The Fifth Risk(38)
Pause a moment to consider the audacity of that maneuver. A private company whose weather predictions were totally dependent on the billions of dollars spent by the U.S. taxpayer to gather the data necessary for those predictions, and on decades of intellectual weather work sponsored by the U.S. taxpayer, and on international data-sharing treaties made on behalf of the U.S. taxpayer, and on the very forecasts that the National Weather Service generated, was, in effect, trying to force the U.S. taxpayer to pay all over again for what the National Weather Service might be able to tell him or her for free.
After Santorum’s bill failed to pass, AccuWeather’s strategy appeared, to those inside the Weather Service, to change. Myers spent more time interacting directly with the Weather Service. He got himself appointed to various NOAA advisory boards. He gave an AccuWeather board seat to Conrad Lautenbacher, who had run NOAA in the second Bush administration. He became an insistent presence in the lives of the people who ran the Weather Service. And wherever he saw them doing something that might threaten his profits, he jumped in to stop it. After the Joplin tornado, the Weather Service set out to build an app, to better disseminate warnings to the public. AccuWeather already had a weather app, Myers barked, and the government should not compete with it. (“Barry Myers is the reason we don’t have the app,” says a senior National Weather Service official.) In 2015, the Weather Company offered to help NOAA put its satellite data in the cloud, on servers owned by Google and Amazon. Virtually all the satellite data that came into NOAA wound up in places where no one could ever see it again. The Weather Company simply sought to render it accessible to the public. Myers threatened to sue the Weather Service if they did it. “He stopped it,” said David Kenny. “We were willing to donate the technology to NOAA for free. We just wanted to do a science project to prove that we could.”
Myers claimed that, by donating its time and technology to the U.S. government, the Weather Company might somehow gain a commercial advantage. The real threat to AccuWeather here was that many more people would have access to weather data. “It would have been a leap forward for all the people who had the computing power to do forecasts,” said Kenny. One senior official at the Department of Commerce at the time was struck by how far this one company in the private sector had intruded into what was, in the end, a matter of public safety. “You’re essentially taking a public good that’s been paid for with taxpayer dollars and restricting it to the privileged few who want to make money off it,” he said.
By early 2018 Barry Myers had, by some mysterious process, gotten himself one Senate floor vote away from running NOAA. How he went about trying to secure that vote was deeply disturbing, at least in the eyes of the U.S. Senate staffers vetting his nomination. “We don’t hear much from the White House,” said one. “But the AccuWeather lobbyist is up here all the time. It’s almost like it [NOAA] has been subcontracted to him, which is bizarre. It’s Trump saying,” If it is worth it to you, go get it.’ Normally the White House would be doing this.” Myers, for his part, was evasive. During the confirmation process, he was asked to name the people who sat on the AccuWeather board. Myers declined; the information belonged to the company and wasn’t his own to disclose, he indicated. But just a short time earlier, in a private meeting, he had rattled the names off easily. (Several of them were members of his family.) He claimed he would sell his stake in AccuWeather but did not explain how or to whom. “He says he’s going to sell his AccuWeather shares, but he could sell it to his brother for a dollar and buy it back for a dollar when he leaves office,” says Walter Shaub, former head of the Office of Government Ethics.
In his bizarre competition with the National Weather Service, there were two ways for Barry Myers to win. His family business might consistently make better weather forecasts and earn the trust of paying customers through its virtuosity. Or it could make the National Weather Service forecasts worse—or at least less accessible. As a private citizen Myers devoted considerable energy to making the National Weather Service seem worse. As a public servant he could do much more. “Barry is uniquely dangerous, in a way a Scott Pruitt is not,” said a Senate staffer. “Scott Pruitt does not understand the agency [Environmental Protection] he’s trying to destroy. Barry’s skills make him more effective in dismantling NOAA. There are a million little things he could do that we will never understand.”
Another McKinsey study estimated that the entire industry generated somewhere between $2 billion and $4 billion a year in revenue and was growing fast. With reason. The annual cost of natural disasters in the 1980s had been $50 billion. Hurricane Sandy alone inflicted over $65 billion worth of damage. The private weather industry, unlike the National Weather Service, has a financial interest in catastrophe. The more spectacular and expensive the disasters, the more people will pay for warning of them. The more people stand to lose, the more money they will be inclined to pay. The more they pay, the more the weather industry can afford to donate to elected officials, and the more influence it will gain over the political process.
The dystopic endgame is not difficult to predict: the day you get only the weather forecast you pay for. A private company will become better than the Weather Service at knowing where a hurricane will make landfall: What will it do with that information? Tell the public or trade it inside a hedge fund? You know what Hurricane Harvey is going to do to Houston before Houston knows: Do you help Houston? Or do you find clever ways to make money off Houston’s destruction?