Protecting NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is protecting yourself, your family, your property, your community, your present, your future.
The conservative Heritage Foundation recommends breaking up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and selling off some of the parts to commercial entities. The authors of Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (PDF), the formal name of the plan to gut the government, write in the summary,
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories. (p 664)
The authors continue,
Break Up NOAA. The single biggest Department of Commerce agency outside of decennial census years is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which houses the National Weather Service, National Marine Fisheries Service, and other components. NOAA garners $6.5 billion of the department’s $12 billion annual operational budget and accounts for more than half of the department’s personnel in non-decadal Census years (2021 figures). (p 674)
When It Comes To U.S. Weather Forecasting: Private, Public Or Both? explains the value proposition of government’s active and continued role in weather data collection and information dissemination. And Andrew Blum, author of The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast, makes the essential point of how privatization will create winners and losers:
Well you pay for it now in the ad that they you or the subscription costs or things like that. The risk is if it begins to bifurcate the global system if it begins not just to add value to the existing public system but to to begin to sort of erode the foundations of global data exchange of global weather data that have really built the system we have today.
Meaning, companies and wealthy individuals may get and use weather and climate data and expert analysis while low- and moderate-income individuals and less wealthy countries, states, and counties may (will) not.
Want to buy the book? Order it. (We receive no benefit if you buy the book from East City Bookshop.)