Trump Admin Guts Vital Ocean Monitoring System

[Uncle Joe]

We’re joined by ocean policy expert David Helvarg to discuss the Trump administration’s dismantling of the Ocean Observatories Initiative, the “cutting-edge eyes [and] ears” of the ocean. The program’s closure, proposed in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook for Trump’s second administration, involves the decommissioning of a vast network of ocean floor sensors that collect data on marine ecosystems, ocean currents and global climate data, protecting the world’s oceans and providing critical information about extreme weather. In their place is the increasingly unregulated expansion of resource extraction driven by the fossil fuel industry, “essentially developing the ocean for offshore oil drilling and mining — basically, as a gas station and a garbage dump.”

Helvarg, the author of Forest of the Sea: The Remarkable Life and Imperiled Future of Kelp, also discusses “the world’s other forest crisis”: the loss of over half of kelp forests to warming ocean temperatures, throwing coastal ecosystems deeply out of balance. “We have an ocean,” adds Helvarg. “It’s full of life. It’s at risk. And we need to better understand the other 71% of our blue marble planet to protect it — and not to let a few individuals and corporations destroy it.”

[Botany]

1. The Sperm Whale might go extinct because the food it eats, krill, can't survive in warmer oceans, the snow

and king crab populations are crashing because the Bering Sea is getting too warm for their eggs, New Orleans will go underwater because of rising sea levels from the melting glaciers and ice caps, and now
I read that 1/2 of the world’s kelp is gone because of climate change and what does Trump do? Get
rid of the equipment used to monitor our oceans.

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