The Week in Climate Hearings: Don't Look

Notorious fossil-fuel executive, climate denier, and man-hunter Dick Cheney has expired.

It’s election day statewide in Virginia, New Jersey, and Georgia, with municipal elections across the nation, including New York City, Seattle, Boston, Detroit, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Allegheny County, Charlotte, and Albuquerque. Lead Locally and Climate Cabinet have endorsed strong slates of climate hawks. The Climate Politics Almanac will publish a full review of the election results this week.

The Sith Shutdown continues into its second month, with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La., no relation) continuing to keep the House of Representatives effectively dissolved, which includes continuing to refuse to seat Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.), who was elected on September 23rd. The Trump regime’s latest abuses of the appropriations standoff include continuing its deadly ICE buildup while illegally killing tsunami monitoring in Alaska, illegally refusing to disburse SNAP funds and illegally demolishing the Goddard Space Flight Center.

Most of the Goddard center, the birthplace of the Hubble and Webb space telescopes, is being illegally emptied during the government shutdown, with demolition planned to commence in the coming months. “I think it just kind of speaks to the atmosphere of the agency and the nation,” a Goddard spacecraft engineer told reporter Josh Dinner, “where people are like, ‘Well, laws don't matter for the people at the top anymore.’”

As Hill Heat noted last week, Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates has formally rejected the scientific threat of manmade climate change. Bill McKibben, Michael Mann, and Jigar Shah connect the dots from Gates to the sophistry of Bjørn Lomborg, whom Gates has long funded. Gates is following the lead of Google billionaire Eric Schmidt, who became a worshipper of the Techno-Moloch in 2024. As an industry, Big Tech is now aligning itself with the continued expansion of fossil-fuel production, as a consequence of its embrace of “artificial intelligence” computing that requires inconceivably energy-intensive data centers.

Working with the Big Tech giants, Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-Pa.), Gov. Wes Moore (D-Md.), Gov. Phil Murphy (D-N.J.), and Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-Va.) have teamed up on a proposal to fast-track hyperscale data-center construction in their states—on the plus side, the proposal would favor data centers that add electricity production to the grid; on the downside, that production will probably be fueled by fracked gas.

The death toll across the Caribbean from the fossil-fueled Hurricane Melissa has reached 67, with damages in the range of $50 billion. The death toll from last week’s catastrophic floods in Vietnam has reached 40, with the fossil-fueled Typhoon Kalmaegi looming for landfall on Thursday.

The U.S. Senate is not working hard this week, with Majority Leader John Thune forcing more stage votes on the House GOP continuing resolution, and pushing a few more Trump nominees forward on party-line votes.

The Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee is holding two hearings for transportation nominees this week. On Wednesday afternoon at 2:15 pm, the committee has a nomination hearing for Ryan McCormack to be Transportation Under Secretary for Policy, Daniel Edwards to be Transportation Assistant Secretary for Aviation and International Affairs, and Trent Morse to the Board of the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority. McCormack is a long-time staffer for Sean Duffy, who is now the Secretary of Transportation and acting NASA Administrator. Edwards is a longtime private aviation executive. Morse is a Trumpist political operative and campaign official who served as a White House official in Trump’s first term.

On Thursday morning, the committee holds a nomination hearing for John DeLeeuw to the National Transportation Safety Board, and Richard Kloster and Michelle Schultz to the Surface Transportation Board.

In May, Trump illegally fired Alvin Brown, the vice chair of the NTSB. In August, Trump illegally fired STB board member Robert Primus. Both Brown and Primus are Black. DeLeeuw, an American Airlines official, is nominated to replace Brown. Kloster, a Republican rail industry executive, is nominated to replace Primus. Schultz, a Republican lawyer married to Jim Schultz, a White House ethics official in Trump’s first term, has been a member of the STB since her appointment by Trump in 2018.

On Wednesday afternoon at 3 pm, the Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee is holding a nomination hearing for Glen Smith to be Under Secretary of Agriculture for Rural Development. Smith is an agribusiness executive from Iowa.

Finally: Elizabeth Dwoskin reports, with photos from Ash Ponders, that the Christmas Adventurers Club is real.