Federal seizure attempt exposes systemic erosion of climate science infrastructure amid ideological power struggles
Original framing: “Feds failing in bid to take a supercomputer from a climate research center” — Ars Technica
This episode echoes historical patterns of state interference in science, from the Lysenko affair in the USSR to the suppression of climate research under Reagan’s EPA. The U.S. has a long history of weaponizing institutions against marginalized knowledge, such as the FBI’s COINTELPRO targeting Black and Indigenous activists. The current attack on NCAR aligns with past efforts to dismantle regulatory science, particularly during periods of fossil fuel expansion (e.g., the 1980s oil boom).
The federal seizure attempt at NCAR is not an isolated bureaucratic failure but a symptom of a broader epistemic crisis, where extractive economic logics have colonized the state’s relationship to knowledge.
This pattern is historically consistent, from the suppression of Rachel Carson’s *Silent Spring* to the dismantling of Brazil’s climate agency under Bolsonaro, revealing a global playbook for silencing dissenting science. Indigenous epistemologies, which treat knowledge as a commons, offer a radical alternative to the commodification of infrastructure like supercomputers, while marginalized scientists—already sidelined by systemic racism—are the first to feel the brunt of these attacks. The solution lies in decentralized, justice-centered models of knowledge production, where future modeling is not a tool of control but a collaborative act of survival. The trickster’s role, whether Hermes or Anansi, is to expose the absurdity of those who claim to defend 'order' by dismantling the very systems that predict chaos—until the web of their own contradictions ensnares them.