Help save public weather information

I’ll admit to being a bit of a weather junkie, but this should be of interest to anyone with a political sensibility generally to the left of, say, those who would advocate privatizing roads and sewers and such.

Apparently Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) — yes, Savage Love readers, that Rick Santorum — has introduced a bill that would prohibit the National Weather Service from providing “a product or service…that is or could be provided by the private sector”, with the exception of severe weather alerts. In other words, services like the Weather Underground would no longer be possible, since they ‘compete’ with commercial interests including what has to be one of the most boring cable TV channels around (and that’s saying a lot!).

In the course of his great analysis of the proposed bill, Dr. Jeff Masters of the WUnderground points out that, in order to fulfill its purported core mission of providing severe weather alerts and information to the public, the National Weather Service has to monitor and forecast continually. In other words, their costs are going to be pretty much the same whether the public has access to the day-to-day weather information or not.

This bill is described as a way to use the more efficient private sector to provide a service that the public sector doesn’t need to provide. If the public sector costs are more or less fixed, however, that argument doesn’t work, and the result is simply to force us to pay for the same thing twice — once to the government, and again to Santorum’s campaign donors.

The bill is still in committee — please take a moment to sign this petition, and if you live in a state with a Senator on the Commerce Committee (and I know at least some of you do, Floridians…), give them a call to urge them to oppose this shameless ploy.