John Oliver Slams NWA Privitization Efforts

Once again, on "Last Week Tonight," John Oliver took an obscure, dry subject and turned into entertainiment and real information.

He tackled weather on Sunday.  (See the video at the bottom of this post.) Specifically, his 16-minute segment covered the National Weather Service and Republican or conservative efforts to privatize it.

As I've mentioned in this blog previously, so called free market types think that the National Weather Service shouldn't be giving us potentially lifesaving forecasts for free. We should pay for it from private weather companies.  

I'm overdramatizing it, of course, but as Oliver points outs, the private weather companies depend on the National Weather Service for a large share of their output.  The NWS is the source of their raw data.

True, private weather companies like Accuweather and The Weather Channel do perform great public services, and frankly, I'm glad they're around. I applaud any and all efforts to educate the public about the weather, hazards, climate change and all kinds of important stuff.

These private weather companies are certainly crucial in that effort.

Oliver's segment focused on the Myers family, which runs Accuweather.  The Trump administration tapped Barry Myers to run the National Weather Service a couple years ago, but the Senate has been sitting on the nomination, so Myers hasn't started serving yet.

Myers has long lobbied Congress to limit free public distribution of information and data from the National Weather Service.

Do note that National Weather Service data, provided to the public free of charge, includes such life saving things as tornado, flash flood, hurricane and blizzard warnings.

As Oliver points out, turning everything over to private weather companies risks limiting those warnings to only those who can buy information from private weather companies. If you can't afford it, sorry, you don't find out the tornado is heading toward your house until it's too late.

This, of course, would be a worse-case scenario if the NWS were privatized, but it's worth considering

John Oliver makes all this easy and entertaining, so it's worth watching his segment. Here it is: