Project 2025 is Proceeding at Speed, This Time in Our Oceans
In all of its hateful, stupid, shortsighted glory
I don’t need to tell y’all how much I love the ocean.
It’s only the subject of some of my longest articles, and one of my most enduring and beloved memories of home. Standing on the beach, listening to the rushing waves and the cries of gulls overhead brings me a peace I can scarely describe.
I’ve tried. I don’t know that I do it justice.
I also don’t need to tell you that the ocean is under threat. It is being poisoned, filled with microplastics, over-salted and warming to an alarming degree — enough to kill off the many wondrous species that live in its depths.
Everything from the beautiful coral reefs to the algae and plankton that produce the oxygen we breathe is dying.
Being one of our most important ecosystems makes this mass die-off an existential threat to humanity.
As such, you would think that we would be able to take that threat seriously. Maybe the most powerful nation in the world would be taking steps to protect it, ensure the survival of our species at the very least, even if it didn’t care about any others.
You would think so. But no, you would be wrong.
By now, I think most of us are familiar with Project 2025 and the plans it outlined for Trump’s regime now that he’s in power. We’ve been watching them fulfil it, one line at a time, for a year and a half now.
And now we’re watching them come after science, as we knew they would. Including an attack on our oceanic observation network — more than an attack, a complete dismantling of the entire project.
See, there’s a worldwide ocean monitoring system that expands across multiple countries and pretty much all of our world’s oceans. It includes everything from temperature gauging to weather pattern prediction. It watches for seismic activity and helps scientists study Climate Change and its impacts.
Trump is now dismantling that system.
That means we’re going to have a harder time tracking weather patterns. It means we won’t get advanced warning when major storms are coming our way, or when the ocean’s temperature ratchets up again, putting us at risk of mass die-offs and worsening storms.
And this doesn’t just impact the United States. This system has global reach and cooperation.
Trump’s actions and his Project 2025 isn’t just presenting a threat to his own constituents, it’s a direct threat to the entire world’s population. All countries, all peoples, all ecosystems and wildlife.
He’s going to take us all down with him just because of his fucking ego.
This terrifies me to a degree I’m not sure most people are grasping. You know how bad a hurricane can be when it strikes landfall? Imagine how bad it’d be if most people don’t know it’s coming and that they need to take action and evacuate.
We already knew this year would be bad for our food supply, too. With the Strait of Hormuz closed, shipping costs go up with the cost of oil, fertilizer shipments are failing, and agriculture workers are already missing prime planting seasons.
We were looking down the barrel of smaller yields anyway, now we’re facing uncertain weather forecasts through the growing season as well.
If we were worried about mass famine before — and I was — then we have to be chewing our nails at this point.
I can’t overstate how bad this is. On top of everything else Trump is already doing, this is just as bad for human rights and safety as his fucking ICE Gestapo roaming the streets.
This will kill people. Human beings around the world will die because of this action. And because he ripped up USAID, there won’t even be humanitarian aid to stop the bleeding.
I’m sick to my stomach, y’all. This is so fucking bad.
Solidarity wins.