The U.S. government site climate.gov offered years‘ worth of climate-science information — until its production team was fired earlier this summer. The site „is technically still online, but has been intentionally buried by the team of political appointees who now run the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,“ reports the Guardian.
But now „a team of climate communication experts — including many members of the former climate.gov team — is working to resurrect its content into a new organization with an expanded mission.“
Their effort’s new website, climate.us, would not only offer public-facing interpretations of climate science, but could also begin to directly offer climate-related services, such as assisting local governments with mapping increased flooding risk due to climate change. The effort is being led by climate.gov’s former managing editor, Rebecca Lindsey, who, although now unemployed, has recruited several of her former colleagues to volunteer their time in an attempt to build climate.us into a thriving non-profit organization… „None of us were ready to let go of climate.gov and the mission….“ Lindsey’s new team has received a steady flow of outside support, including legal support, and a short-term grant that has helped them develop a vision for what they’d like to do next…
As multiyear veterans of the federal bureaucracy, at times they’ve been surprised by the possibilities that the new effort might offer. „We’re allowed to use TikTok now,“ said Lindsey. „We’re allowed to have a little bit of fun…
The climate.us team is also in the process of soft-launching a crowdsourced fundraising drive that Lindsey hopes they can leverage into more permanent support from a major foundation…. „[W]e do not yet have the sort of large operational funding that we will need if we’re going to actually transition climate.gov operations to the non-profit space.“ In the meantime, Lindsey and her team have found themselves spending the summer knee-deep in the logistics of building a major non-profit from scratch.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.