The White House's New Climate Plan: Pointing a Laser at the Thermometer

The White House's New Climate Plan: Pointing a Laser at the Thermometer

You know how when a toddler doesn't want something to be true, they just squeeze their eyes shut and cover their ears? It's a cute, if ineffective, defense mechanism.

Well, it seems that toddler logic has now become the official science policy of the United States of America.

In a move so brazenly anti-science it feels like a parody, the White House has ordered NASA to draw up plans to actively destroy two of its most critical satellites.¹

And let’s be crystal clear: these aren't just a couple of forgotten tin cans floating around up there. These are the only two federal objects specifically designed to monitor the planet-warming greenhouse gases that are choking our atmosphere.² They are, quite literally, our planet’s smoke detectors.

This isn't just data for academics, either. This is the information used by farmers to plan their crops, by insurance companies to assess risk, and by city planners to prepare for a changing reality. Hell, even oil and gas companies use this data.

But here's where it goes from standard political negligence to a full-blown villain plot.

This isn’t a quiet funding cut. This isn't a program being “sunsetted.” This is a hit job. The administration has tasked the brilliant minds at NASA—the people who landed a car-sized rover on Mars—with figuring out the most efficient way to murder their own work.³ It’s like telling the fire department to go burn down the firehouse.

The motive is as terrifying as it is simple. The administration is essentially saying, "We don't like the data these satellites are giving us, so we're going to get rid of the satellites."⁴

It is the ultimate gaslight, performed from low Earth orbit. If there's no official, inconvenient data showing the planet is in trouble, they can stand at a podium and claim, with a straight face, that there's no trouble at all.

This is a government actively and willfully blinding itself—and the rest of us—from a clear and present danger. It's an unprecedented act of state-sponsored ignorance.

Any nation that values its future invests in knowledge. It seeks truth, even when that truth is uncomfortable. What we're witnessing is the opposite: a powerful few who would rather fly the plane straight into the side of the mountain than admit the radar is working perfectly.

This isn't about satellites anymore. It's about whether we want to live in a country that solves problems or one that just pretends they don't exist. The lights are being switched off, one by one. It’s our job to notice before it goes completely dark.