Trump Admin Guts Vital Sea Monitoring, "Tears Out the Eyes and Ears of Science": David Helvarg

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AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . I’m Amy Goodman.

The Trump administration has begun dismantling the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a network of more than 900 ocean floor sensors that collect critical data on marine ecosystems, ocean currents and global climate data. The deep sea sensors were installed a decade ago at a cost of $370 million, funded by the National Science Foundation. The independent NSF board has since been dismantled by the Trump administration. The decommissioning of the sensors has already begun and is expected to be completed next year.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has pushed to expand deep sea mining and loosen fishing regulations. The closure of the Oceans Observatories Initiative was recommended by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook for Trump’s presidency. Scientists warn the move will severely degrade efforts to monitor changing climate patterns and could negatively affect weather forecasting and extreme weather alerts.

For more, we’re joined in studio by David Helvarg, executive director of Blue Frontier, an ocean policy group, co-host of the Rising Tide: Ocean podcast and an author. His latest book is just out, Forest of the Sea: The Remarkable Life and Imperiled Future of Kelp .

Well, we won’t be talking as much about kelp today, David, though we have to have you back on to talk about that. But right now the dismantling of this nearly $400 million deep sea sensor network, talk specifically about what it means.

DAVID HELVARG : Well, specifically, the Congress refused to allow the administration to defund this project for the last two years, so now they’re disassembling it. And this is the cutting-edge eyes and particularly ears of science in the ocean. This was scheduled to continue as the most advanced system for understanding the deep ocean, the circulation of the ocean, the warming of the ocean, supposed to continue for the next 15 years at least.

And as you stated, it was the Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s overall plan for creating an administrative authoritarian state, which includes a strong focus on, essentially, developing the ocean for offshore oil drilling and for deep sea mining, basically as a gas station and a garbage dump. And the result is — they said it was — you know, it was the instrument by which NOAA , the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, was promoting climate hysteria. And what they mean by that is accurate science that reflects the reality that the burning of fossil fuels is overheating our ocean.

Last year, NOAA reported the ocean’s been the hottest in recorded history, going back to the 1880s. So, we have these extreme marine heat waves that have huge effects on coastal hazards and coastal security. It’s also 80% of the world’s coral reefs were bleached last year because of the warming of the ocean. The kelp forests are the world’s other forest crisis that’s happening. We’ve lost over half the kelp forests, that still are more extensive than the Amazon rainforest. And so, we’re — we’re in this crisis, and they’re blinding us to understanding that crisis, because our understanding would direct us to rapidly transition off of fossil fuels, which are overheating and acidifying our ocean. And it’s a scary moment.

AMY GOODMAN : So, scientists have warned that dismantling the system will severely degrade the accuracy of weather predictions and El Niño forecasts. Explain.

DAVID HELVARG : El Niño is a periodic warming of the Pacific. It may — all the projections right now, or at least the predictions, are that it’ll become more extreme than it’s ever been this year, on top of which we’re having a new wave of marine heat waves. The last marine heat wave that hit the West Coast basically destroyed 95% of the kelp forest in Northern California. And it impacts on towns like Fort Bragg, California. Fisheries collapse, tourism based on abalone diving, 30 million a year that was lost.

The good news is, is people who were in conflict before — the fishing community, the tribes, the environmentalists — are all now trying to work together to restore the ocean. The bad news is they’re coming up against an administration that’s — that only wants to drill offshore. And I’ve talked to the AFL - CIO in Rhode Island, where they’ve twice had to drop tools. You know, they had 80% completion on the Revolution wind farms off Rhode Island, which, when they’re completed, will not only provide clean energy to the communities onshore, but reduce utility bills for 400,000 people in Rhode Island and Connecticut. On the West Coast, people are out of work because of the loss of kelp and fisheries. And, you know, so it doesn’t make economic sense. I mean, we’re literally at the point where it’s cheaper to produce clean energy than to produce coal and oil, which were great energy systems through the 16th and 19th century. T…