Trump’s EPA Head Has Learned One Terrible Lesson From Elon Musk

In seven short weeks, the Trump administration has gone from promising a new “golden age” to arguing that a recession is “worth it.” It’s gone from promising “day one” egg-price decreases to telling people to “shut up” and keep backyard poultry. It’s gone from demonizing electric cars to advertising them on the White House lawn and characterizing Tesla protests as “domestic terrorism.” Most spectacularly, it’s gone from 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada and 10 percent tariffs on China to a one-month pause on tariffs on Mexico and Canada, to 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada and 20 percent tariffs on China, to a one-month delay on auto tariffs, to a temporary pause on tariffs on Canada and Mexico specifically for items compliant with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement, to a 50 percent tariff on Canadian steel and aluminum starting March 12 to … scratch that, never mind.

Perhaps you find this chaotic. Perhaps you think this administration lacks ideological coherence. That’s an understandable conclusion to draw, but it’s not the whole picture.

Several news stories this week suggest that the Trump administration not only has a few consistent positions but is starting to adopt a consistent communications strategy regarding those positions. One is that protest is illegal and protesters are terrorists. (These narratives have been on display both in the detention and attempted deportation of protest leader Mahmoud Khalil, and in Trump’s threat against Tesla protesters.) Another, which is now making its way into environmental and climate policy, is that extra-procedural cancellations of contractually or congressionally guaranteed payments are fine because they’re cracking down on fraud. And the common strategy in both these positions is to open with a bold assertion and, in lieu of producing evidence, escalate the assertions rapidly when challenged.

Elon Musk, the “special government employee” heading the newly created, legally embattled Department of Government Efficiency, has been refining this strategy for weeks. The dominant message from DOGE, initially, was that it was cutting down on government waste and inefficiency. A few weeks into the administration, as people began to question whether Musk and some random acolytes below the age of prefrontal cortex maturity should really be getting access to sensitive data, the fraud assertions started escalating. A day after a judge challenged the fraud claims, Musk and Trump held their joint Oval Office presser, on February 11, alleging “massive amounts of fraud,” “billions of dollars of abuse, incompetence, and corruption,” “foreign fraud rings” in “entitlement programs,” 150-year-old people receiving Social Security benefits, and “tens of billions of dollars” of positively identified fraudulent payments. (You can read The Washington Post’s debunking of this, and of the White House press secretary’s subsequent effort to substantiate these claims, here.)

Since then, these assertions have only grown in scale. On Monday, Musk told Fox Business’s Larry Kudlow that “entitlements” claims via fake or stolen Social Security numbers accounted for an estimated “10 percent of federal expenditures,” or “half a trillion dollars”—a staggering claim, which he then embroidered by claiming that the lure of this fast cash was a major contributor to undocumented immigration. (Half a trillion dollars, as Forbes reporter Alison Durkee pointed out, is about a third of total Social Security payments last year. Estimates from actual reports, with data, suggest less than 1 percent of Social Security claims are fraudulent. Musk’s claim that undocumented immigrants come to the U.S. to enrich themselves off Social Security is particularly bizarre, since undocumented immigrants are arguably the ones being scammed, paying into Social Security without getting anything back.)

Lee Zeldin, the Trump loyalist appointed to head the Environmental Protection Agency, seems to be following Musk’s lead. On Tuesday, he announced the termination of $20 billion in grants that have already been promised to institutions via the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund program, which Congress established in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. He cited “substantial concerns regarding program integrity, objections to the award process, programmatic fraud, waste, and abuse, and misalignment with the agency’s priorities,” but provided no evidence to support such widespread fraud claims. The best he came up with was that “a group linked to Stacey Abrams received two billion dollars after reporting a mere 100 dollars in total revenue the year before” (a debunking of which you can read here) and that “the founding director of the EPA’s program dished out $5 billion to his former employer.”

Pending clarity on the details, one could argue this last allegation is a conflict of interest—a weak one, given that the individual in question, Jahi Wise, doesn’t seem to have been rehired by that former employer—but not fraud, and not a conflict that can hold a candle to Musk, whose business has been built on an estimated $38 billion in government spending, being given the keys to the federal coffers and cutting subsidies to his flailing car company’s ascendant competitors. The press release also says the matter has been referred to the Office of the Inspector General and is being investigated by the Department of Justice and the FBI. In fact, a top DOJ prosecutor recently resigned after being asked to investigate EPA grants, reportedly declining to open a grand jury investigation due to insufficient evidence.

The Greenhouse Gas Reduction fund has elements that conservatives should celebrate: It aimed to reduce energy bills in cash-strapped locations, and to do so while minimizing government spending (by essentially using it only as seed money for private capital). But Zeldin, implementing Musk’s narrative strategy, has now turned the program into an increasingly colorful heist story. The administration’s crusade against it can be traced to a December video by right-wing sting group Project Veritas, in which a twentysomething EPA employee in the lame-duck Biden administration said that they were trying to get grants awarded as quickly as possible: “It truly like feels we’re on the Titanic and we’re throwing gold bars off the edge.” This isn’t really evidence of anything aside from a single twentysomething having a big mouth (and the analogy falls apart as soon as you think about it for more than two seconds). But as legal challenges to its extra-procedural spending freezes mounted, the Trump administration has clung to this analogy ever more closely. In recent statements, Zeldin has even adjusted his language in a way that implies his team has “located BILLIONS of dollars’ worth” of literal gold bars that the Biden administration tried to hide at Citibank.

Again: You may think this sounds chaotic. You may think that outlandish fantasies can’t be an actual comms strategy. But they are, and it’s not ineffective: The opposition can’t actually prove a negative, i.e., that fraud doesn’t exist, and if your team comes up with a wilder story each week, the press has to actually debunk it, which means they have to report that you said it, which means the claim itself is all that some people will hear or remember. Furthermore, the “fraud” story gives the Trump administration a victim to point to: you, the taxpayer. Any victim Democrats come up with therefore has to be more compelling to people than monetary self-interest.

The White House may be filled with people dressed in clown costumes throwing spaghetti at a wall. But they have a story about why they’re throwing spaghetti at the wall, and they’re sticking to it—and right-wing news networks are dutifully transmitting it to voters. If Democrats want to get a different message to voters, they’re not going to get anywhere by standing next to the clowns hurling spaghetti with a sign reading, “This is not normal.” Their only option is to go find some people who’ve been smacked in the face by projectile pasta, stick those people in front of a camera, and start making the case that the Trump administration is, in fact, hurting people.

Stat of the Week
22%

That’s how much the nation’s butterfly population has decreased in the last 20 years—a troubling indicator given insects’ foundational role in ecosystems.

What I’m Reading

What the world needs now is more fossil fuels, says Trump’s energy secretary

The Trump administration’s broader thesis on climate change is becoming clear. Speaking at the annual oil and gas conference known as CERAWeek, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who earned $5.6 million helming a fracking company in 2023, outlined it: Climate change is happening, but it’s the necessary price you pay for the wealth that fossil fuel companies create. (The fact that fossil fuels create more wealth specifically for Wright and the other fossil fuel executives he was speaking to than they do for many of the people poisoned by them does not seem to have been discussed.) The Guardian’s Dharna Noor reports:

“The Trump administration will treat climate change for what it is, a global physical phenomenon that is a side-effect of building the modern world,” he added. “Everything in life involves trade-off.”

Though he admitted fossil fuels’ greenhouse gas emissions were warming the planet, he said “there is no physical way” solar, wind and batteries could replace the “myriad” uses of gas—something top experts dispute. Further, a bigger and more immediate problem was energy poverty, Wright said.

“Where is the Cop conference for this far more urgent global challenge,” he said, referring to the annual United Nations climate talks, known as the Conference of the Parties (Cop). “I look forward to working with all of you to better energize the world and fully unleash human potential.”

Read Dharna Noor’s full report at The Guardian.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

“I can tell you point-blank who I’m voting for: Donald Trump,” a scallop fisherman last fall told The New Bedford Light, which reported the proliferation of Trump flags on fishing vessels in the coastal Massachusetts town. “The Democratic Party is not the fisherman’s friend,” he said.

The fishing industry has generally been pro-Trump because he’s anti-regulation and opposed to offshore wind farms. Many are also hoping Trump might reopen commercial fishing in protected federal waters, as he did during his first administration. But if Trump continues on his current course, he could jeopardize some of these supporters’ livelihoods. After all, he just started a trade war with America’s two top seafood trade partners.

