Trump's latest attack on carbon research will hamper Canadian scientists

National Observer

3 days ago

In early August, Debra Wunch, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Toronto, got wind that the Trump administration might destroy the NASA satellite that underpins her career.
"It's devastating," said Wunch, who studies how many greenhouse gases Toronto emits and the impact of boreal forests on the carbon cycle. "These satellites have been a fundamental part of my career since 2007 — I've been working with these data for a very long time."
The satellite, OCO-2, is part of NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) project and measures where on the Earth's surface carbon dioxide is being emitted or absorbed. The data are detailed enough that researchers can pinpoint carbon dioxide emissions from a specific source, such as a power plant or wildfire, and track changes in the growing season. The data are widely used by scientists, farmers and the fossil fuel industry.
Last week, NPR reported that the Trump administration asked employees at NASA to create plans to end at least two satellite missions, including the OCO project, as part of Trump's proposed budget cuts. If those plans go through — Trump's budget needs to be approved by Congress, which isn't guaranteed — the OCO-2 satellite will be destroyed when it burns up re-entering the atmosphere after being abandoned.
Although budget cuts are being used to justify the move, the Trump administration has made similar efforts to dismantle other programs dedicated to monitoring climate change. Soon after taking office, he forced US government researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to stop all collaboration with "foreign nationals" — a move critics decried as a "body blow to climate research."
The administration has also stopped tracking the cost of climate-related disasters, and is pushing the country's Environmental Protection Agency to eliminate the legal basis for some of the US's key climate rules — with "indispensible" help from climate denying Canadian economist Ross McKitrick — among dozens of other moves to roll back climate efforts.
Russ Vought, the director of the Trump White House Office of Management and Budget — the office responsible for drafting the White House's budget proposal — was a co-author of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025. In that document, he wrote that"the Biden Administration's climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding."
The Trump administration wants to eliminate a NASA satellite mission that pinpoints carbon dioxide emissions from a specific source, such as a power plant or wildfire, and track changes in the growing season.
The OCO project also operates a second device on the International Space Station, OCO-3. Last month, NASA announced it is accepting proposals from companies and universities that want to cover the machine's operating costs.
The devices are still functional, and an official review by NASA in 2023 recommended continuing the mission for at least three more years. It concluded the satellite is of "high utility" because it helps agencies track industrial emissions, the planet's carbon cycle and to monitor compliance with international climate commitments.
Operating both devices costs about $15 million a year — roughly two per cent of the $750 million it cost NASA to build them, David Crisp, the NASA scientist who designed the instruments and managed the missions until 2022, told NPR.
Wunch is one of thousands of researchers, including several Canadians, who have worked on the OCO or rely on data collected by the devices to better understand the climate crisis and whether our efforts to fight it are working.
OCO-2 was the first satellite dedicated to making CO2 measurements with enough accuracy and precision to answer scientific questions about the carbon cycle, said Ray Nassar, a scientist with Environment and Climate Change Canada who was the first person to use OCO-2 data to calculate emissions specific to coal-fired power plants in 2017.
"OCO-2 was extremely important in giving us the first observations of that kind that could do that," he said. "They're the leading satellites making this type of measurement, and there's already been a significant investment to get them up in space. To just turn them off at this point, we would lose a valuable source of data"
The satellite circles the Earth from south to north, monitoring CO2 in the atmosphere in narrow bands roughly one kilometer wide. This gives researchers enough precision to identify where the gas is being emitted or absorbed, a level of detail unmatched by any other satellites currently in orbit.
"Because it's measuring carbon dioxide all around the world, we're able to get more of an idea of regionally, where carbon is being absorbed and where it's being emitted," said Brendan Bryne, a Canadian researcher who worked on the OCO project at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab between 2018 and 2024.
Japan has three CO2-measuring satellites in orbit, but they scan a bigger area than the OCO ones. The European Space Agency is planning to send three satellites that can collect similar data on CO2 emissions into space late next year.
OCO-2 and OCO-3 can also measure a specific type of photon that plants release during photosynthesis, which researchers can use to track changes in the growing season, as well as when boreal forests start re-absorbing carbon after a wildfire. Losing the satellites will prevent her and other researchers from conducting most of this type of research, said Wunch.
"Without commenting on a specific policy decision by any country, turning off satellites that are delivering valuable data is generally a bad thing to do," said Nassar.
Simon Donner, a climate scientist at the University of British Columbia, wrote in an email that Trump's proposal is "a foolish decision for financial reasons alone. The vast majority of the cost of satellites is in their construction and launch. Once they are in space, it is relatively cheap to keep them operating, and you get downstream economic benefits from the use of the data."
Canada's National Observer reached out to NASA asking about the proposed cuts, but didn't receive a response. Environment and Climate Change Canada couldn't provide a response by deadline to a question about whether Canada could take over the project's operational costs, if the US were willing to transfer the mission.
Wunch was clear about the toll that could come if NASA is forced to abandon the OCO mission: "I'm just very sad," she said.