Playing catch-up

PRESENTED BY DUMBOS AND PURPLE HAGS

You ever feel annoyed at yourself for not getting ahead of the work, not being on top of everything? That’s where I’m at.

First off, I’m annoyed that The New York Times’s Eric Niiler got the story that the Ocean Observations Initiative, a critical network of five underwater arrays managed by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute since 2016, is being shut down by the Trump regime’s National Science Foundation. The “descoping” of the buoys, gliders, fiber-optic cables, was announced by OOI on its website on May 21, just waiting to be noticed. Did I? No!

Late last year, Trump vizier Russ Vought took control of the NSF and has been wielding it to exact retribution against political opponents and his greatest enemy: “climate alarmism.” This is another part of his campaign to burn down the American scientific enterprise and salt the earth to prevent it from ever rising again.

The network, which cost $48 million a year to run, is being killed for no reason, or, in the garbage words of the pathetic NSF flack Michael England, because it “aligns with NSF’s wider strategy to have a nimbler approach to prioritizing support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies as well as a deliberate approach to smart life cycle management within its portfolio of research infrastructure.”

Before the development of LLMs, this bilge was not easy to produce. England got a certificate in “Leading Through the Changing Media Landscape” from the Harvard Kennedy School and it only cost $4900!

The Ocean Observations Initiative is part of a broader ocean observation effort run by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, which is Vought’s primary target. This project to know what the hell is happening to our oceans has been driven by the Coordinated Ocean Observations and Research Act, signed into law by Trump in December 2020.

In more bad news, the Times has an opening for another climate policy reporter, which means they might get even more stories about Vought’s war on climate science before I do.

I’m also behind the story that National Public Radio shut down its ten-journalist climate desk last week. Among those fired were the brilliant Neela Bannerjee, one of the country’s most experienced and principled climate journalists.

And I had wanted to get out a comprehensive, well-written preview of local climate candidates before today’s primaries to accompany my preview of today’s Congressional primaries. Did I? No!

Instead, you get only this hasty overview of today’s candidates in California, New Jersey, and New Mexico endorsed by climate groups like Jane Fonda Climate PAC, Lead Locally, Climate Cabinet, Climate Action California, and Food and Water Watch. As a bare list of candidates, it’s pretty tiresome!

California

State-wide

• Governor: Tom Steyer, better known as Kat Taylor’s husband

• Insurance Commissioner: Ben Allen

• Secretary of State: Shirley Weber

• Controller: Malia Cohen

• Attorney General: Rob Bonta

Senate

• SD 2: Damon Connolly

Assembly

• AD 30: Dawn Addis

• AD 42: Deborah Klein Lopez, a fierce climate hawk

• AD 44: Nick Schultz

• AD 50: Robert Garcia

• AD 65: Fatima Iqbal-Zubair

• AD 72: Chris Kluwe

Los Angeles

• LA County City Attorney: Marissa Roy

• LA County Board of Supervisors, District 3: Lindsey Horvath

• City Council, District 9: Estuardo Mazariegos

• City Council, District 11: Faizah Malik

California Climate Action has a longer list for the California legislature, including endorsements for multiple candidates in some districts, as strong on climate. This is important, because a large bloc of California Democrats are aligned with Big Oil.

• SD 4: Jaron Brandon

• SD 6: Sean Frame

• SD 10: David Cohen and Scott Sakikihara

• SD 18: Steve Padilla

• SD 20: Caroline Menjivar

• SD 24: John Erickson

• SD 26: Wendy Carrillo

• SD 36: Chris Duncan

• SD 38: Catherine Blakespear

• AD 2: Chris Rogers

• AD 5: Neva Parker

• AD 12: Eli Beckman, Holli Thier, and Jackie Elward

• AD 16: Rebecca Bauer-Kahan

• AD 23: Marc Berman

• AD 24: Alex Lee

• AD 25: Ash Kalra

• AD 28: Gail Pellerin

• AD 37: Gregg Hart

• AD 38: Steve Bennett

• AD 40: Pilar Schiavo

• AD 43: Celeste Rodriguez

• AD 51: Rick Chavez Zbur

• AD 55: Isaac Bryan

• AD 57: Sade Elhawary

• AD 58: Jessie Lopez

• AD 73: Cottie Petrie-Norris

• AD 74: Sergio Farias

• AD 77: Tasha Boerner

• AD 78: Chris Ward

New Jersey

The mostly shuttered Primary School newsletter has a special edition for today’s New Jersey primaries. Food and Water Watch has endorsed in two county races:

• Hudson County Commissioner: Ron Bautista

• Passaic County Commissioner: Ali Aljarrah

New Mexico

As a rapidly warming, increasingly populated, immigrant-heavy state with robust oil and gas reserves, New Mexico is a hotly contested battleground of American climate politics. Lead Locally and JanePAC are working to help local climate activists build their needed political power. “The nation’s second largest producer of crude oil, New Mexico needs stronger policies to protect communities from the oil and gas industry and to transition to clean energy,” Lead Locally writes. “A major climate bill that would have codified the governor’s net-zero by 2050 goals was recently defeated by four votes in the State Senate.”

State-wide

• Land Commissioner: Juan Sanchez

N.M. House of Representatives

• HD-4: Joseph Hernandez

• HD-13: Patricia Roybal Caballero

• HD-16: Yanira Gurrola

• HD-21: Debbie Sariñana

• HD-26: Eleanor Chavez

• HD-35: Angelica Rubio

• HD-37: Lori Martinez

• HD-41: Yolanda Jaramillo

• HD-44: Kathleen Cates

• HD-68: Charlotte Little

• HD-69: Michelle Paulene Abeyta

• HD-70: Anita Gonzales

County

• Bernalillo County Commission District 5: Eric Olivas

Before I go, a little more catching up:

• Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.) did a roundtable last week at Whitney Library on Nevada's broiling heat: “It’s so important to recognize extreme heat as a national disaster, and it’s getting worse. As climate change comes, this is not going away, it’s going to get worse.”

• Tropical Storm Jangmi is battering Japan.

• The post-human economy is going green.

Hearings on the Hill:

• 10 AM: Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee
     Coast Guard, Maritime, and Fisheries Subcommittee
  Alaskan Fisheries and Other Coastal Economies

• 10 AM: Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee
  Oversight of the United States Forest Service

• 4 PM: House Rules Committee
  H.R. 8646, Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agency Appropriations Act, 2027, and Other Bills

Thanks for subscribing and spreading the word. If you’ve got job listings, event listings, or other hot news, I want to hear it. Connect with me—@climatebrad.hillheat.com on BlueSky and @[email protected].