We’re joined by ocean policy expert David Helvarg to discuss the Trump administration’s dismantling of the Ocean Observatories Initiative, the “cutting-edge eyes [and] ears” of the ocean. The program’s closure, proposed in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook for Trump’s second administration, involves the decommissioning of a vast network of ocean floor sensors that collect data on marine ecosystems, ocean currents and global climate data, protecting the world’s oceans and providing critical information about extreme weather. In their place is the increasingly unregulated expansion of resource extraction driven by the fossil fuel industry, “essentially developing the ocean for offshore oil drilling and mining—basically, as a gas station and a garbage dump.”
Helvarg, the author of Forest of the Sea: The Remarkable Life and Imperiled Future of Kelp, also discusses “the world’s other forest crisis”: the loss of over half of kelp forests to warming ocean temperatures, throwing coastal ecosystems deeply out of balance. “We have an ocean,” adds Helvarg. “It’s full of life. It’s at risk. And we need to better understand the other 71% of our blue marble planet to protect it—and not to let a few individuals and corporations destroy it.”
Transcript
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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
The Trump administration has begun dismantling the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a network of more than 900 ocean floor sensors that collect critical data on marine ecosystems, ocean currents and global climate data. The deep sea sensors were installed a decade ago at a cost of $370 million, funded by the National Science Foundation. The independent NSF board has since been dismantled by the Trump administration. The decommissioning of the sensors has already begun and is expected to be completed next year.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has pushed to expand deep sea mining and loosen fishing regulations. The closure of the Oceans Observatories Initiative was recommended by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook for Trump’s presidency. Scientists warn the move will severely degrade efforts to monitor changing climate patterns and could negatively affect weather forecasting and extreme weather alerts.
For more, we’re joined in studio by David Helvarg, executive director of Blue Frontier, an ocean policy group, co-host of the Rising Tide: Ocean podcast and an author. His latest book is just out, Forest of the Sea: The Remarkable Life and Imperiled Future of Kelp.
Well, we won’t be talking as much about kelp today, David, though we have to have you back on to talk about that. But right now the dismantling of this nearly $400 million deep sea sensor network, talk specifically about what it means.
DAVID HELVARG: Well, specifically, the Congress refused to allow the administration to defund this project for the last two years, so now they’re disassembling it. And this is the cutting-edge eyes and particularly ears of science in the ocean. This was scheduled to continue as the most advanced system for understanding the deep ocean, the circulation of the ocean, the warming of the ocean, supposed to continue for the next 15 years at least.
And as you stated, it was the Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s overall plan for creating an administrative authoritarian state, which includes a strong focus on, essentially, developing the ocean for offshore oil drilling and for deep sea mining, basically as a gas station and a garbage dump. And the result is—they said it was—you know, it was the instrument by which NOAA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, was promoting climate hysteria. And what they mean by that is accurate science that reflects the reality that the burning of fossil fuels is overheating our ocean.
Last year, NOAA reported the ocean’s been the hottest in recorded history, going back to the 1880s. So, we have these extreme marine heat waves that have huge effects on coastal hazards and coastal security. It’s also 80% of the world’s coral reefs were bleached last year because of the warming of the ocean. The kelp forests are the world’s other forest crisis that’s happening. We’ve lost over half the kelp forests, that still are more extensive than the Amazon rainforest. And so, we’re—we’re in this crisis, and they’re blinding us to understanding that crisis, because our understanding would direct us to rapidly transition off of fossil fuels, which are overheating and acidifying our ocean. And it’s a scary moment.
AMY GOODMAN: So, scientists have warned that dismantling the system will severely degrade the accuracy of weather predictions and El Niño forecasts. Explain.
DAVID HELVARG: El Niño is a periodic warming of the Pacific. It may—all the projections right now, or at least the predictions, are that it’ll become more extreme than it’s ever been this year, on top of which we’re having a new wave of marine heat waves. The last marine heat wave that hit the West Coast basically destroyed 95 percent of the kelp forest in Northern California. And it impacts on towns like Fort Bragg, California. Fisheries collapse, tourism based on abalone diving, 30 million a year that was lost.
