Trump and RFK Jr. Want to Make America Poisoned Again

This weekend, The Guardian reported that the Trump administration is “quietly” planning to gut both federal and state regulations on PFAS, which are commonly known as forever chemicals. It would do this, Tom Perkins reported, by “changing the way the [Environmental Protection Agency] carries out chemical risk evaluations, which would also pre-empt state laws that offer one of the few meaningful checks on toxic chemicals in consumer products.” An EPA employee, who requested anonymity over retaliation fears, said the administration would “exclude a huge number of consumer products from being considered for risk management.”

This approach to PFAS would be something of a masks-off moment for the administration on public health. While dismissive or hostile toward vaccines, cancer research, epidemiology, and more, the administration at least claims to be interested in limiting chronic disease, boosting fertility, and advancing other health and purity preoccupations under the banner of Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr.’s slogan “Make America Healthy Again.” HHS has moved to ban food dyes, and one would assume that RFK Jr. would see PFAS as a similarly ubiquitous threat to personal health—especially since he has previously been a vocal critic of forever chemicals, as well as microplastics.

For those who have been following the administration closely, the Guardian report is absolutely not the first or only sign that it may not actually be serious about chronic disease and environmental health. The EPA earlier withdrew a Biden-era plan to limit the release of PFAS into drinking water. Under RFK Jr.’s leadership, HHS has canceled vital grants that were working to address some of the chronic diseases he claims to be interested in. And as TNR contributing editor Liza Featherstone recently pointed out, Kennedy seems to have completely abandoned his former bête noire, microplastics, in recent months—even as new, troubling research has emerged suggesting the threat they pose is far greater than previously realized.

Yet there’s perhaps a special drama and dissonance in the administration’s PFAS position. PFAS, which get their nickname from their astonishing persistence in the environment and the human body, have been linked to cardiovascular disease, kidney and testicular cancer, type 2 diabetes, childhood obesity, hormonal disruption, and reduced immune system function—you know, chronic disease and bodily fitness–type stuff. There’s some evidence they also disrupt fertility, a fixation of Vice President JD Vance and prolific babymaker Elon Musk. In a particularly grim twist noted previously in this newsletter, research suggests women who’ve borne multiple children may have lower levels of PFAS solely because they pass some of their PFAS load into their children’s bodies during pregnancy. And prenatal and early-childhood PFAS exposure has even been linked to symptoms of ADHD, rates of which the Trump administration claims to find especially troubling. (In a typical move, the administration has also attacked ADHD medication.)

Limiting PFAS is also wildly popular with the public: In polling last year by Data for Progress, three-quarters of likely voters—including a whopping 71 percent of Republicans—supported new EPA standards limiting the amount of PFAS in drinking water. Trump’s EPA head Lee Zeldin previously supported federal action on PFAS, in his prior life as a congressman representing Long Island, and said in his confirmation hearing that PFAS would be a “top priority” for him in his current role.

Yet if this recent report is accurate, the Trump administration isn’t just dismantling PFAS regulations at the federal level. It’s trying to prevent states from limiting PFAS too. This tactic, colloquially known as “preemption,” has been a favorite tool of the right in recent years—ironic, perhaps, given conservatives’ self-professed devotion to small government and local sovereignty. Republicans often deploy the tactic to protect corporations’ prerogative to poison people: 20 GOP-dominated states have passed preemption laws that prohibit cities from banning gas hookups.

The Trump administration’s war on both state and local authority and on environmental health appears to be escalating. On Tuesday, the president signed an executive order to “[Reinvigorate] America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry.” Coal pollution has been linked to respiratory disease, cardiovascular disease, and even cognitive impairment and neurodegeneration. In 2023, researchers combing through Medicare death records concluded that coal pollution had caused roughly half a million of those deaths between 1999 and 2020. The president also signed an executive order on “Protecting American Energy From State Overreach.” In the name of “American energy dominance and our economic and national security,” it seeks to block policies any state might enact to try to protect its people from the risks of fossil fuels.

Taken together, these moves make clear that Trump and Kennedy were never serious about making America healthier. The only people these actions will protect are corporate executives, who will get richer as the country gets sicker.

Stat of the Week
80,000

That’s how many houses in the New York area could be “lost to floods over the next 15 years,” per a new report.

What I’m Reading

Relentless rain and storms kill at least 24 in South and parts of Midwest

The stories out of Tennessee, Kentucky, and other nearby states in the past few days—including that of a 9-year-old swept away by floodwaters on his walk to the bus—make for very hard reading. They come amid steep cuts to both the National Weather Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Cities have ordered evacuations as rescue crews in inflatable boats checked on residents in Kentucky and Tennessee, while utilities shut off power and gas in areas from Texas to Ohio. The Tennessee Emergency Management Agency said it is working with local and federal partners to evaluate storm damages and decide whether they meet the criteria for a major federal disaster declaration. The agency has advised residents to report any damages to their local emergency management offices.

“As long as I’ve been alive—and I’m 52—this is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” said Wendy Quire, the general manager at the Brown Barrel restaurant in downtown Frankfort, Kentucky, the state capital built around the swollen Kentucky River.

“The rain just won’t stop,” Quire said Sunday. “It’s been nonstop for days and days.”

Officials diverted traffic and turned off utilities to businesses in the city as the river was expected to crest above 49 feet Monday at a record-setting level, said Frankfort Mayor Layne Wilkerson. The city’s flood wall system is designed to withstand 51 feet of water.

Read the full report at CBS 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.

In the wake of the election, many discouraged leftists announced they were tuning out. Two months into Donald Trump’s presidency, however, the case for sitting on the sofa and drowning anxieties in escapist television is getting slimmer. And that’s especially true for people concerned about the climate crisis, who are often presumed to be at particular risk of despair and burnout.

“Action is the antidote to despair,” Joan Baez famously said, a line frequently quoted in climate circles. It’s not just an inspirational meme: There’s now a growing body of evidence that climate protest works—not just to decrease anxiety in your head but to change the world outside of it. And contrary to all the stereotypes about preachy greenies putting other people off the cause, there doesn’t seem to be much risk of provoking backlash.

When researchers working with the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication reviewed 50 recent studies on the impact of climate activism for an article published last week, they found “strong evidence that climate activism shifts public opinion and media coverage in a pro-climate direction.” They also found evidence that activism can sway policymakers and increase the percentage of vote share going to pro-climate candidates. One particularly intriguing study from Germany found not only that “areas that were exposed to protests had a higher share of the vote (+2-2.5% points) go to the Green party,” but also that “repeated exposure [i.e., more protests] increased this effect.”

The ubiquitous fear that the wrong types of protest might turn people off, on the other hand, doesn’t seem very well supported. “We’re beginning to think that concerns about backlash are a bit overstated, generally,” lead author Laura Thomas-Walters told me over Zoom, noting that this trend held both for climate protest and for political messaging in general. Even if the public objects to certain activism, like people vandalizing artwork or monuments, that doesn’t mean that particular group turns them off the climate cause in general.

Cautioning that she was speaking for herself and not necessarily for the other authors, Thomas-Walters said that “there will be some people who get pissed off, but they’ll be pissed off no matter what you do. If you mention you’re vegan, they’ll say I’m going to eat two steaks tonight just to spite you.” The review also found recent evidence that more extreme actions can actually increase support for moderate climate groups, in what’s known as the “radical flank effect.” This is a known phenomenon that goes back decades and isn’t just about climate activism. “There’s a good argument,” Thomas-Walters said, “that Martin Luther King wouldn’t have been so successful if it wasn’t for Malcolm X making him look a lot more moderate than he basically was.”

This research comes at a complicated time for activism in the U.S. Protest against the Trump administration and Elon Musk is growing, and seems to be having an effect. But moves to suppress and even criminalize protest are growing, as well. Earlier this week, TNR’s Kate Aronoff wrote about the proliferating signs that the administration is cracking down not just on pro-Palestine demonstrators but on activists of all stripes. The recent verdict holding environmental group Greenpeace liable for the company Energy Transfer’s expenses due to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests has also rocked the environmental movement.

