Fancy Tools, Empty Pockets – Watts Up With That?

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

One of the most reliable tells in the climate shell game is a government program with a name that promises “carbon” and delivers something suspiciously less concrete. Enter the OCO satellites—Orbiting Carbon Observatories, which, right off the bat, don’t actually measure “carbon.” They measure CO₂. It’s like opening a box labeled “Mystery Steak” and finding tofu.

If you want a tale of cosmic hubris stitched to pure bureaucratic ambition, look no further than NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellites—OCO by name, not by actual carbon content. These polished tin cans were launched to spy on atmospheric CO₂ from space, the latest chapter in humanity’s endless fantasy that, if we just measure nature sharply enough, we might finally drag the carbon cycle kicking and screaming under bureaucratic control.

The original OCO was a flame-out before the party started—launched in 2009, it belly-flopped into the Southern Ocean. NASA called this a “launch vehicle anomaly”—which is bureaucratese for “the thing blew up.”

Then, like every Hollywood flop, we got the sequel: OCO-2, plucky and determined, rising phoenix-like in July 2014. Imagine NASA muttering “this time for sure” and clutching its high-resolution spectrometer like a blackjack player eyeing his last stack of chips.

What does OCO-2 do? It chases reflected sunlight—zeroing in on those precise, CO₂-hungry wavelengths the gas loves to slurp up. With this, OCO-2 pulls the ultimate global neighborhood watch: polar sun-synchronous orbit, meaning it goes pole to pole, day after day, circling the globe every sixteen spins of the Earth. The result? Near-global selfies of the planet’s every atmospheric sigh, with precision down to less than one part per million. Yes, it picks out the smallest seasonal burp in CO₂ from the leafy lungs of the world; yes, climate modelers treat its graphs like sacred runes; no, it won’t find your missing car keys.

And then came OCO-3—the inevitable space family photo. Shuttled up to the International Space Station in 2019, this cousin gets to peek sideways, take “action shots” in new viewing geometries, and basically try angles even OCO-2 didn’t dare. Think of it as the satellite version of a go-pro on a skateboard: more, more, always more coverage.

So the OCO saga rolls on—a dazzling dance of technical triumphs, fizzled launches, and a hope bordering on superstition: if we can just catalog the ghostly flux of carbon well enough, maybe we’ll wrestle the climate into submission. It’s noble, in a way. Or maybe it’s just expensive performance art for an audience allergic to low budgets and short stories. Either way, it’s one hell of a ride—assuming you’re not footing the bill.

Now, with the Trump Administration threatening to pull the plug on OCO, the usual suspects are sounding the klaxons—“Catastrophe! The data! The lost science!” Yet, I did what apparently nobody at NASA, NOAA, or CNN ever attempts: I actually looked at what the satellites have coughed up, and whether anyone—any actual person, business, or government—has found these cosmic spreadsheets useful outside of tenure applications and conference circuit PowerPoints.

First, let’s take the case most likely to give the climate alarmists the vapors: a real, honest-to-god, peer-reviewed study that used OCO data to figure out how much more corn, soy, and wheat the Midwest is pumping out thanks to the CO₂ “fertilization effect.” The math, by Taylor and Schlenker, goes like this: for every 1 ppm rise in CO₂ measured from space, corn yields go up 0.5%, soybeans 0.6%, wheat 0.8%. Over the last decade, thanks in part to 20 ppm worth of bonus CO₂, global farmers collected an extra $71.7 billion worth of food, including $4 billion a year for U.S. corn alone. If you’re a wheat farmer, this is the part where you lift your hat and say “Thanks to fossil fuels for all the carbon dioxide!”

But here’s the rub. These dollars aren’t landing in anyone’s account because of OCO. They’re landing because… well, CO₂ went up. The OCO satellites simply told us, after the fact, how green the grass grew. Their role is “observer,” not “rainmaker.” If you’re waiting for a case where a power utility, a city, a trader on the CBOT, or even a budget-stressed county extension officer flipped through OCO’s gigabytes and made a buck, I hope you packed a lunch and a good book.

The supposed “applications” for OCO-2 data beyond academic joyrides? They’re a gospel of indirectness. “National carbon accounting.” “Large-scale scientific assessments.” “Paris Agreement verification.” “Model input.” If you boil this all down, what you get is more paperwork, higher-resolution graphs, and the chance for government ministries to add another decimal point to emission numbers with satellite snapshots. The impact on your life, the price of your groceries, or the peril to your electrical grid? Round off to zero.

Best I can tell, not a single primary source—not NASA, not peer-reviewed journals, not the Paris Agreement’s own secretariat—documents any organization, utility, or corporation making a real-world, real-money decision using OCO data. Every “benefit” is hypothetical, every “application” is a footnote for a climate negotiation PowerPoint, and every stakeholder story ends a step before anything actually happens.

So when the media lights up with righteous indignation about the imminent unplugging of the OCO satellites, it’s not because the world stands to lose operations, dollars, or even actionable knowledge. It’s because a lot of institutional, academic, and consulting interests stand to lose a reliable grant generator—a justification parade for more “urgent” research, more staff, more servers buzzing away in the service of an endless, mostly circular, pursuit of “climate verification.”

Could I have missed a secret billion-dollar industry quietly built on real-time OCO data? Well, sure. And if those unicorns take up day-trading next week, I’ll issue an apology.

Until then, the obvious answer is: if a satellite’s only measurable benefit is keeping research staff busy and PowerPoint decks vivid, it’s better to let the thing burn up, let the lights go out at OCO HQ, and see if maybe, just maybe, someone finds a direct use for satellite data that isn’t another exercise in scientific navel-gazing. Otherwise, call it what it is:

A very fancy, very expensive cosmic spectator sport.

My very best regards to all of you on a lovely summer morning,

w.

My Usual Request: When you comment, please quote the exact words that you are referring to. It avoids endless misunderstandings.

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