The United States imports much more seafood than it exports—to the tune of a roughly $25 billion trade deficit, according to government data from 2022. But it does export quite a bit of its catch to Canada, serving as Canada’s top supplier for both salmon and lobster. And it exports even more to China. In fact, the Agriculture Department reported last year that seafood exports to China were actually increasing, unlike many other commodities. Both countries quickly retaliated against Trump’s tariffs on Tuesday. Canada’s two-phase tariff announcement included only a very limited list of seafood products in the first, immediate round of tariffs; almost all U.S. seafood seems to be in the firing line for a second round of tariffs scheduled for later this month. China, meanwhile, simply matched Trump’s extra 10 percent tariff increase with its own 10 percent increase, effectively immediately—seafood included.

It’s possible that Trump, despite the support of New Bedford residents, may not be all that concerned about alienating voters in Maine and Massachusetts—states that account for 99 percent of Canada’s lobster imports. (He is, after all, unusually explicit in his punitive and vengeful attitude toward blue states.) But you’d think he’d be a little more concerned about Alaska, where he bested Kamala Harris by 13 points last year. Alaska is America’s top producer of Pacific salmon, and China is the top export destination for it. (China’s imports of U.S. salmon nearly tripled between 2020 and 2023, according to the USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service.)

China processes and reexports some of that salmon, which complicates things further. When Trump started a trade war with China in 2017, Alaska’s two senators and one congressman—all Republicans—lobbied the administration to exempt seafood harvested in Alaska and processed in China from the tariffs, since a lot of American seafood gets deboned in China and then returned to the U.S. These products were included anyway. The lawmakers wrote a letter expressing their displeasure. But the damage from China’s retaliation to Trump’s trade war persisted into the Biden administration, with Alaskan pollock affected as well.

There are other ways Trump’s policies could wreak havoc on the industry. In theory, the tariffs could help some businesses by encouraging Americans to eat more domestic seafood, as it becomes more affordable relative to seafood impacted by the tariffs. On the other hand, it’s always a little tricky to predict how consumers are going to respond, and given the likelihood that tariffs will spike prices throughout the supply chain, it’s possible consumers will just decrease their seafood consumption. The tariffs on steel and aluminum are inevitably going to affect the cost of fishing equipment, for example. And Trump’s targeting of immigrant workers could also cause problems, given that a majority of the seafood-processing workforce is foreign-born.

Then there are the cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. While many in the seafood industry resent what they see as heavy-handed regulation—another fisherman told The New Bedford Light that NOAA Fisheries “is the first one that should be cut”—NOAA also provides a lot of direct and indirect support to the industry via training and grants, ecosystem restoration, and climate monitoring. This last one is a huge deal in an industry that is already being hit by climate change. (Read more in Audrey Gray’s report for TNR several years ago on global warming in the Gulf of Maine and The New York Times’ report this week on how climate change is affecting plankton and the entire oceanic ecosystem with it.)

TNR’s Kate Aronoff also writes, this week, about NOAA’s monitoring program for toxic algal blooms, which is being jeopardized by DOGE cuts, potentially threatening both municipal water quality and fishing. It’s not hard to imagine that Trump’s and Elon Musk’s indiscriminate slashing of government programs will harm the fishing industry more than it helps.

Stat of the Week
$50 million

That’s the estimated annual cost in the U.S. of toxic algal blooms, the monitoring and science of which is now threatened due to the Trump administration’s cuts to NOAA.

What I’m Reading

As Tariffs Slam Maple Syrup, Sugarmakers Branch Out

The U.S. maple syrup industry is already dealing with the upheaval of climate change, given that its business depends on “a single product harvested in a window of just a few weeks every spring,” with that window depending “on a freeze-thaw cycle.” Tariffs are now making the business harder. As a result, reports Callie Radke Stevens, some are now turning to Indigenous practices of tapping birch and other trees:

A stiff tariff from the Trump administration on Canadian goods, including the equipment used to make syrup, has unsettled the industry and could drive up the price of U.S. syrup. This has coincided with a slow syrup run in February. Such short-term woes are combining with longer-term concerns, as a changing climate alters both production and the business model.

So the Wheelers and other sugarmakers are expanding into other tree syrups, to fortify their businesses in the face of changing weather (political and actual) and in hopes of keeping forests healthy. Researchers and farmers alike are investigating species like beech, sycamore, walnut, and even other species of maple.

Read Callie Radke Stevens’s full report at Civil Eats.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

Last November, people in farming-dependent counties voted for Donald Trump by a staggering average of 78 percent. So why does he seem so hell-bent on screwing them over?

Earlier this month, multiple outlets reported farmers’ complaints that promised funds—including reimbursements for improvements already paid for and installed—had been frozen, contrary to the administration’s assurances. Missouri cattle farmer Skylar Holden, in a viral video on TikTok, said that although he voted for Trump, his $240,000 contract with the Agriculture Department to improve infrastructure on his farm was now frozen, and he’d already spent $80,000 on materials and labor. The Washington Post last week “spoke with farmers and farm organizations in 10 states who had contacted their congressional delegations about the USDA funding freeze. Some farmers from conservative-leaning districts said they have received no reply. Others said they were told that their representatives supported the administration’s decision—and some representatives appeared to suggest that Trump’s funding freeze was not affecting farmers at all.” These kinds of stories are now proliferating in local news outlets in rural states, whose residents are also being hit by USDA firings.

And this week, the Post revealed a new detail: After a federal judge blocked the freeze on January 28, middle managers at the Department of Agriculture asked superiors whether they could release these funds—and were told they could not. But supposedly, this is getting resolved: Newly confirmed Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins recently claimed to have “release[d] the first tranche of funding that was paused due to the review of funding in the Inflation Reduction Act” and promised that the department would “honor contracts that were already made directly to farmers.”

You’ll notice some caveats in there: “already made” and “directly to farmers.” It’s unclear whether this money will be enough, or be disbursed soon enough, for some of the farms in question, NBC’s Suzy Khimm reported Saturday. First, the IRA funds aren’t the only funds that have been frozen. Second, small farms operating on tight profit margins “make up a large proportion of the farms participating in some of the federal grant programs” in question. And third, farming isn’t something that can be put on hold: As March draws near, many farms are heading into thawing, planting, and animal birthing season.

This, on its own, would be cause for concern in an agricultural system that already operates with worryingly few redundancies—especially since American agriculture is also heavily dependent on immigrant workers, whom the Trump administration is also targeting. But it’s not the only crisis at USDA right now. Only days after Rollins was sworn in, the department accidentally fired people working on the government’s response to the H5N1 avian flu and had to set about trying to rehire them. While Trump said Friday that Rollins is “going to do something with the eggs” (by which he apparently meant lower egg prices), this is hardly a good start. NPR recently profiled two other workers fired at USDA, both of whom worked on securing the food system in the face of escalating threats from pests, pathogens, and climate shocks. This is consistent with recent New York Times reporting that some 400 people in the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service have been fired, along with an estimated 800 agricultural scientists. The USDA apparently did not answer Times reporters’ questions about how many employees had been fired overall, but current estimates are that around 4,200 probationary USDA employees alone have been laid off.

Many experts already consider U.S. agriculture to be underprepared for the pathogens, pesticide resistance, weather pattern shifts, and other threats that are predicted to become more common. On Monday, a coalition of environmental groups and the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York sued the USDA for “unlawfully removing department webpages focused on climate change,” which help farmers “make the best choices and access resources to mitigate harm to their livelihoods,” according to the press release.

Whether Rollins is the best person to sort through this mess is another question. As Mike Lavender, policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, told journalist Tom Philpott on a recent podcast, the USDA is a large department, which means a core component of the job is “managing a huge number of people.” But aside from growing up on a farm, Rollins’s primary qualification for this role seems to have been her time leading the America First Policy Institute, “which was a relatively small think-tank organization that didn’t focus a ton on agriculture,” Lavender said. “So when you start parsing through her record, looking for the substantive linkages to domestic agricultural policy, there’s not a ton there to go on, and there’s not a lot of record of experience in managing huge businesses, organizations with a lot of employees, which is a significant part of the USDA role.”

One of the fired USDA employees NPR profiled was a veteran who’d served in the Air Force for 20 years and was training dogs to detect contraband agricultural products so that potential pathogens and pests can be kept out of the U.S. “I gave blood, sweat, and tears to this country for 20 years to continue service to the federal government,” he told NPR. “I kind of feel like I was just thrown out like a piece of trash.”

