MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
For more than a decade, the website climate.gov explained climate science to the public, serving up timely information about hurricanes, wildfires, droughts. The site was run by NOAA - that's the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - and it drew nearly a million visitors a month. Well, earlier this year, the Trump administration began to dismantle climate.gov. It stopped updating the site. It laid off the staff.
Now, some of those staffers are regrouping. They are attempting to launch a new site called climate.us. And Rebecca Lindsey is leading the charge. She's the former editor of climate.gov, and she's here now. Rebecca Lindsey, welcome.
REBECCA LINDSEY: Thank you.
KELLY: So why this new site? Tell me what you're hoping to achieve.
LINDSEY: We were just hoping to protect and preserve the information that existed on climate.gov. We want to essentially create a nonprofit successor to climate.gov in a place outside the federal domain where people can trust that the information is not going to be politicized or tampered with.
KELLY: So nonprofit, outside the US government. Volunteer-run at this point, is that right?
LINDSEY: It is.
KELLY: OK.
LINDSEY: Right now, we are strictly doing this as a labor of love. And there's a team of about four of us that have been working on it over the summer. We're not sure how long we will be able to go around unemployed, but we are trying to get nonprofit and foundation funding to transition the whole operation from the federal domain to the nonprofit sector.
KELLY: So I will note, right before we called you, I typed climate.gov into my browser. I was redirected to a climate site run by NOAA. I'm looking at it right now. It does include recent news like the fact that July 2025 was the Earth's third warmest July on record. There's also drought.gov. There's heat.gov. Can't people still get the climate information they are looking for at an official U.S. government website?
LINDSEY: For right now, yes, there's some information that can still be found on other government websites. Climate.gov, though, was unique. We were the only website that actively worked to combat misinformation on social media. And we provided a direct link from the science community and the world of scientists to the public.
KELLY: Yeah, I am thinking - I'm sitting here talking to you from the NPR newsroom. We have a climate desk. Many news organizations have a climate desk. There are plenty of climate scientists who are able to post directly on social media. Plenty of nongovernmental places where people can learn about climate change, in other words. What do you see your site adding to that mix that's not currently out there?
LINDSEY: Well, many of those sites that you mention - the many of those news desks - actually depend on climate.gov for story ideas. We even routinely see our data visualizations and maps used by the mainstream media. The other thing is, climate.gov had a complete collection of classroom resources for teachers. So it was really a full-service platform for climate information for multiple audiences.
KELLY: Does being outside the government have any advantages? Does that open any new opportunities for you?
LINDSEY: Yes, and that's really one of the things that's most exciting about this initiative. We do have the potential to partner with other organizations in ways that we didn't when we were affiliated with the federal government. It's also possible that we will be able to expand our communications into things like what people can do about climate change. It was something that we were asked for constantly. People would say, can you please add information to your site that is about what we can do about climate change? And we will, of course, now have the freedom to do that.
KELLY: Rebecca Lindsey, former editor of climate.gov, now spearheading the new site climate.us. Rebecca Lindsey, thank you.
LINDSEY: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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