academic imports, and we've made it impossible to start a business while letting private equity gobble up entire markets to play financial games with loans - setting up a time bomb for catastrophe. Now we're shutting down food inspection systems, disabling ecological oversight, firing every qualified person we can and installing sycophants in their place. Some with for-life positions! The economy is only desperately clinging on pretending everything is fine and they can weather the store - but the King has no clothes and has taken full control of economic levers with no oversight. And beyond requiring regime change, the US can no longer solve such issues without constitutional amendments. Our government has proven to be fundamentally broken. Which simply will not happen because it is broken. The US seems to be on an unrecoverable path to third world theocratic state status. We will lose our democracy and we will lose our economy. And I see no path out of it anymore.
- jacquesm 7mo ago> I'm not convinced Humpty will come together again at all Agreed, that's sort of the point of the rhyme. You can break stuff far easier than that you can make or repair stuff.
- softwaredoug 7mo agoThis fits a consistent trend: Unless Congress explicitly mandates something by law, they should expect an administration to unilaterally dismantle it. Congress delegated authority assuming it’s used in good faith and courts+executive have called Congress’s bluff. In this case it’s a facility created by NSF, but Congress doesn’t explicitly say this HAS to exist. Therefore it won’t exist any longer.
- mikeocool 7mo agoWhile true in the abstract, this administration has also dismantled numerous things that are mandated by congress.
- softwaredoug 7mo agoLike what?
- TOMDM 7mo agoThe department of education for one. It's been crippled essentially without anything being passed by Congress
- softwaredoug 7mo agoEvery statutory requirement is still being fulfilled. There’s a lot of talk, but we still have a Dept of Education, even if it’s reduced in staffing 50%
- jedberg 7mo agoIt's worse than that though. They are dismantling things that congress has mandated, and also just not making legally mandated payments, and no one is stopping them. Congress has abdicated their duty of checks and balances. In a functioning government, the executive would have already been removed for not following legally mandated spending.
- TOMDM 7mo ago
- mudil 7mo agoFor some it's more iconic than for others.
- bigyabai 7mo agoWhat is that supposed to mean? Don't paraphrase, just say it.
- ntchpalm 7mo agoThis is just an attempt by one political party to censor climate research. The hope is, if there is no research being done, then there will be no pressure to do anything about it. This is similar to the COVID mentality of, "stop the testing." If you don't test for COVID, the numbers don't get worse. However, as someone who has worked at NCAR for many years, I can tell you that the place is a mess. The Table Mesa facility is mostly devoid of employees, with entire floors of offices left in a state of dark decay. Most of the vehicles in the parking lot are people hiking the trails, and days of yucky weather will reveal at most a couple dozen cars in the parking lot, mainly maintenance people. Elementary school groups continue to show up for tours, but the scientists and technical staff have moved to other buildings in town, specifically the Center Green and Foothills Lab clusters. NCAR has become a mere shadow of its former self, with > 30% of its funding being absorbed by the Directorate and President's offices, with some executive salaries exceeding half a million dollars (not bad for a non-profit). The younger talent have fled, from the engineers up to the upper management, and what remains are aged-out scientists just waiting for retirement. Internal surveys, which seem to be sent out almost weekly, tend to show very low confidence in the leadership. It's a tanker running on inertia, and breaking it up and selling it off may be the best thing for it.
- hsuduebc2 7mo ago>A month earlier, Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), had said the White House would “break up” NCAR, citing its role in “climate alarmism.” This is absolutely the biggest pain of today's politics. You can't argue with their dogma even when it agains literally all the facts. Needless to say, both parties are doing it. Just a little bit differently.