Stat of the Week
$5 billion

That’s how much BP now plans to cut from its low-carbon investment plan, instead increasing its oil and gas production targets by 60 percent.

What I’m Reading

Coffee Prices Are at a 50-Year High. Producers Aren’t Celebrating.

Last week, this newsletter mentioned some of the upward pressures on coffee prices right now, including the crop’s particular vulnerability to climate change and weather shocks. The Times recently published a wonderfully in-depth feature on this topic, covering not just the market quirks that make this industry particularly tricky but also farmers’ efforts to shift to new coffee varieties and farming techniques that may make them more resilient. Don’t miss the more hopeful story of one farmer in Corquín, Honduras:

An agricultural engineer by training, Mr. Romero began studying how to shelter his own crop from the elements. He proposed adding a canopy of taller trees like pine and mahogany to cast shade over his coffee. That would keep moisture in the soil and preserve the health of the roots, allowing them to take up more water and nutrients. He made plans to intersperse fruit trees—mangoes, oranges, lemons and plantains—diversifying his harvest while adding additional roots to preserve soil.

In 2009, Mr. Romero persuaded his wife, his parents and his brother to pool their land holdings, turning their 140 acres into a collective plantation that would pursue this new mode of operation, with sustainability as their lodestar.

He organized two dozen other farms into a cooperative called Cafico. Members could share techniques and operate a nursery to produce suitable varieties of coffee plants and shade trees. They financed the construction of a mill to dry and process their harvest and sell the crop. They eschewed chemical fertilizers and pesticides, dedicating themselves to organic production.

His pitch encountered initial resistance from potential members, given the arithmetic.… “Everyone said we were crazy,” said Mr. Romero, 45. “Now, they are copying the model.”

Read Peter S. Goodman’s and Alejandro Cegarra’s full report at The New York Times.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

Last week, new data dropped showing that inflation has hit a seven-month high, driven in no small part by rising food, gas, and housing costs. Egg prices alone jumped 15.2 percent from December. But coffee and other items have also grown more expensive.

As numerous pieces were quick to point out, this is not a great look for President Donald Trump, who campaigned on the promise of lowering costs for consumers on “day one,” and who has also promised lower interest rates, which the Fed is unlikely to deliver unless inflation is under control. Trump reacted to the inflation news by blaming his predecessor. “BIDEN INFLATION UP!” he posted on Truth Social.

At least one survey already suggests consumers aren’t buying this line: The University of Michigan’s February survey of consumers found they expect inflation to increase, particularly in light of the tariffs Trump has slapped on top trading partners. Nor are economists overly impressed by Elon Musk’s proposal to tackle the problem: dramatically slashing government spending. Even if Musk could cut spending as much as he suggests (doubtful, reports The Economist, which finds much evidence of chaos but not much movement in actual numbers) experts say the result would crash the economy.

But the whom-to-blame discourse threatens to obscure a broader truth about food prices in particular right now: These price increases aren’t random. While inflation overall is a complicated topic, to put it mildly, many of these individual price increases have clear causes and were accurately predicted not just months, but years in advance. And Team Trump, even without their sudden enthusiasm for tariffs, would be poorly suited to tackle these particular price hikes. That’s because the dominant conservative model for fighting high cost of living—removing regulations and cutting government spending—isn’t very well suited to the crises driving some of these increases.

As Jan Dutkiewicz wrote at The New Republic last month, egg price increases are being driven partly by the H5N1 avian flu outbreak—which is being exacerbated by longstanding underregulation of animal agriculture. “Virtually all of the 100-or-so billion eggs produced annually in the United States come from factory farms,” and “cramming so many virtually genetically identical birds of the same breed into such tight quarters makes factory farms hotbeds of disease,” Jan wrote. “For decades, public health experts have feared that the next big pandemic would originate in poultry.… Reducing the risk of zoonotic outbreaks in the food system, mostly by reducing land clearing for crops and moving away from the factory farming of animals, is a lesson we should have learned from previous avian flu outbreaks and from the 2009 swine flu outbreak. And it should have been driven home by the scope and scale of the human and economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Paradoxically, he continued, the historical cheapness of eggs has fed a national egg-eating habit that now gives egg prices disproportionate sway over our overall experience of inflation:

[I]f consumers eat a lot of eggs, the price of eggs will be weighted heavily in calculating the [Consumer Price Index]. As the Brookings Institute put it, in an article written before the current outbreak of H5N1, “Americans spend more on chicken than tofu, so changes in the price of chicken have a greater impact on the CPI.” In the face of a supply shock like H5N1, egg prices rise much faster than those of other goods, which not only drives up CPI but makes the difference in prices very obviously visible to shoppers, even though most of them don’t connect the price hikes to a disease ravaging farms thousands of miles away from their supermarket.

Cheap eggs might just be a bad long-term goal to aim for, Jan argued. And whether or not you agree with that conclusion, cheap eggs seem like a difficult outcome for the Trump team to deliver merely by slashing spending and regulations. They could, of course, simply stop doing anything about the avian flu: no more testing, and thus no more culling of diseased chicken flocks or federal compensation for those culls. This “let the world burn” strategy is not impossible to imagine of Trump—but it’s hard to see how this would accomplish the putative goal, given that sick birds typically stop laying eggs.

The Trump administration’s economic approach also seems suboptimally calibrated for dealing with the kind of price volatility we’re starting to see with coffee. In January, Arabica coffee futures spiked to record levels amid tariff fears, The Wall Street Journal reported—but that wasn’t the only reason for the volatility. Severe drought in Brazil and wild swings in precipitation in Vietnam—the world’s two top coffee-producing countries—had already lowered yields.

This is consistent with what researchers have long predicted might happen as climate change accelerates. In fact, last March, researchers with the European Central Bank calculated that “weather and climate shocks” alone may drive food price increases of 1.5–1.8 percentage points a year within a decade, and increases of 2.2–4.3 percentage points a year by 2060.

Coffee has long been identified, along with chocolate, as a crop particularly sensitive to these weather changes. In fact, chocolate prices are also way up for weather reasons, leading to multiple stories last week (and a data-heavy report from Climate Central) explaining the context to Valentine’s Day shoppers.

Deregulation and cutting all funds geared at addressing climate change isn’t going to help this problem. “Drill, baby, drill,” the slogan Trump adopted for his inauguration, has long been the Republican rallying cry for economic growth and low cost of living. But Democrats have tried this approach, too, and it’s not even very effective at lowering gas prices—much less the prices of things that get harder to produce the more fossil fuels you burn.

There are, of course, efforts to diversify coffee strains and make the global coffee market more resilient to climate shocks. One of the bodies funding those efforts was the U.S. Agency for International Development, which the Trump administration is now dismantling.

Stat of the Week
$19 billion

That’s how much money—intended for states, municipalities, and nonprofits—remained frozen in EPA coffers as of the end of last week, despite court orders for the Trump administration to resume disbursements, according to Inside Climate News.

What I’m Reading

‘The path forward is clear’: how Trump taking office has ‘turbocharged’ climate accountability efforts

Last spring, Liza Featherstone wrote at TNR about Vermont’s new law, following the federal “Superfund” model for chemical cleanups, that aims to make fossil fuel companies pay into a fund that can then be used to offset the costs of climate disasters. This model of climate policy, The Guardian’s Dharna Noor reports, is now spreading rapidly, although courtroom challenges from the fossil fuel industry are spreading almost as quickly:

“I think Trump’s election has turbocharged the ‘make polluters pay’ movement,” said [Jamie] Henn, who has been a leader in the campaign for a decade.… The state of Vermont in May passed a first-of-its-kind law holding fossil fuel firms financially responsible for climate damages and New York passed a similar measure in December.… Similar bills are being considered in Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts and now Rhode Island, where a measure was introduced last week. A policy will also soon be introduced in California, where recent deadly wildfires have revived the call for the proposal after one was weighed last year.

Minnesota and Oregon lawmakers are also considering introducing climate superfund acts. And since inauguration day, activists and officials in a dozen other states have expressed interest in doing the same, said Henn.

“I think people are really latching on to this message and this approach right now,” Henn said. “It finally gives people a way to respond to climate disasters, and it’s something that we can do without the federal government.”

