CURMUDGUCATION: Privatization and the Weather

CURMUDGUCATION: Privatization and the Weather

Privatization and the Weather

Like many Trumpian flaps, the recent Alabama hurricane flap du jour directed our attention to things we probably should have already been paying attention to-- in this case, the drive to privatize the US Weather Service.

Barry Myers was the top lawyer for Accuweather, the weather service founded by his brother Joel. This article from Bloomberg Businessweek chronicles the thirty or so years that Myers spent fighting with the National Weather Service. He had a variety of complaints, not the least of which was that while Accuweather was charging clients to get weather reports, NWS was giving away that stuff for free.

It's going to be a bad day for somebody.

There are two things wrong with that argument. One is that one of the people that the NWS gives it away free to is-- Accuweather. NWS has 120 Doppler Radar positions around the country, plus the computer power to process all that information that comes in, and they do, in fact, give it away. Even if your local tv station has its own Super Eye On The Weather Sky Place weather product, chances are good that it depends on NWS data. At one point in his years of kvetching, Myers argued that it was like the US Postal Service vs. FedEx, only with the USPS delivering for free. While his analogy is a bit off, it's self-defeating in one respect-- when FedEx doesn't want to deliver your package to some remote address, it hands the package off to the USPS. Their entire business model depends on using the federally funded service to fill in the less profitable holes, CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Privatization and the Weather