At the same time, the evidence that engagement can help people struggling with their anxiety about current events and the environment keeps building. And the YPCC review now adds more information about how activism functions in the broader world.

“One of the reasons I did this review, personally, is because I’m also a climate activist in the U.K.,” said Thomas-Walters, who’s a member of Extinction Rebellion. “You are relying on people’s limited attention and energy and money and stuff,” so having data about what works is useful. “Activists and people get burned out, so we want to be as effective as we can.”

I asked her whether she had a sense of what U.S. activists, in particular, might take away from this review. Much of the evidence this review included, even research from Europe, she said, should “apply relatively well to a lot of the Western world,” and some of it came specifically from the U.S. And she pointed to one other thing that U.S. climate activists might want to focus on in this moment: “With Trump in power, we’ve seen some evidence of successful climate stuff that’s happening on the local scale, and I think building that deeper community of activists on a local area and being able to achieve local wins might be a good way to keep people going.”

Stat of the Week
40% poorer

That’s the hit the average person will take if the world warms by four degrees Celsius, according to a new study.

What I’m Reading

Pension Funds Push Forward on Climate Goals Despite Backlash

Banks are scrapping their climate goals left and right. But pension funds, Eshe Nelson reports, are taking a different approach—and their investing power shouldn’t be discounted.

At a time of growing backlash to environmental, social and governance goals and investment strategies, pension funds, particularly in blue states and Europe, have emerged as a bulwark against efforts to sideline climate-related risks.

The funds, which sit at the top of the investment chain, have stepped up engagement with asset managers and companies on climate goals and have kept public commitments to use their fiscal might to reduce carbon emissions. In some cases, that has meant shifting to European asset managers, which have not backed off on climate commitments as much as their American counterparts have.

[NYC Comptroller Brad] Lander’s office oversees investments for five public pension funds for 700,000 of the city’s current and former employees. The funds are pushing ahead with engagement, bringing more shareholder resolutions to banks to disclose the ratio of their fossil fuel investments versus clean energy and to utilities companies on their climate targets.

Read Eshe Nelson’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.

The Trump administration has disrupted quite a few money flows in its first two months, reserving special effort and scorn for those authorized by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Farmers who undertook infrastructure improvements with the guarantee of Agriculture Department reimbursement suddenly found the payments frozen. Green banks, nonprofits, local governments, and other groups who had been awarded Environmental Protection Agency grants for everything from clean energy financing to lead pipe remediation found these grants “terminated.” The administration has even accused the grantees of fraud—though so far without much evidence.

This has startled people who thought you couldn’t legally cancel stuff that’s already been promised. Trump’s campaign pledge to rescind “unspent” IRA funds, it turns out, didn’t mean already committed funds were safe. Court rulings against the administration haven’t necessarily turned the taps back on. Nor, at the political level, has the IRA’s track record of benefiting red districts offered as much protection in these initial weeks as experts and advocates predicted it would; a congressional repeal effort is now underway, and while 21 House Republicans have said they oppose repealing the entirety of the act’s clean energy tax credits, their leaders show no sign of slowing their roll.

But let’s say you’re not a green bank or a farmer. Let’s say you’re not one of the groups currently suing the administration for breach of contract while the administration not-so-subtly threatens to sic the FBI on you for having the audacity to apply for and receive a government grant.

Let’s say you’re a homeowner whose boiler or water heater badly needs replacing, and you’re looking to defray some costs or even save on energy bills going forward. Let’s say your electrical panel is a growing fire hazard that you’ve ignored for way too long and the IRA’s provisions for panel upgrades could enable you to replace it. Do all those funds still exist? Or did you miss the window?