Read Dharna Noor’s full report at The Guardian.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

On Monday night, a new coalition of progressive and environmental groups held a call outlining a strategy to “fight Trump and the oil oligarchs.” “We’ve been on defensive for the last three weeks, but it’s time for us to go on the offensive,” said Friends of the Earth President Erich Pica. “We can’t keep drinking out of the firehose,” said host Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of Our Revolution, an organizing group born out of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign.

The call was one of several recent signs that, after lying low for the first few weeks of the Trump administration, environmental groups are suiting up for battle. The United to End Polluter Handouts coalition—which among its over 30 members includes the youth-focused Sunrise Movement, NextGen America, and Zero Hour; senior-focused Third Act; consumer rights nonprofit Public Citizen; and social justice grassroots organization Hip Hop Caucus—is embracing a particular strategy, organizers on the call explained: to target the budget reconciliation process in March with a demand to end fossil fuel subsidies.

The goal, organizers say, is not just to strike a blow against the oil and gas industry. It’s also to hit oil executives in a way that undermines Trump’s entire platform.

The reconciliation process needed to pass the tax bill, Pica argued, is where the rubber of the Trump administration meets the road. “They want to pass this tax cut bill so they have to cut other types of social spending. They want to increase defense at the cost of SNAP, increase oil and gas subsidies at the expense of Medicaid. This is their big plan,” he said. “It’s their plan because they don’t have the votes in the Senate to pass anything other than a tax bill.” So that’s where environmental and other progressive groups “can pick a fight,” he said. “And if we don’t win, we will use this moment to gum up the reconciliation package.” A significant part of the task, he and others on the call agreed, would be forcing Democrats to “hold the line.”

That’s easier said than done. As several people on the call acknowledged, politicians typically look for deals in these sorts of negotiations. Democrats so far have not indicated much willingness to fight via all available means. And at the end of the day, the GOP does have the votes to push a reconciliation package through, with or without Democratic cooperation.

But the groups on the call Monday aren’t the only ones unveiling new strategies in the coming weeks. The Center for Biological Diversity, for example, launched 266 lawsuits against environmental rollbacks under the last Trump administration alongside other environmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council—winning a striking majority of them. “Because [Trump and Elon Musk] have moved with such speed it has taken a little bit of time for us to catch up,” Center for Biological Diversity Government Affairs Director Brett Hartl told me by phone. “But I think we expect to have at least one or two more lawsuits against DOGE,” he said, in addition to those already filed by such groups as Democratic attorneys general, “and I think there’ll be other lawsuits challenging aspects of some of the executive orders in the next, I would say one to three weeks.”

Despite the widely reported absence of “the resistance” this time around, these groups emphasize that they haven’t gone anywhere. And there’s another common theme: While the opposition is at a significant disadvantage given Democratic minorities in the House and Senate, the dizzying pace of the administration’s opening weeks, they argue, masks vulnerability—which Trump’s opponents can exploit.

“President Trump and the Republicans are weak,” Pica said Monday, pointing to the thin GOP majority dictating a need to pass legislation via the budget reconciliation process. “This is an opportunity to lay out and expose Trump for who he really is,” Sunrise Movement Executive Director Aru Shiney-Ajay said. “The reason he has such a high approval rating is that he was able to fool people into thinking that he fought for everyday people.” Attacking his “oligarch” allies, she and others on the call argued, undermines his core appeal to certain voters.

Environmental advocate Bill McKibben recently proposed a similar approach in his newsletter The Crucial Years. “Our job is not to stop what Trump is doing, because we can’t,” he wrote to fellow activists. “Our basic job is to make what he’s doing is deeply unpopular, because that will stiffen the backbone of the courts and any remaining moderate Republicans, and set us up for possible gains if and when we next have elections. So: witness, communicate, ridicule, amplify strong voices.”

And if the would-be activists reading that newsletter are still sitting stunned on their sofas, uncertain what to do with the barrage of news over the last few weeks? When I asked Hartl what he would say to environmentally concerned readers who might be feeling more overwhelmed than empowered at present, he pointed to the need to distinguish substance from show.

“Make sure that elected officials and your representatives and people know when [Trump’s] actions are causing real harm, as opposed to the noise and chaos that he is so good at generating all the time,” he said. “That is his one true superpower, is flooding the news with nonsensical chaos.” While many of the spectacular Week One executive orders on environmental matters were ultimately symbolic requests for agencies to produce reports, (which is part of why groups were slow to sue, Hartl explained) halting Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, disbursements is another matter. “People are going to lose their jobs, because the money’s not going to be there so they’re not going to be able to do the work they were promised to do,” he said.

Like many in the past week, Hartl questioned whether Trump actually has the political support for these sorts of moves. “He promised to have the cleanest air and cleanest water in the world. He told everyone RFK Jr. was going to fix our broken food systems and get chemicals out of the environment. He didn’t run a campaign on utterly destroying the environment and killing people’s jobs,” Hartl said. “So folks need to bring all that to light, because they’re deeply unpopular. And his one vulnerability is that he is actually incredibly thin-skinned and sensitive to public opinion. The only thing that really makes him change his mind is when things are going bad—and then he’ll just change on a whim cause he doesn’t really have any principles.”

Stat of the Week
60% to 80% chance

That’s how likely it is that the target set by the Paris climate agreement—limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures—has already been crossed, according to a new study. Read CNN’s report on this study and two other grim ones here.

What I’m Reading

Farmers on the hook for millions after Trump freezesUSDA funds

That’s how likely it is that the target set by the Paris climate agreement—limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures—has already been crossed, according to a new study. Read CNN’s report on this study and two other grim ones here.

The Washington Post paints a portrait of utter chaos following the president’s Day One order to halt disbursements from the IRA. While the White House “repeatedly said the freeze of agriculture funding and other federal financial assistance would not affect benefits that go directly to individuals, such as farmers,” the Post reports that farmers were still unable to access funds—including reimbursements for projects already completed—as of last weekend.

[Last] Wednesday, National Farmers Union President Rob Larew testified before the Senate Agriculture Committee that the Trump administration’s sweeping decisions on federal funding were creating concern for farmers across the country.

“No one knows what funding will be available or if key programs will have the staff needed to operate,” Larew said. “Freezing spending and making sweeping decisions without congressional oversight just adds more uncertainty to an already tough farm economy.”

Skylar Holden, a cattle farmer in eastern Missouri, said he signed a $240,000 contract in December under the Environmental Quality Incentives Program to share costs on investments for his farm.

With the funding, Holden erected new fencing and installed a well. He had planned further improvements to his farm’s water system and spent $80,000 on materials and labor contracts that he expected would be partly paid back by the government.

This month, a USDA representative told him the funding was paused because of Trump’s executive order.

Read the full report from Daniel Wu, Gaya Gupta, and Anumita Kaur here.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

If you’ve found it impossible to keep track of all the news in the past two weeks, you’re not alone. Here’s a brief rundown of where things stand on the environmental front, two weeks into Donald Trump’s second term—and a few themes that might not be apparent from the daily headline deluge. (The typical Trump-era caveat applies: This list may be outdated by the time you read it, given the rapid pace of executive actions so far, and it’s not intended to be exhaustive.)

Within hours of his inauguration, Trump signed an executive order titled “Unleashing American Energy,” a roughly 3,500-word document ordering all agencies to review, identify, and begin the suspension or reversal of any policies “that impose an undue burden on the identification, development, or use of domestic energy resources—with particular attention to oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower, biofuels, critical mineral, and nuclear energy resources,” or that somehow restrict “consumer choice of vehicles and appliances.”

The order also revoked a number of Biden-era executive orders to do with clean energy, climate change adaptation, and the establishment of a national Climate Corps; ordered the agencies to take steps to expedite the federal permitting process; barred agencies from using “methodologies that are arbitrary or ideologically motivated” in their environmental analyses (specifically singling out the concept of the “social cost of carbon”); and ordered all agencies to “immediately pause the disbursement of funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 … or the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act,” with electric vehicle programs specifically put in the crosshairs. It also outlined protocol for fast-tracking the approval of liquefied natural gas ports and instructed agencies to remove any “undue burdens” on the mineral mining industry and prioritize actions to facilitate mineral extraction.

In the same flurry of week one orders, Trump declared a “national energy emergency,” ordering agencies to use emergency authorities to speed oil and gas production (but not solar and wind power). A separate order singled out Alaska’s reserves in particular for exploitation. Trump withdrew the country from the Paris climate accord and Joe Biden’s U.S. International Climate Finance Plan, ordered agencies to rethink water distribution in Southern California (which the federal government doesn’t really control), and ordered a performance review for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. He also ordered a blanket pause on federal grant money, which would affect a number of environmental and clean energy programs—although this order was then rescinded and also paused by multiple federal judges.

