Why Kate Marvel left NASA

Why Sheldon Whitehouse keeps calling out Big Oil

For years, Senator Sheldon has been one of Congress’s most relentless climate voices, delivering more than 300 “Time to Wake Up” speeches [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhyg5hj7I21jr7tP--id5EmMTmpTbdlw1] on the Senate floor about climate change and the fossil fuel industry’s political power. Lately, that persistence has taken a more targeted form: pressing the Trump administration over its extraordinary new favors to the oil and gas industry; investigating its decision to exempt Gulf drilling from endangered species protections [https://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2026/4/whitehouse-investigates-trump-s-god-squad-waiving-endangered-species-protections-to-expand-oil-drilling]; and pushing a windfall profits tax [https://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2026/3/as-trump-s-war-surges-gas-prices-whitehouse-and-khanna-reintroduce-big-oil-profits-clawback-to-provide-relief-at-the-pump]on oil companies at a time when Republicans control Congress and the White House. Whitehouse knows none of it is likely to move through Washington right now. So why does this gentleman from Rhode Island continue this brutal exercise of self-flagellation in the Senate? What is he trying to accomplish? And does he really think that if Democrats were in power, things would be any different? That’s what we wanted to know, and what Emily asked him. So let’s hear from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit heated.world/subscribe [https://heated.world/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Why Kate Marvel left NASA

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit heated.world [https://heated.world?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] Kate Marvel spent more than a decade at NASA studying the future of life on Earth. Then the Trump administration made that job feel impossible. Marvel, a prominent climate scientist, resigned from NASA last month amid the Trump administration’s sweeping attacks on federal science. Since Trump’s second term started, more than 10,000 federal employees with STEM Ph.D.s have left the government—mostly through layoffs, firings and buyouts—and more than 7,800 research grants were terminated or frozen. In her resignation letter—a masterclass in principled dissent [https://grist.nyc3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/docs/kate-marvel-resignation-letter.pdf]—Marvel wrote that she never expected to voluntarily leave her dream job. However, she wrote, "I’m leaving because I want to tell the truth." In our conversation today, Marvel tells the truth about what’s happening to federal science under the Trump administration. We talk about the work she was doing at NASA before Trump, and why the administration would want to make that work difficult to accomplish. We also talk about one side-effect of Trump’s attack on science that no one is talking about: The loss of nerd culture, and why that culture is important to democracy. Then, for paid subscribers, we keep going into one of the most controversial questions in climate science: geoengineering. We talk about what it means to study technologies that could intentionally alter the climate system, and why the collapse of trusted public science makes those future decisions even more dangerous. We also get into our feelings about the state of federal science, and the strategies we’re deploying to not just cope, but fight back.

Why Shein bought Everlane

Tracy and I go deep about Shein’s purchase of Everlane [https://heated.world/p/everlane-was-never-eco-friendly], fashion industry greenwashing, and what true sustainable fashion looks like. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit heated.world/subscribe [https://heated.world/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Hantavirus is a climate story

What is coming when it comes to hantaviruses and climate change? How are they connected? And how could the rapidly approaching Super El Nino [https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change/once-in-a-century-super-el-nino-in-the-cards-as-ocean-temperatures-reach-near-record-highs-in-april]—a phenomenon worsened by climate change—affect the spread of hantavirus and other infectious diseases? That’s what we’re going to explore today. Special thanks to Drs. Kirk Osmond Douglas [https://sciprofiles.com/profile/1560636], James Shepherd [https://medicine.yale.edu/profile/james-shepherd/], and Angel Desai [https://health.ucdavis.edu/internal-medicine/team/42806/angel-desai-infectious-diseases-sacramento-sacramento] for sharing their expertise that informed this story. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit heated.world/subscribe [https://heated.world/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Trump’s NOAA cuts would save less than a day and a half of Iran War spending

Our good friends at the Popular Information newsletter have calculated the real cost of the Iran War so far: $72 billion for the first 60 days [https://substack.com/home/post/p-196611596], or about $1.2 billion in taxpayer dollars per day. The numbers are revealing, in that they show the Trump administration is perfectly capable of finding money when the goal is destruction. But when it comes to protecting Americans from fossil-fueled extreme weather [https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/extreme-weather/], suddenly we’re told the cupboard is bare. The Trump administration recently released a proposed budget [https://www.commerce.gov/sites/default/files/2026-04/FY2027-NOAA-CJ-Submission.pdf] that would cut NOAA by 26 percent. This proposed $1.6 billion cut—equivalent to about 1.3 days of the war in Iran—would eliminate NOAA climate, weather, and ocean research labs, zero out grants that help improve rainfall and flood prediction, and cut the Integrated Ocean Observing System—our national system for monitoring what is happening in the ocean, where hurricanes strengthen, and where coastal flooding begins. And this comes on top of DOGE-driven layoffs last year that eliminated roughly 880 NOAA jobs [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/noaa-layoffs-trump-musk-doge/?utm_source=chatgpt.com], including staff at the National Weather Service. The stupidity of this is almost difficult to overstate. Because Trump is not proposing to gut NOAA during some calm, stable weather period. He’s doing it at the very moment forecasters are warning that a potentially dangerous El Niño may be on the way.In today's episode, we talk to Craig McLean, the former acting chief scientist of NOAA, who spent more than 40 years at the agency [https://research.noaa.gov/craig-n-mclean-director-of-noaa-research-to-retire/]. McLean recently wrote that the NOAA budget request “is not streamlining. It’s sabotage.” McLean knows what it looks like when politics corrupts weather science. You might recall, McLean was the NOAA official at the center of “Sharpiegate [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Dorian–Alabama_controversy],” the infamous Trump-era scandal in which the president falsely claimed Hurricane Dorian was threatening Alabama, then displayed a forecast map that appeared to have been altered with a Sharpie to make him look right. McLean pushed back after NOAA leadership rebuked its own forecasters for correcting the president, calling for an investigation into whether the agency’s scientific integrity policy had been violated. McLean was then relieved of his position. In our interview, McLean speaks about what these cuts would actually do, why NOAA research matters far beyond “the weather,” what Sharpiegate revealed about scientific integrity under Trump, and why attacking climate science is so dangerous at the exact moment Americans need it most. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit heated.world/subscribe [https://heated.world/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]