The incentives still exist, said David Friedman, senior director for federal policy at Rewiring America, a nonprofit focused on electrification. There are two main categories: tax credits, which get counted against your tax liability at tax time, and rebates, which can reduce up-front costs. The rebates, which the IRA stipulated had to be administered via state governments, “were a little more up in the air” for a bit, Friedman said. Only 10 states plus the District of Columbia had their programs up and running when Trump took office, and two of those paused them when the Energy Department suddenly froze the funds needed to reimburse states for the rebates. Now that the payment portal has reopened, The Washington Post recently reported, “some states, including California, New York, Maine and New Mexico, are continuing their rebate programs.”

Even if you live outside one of those states, the federal tax credits never went away. “It’s going to take an act of Congress to change that,” Friedman said. And even if Congress were to repeal this particular part of the IRA, “it’s pretty rare and honestly would be pretty painful to take away a tax credit in the middle of the year.… Typically when changes are made to tax law, it’s going forward, not present or going back.” If Congress were to repeal these, they’d probably just end them ahead of schedule—maybe by a few years, he said, or maybe in 2026, rather than cutting them midyear.

Tax credits don’t offer the instant affordability perks of rebates, of course. In the case of a new electrical panel or a heat pump water heater, the rebates could offer lower-income households $4,000 and $1,750, respectively, off the cost of the new devices, whereas the federal tax credit for a panel upgrade offers only 30 percent of the project cost, for a maximum of $600.

Rebates “help people who can least afford the skyrocketing energy prices people are facing today,” Friedman explained. “They’re targeted at low-and moderate-income households. These are folks who are much more likely to put a Band-Aid, effectively, on their hot water heater or their heating and cooling system because they can’t afford to repair it, and that traps them in an expensive cycle. It sticks them with an outdated unit that costs more to operate and so they have higher utility bills.” In theory, the rebate programs are set to expand, because every state except for South Dakota applied to participate in the program, Friedman said. Even states that don’t yet have their programs up and running have “got contracts with the money that is legally obligated to them.”

Contracts, of course, have not exactly deterred the Trump administration so far in its quest to freeze funds—despite a barrage of unfavorable judicial rulings. A growing number of advocates for these home energy incentives, though, are arguing that axing them would also be bad politics. “I think that one thing that’s become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs—inflation, fossil fuel prices—those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans,” Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis recently told Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin, in a piece about the “dollars-and-cents arguments” for keeping the IRA. Heatmap Pro’s own opinion modeling, Zeitlin noted, backed that up, showing that “lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country.”

“A package of heat pump, water heater, heat pump heating-cooling system, and some good insulation and windows is going to save you nearly a thousand dollars a year,” Friedman said. Getting rid of the incentives that make that more affordable for people, he said, “would be a tax hike on the American public. And at a time when you’ve got a president who’s promised to cut people’s energy bills in half, it would cripple their ability to fight high energy prices.” That’s in addition to Trump’s tariff policies possibly raising utility bills all on their own.

When analysts point out that IRA funds have particularly benefited red districts, they’re typically referring to money that has gone into manufacturing. But the home energy incentives could particularly benefit Republicans too. Homeowners are both more likely to lean GOP than Democrat and about twice as likely to self-identify as “strongly Republican” than renters are.

Whether either the manufacturing benefits or the utility-bill benefits to their constituents convince the GOP to spare the IRA remains to be seen. After all, lots of groups lean much further right than homeowners do; that hasn’t stopped Trump from pursuing policies that wreak havoc on their bottom lines.

Stat of the Week
26 gigawatts

That’s how much power—“more than the total generation capacity of most U.S. states,” Inside Climate News reports—it would take to clean up the wastewater from oil operations in Texas’s Permian Basin.

What I’m Reading

This muggy city keeps cool with minimal AC. Here’s how.