On January 29, the Senate confirmed Trump’s nominee for the Environmental Protection Agency head, Lee Zeldin—a noted Trump loyalist. Trump also appointed David Fotouhi (another Trump EPA veteran, who recently as a litigator challenged the EPA’s asbestos ban) as second in command, tapped chemical industry insiders Nancy Beck and Lynn Dekleva to lead the EPA’s chemical regulation, and named two former oil lobbyists—Alex Dominguez and Aaron Szabo—to manage auto emissions and air pollution for the agency. Meanwhile, newly confirmed Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy instructed the Department of Transportation to preferentially fund projects serving areas with higher marriage and birth rates, and began the process of reversing Biden policies on fuel efficiency standards.

This week opened with the administration reminding all recently hired EPA workers via email that “as a probationary/trial period employee,” they could be fired immediately—an EPA-specific escalation from the prior week’s general threats and buyouts offered to all federal workers via the extrajudicial powers of Elon Musk. The White House also announced the nomination of Neil Jacobs, known for altering a map of the projected path of Hurricane Dorian with a Sharpie during Trump’s first administration, in an attempt to corroborate the president’s misleading tweet, to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The Senate confirmed Trump’s nominee, the fracking executive Chris Wright, to lead the Department of Energy. On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that the EPA would also be “demoting career employees who oversee scientific research, the enforcement of pollution laws, hazardous waste cleanup and the agency’s human resources department and will replace them with political appointees.”

So what does this add up to? And how does it fit into the much larger flurry of executive actions on foreign aid, immigration, public health, LGBTQ rights, and more in the past two weeks?

First, while some aspects of Trump’s first two weeks (such as the speed and scale of some of the assaults on the federal workforce, the attacks on USAID in particular, handing over the federal payment system to Musk and his teenage staff) have surprised even watchful experts, you really can’t say that most of these environmental moves come as a shock. They’re fully in line with what informed observers expected from a reelected Trump administration; the president has been telegraphing these decisions for months, and they’re also found in the pages of the GOP’s Project 2025 policy manifesto.

The second theme here is that—as with many of Trump’s other moves, and as this newsletter predicted two weeks ago, noting the oligarchic aesthetics of the inauguration festivities—you really can follow the money. All of these actions benefit specific industries and people. Gutting the environmental review and permitting process and greenlighting liquefied natural gas terminals will please the oil and gas industry that Trump explicitly courted for donations during his campaign. Killing the electric vehicle subsidy will please Musk—who has openly said this would benefit Tesla (currently struggling) by hurting the company’s competitors. In general, putting corporate lobbyists in charge of regulating the industries they come from is a good way to please corporate interests, and revoking any policy that restricts “consumer choice” in household appliances tends to benefit companies manufacturing appliances that are dangerous.

The third point is one that pertains to many of Trump’s moves in other areas, as well. Right now there seems to be a stark divide in the commentariat: an open argument over whether the administration’s actions over the past two weeks are a catastrophic attack on literally lifesaving programs and American political norms, or merely a predictable show of bluster from team Trump that will inevitably be slowed or halted by legal challenges and lack of congressional support.

But both these things can be true at once. It’s possible—likely, even—that many of Trump’s initial actions will fizzle for legal or organizational reasons. It’s also possible for these actions to do a lot of damage, even if the specific orders are eventually countermanded. “On Friday morning,” Brett Murphy and Anna Maria Barry-Jester recently reported for ProPublica, “the staffers at a half dozen U.S.-funded medical facilities in Sudan who care for severely malnourished children had a choice to make: Defy President Donald Trump’s order to immediately stop their operations or let up to 100 babies and toddlers die.”

The effects of halting funds for environmental programs won’t be as gut-wrenchingly immediate as the halt on foreign aid. But the same principle applies across multiple fields: Programs and projects operating on tight margins and relying on predicted federal funds to show up can’t necessarily wait for this all to be cleared up.

“We have one woman in her 80s who lives alone, and if she does not get her roof fixed, well, we’re going to have a senior in her late 80s who is homeless,” Warren Tidwell, leading efforts to repair storm damage in Alabama using IRA funds, recently told the Times. The same article pointed to farmers and small-business owners waiting for reimbursement who went into debt to fund improvements that the Rural Energy for America Program was supposed to reimburse, or clean energy projects whose status is suddenly up in the air. The uncertainty alone will probably shutter some projects.

The overarching analysis is fairly grim. Trump was hardly an unknown quantity. The chaos he has unleashed was predictable, as was his capture by a slew of cronies benefiting from a rollback of sensible energy and environmental policy. If anything’s getting lost in all the Sturm und Drang, it’s that ordinary people will wind up impoverished or harmed as a select few profit, regardless of how things ultimately play out in the courts. That alone ought to be generating more opposition, and more pointed media coverage, than we’re currently seeing.

Stat of the Week
50%

A paper published this week found a 50 percent increase in microplastics in human brains in 2024 as compared to 2016.

What I’m Reading

How Trump’s USAID shutdown threatens the world’s climate goals

The attempt to completely shutter USAID hasn’t gotten as much attention as other Trump orders. But it’s one of the places where these early actions could do significant and irreversible damage. In addition to USAID’s lifesaving work in public health, Jake Bittle reminds readers at Grist, the agency also distributes funds to help “low-income countries build renewable energy and adapt to worsening natural disasters, as well as conserve carbon sinks and sensitive ecosystems.” The piece also serves as an important reminder that public health and climate change can’t really be siloed into separate categories.

Even if USAID eventually resumes operations to provide emergency humanitarian assistance such as famine support and HIV prevention, the agency is still likely to terminate all its climate-related work under the Trump administration. The result would be a blow to the landmark Paris climate agreement just as significant as Trump’s formal withdrawal of the U.S. from the international pact. By clawing back billions of dollars that Congress has already committed to the fight against global warming, the U.S. is poised to derail climate progress far beyond its own borders.…

In 2022 … USAID offices around the world began tweaking their operations to ensure the projects they were funding would hold up as temperatures continue to rise. For example, the agency would ensure water and sewer systems could handle bigger floods, or would plan to inoculate against diseases that might spread faster in warm weather.…

Zimbabwe’s minister for climate and the environment, Washington Zhakata, said that a shutoff of USAID funding will make it nearly impossible for the country to meet its commitments to the Paris agreement. The country has promised not only to develop renewable energy but also to spend huge amounts of money on drought and flood protections. It has developed a nationwide adaptation plan on the premise that future funding would be provided—and provided in large part by the countries that are responsible for the most carbon emissions historically, like the U.S.

Read Jake Bittle’s full report at Grist.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

Last week, Trump appointed two veterans of his first administration, Nancy Beck and Lynn Dekleva, to lead chemical regulation at the Environmental Protection Agency. Beck is a chemical industry lobbyist. Dekleva is currently senior director at the American Chemistry Council, an organization whose positions include opposing the EPA’s recent, arguably belated ban on noncritical uses of methylene chloride—a chemical so toxic that it has been shown to poison even trained workers using protective gear. These appointments, while buried beneath the landslide of other headlines out of the White House over the past week, served as a critical indicator: Specifically, they dashed the (limited) hopes some advocates were nursing that right-wingers’ newish preoccupation with environmental health—embodied primarily in the chaotic figure of Trump’s Health and Human Services nominee, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—might make the second Trump administration marginally more environmentally friendly on chemical and plastics regulation than the first one.

The Washington Post, covering the appointments, highlighted the typical rationale for appointing industry insiders to such posts: that the EPA’s chemical approval process needs reform. “The EPA’s flawed decision-making process has consequently inhibited American innovation and our ability to compete in the global market,” according to Republican Representative Brett Guthrie of Kentucky. The Post also quoted lawyer Dimitri Karakitsos, who has represented chemical companies, arguing the approval process for new chemicals is actually impeding environmental progress: “A lot of these new chemicals tend to be greener and safer, and we want that innovation on the market,” he said.

Is that true? It’s a counterintuitive take, given that the EPA has come under heavy criticism in recent years for failing to ban even chemicals that dozens of other countries have chosen to ban over links to severe health damage. I called two experts to get their perspectives on the matter.

