A former NASA staffer says the agency is failing the planet as the Earth’s climate approaches a devastating point of no return.
, the Trump administration declared war on climate science.
In the first two weeks of Trump’s second term, the administration started scrubbing critical environmental resources and datasets from federal agency websites and withdrew the United States from international organizations dedicated to combating climate change, dismissing them as a “waste of taxpayer dollars.” Trump himself has dismissed climate science as “woke,” while vowing to “drill, baby, drill” for fossil fuels as our planet stands at the edge of a climate disaster.
Nowhere has that regressive agenda been felt more than at NASA. The agency announced in July that thousands of employees had accepted a controversial deferred resignation program, losing roughly 20 percent of its workforce as a result.
In August, the Trump administration instructed NASA employees to come up with plans to terminate two major missions, including the premature destruction of a greenhouse gas-observing space satellite, dubbed Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2), which is still collecting “exceptionally high quality” data while orbiting the Earth.
According to one former NASA staffer, it all adds up to a ringing failure by the agency as the Earth’s climate approaches a devastating point of no return.
In a “plea to NASA administrator Jared Isaacman” posted to LinkedIn, former NASA Earth public engagement lead Jon Mikel Walton argued that the agency needs to continue funding its Earth Science missions, including a fleet of space-based observatories such as OCO-2. (A NASA spokesperson told Futurism in an email that the agency “cannot speculate regarding any programmatic changes” when asked about the future of the spacecraft.