The Washington Post’s Allyson Chiu profiles Palava City in India, a newish experimental community where one study found that “maximum temperature is consistently 2 to 3 degrees Celsius (3.6 to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) cooler than in nearby cities, including Mumbai.” Low-energy cooling solutions are no small feat here, given that a lot of passive cooling strategies (like windcatchers) work better in drier climates. But buoyed by government support, high-income residents, and a more or less blank slate, developers are quickly throwing a lot of ideas on the table, Chiu reports. What they learn through trial and error, some hope, could help more traditional, cash-strapped cities:

Early apartments were built with smaller windows to reduce the amount of heat that could enter, Abdullah said. But when residents complained about the window size, he said, the developers responded by constructing apartments with larger windows set farther back into the building. This design provides shade and cuts the amount of direct heat hitting the glass. More recently, Abdullah said, they’ve been experimenting with glass treatments such as films that can be applied to windows to keep heat out.

On a sunny June day, the interior of a newly constructed unit with treated windows is noticeably cooler than the outdoors, even with the air conditioning shut off.

But window design is just one way the community saves energy. Palava has cut residential energy use through a combination of approaches, including installing solar-powered water heaters on buildings and efficient air conditioners inside.

Read Allyson Chiu’s full report at The Washington Post.

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

Days before new tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China took effect earlier this month, President Trump issued two executive orders. One bemoaned America’s status as a net importer of lumber, ordering the secretary of commerce to investigate the “national security risks” of importing lumber and what would be needed for domestic production to fulfill all domestic demand. The other decried “onerous Federal policies” that have hampered the industry, directing the government to speed the approval of forestry projects on federal land and find ways to minimize the effect of the Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Policy Act.

Boosting logging is controversial from several angles. But as with many industries Trump claims to champion, there’s also a second question here: Is the administration’s theory of the industry’s decline—and prescription for its revival—actually accurate?

Trump’s tariffs and executive orders seem to assume that foreign competition and lack of lands to log are the primary things hampering U.S. timber production. But when I talked to experts familiar with the industry’s history, they painted a more complicated picture. There are some potential upsides to boosting domestic timber production—even on the environmental front. But the U.S. timber industry’s struggles aren’t as simple as the president seems to think, and some of his policies could even hurt the industry he claims to be helping.

Access to prime logging land “[is] really not the main factor holding things back,” said Michael Snyder, the former commissioner of Vermont Forests, Parks, and Recreation, who now consults on forestry and forest policy with Greenfire Enterprises. “Sure, increased supply of raw material … would seem on the surface to be helpful, but [it’s] not if you don’t have a workforce—that includes loggers, truckers in particular; if you don’t have receiving primary processing facilities, basic sawmills, secondary manufacturing facilities, retailers, and all of those elements of any value chain in the forest economy, which are all in distress right now pretty much everywhere.” Sawmills closing has been a problem for decades, and might not be an easy trend to reverse. “In Vermont, we’ve lost 158 mills since 2000, and I think last year Oregon lost seven major mills,” said Snyder.*

“There’s not one single factor that led to the decrease in both jobs as well as harvests,” said University of Oregon historian Steven Beda, who focuses on the history of the U.S. timber industry. Environmental backlash in the 1980s definitely had an effect in terms of limiting access to federal lands, he said. But also, the broader economic problems of the 1970s hit the industry hard, and over time traditional logging states like Oregon, Washington, and Idaho began to “pivot” from natural resource extraction “towards more of a high-tech economy,” said Beda, “so there’s less of an incentive for politicians to support the timber industry. Then you also have capital flight—a lot of the timber companies realizing that they can be more profitable operating in the South,” in part because of lower rates of unionization there. Both international competition and regional competition, he said, have played a role in reducing the size of the Northwest timber industry, which is the one Trump primarily seems to be targeting with his executive orders, since that’s where most of the federal forest land is located.

If the goal is to resurrect the pre-1980s Northwest timber industry, Beda said, that might be tough, because “both the workforce and the sawmills kind of stabilized and readjusted to the harvest rates that took shape after the end of the spotted owl conflict,” referring to the environmental backlash and endangered species advocacy that closed off many federal lands to logging.

Neither Beda nor Snyder see themselves as anti-timber. “I’m actually someone who believes that the Forest Service lands should be open to more logging,” said Beda. Snyder is a long-time advocate for people to value forestry more and take it seriously. “People realize they need plumbers and are willing to pay for it,” he said. “People don’t realize how much wood and wood products they use in their daily lives, from floors and cabinets to textiles and food additives and paper. They think we just need to leave forests alone. I don’t know where we’re going to get these materials. Plastics, concrete, and steel are far worse. So if not wood, what, and if not here, where?”