“I actually do think that there are tremendous innovations and discoveries of new chemicals happening today,” Yale School of the Environment professor and former director of the U.S. Green Chemistry Program Paul Anastas told me. “And yes … when you can demonstrate these things—that it’s safer, greener, performs better—there should be a more effective way of fast-tracking these innovations into the marketplace so that they can make their positive benefits.” At the same time, he said, “the role of science at EPA is fundamental, and everything that the EPA does must be science-based.”

A key part of the industry position, however, is that U.S. regulatory procedures are somehow exceptionally obstructive, particularly in an international context. Those with experience in this international context say that argument doesn’t hold up.

“The idea that U.S. chemical regulation is so advanced that it hinders and slows down U.S. competitivity is preposterous,” said David Azoulay, director of environmental health at the Center for International Environmental Law, or CIEL, over the phone from Geneva. The U.S. has “the least stringent, least efficient, and least protective legislation compared to any of the other major economies—and that includes economies like the EU of course, which is the most often mentioned, but also includes Korea, Japan, even China.” The EU, for example, “regulates or bans over 1,300 chemicals in cosmetics. The U.S. bans less than two dozen.”

The anti-regulatory argument also rests on the assumption that regulating to prevent environmental harm slows innovation. But when CIEL investigated this in 2013, Azoulay said, using patent applications as a proxy for innovation, “every time there was a new type of regulatory control measure being put in place around phthalates, we saw a spike in a number of patents being filed for new products or new substances or new applications that didn’t use phthalates.” He also pointed to a wealth of recent research showing that, contrary to the assumption that regulations hurt the economy, under-regulating harmful chemicals can cost billions of dollars.

These studies probably aren’t going to prevent people from arguing that EPA regulations harm American companies’ ability to compete. “An additional perspective that’s useful to consider,” Azoulay added, “is that, contrary to some simplified beliefs, the chemical industry is very much a global industry. All of those major chemical producers are multinationals that have production bases in the U.S., in Europe, in China, in the Gulf, in other places, that try to take advantage of being closest to the primary materials or the markets or whatever.” And the arguments everywhere seem to be the same: “Those rules in that particular jurisdiction are hindering competitivity. But because it’s the same companies making the same arguments, what they’re actually doing is trying to bring the floor down, and trying to lower the level of protection of health and the environment.”

If the track record of the first Trump administration is any indicator, those companies may be pleased by what happens next at the EPA. Then again, maybe they won’t. When the first Trump administration tried to weaken methylene chloride regulations, for example, they were quickly and repeatedly sued. Rushed, poorly evidenced environmental rollbacks in the first Trump administration were what allowed groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council to boast that “on average, we sued once every ten days for four years, and we won victories in nearly 90 percent of the resolved cases.” As these battles play out, however, many fear the toll—to insufficiently protected workers, to the people passively absorbing toxic chemicals in their environment, and to ecosystems—may mount.

Good News/Bad News

A new study pushes back against earlier ones suggesting that the Atlantic Ocean’s system of currents is slowing down. This study finds no evidence of the system weakening at all—very good news, given that, as previously discussed in this newsletter, a lot of agriculture depends on the weather systems that depend, in turn, on these currents.

Maryland’s renewable energy program isn’t working, a new report suggests. Inside Climate News’s Aman Azhar explains the findings and talks to the report’s authors, who say this is a “well-known problem in the state that people don’t want to talk about.”

Stat of the Week
35%

A previous edition of this newsletter noted that a so-called attribution study of climate change’s contribution to the L.A. fires might take time. Only two weeks later, a report from the World Weather Attribution group calculates that climate change made the hot, dry, windy conditions that helped the fires spread 35 percent more likely.

What I’m Reading

Kentucky’s Mountaintop Mines Are Turned Into Neighborhoods

Old coal mines that blew the tops off mountains have left lots of manmade plateaus in Kentucky. While these “ecological graveyards” may not be as lush as the landscape they’ve replaced, Austyn Gaffney writes, they may prove to be a lifeline in a state struggling to adapt to increasingly severe floods:

In 2022, apocalyptic flooding swept across eastern Kentucky, killing 45 people, destroying 542 homes and damaging thousands more. Now, instead of rebuilding in the floodplain, the state is permanently lifting residents onto safer land. Officials are more than two years into a nearly $800 million plan to reclaim these landscapes again, turning them from deserts into developments.… Seven communities across four counties, with aspirational names like Skyview and Olive Branch, have been designed for 665 brand-new properties, some of which will run on solar. Fourteen houses have been completed and about a dozen people have moved in to two communities called Thompson Branch and Wayland, according to the state.

Read Austyn Gaffney and Jon Cherry’s feature in The New York Times.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

In the first hours of his second term, President Trump signed executive orders re-withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate agreement, rolling back incentives for electric vehicles, pausing approvals for wind farms in federal waters, and declaring a “national energy emergency” to expedite drilling and open up more land and sea for drilling. He also withdrew the U.S. from the World Health Organization, signed an unconstitutional order trying to end birthright citizenship, attempted to set a national two-gender policy, ordered federal workers back to the office while making it easier to fire them, rescinded a Biden order lowering prescription drug costs, and pardoned those who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

You may remember this pattern from 2016—the “throw everything at them, plus a kitchen sink and ferret, ideally at 3 a.m. on Twitter” approach to politics. Trump’s first term was characterized by multiple news bombshells per day, a bewildering number of unrelated proclamations, crises, and scandals per week, and each Friday closing with politicians, media workers, and news readers struggling to remember what had happened just a few days prior. It’s no wonder a book urging digital detox and bird-watching as a form of radical political action became a breakout hit. This time around, people have announced they’re tuning out; essayists (including at TNR) have mused what ethical retreat and rest might look like during Trump 2.0; and leftists on Bluesky are urging fellow activists to “find your lane” and focus on that, rather than trying to track every last move the administration makes on the environment, reproductive autonomy, trans rights, immigration, etc.

The downside of choosing a lane, though, is that it makes it harder to see the themes emerging in Trump’s second presidency. And there are already some through lines on the climate front that aren’t perceptible in the catalog of his executive orders alone.

The three richest men in the world watched from prominent seats—in front of Cabinet nominees—as Trump was sworn in on Monday. As the president bragged about the country’s oil and gas reserves, promising to “export American energy all over the world,” applause broke out not just in the Capitol Rotunda, The New York Times reported, but “at the Hay-Adams hotel in downtown Washington, where some of the country’s leading oil and gas executives popped champagne and ate mini Pop-Tart pastries with Mr. Trump’s image,” hosted by fracking magnate Harold Hamm, who personally donated $4.3 million to pro-Trump PACs. Since April 2024, when Trump promised fossil fuel execs at Mar-a-Lago favorable policies in exchange for campaign donations, top fossil fuel billionaires’ wealth has grown by $40.2 billion, the Climate Accountability Research Project recently reported.

I remember a time when I didn’t really “get” the Green New Deal: A lot of the policies associated with it, like affordable housing and single-payer health care, seemed like good ideas but sort of orthogonal to the primary goal of lowering emissions. But it’s a political strategy as much as an ideological statement, and the political strategy rests on two core insights: first, that not only is it hard to disentangle inequality and the climate crisis, but the unchecked power of the wealthy is in fact driving rampant emissions and obstructing the progress of policies to curtail them. Second, climate policies and the politicians supporting them will not succeed without the ability to demonstrate material benefits in people’s everyday lives. In other words: For long-term success, climate policies can’t just be about lowering emissions. They need to show people that low-carbon life can be fun. They need to be defanging the culture war.

If the spectacle of ring-kissing billionaires at Trump’s second inauguration doesn’t show once and for all that Green New Deal supporters have a point, I’m not sure what will. Because these executive orders aren’t coming from the electorate: Outside the pro-petroleum Pop-Tart crowd at the Hay-Adams, these policies just aren’t that popular. Wind power is still backed by 72 percent of the population, per a Pew poll last year, while only a minority support further offshore drilling and even fewer back fracking. That’s hardly a ringing endorsement for the platform Trump announced at a Sunday rally—that “we’re going to drill, baby, drill and do all of the things that we wanted to” but “aren’t going to do the wind thing.”

The policies’ political currency comes instead from their culture-war status, i.e., their ability to motivate a core group of voters and a lot of money. Culture wars, as several writers at TNR have pointed out in recent years, are a deft bit of political theater that more often than not turn out to serve corporate interests. Per Green New Deal thinking, the way to combat that—aside from taxing billionaires out of a few of their zeros—is to enact policies that provide people with a more material benefit on a regular Tuesday than the fossil fuel industrial complex does.