The good news is, is people who were in conflict before—the fishing community, the tribes, the environmentalists—are all now trying to work together to restore the ocean. The bad news is they’re coming up against an administration that’s — that only wants to drill offshore. And I’ve talked to the AFL-CIO in Rhode Island, where they’ve twice had to drop tools. You know, they had 80 percent completion on the Revolution wind farms off Rhode Island, which, when they’re completed, will not only provide clean energy to the communities onshore, but reduce utility bills for 400,000 people in Rhode Island and Connecticut. On the West Coast, people are out of work because of the loss of kelp and fisheries. And, you know, so it doesn’t make economic sense. I mean, we’re literally at the point where it’s cheaper to produce clean energy than to produce coal and oil, which were great energy systems through the 16th and 19th century. Today, in the 21st century, we’re just facing off against greed and ignorance, really.
AMY GOODMAN: In the context of all this happening—
DAVID HELVARG: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —if you can just talk about the main thesis of your book, Forest of the Sea: The Remarkable Life and Imperiled Future of Kelp?
DAVID HELVARG: It’s the world’s other forest crisis that people don’t know about. And people don’t understand that there are over thousands of species that depend on these forests, these algal forests in the sea. I have a chapter called “Kelp Is the New Coral.” They’re like the ivory and ebony. And it’s not just the beauty that I experience when I’m diving in it. It’s, you know, salmon and herring and cod depend on kelp, as do leafy seadragons and wolf eels and whales.
And people say, “Well, I’m not there.” Kelp provides alginate, which is a emulsifier that’s in our food and our cosmetics and our pharmaceuticals. You know, so, every day, the toothpaste, the shampoo we use, the ice cream we eat have kelp in them. And that kelp, the wild kelp, is the mother seed for an aquaculture industry that’s 40 million tons a year for food and production. We’re now growing—people don’t know we’ve switched. There’s more seaweed. There’s more sea farming than there is wild capture in the ocean, where 130 million tons of seafood is grown versus 90 million caught out of the wild.
AMY GOODMAN: What kills kelp?
DAVID HELVARG: What kills kelp? Like coral, it used to be mostly overfishing and pollution. And today, it’s marine heat waves driven by climate change. And they literally—you know, the last marine heat wave, similar to the one that’s going to approach this late summer and early fall, wiped out the kelp. It weakened it. You know, kelp and coral both have temperature effects. When Alaskan waters in Prince William Sound go from 46 degrees to 76 degrees, kills the kelp, when—just like when the Florida reefs went to 101 degrees in 2023, it killed the coral. And so, it’s the warming, the acidification. It drives diseases, harmful algal blooms.
It drove a sea star wasting disease that wiped out 90 percent of all the starfish on the West Coast, 99 percent of the last predator starfish, this giant seaflower star that grows to the size of a bald eagle, 13 pounds, and it’s cannibalistic, and it’s aggressive. And it was the last predator left after we wiped out the sea otters and the big fish and lobsters. And so, when the sea stars died off, the little urchins came out of their hidey holes, reproduced 10,000 percent, ate all the kelp and turned these incredibly productive kelp forests into urchin barrens. And that’s happening not just in California, but in Australia, New Zealand, Norway, around the world.
And again, it’s larger than the Amazon rainforest, and people don’t know about it. People at least know coral is in trouble. They don’t know that the world’s kelp forests, that cover over a third of our coastlines, up to a third, is equally in trouble.
And, you know, I’ve got dual feelings. One, yes, it creates $500 billion of goods and services for us humans. But also, it’s just—you know, when I’m down there looking up at the cathedral light with some curious harbor seal, you know, chewing on my fins, it’s otherworldly. I mean, we’re literally spending $5 billion right now on the [Europa] Clipper to send a probe to [Jupiter]’s moon to see if it has an ocean that might have life. And the Europa, you know, moon might have an ocean. We have an ocean. It’s full of life. It’s at risk. And we need to better understand the other 71 percent of our blue marble planet to protect it, and not to let a few greedy individuals and corporations destroy it.
AMY GOODMAN: David Helvarg is author and also executive director of Blue Frontier, his latest book, just out, Forest of the Sea: The Remarkable Life and Imperiled Future of Kelp.
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