Donald Trump’s administration has started to remove or downgrade mentions of the climate crisis across the US government, with the websites of several major departments pulling down references to anything related to the climate crisis. Climate scientists said they were braced “for the worst”.
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“We should plan for the worst,” said @michaelemann.bsky.social, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. “The keys to the car have been given to the polluters and fossil fuel plutocrats and they intend to drive it off the climate cliff.”
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
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— Birmingham Climate Justice Coalition (@brumcjc.bsky.social) February 4, 2025 at 8:12 PM
A major climate portal on the Department of Defense’s website has been scrapped, as has the main climate change section on the site of the Department of State. A climate change page on the White House’s website no longer exists, nor does climate content provided by the US agriculture department, including information that provides vulnerability assessments for wildfires.
An entire section on “climate and sustainability” hosted by the Department of Transportation has now vanished, with the department’s new leadership also ordering the elimination of any policy positions, directives or funding “which reference or relate in any way to climate change, ‘greenhouse gas’ [sic] emissions, racial equity, gender identity, ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ goals, environmental justice or the Justice40 initiative”.
This is an open thread where everyone is welcome, especially night owls and early birds, to share and discuss the happenings of the day. Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
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More than thirty lawsuits have been filed and we are trying our best to keep this page updated in real-time. By 2/10/25, we will organize this page by topic area for ease of read. If you’re new to Court Watch, we’d encourage you to check out our reporting.
Almost overnight, banal-seeming federal IT systems have become an ideologically driven bulldozer
Elon Musk’s campaign to cut Washington’s bureaucracy is aiming at a very specific, very sensitive digital power center: the federal IT infrastructure.
Musk and his allies have gained access to the Treasury Department’s payments systems, and they’ve commandeered enough control at the Office of Personnel Management to send a mass email offering federal employees early buyouts. Unnamed federal officials told The Washington Post today that they’re now concerned about DOGE access to student loan data.
The overall effect has been to turn once banal-seeming federal IT systems into an ideologically driven bulldozer for removing programs deemed — by, apparently, Musk — as either unnecessary or excessively “woke.”
...It is… within DOGE’s mission: In his order establishing the department, officially with a mere renaming of the existing U.S. Digital Service, Trump directed it to “implement the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”
...In practice, however, many governance experts have watched the launch of DOGE with alarm bordering on horror.
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🌎 The Mauna Loa CO₂ record is the gold standard for tracking Earth's rising carbon levels. Since 1958, it has provided uninterrupted data, proving human-driven climate change. 📈
The site is down this morning. This is the latest, dangerous move by the #Trump administration.
#ClimateChange
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— Chris Gloninger (@climatechris.bsky.social) February 5, 2025 at 8:15 AM
Staffers with Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) reportedly entered the headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Silver Spring, Maryland, and the Department of Commerce in Washington DC today, inciting concerns of downsizing at the agency.
“They apparently just sort of walked past security and said: ‘Get out of my way,’ and they’re looking for access for the IT systems, as they have in other agencies,” said Andrew Rosenberg, a former Noaa official who is now a fellow at the University of New Hampshire. “They will have access to the entire computer system, a lot of which is confidential information.”
Project 2025, written by several former Trump staffers, has called for the agency to be “broken up and downsized”, claiming the agency is “harmful to US prosperity” for its role in climate science.
On his first day in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that attempts to slow the growth in the country’s wind generation capacity.
The order paused all leasing of federal waters for offshore wind and paused new or renewed approvals for onshore or offshore wind projects on federal land until the outcome of a “comprehensive assessment and review of federal wind leases and permitting practices.” The order also suspended a large and previously approved project in Idaho. Although the order described the provisions as temporary, no end date is specified.
“We’re not going to do the wind thing,” Trump said after his inauguration on Jan. 20 during a rally. “Big, ugly windmills, they ruin your neighborhood.”
Trump’s attacks against wind power are not new. We’ve been fact-checking his false and misleading claims for nearly a decade. He has said, for example, that wind energy doesn’t work, either because it’s unreliable or because it needs subsidies. But as we’ve explained, electrical grids are able to manage the variability of wind power due to fluctuations in weather. And while subsidies have played an important role in building the wind industry, onshore wind — the type that makes up the vast majority of wind turbines in the U.S. — is on par with or cheaper than natural gas or coal plants.
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This #BlackHistoryMonth let’s celebrate trailblazing American #biochemist Marie Maynard Daly (1921-2003), 1st Black woman to earn a PhD in #chemistry in the US! 🧪🐡👩🏾🔬 #histsci She made important research contributions to the biochemisty of the cell nucleus & cardiovascular issues & our knowledge of 🧵
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— Ele Willoughby (@minouette.bsky.social) February 5, 2025 at 8:08 AM
As the United States sees a climb in bird flu rates, cases are also on the rise in Virginia, particularly in the eastern portions of the Commonwealth.