Who knows whether this theory will ultimately be proven correct? (This week, Liza Featherstone wrote for TNR about one intriguing but vulnerable policy currently testing it: New York City’s congestion pricing.) But as Trump’s inaugural spectacle shows, we’re way past the point where his opponents can afford to ridicule this progressive strategy as “the green dream or whatever”—as Pelosi did during Trump’s first term. Socialists shouldn’t be the only ones noting the reactionary role “capital” has played in this election and inauguration. And there’s a message here for ordinary news consumers too: Whatever approach you take in processing the incoming onslaught, keep an eye on the oligarchy of it all. If you’re staying in your “lane,” remember that these lanes are often connected—and what connects them is often money.

Good News/Bad News

Not all of Trump’s attempts to scrap pro-environment policies will hold up in court or have the effect he’s promised supporters that they will have. Meanwhile, America’s second withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement has so far mostly drawn criticism and pledges from other countries to stay the course.

Things aren’t looking good for the endangered right whale. After much hemming and hawing, the Biden administration in its final days ultimately dropped a proposal to tighten speed limits to prevent deadly ship strikes.

Stat of the Week
1/3 of the Arctic

That’s the portion of the once-great carbon sink that, as the ground thaws, is now adding emissions to the atmosphere rather than subtracting them, according to a new study.

What I’m Reading

What happens when the California fires go out? More gentrification.

Climate disasters don’t level the playing field, this piece suggests: They just clear it for bigger buildings, mortgages, and rental bills. This could be what happens in Los Angeles in the wake of recent fires:

When a natural disaster strikes a community, housing prices almost always rise. In the short term, the reason is obvious: Apartments and houses have been damaged or destroyed, so there are fewer of them, and that decline in supply causes rents to spike.

But as rebuilding efforts drag on, many middle- and low-income people never return to their neighborhoods because they can’t afford to.

“One of the reasons gentrification happens is that everything just becomes more expensive,” said Jennifer Gray Thompson, founder and CEO of After the Fire, a nonprofit that helps communities prepare for and recover from wildfires. One reason is the high cost of building, but there are others, including landlords taking advantage of high demand to raise rents and real estate investors buying up properties to try to profit off of them later.

Read Abdallah Fayyad’s full report at Vox.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

In Kim Stanley Robinson’s widely acclaimed, Obama-praised climate novel, The Ministry for the Future, the climate crisis is already well underway when catastrophic rains drown Los Angeles in water. Recreational kayaks and motorboats become crucial rescue vehicles, thousands die in the floods, and early projections suggest some $30 trillion in damage.

“So now,” the main character muses, “one could imagine that the American people might support action on the climate change front. Better late than never! But no. Already it was becoming clear that LA was not popular in Texas, or on the east coast, or even in San Francisco for that matter.” Despite these public sentiments, “California’s government, one of the most progressive in the world, and the US federal government, one of the most reactionary in the world—both were making efforts to help.” And the devastation of a famed city shocked just enough elites to make a difference: “If it could happen to LA, rich as it was, dreamy as it was, it could happen anywhere. Some deep flip in the global unconscious was making people queasy.” Los Angeles’s disaster becomes one of the key turning points leading to a global carbon coin.

Right now, Los Angeles is burning. But so far, the incineration of over 40,000 acres in America’s second-largest city doesn’t seem poised to be any kind of turning point. The Wall Street Journal published an editorial ridiculing the idea that climate change could have driven both the exceptionally wet winters in 2023 and 2024 and the recent dry spell. (While a full so-called attribution study on climate change’s contribution to the fires will take time, there’s already a lot of research suggesting climate change can, in fact, increase both flooding and fire risks, and early analysis out of UCLA suggests climate change did play a role here.) Georgia congresswoman and renowned random-number-generator Marjorie Taylor Greene asked why “they” didn’t use geoengineering to dump rain on the fires. Donald Trump, days away from his second term as president, blamed the destruction on Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom and a tiny fish called the delta smelt, outlandishly claiming that policies to protect the endangered species had deliberately deprived Los Angeles of water. (This whopper was universally panned by fact-checkers.) And Trump’s pick for energy secretary has previously denied that climate change has anything to do with wildfires.

One line in Robinson’s novel rings particularly true: A lot of people seem to dislike L.A.—or at least a lot of right-wingers seem to dislike its image as haven for California liberals. The Journal also blamed the fires on Democrats: Newsom, the state legislature, and “the mayors of Los Angeles,” in that order, for spending money on climate policy that could have been spent directly on wildfire prevention (wildfire prevention also received funding). Republican Representative Warren Davidson, from Ohio, suggested on Fox Business last week that California should only get federal disaster aid “if they change their policies.” He was a little vague about which California policies needed to be changed. Elon Musk, right-wing actor James Woods, former Fox host Megyn Kelly, and conservative CNN commentator Scott Jennings all blamed the unchecked blazes on diversity hiring within the Los Angeles Fire Department. Another favorite target has been the environmental review process, which can delay risk-reduction practices like thinning or prescribed burns. (Libertarian Reason magazine—not a typical defender of regulation—was an unexpected voice debunking the notion that environmental review was to blame.)

The fires in L.A. have thankfully not yet reached the level of devastation Robinson portrayed in his novel. But the cascading effects of this type of disaster also make the scale of the destruction larger than it might seem from any one news story: Not only have at least 24 people been killed, but the smoke hazards threaten thousands or even millions more. The damage from smoke inhalation—not just in terms of immediate respiratory problems but in terms of increased cancer, respiratory disease, cardiovascular disease, and even dementia risk—may only be tallied years later.

Measuring destruction in terms of the number of homes burned can also be misleading, as if the fires’ effect on individual people and households can be reduced to “Did your home burn down or not?” and “Did you have insurance or not?” Being displaced is expensive, particularly if it means missing work as well. Those who have homes to return to but find their workplace has burned down, or their child’s school or daycare building has burned down, also face significant disruption and expense. Tap water could remain unusable for a while, multiple experts have emphasized. You can’t have destruction at this scale and not face a bottleneck of builders, repair workers, and materials afterward—affecting timelines not just for rebuilding but, most likely, unrelated repairs as well, both for renters and owners. Housing will get even more expensive than it already is. Without massive regulatory intervention, home insurance will get even patchier and less affordable—in a state already plagued by sky-high premiums and cancellations. Beneath the many headlines about how celebrities or Hollywood filming schedules are faring, the reality is that any of these factors alone can spell serious disruption or even financial catastrophe for vulnerable households, and even less vulnerable ones.

Despite this massive upheaval, there’s little sign that the wildfires are serving as a turning point even for policymakers who are trying to address the disaster. A one-year moratorium on insurance cancellations and nonrenewals, recently issued by the state’s insurance commissioner, won’t help much unless state and federal policymakers use that time to come up with a more durable solution. Newsom’s decision to suspend the environmental review process for homeowners and businesses trying to rebuild isn’t a panacea, either.

“For many Angelenos, this is our most jarring confrontation yet with global warming,” Los Angeles Times’ Sammy Roth wrote this week. “But hundreds of millions of Americans have faced fossil-fueled disasters, and the politics of climate obstruction have hardly budged.” Time will tell whether that eventually changes. For now, the turning points of Robinson’s novel feel a long way off.

Good News/Bad News

Can ants help fight the crop diseases that climate change seems to be intensifying? Read Ayurella Horn-Muller’s intriguing story at Grist about this new research.

While advocates have hoped that states could be a bulwark against the new administration’s anticipated assault on climate policy, early signs from Maryland are not entirely encouraging, Aman Azhar reports for Inside Climate News. Governor Wes Moore has already announced his intention to cut some climate spending—particularly in programs receiving federal support that may soon be slashed.

Stat of the Week
30%

That’s how much average homeowners’ insurance premiums rose nationwide between 2020 and 2023, even prior to recent catastrophes like Hurricane Helene and the Los Angeles wildfires.

What I’m Reading

In a First, the EPA Warns of “Forever Chemicals” in Sludge Fertilizer

If you haven’t already read Molly Taft’s remarkable story about PFAS in so-called biosolids fertilizer, made out of human waste—and the people who realized the connection and are now fighting to limit the damage—read that first. Then read the striking update that came on Tuesday. Finally, the Environmental Protection Agency released a study confirming what Maine officials have been warning people about for years: that this type of fertilizer can result in crop contamination wildly exceeding EPA safety thresholds.

