Blog

When the Monitors Go Dark: Climate Data, Energy Shocks, and the Decisions We Cannot Make

Jan Gunash · Co-Founder & CGO · March 30, 2026

The best questions are not always the comfortable ones. Like: what happens to the decisions we make about energy and climate when the data those decisions depend on simply stops being collected? And when a crisis forces every government on earth to choose between energy security and the clean transition, what do they reach for when the evidence base has been quietly hollowed out?

These are not hypothetical questions. Both are happening at once, right now, and the two stories are more connected than most of the coverage is letting on.

The Monitors Are Going Dark

Something is being lost that cannot easily be recovered. Over the past year, the Trump administration has proposed cuts to NOAA totaling more than $2.2 billion, including the elimination of its entire Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which coordinates and performs the agency's climate and weather research (source: Scientific American). The proposed 2026 budget contains the literal line: Total, Climate Research: $0 (source: Eos / AGU).

The practical consequences are already visible. NOAA has ended the national disasters database that tracked the economic cost of extreme weather events since 1980, the only standardized record of its kind drawing from proprietary insurance and reinsurance data that no other institution has access to (source: CNN). The National Snow and Ice Data Center has halted maintenance on several Arctic monitoring datasets after losing NOAA support. Regional climate centers across six U.S. regions have seen funding lapse, leaving gaps in the agricultural and water planning data that local governments and farmers depend on. A meteorologist in Kansas City began manually copying 150 years of local weather records into a spreadsheet, because he was worried they would otherwise be gone (source: FOX4).

The Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, where researchers have continuously measured atmospheric CO2 since 1958, producing the Keeling Curve that remains the single most important long-term record of human-caused climate change, is also in jeopardy under the proposed cuts (source: MIT Technology Review). Some of these datasets took decades to build. Once interrupted, they cannot simply be restarted. The gaps become permanent.

The administration's position is that AI and the private sector can fill the void. NOAA's stated strategic priorities now include integrating AI to modernize forecasting (source: Bloomberg). But this argument inverts the actual relationship between AI and data. AI weather and climate models learn from historical observations. They are trained on reanalysis datasets built from decades of physical measurements, buoys, weather balloons, radiosondes, satellites. In the March 16 edition of this newsletter, we examined how AI climate models already struggle in data-sparse regions because they are learning from model estimates rather than real observations. Defunding the observation network does not modernize AI climate science. It starves it. The algorithm cannot learn from data that was never collected.

The Crisis That Makes the Gaps Dangerous

Into this eroding data environment, the Iran war has now delivered the largest oil supply disruption in the history of the global market. Some 16% of world oil supply has been disrupted, more than double the volume disrupted during the 1970s oil shock. A fifth of global LNG supply has been taken offline (source: Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy). The IEA has called it the biggest supply disruption it has ever recorded and has begun coordinating the release of member nations' 1.4 billion barrel strategic oil reserves (source: Carbon Brief).

The energy security question this raises is not new. It is the same question that appeared after the 1973 Arab oil embargo, after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and now again in 2026: does an acute fossil fuel shock accelerate the clean energy transition, or does it push governments back toward the fuels they know?

The evidence from history is mixed and the current situation is genuinely different. Unlike in previous oil shocks, renewable energy is now cost-competitive with fossil fuels in most of the world. More than 90% of new renewable power projects globally in 2024 were already cheaper than fossil-fuel alternatives (source: IEA via Foreign Affairs Forum). The IEA Executive Director has said that the fallout from the Iran war is likely to direct even more investment toward clean energy, precisely because renewables represent domestic, geopolitically insulated power that is immune to chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz (source: CNBC).

Pakistan's solar boom has already preempted more than $12 billion in fossil fuel imports since 2020 and is projected to save another $6.3 billion in 2026 at current elevated prices (source: Insurance Journal). Countries across Asia that have dismissed renewables as too expensive or unreliable are rethinking that position in real time. Indonesia is accelerating solar and geothermal projects. South Korea's president has called the crisis a potential catalyst for the clean energy transition. The framing is shifting: renewables are no longer primarily an environmental choice. They are an energy security tool.

But the deceleration case is also real and should not be dismissed. Modern clean energy systems require capital, grid infrastructure, and minerals, all of which are under strain simultaneously. A trade disruption in critical minerals could cut renewables and electric vehicle investment by up to 30%, according to IMF modeling (source: TIME). If the energy shock tips major economies into stagflation, the fiscal space to fund the transition contracts at exactly the moment the case for it is strongest. Europe entered this crisis with gas storage at 46 billion cubic metres, compared to 60 billion in 2025 and 77 billion in 2024 (source: Bruegel). Germany faces its second energy shock before recovering from the first.

The Data Underneath the Decision

Here is where the two stories converge. Every government making an energy security decision right now, whether to accelerate renewables, extend fossil fuel contracts, reopen coal plants, or build new LNG terminals, is doing so against a backdrop of climate data that is becoming less complete, less reliable, and less publicly accessible.

The decisions made in the next twelve to twenty-four months will shape energy infrastructure for decades. Power plants built today operate for thirty to forty years. Grid investments lock in system architectures. Long-term supply contracts create dependencies that outlast the administrations that signed them. These decisions require good data: accurate climate risk assessments, reliable extreme weather projections, honest accounting of future energy costs under different scenarios. That data comes from exactly the kind of long-term observational infrastructure that is currently being defunded.

The 1973 oil embargo accelerated energy efficiency investment and nuclear expansion in many countries. Whether the 2026 Hormuz crisis accelerates the clean energy transition will depend in large part on the quality of the evidence governments can reach for when designing policy responses. If the monitoring systems that generate that evidence are being shut down at the same moment governments most need them, the gap between good intention and informed action becomes very hard to close.

The Path Forward

The observation network is not glamorous infrastructure. It does not generate benchmark scores or quarterly returns. It generates the foundational data that makes every downstream decision, including AI climate modeling, energy planning, adaptation investment, and disaster risk management, more accurate and more honest.

Defending it matters for the same reason that building mineral traceability systems matters, and the same reason that closing data gaps in critical minerals supply chains matters. It is all the same underlying problem: consequential decisions being made on incomplete or disappearing information.

The IEA is calling this the worst energy supply disruption it has ever recorded. The question is whether the response to it will be shaped by evidence or by the data vacuum that is quietly opening up underneath the institutions that generate it.

What we measure, we can manage. What we stop measuring, we cannot.

Sources:

Want to contribute your thoughts or findings in data and AI with climate, energy, or nature? Message Jan Gunash on LinkedIn or send an email to jgunash@projectcoeus.com.