But both pointed to a serious problem with the Trump administration’s approach. It “just doesn’t add up,” said Snyder, pointing to the administration’s massive cuts across the Forest Service. “We’re going to get more wood off federal land but get rid of thousands of federal employees who actually do that work? It’s absurd.”

Beda agreed. “You can’t do both. You can’t cut Forest Service staff and say you want more logging on Forest Service lands. You need people to administer the contracts, put together the budgeting, all the zillion pieces that are part of public lands logging.… When you actually go back and look to the peak, the Forest Service harvests, at least in Oregon, peaked in the early 1980s, and that not coincidentally is also when the Forest Service had the largest budget and the largest staff.”

Tariffs could also hurt the industry long before they help because of the cross-border nature of wood processing. As the tariffs on Canada took effect, Snyder said, he heard from loggers in Vermont that their exports to the sawmills on the Canadian border immediately cratered. “Everything from up to a 50 percent price drop to complete shutoffs of deliveries. This is coming when we’re about to head into mud season, which is a traditional time for loggers to stay out of the woods ’cause of the vulnerable soft ground,” he said.

At the end of the day, “we should in my view be using more of our own wood, but these are not the buttons and levers to pull and push to get us there,” Snyder said. “It’s going to take an integrated, coherent, comprehensive approach.”

He’d like to see the Endangered Species Act protected, serious money put into research on sustainable forestry, how to preserve habitats and water quality, and whether wood products could substitute for things like single-use plastics and carbon-intensive construction materials like concrete. “The way we invest in high-tech, medical, automotive—we need to have the same kind of approach to the forests of our country and the people who manage and make their living in them,” he said. But “it’s not going to happen with sweeping executive orders and tariffs like this. It’s just going to piss everybody off.”

Stat of the Week
66%

That’s how many respondents support the U.S. transitioning to 100 percent clean energy by 2050, according to the Climate Opinion Maps that the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication recently published. (Also, 75 percent backed regulating carbon dioxide “as a pollutant” and 67 percent backed requiring fossil fuel companies to pay a carbon tax—striking numbers given that the Trump administration is moving in the exact opposite direction.)

What I’m Reading

‘Our people are hungry’: What federal food aid cuts mean in a warming world

Ayurella Horn-Muller and Naveena Sadasivam introduce readers to Mark Broyles, a 57-year-old living in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, where over 80 percent of residents voted for Donald Trump. Broyles’s “family of four, his mother, and her husband” have been using the food boxes provided by the nonprofit Appalachian Sustainable Development, which “helps small farmers sell fresh goods to public schools and grocery stores.” But now, due to Trump administration funding cuts, the food box program is gone. Programs benefiting both farmers and food-insecure households are folding across the country.

For decades, the USDA has funded several programs that are meant to address the country’s rising food-insecurity crisis—a problem that has only worsened as climate change has advanced, the COVID-19 pandemic led to layoffs, and grocery prices have skyrocketed. A network of nonprofit food banks, pantries, and hubs around the country rely extensively on government funding, particularly through the USDA. The Appalachian Sustainable Development is but one of them. The first few months of the Trump administration have plunged the USDA and its network of funding recipients into chaos.

The agency has abruptly canceled contracts with farmers and nonprofits, [frozen] funding for other long-running programs even as the courts have mandated that the Trump administration release funding, and fired thousands of employees, who were then temporarily reinstated as a result of a court order. Trump’s funding freeze and the USDA’s subsequent gutting of local food system programs has left them without a significant portion of their budgets, money they need to feed their communities. Experts say the administration’s move to axe these resources leaves the country’s first line of defense against the surging demand for hunger relief without enough supply.

Read Ayurella Horn-Muller and Naveena Sadasivam’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.

* This article originally misstated the state in which these mills were lost.

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.