Although numbers aren’t as high in the Shenandoah Valley, experts at the Wildlife Center of Virginia recommend taking down any bird feeders.
“It’s just to be safe to prevent that spread. Any time there’s a place where lots of birds are congregating, there’s an increased chance that there’s going to be spread of disease there,” Connor Gillespie, outreach director with the Wildlife Center of Virginia, said.
Birds can easily travel from areas with higher case numbers. By putting away bird feeders near your home, you can minimize your risk of contracting the virus.
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Bird nests made from anti-bird spikes?! 🤯
Hi, I'm a nest researcher 👋 and new here on BlueSky, sharing the craziest #bird nests I've ever found. 👀 Today, I’m sharing my discovery of rebellious birds that build nests out of anti-bird spikes. And honestly, it's like telling a joke...
A thread. 🧵
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— Auke-Florian 🪹 (@aukeflorian.bsky.social) February 4, 2025 at 4:56 PM
...As in many families, orange juice was always on the breakfast table when I was growing up. It was affordable, delicious, and full of vitamin C. (The high levels of sugar were considered less of a problem at the time.) But orange juice isn’t so cheap anymore. Tropicana, for instance, has shrunk its bottles and raised prices in recent years. And since 2019, the price of concentrate has increased by about 80 percent. Chances are slim that it’ll go down anytime soon.
...The primary cause is a disease known as citrus greening. When tiny, hard-to-control insects called Asian citrus psyllids feed on orange trees, they inject bacteria that floods the tree’s veins. Fruits become rancid, misshapen, and discolored, and within a few years, the tree dies. Around the world, millions of acres of orange trees have succumbed, and in the past 20 years, production in Florida’s storied orange groves, which once supplied the majority of America’s juice, has declined 92 percent. What little fruit is left on the trees gets blown to the ground by hurricanes, which are becoming more destructive in the state.
Growers have a few tools to mitigate the disease, such as antibiotic injections and plant-growth sprays to boost fruit production, but they are costly and labor-intensive to use. Many have given up and sold their generations-old groves to real-estate developers; in January, one of Tropicana’s suppliers, Alico, announced that it will no longer invest capital in its citrus operations once the current crop is harvested, because its business is no longer “economically viable.”
THIS IS IMPORTANT — If you use Chrome browser, update it immediately
It’s been quite the week for security warnings impacting vast numbers of users. From 650 million X users advised “don’t change your password,” a fully undetectable backdoor threat to millions of macOS users, to a red alert for those taking security comfort in their password manager. Now the vast majority of the 3.45 billion users of the world’s most popular web browser, Google Chrome, have been warned of security threats requiring an immediate update. Here’s what you need to know and do.
Google has confirmed that all users of the Chrome web browser across the Android, Linux, Mac And Windows operating systems need to update their client immediately. The security update fixes a total of 12 issues, including three vulnerabilities that were discovered by external researchers and include two that have been allocated a high-severity rating. The vulnerabilities are serious enough that Google is restricting details of them until a majority of Chrome users have followed the advice and ensured their browsers have been properly patched. Google said that it “will also retain restrictions if the bug exists in a third party library that other projects similarly depend on, but haven’t yet fixed.”
...Head for the Google Chrome Help|About option to kickstart an automatic check for any updates and initiate the download process. After the download has been completed, you will need to restart your browser, so save any tabs you have open and hit that button now.
A century ago, Albert Einstein became famous overnight. It wasn’t from his experiments, theory of relativity, or his Nobel Prize.
Einstein’s fame in the United States came from a media mistake.
Before fake news and 24-hour cable news, a Washington Times reporter was assigned to go to the docks of New York and cover the arrival of this obscure physicist visiting the US for the first time. It was a simple assignment: write the article, get some quotes, and be on your way.
As he walked to the docks, the reporter noticed something odd. A large crowd was there already for the same reason. Over 10,000 people waited to catch a glimpse as Albert Einstein walked off the boat from Europe.
This simple story was suddenly front-page worthy. A physicist greeted like a rock star.
...The only problem was the reporter got it wrong. The crowd was not there for Einstein.
...When the initial frame is wrong, it can be hard to change. Those mainstream news stories focused on Einstein, and the press thought he was famous. Because the public read about him, they saw him as a celebrity and came out to see him, and the media continued to write about him. One initial mistake made Albert Einstein famous in America.
This will be my last Overnight News Digest. It’s been a great honor to bring you the best of the news for the past couple of years on Wednesday nights, but I’m taking on a couple of new projects and just won’t have the time going forward.
Stay safe out there….
The crew of the Overnight News Digest consists of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Besame, jck, and JeremyBloom. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man (RIP), wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw.
OND is a regular community feature on Daily Kos since 2007, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing each day near 12:00 AM Eastern Time.
