Trump administration trying to destroy two satellites gathering critical climate change data

Update: Friend of the blog Michael Hiltzik reported out this story more than two weeks ago — something not acknowledged in the NYT piece. The Times has a bad habit of doing this, and indeed it’s not the first time it’s happened to Hiltzik.

Even in these degenerate times this (gift link) is a shocking story, to the extent that anything these people do can be shocking any more.

Two extremely sophisticated satellites that were launched at great expense 15 years ago, but are operating at a small fraction of the cost to launch them in the first place, are going to be destroyed by the Trump administration. This despite — or rather because of — the fact that they are in perfect working order, and are gathering crucial data to track climate change, which is why they were launched in the first place.

The reporting here frames this in terms of a “cost savings” measure, because that’s the Vought-Miller administration’s explanation for this, but that of course is simply a lie. The total cost of these missions is almost all sunk costs: trashing these satellites saves almost no money, but it does accomplish the real mission here, which is to continue to destroy the capacity of the United States government to do critical in every sense scientific and medical research.

If a genuine political opposition should somehow arise in this country, and go on to win political power, the people who are trying to revoke the best part of the last couple of centuries (at least; the integralist types want to go back about seven) need to be treated as the treasonous criminals that they so publicly and obviously are.