​​The E.P.A. has for decades encouraged the use of sludge from treated wastewater as inexpensive fertilizer with no limits on how much PFAS it can contain. But the agency’s new draft risk assessment sets a potential new course. If finalized, it could mark what could be the first step toward regulating PFAS in the sludge used as fertilizer, which the industry calls biosolids. The agency currently regulates certain heavy metals and pathogens in sewage sludge used as fertilizer, but not PFAS.

Read Hiroko Tabuchi’s full report at The New York Times.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

It’s a weird time for religion in the United States. Christians are on track to become a religious minority in the country within a few decades but also, soon, to wield incredible power in a second Trump administration—thanks not least to a neo-Crusader defense secretary nominee, Christian nationalists likely leading the Office of Management and Budget as well as the House of Representatives, and an array of powerful Christian judges appointed in Trump’s first term whose numbers will only grow in his second.

Meanwhile, amid a devastatingly grim Advent season for other communities, Latino Christian leaders interviewed by Axios “say they will unpack the Holy Family’s immigration plight during Christmas services to offer hope for immigrants” facing ICE raids and deportations in the new administration. White Protestants and Catholics voted by large margins for Trump; Black Protestants, Jews, atheists, and agnostics voted overwhelmingly against him. Muslim voters outraged by Biden’s support for Israel’s slaughter in Gaza abandoned the Democrats at striking rates, many voting instead for Jill Stein.

So while the ranks of the religiously unaffiliated or even nonreligious may be growing, the relevance of religion to politics clearly persists. And that means religion is relevant to climate change too.

The Pew Research polls in 2022 found that moderately or highly religious people were much less likely to rate climate change as a serious problem than atheists were. But the surveys also showed huge numbers of religious people to be concerned. Growing numbers of religious leaders and groups—even among white evangelicals—are pushing for policies protecting the climate and environment.

To learn about the contours of the growing religious advocacy for climate and environmental protection, I called up the Reverend Susan Hendershot, an ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and president of Interfaith Power and Light, a group focused on engaging people of faith in environmental causes and climate action. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How do you perceive your job in terms of engaging religious communities in climate advocacy?

Interfaith Power and Light started in 2000 because our founder was seeing a disconnect between what she was hearing from environmental organizations, in terms of climate change and care for the earth, and the fact that she was not hearing that in her place of worship. For her, it became a mission to say that as faith communities, we are called to care for creation and we need to find ways to live that out: It’s not just talking about it, it’s doing something.

From the start, there was a focus on greening houses of worship as an act of faith. So everything from energy efficiency upgrades to installing solar in houses of worship. And the other side of that has been the focus on policy advocacy, to say personal action is important and it gets us a certain way down the road as part of civil society, but unless we have the right policies in place, we can’t actually make the progress that we need to make. It’s centered on spiritual values and on the moral opportunity to take action—to say people of faith are and should be leaders in working for climate and environmental justice.

But this is focused on people from many different religious backgrounds, right?

We say we work with people of all spiritual traditions and no spiritual traditions, recognizing that there are a lot of spiritual but not religious folks that are out there and that is a growing percentage. We want to make sure that there’s a big tent out there that’s for everyone who wants to take action from a place of spiritual values.

Climate anxiety is on the rise. What does the lens of faith or spiritual values have to offer the climate fight, in your view?

I see faith communities and leaders having three roles in the climate movement. The first one is pastoral, because there’s a lot of climate anxiety and grief out there, whether it’s people who have suffered from a climate disaster who are recovering and need a support system or young people who are considering whether they even want to have a family because do you want to bring children into a climate-changed world? So that pastoral role is really, really important. Faith leaders are trained to work with people who are suffering, grieving, in trauma.

The second role I see as the practical role, which is offering leadership within their own faith community, working to move climate solutions forward in their houses of worship: renewable energy systems, energy efficiency, electric vehicles. Just serving as models in the community of what’s possible.

The third role is the prophetic role. We have to talk about this. One of the things Katharine Hayhoe says as a climate scientist and person of faith is that the most important thing you can do for climate change is to talk about it, because part of the problem is it’s not being discussed enough. Pastors are called to use their prophetic voices in their places of worship to move people to action.

How does the fragmentation of religious groups right now complicate your work? I’m thinking about the very prominent evangelical voices allied with Trump who see fossil fuels as part of a kind of a nationalist vision.

I like to use Yale Climate Communication’s “Six Americas” study as an example. If you compare when they first started doing those studies to now, over time there has been an increase in the people who are alarmed and concerned about climate change and a really big decrease in those who are what we would call doubters. There are folks who have a lot of influence and power who are pushing fossil fuels and looking to continue to have an “all of the above” energy strategy—we see that in the news media every day now—but the reality I think is that for most folks on the ground, they are grappling with the real climate challenges that they’re facing every day. It used to feel sort of far away, like you’re talking about polar bears and ice caps. Now we’re seeing floods and droughts, and farmers are seeing changes in their growing seasons for their crops. That makes it more real to people. I think those powerful voices pushing fossil fuels will be drowned out by the realities on the ground.

So how do you envision people of faith being mobilized for climate policy advocacy?

The Inflation Reduction Act was the result of many years of advocacy amongst people from all walks of life across the country, and this money is starting to make a real difference on the ground. There’s a lot of money going into nonprofits, including houses of worship, who are installing solar and other energy efficiency systems and getting rid of their gas appliances and so on. One of the things that we found in our recent solar survey is that there are about 2,500 communities of faith around the country that have installed solar, with more coming through the direct pay mechanism with the IRA. We have a few congregations that have received their payment for direct pay, and many many more that have applied, and others that are in the exploratory phase. This trend is competitive with businesses like Starbucks and Walmart and all these other businesses that get a lot of attention around their solar installations.

That’s also happening on the consumer level—faith communities are made up of people, many of whom have homes, and they’re also looking for ways they can adapt, use this federal funding to make these improvements in their own homes that improve their lives, their bottom line, as well as the health of their families.

The next piece of work is to protect what those incentives are and have done so that they won’t be rolled back or clawed back. There’s a lot of personal connection to that for folks, whether that’s because they live near drilling sites and they don’t want to see methane rules rolled back because it’s improving the health and air quality in their community, or folks who are saying we don’t want to roll back the direct pay portion of the IRA funding because that’s a way that’s helping faith communities install solar and be able to put more money into the mission and serve their communities. I think part of the opportunity here is to make those connections for individuals that are personal for them—whatever that means for them or their family.

Good News/Bad News

The BBC has put together a list of “seven quiet breakthroughs for climate and nature in 2024.” They include the U.K. finally closing its last coal-fired power plant and deforestation in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil falling to a nine-year low.

Driven by the climate crisis, the country’s home insurance problem is growing. Nonrenewal rates (that’s when an insurance company drops a home that was previously covered) rose in 46 states in 2023, according to data obtained by the Senate Budget Committee. Read The New York Times’ feature on this or check out their accompanying data visualization to see where insurers are dropping coverage in your state.

Stat of the Week
$100 per year

That’s the possible extra cost to American consumers of increasing liquefied natural gas exports (as the Trump administration plans to do), according to a new study released by the Department of Energy this week. It also found that the LNG exports could lead to an extra 1.5 gigatons of greenhouse gases by 2050.

What I’m Reading

As Clock Ticks to Act on the Climate Crisis, N.C. Activists Target a ‘Carbon Plan’

At Inside Climate News, Lisa Sorg profiles the activists fighting a longtime
villain in the environmental justice movement, Duke Energy, which has released a “carbon plan” that involves building numerous natural gas plants while keeping their coal plants open for years, completely missing the company’s 2030 emissions-reduction goals. Some of these activists, like 74-year-old Bobby Jones, have been fighting Duke Energy for years.

“I know my children and grandchildren will not be the ones who can afford clean water and clean air,” Jones said. “They will be the ones relegated to cancer alleys. So I’ve got to fight. And I’ve got to encourage others to fight. Because we already see climate change. We don’t have to wait for it to happen.”

Jones often thinks of the final words of [environmental justice advocate] John Gurley, as cancer had hollowed out his body. “The last conversation we had, we were talking about Duke Energy. And he said, ‘Bobby, hold them accountable.’”

Read Lisa Sorg’s full report at Inside Climate News.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.