Was This White House Press Release Written by “The Onion”?

Media outlets celebrated Earth Day on Tuesday with a flurry of forced optimism: “reasons to be hopeful,” how to feel useful by “taking a plalk” (picking up litter as you walk) and not reproducing, data showing that climate policy is globally very popular, and why “we’re still winning the climate fight.” Climate groups spent the day breathing a collective sigh of relief that the Trump administration did not, contrary to rumor, mark the day by stripping green groups of their nonprofit tax status.

The White House instead laid off hundreds more staffers in the Environmental Protection Agency and issued a press release worthy of The Onion.

“On Earth Day, We Finally Have a President Who Follows Science,” the statement declared of an administration that has cut so much funding for science that 75 percent of 1,200 scientists responding to a survey by the journal Nature said they were considering leaving the country. The Trump administration has also laid off thousands of researchers, sidelined climate research, frozen all new grants from the National Science Foundation, appointed noted anti-scientific kooks who praise discredited measles treatments, and reportedly plans to completely eliminate the EPA’s science and research arm.

The release further listed eight “key actions President Trump is taking on the environment.” He’s “promoting energy innovation for a healthier future,” the release announced, as Trump attempts to revive coal—a fuel so old its use predates the birth of Christ—while cutting black lung programs for coal miners. He’s “championing sound forest management”—an odd way of describing rolling back forest protections while firing so many U.S. Forest Service workers that their ability either to fight fires or administer logging contracts has come into question.

The third item on the list says, “President Trump is ending the forced use of paper straws,” which can contain PFAS and are probably not much if at all better than plastic ones. This is more accurate than the last two statements, but technically Trump only signed an order reversing federal purchasing policies that favor paper over plastics. And the idea that he did this to protect people from PFAS (known as “forever chemicals”) is risible, given that the administration has reversed a plan to limit PFAS in industrial wastewater, is trying to reverse bans of PFAS in consumer goods, and just canceled about $8 million in grants for research on how to prevent PFAS “from accumulating in crops and the food chain,” according to reporting this week from The New York Times.

“President Trump is cutting wasteful regulations that stifle innovation and raise costs,” the release continues. It explains that this means “pausing restrictive emissions rules for coal plants and revising the National Environmental Policy Act implementation,” which will save “American families thousands annually on energy bills and [prove] that a strong economy and a healthy environment go hand-in-hand.” In reality, energy prices are spiking, in part due to Trump’s tariffs; the administration is dead set against renewables, which are cheaper than fossil fuels; and the “wasteful regulations” the administration is targeting were projected to save 200,000 lives over the next 25 years.

“President Trump is protecting public lands,” the release says, explaining that this means “opening more federal lands and waters for oil, gas, and critical mineral extraction.” Also, the first Trump administration invested in conservation, the release insists. (In 2020, one conservationist described the last four years of Trump conservation policies as “gleefully” taking “a meat cleaver to our national monuments and land protections.”)

Then come two desperate attempts to include some positive spin on tariffs, which are tanking the economy: “President Trump is pushing back on unfair trade practices that harm the environment and undercut U.S. producers and exporters,” and “Trump is cracking down on China—the most prolific polluter in the world.” The release denounces, specifically, Chinese overfishing—a practice the Trump administration is encouraging at home—and ocean plastic pollution. Trump’s election is widely perceived to have torpedoed the world’s best chance for a global treaty to limit plastic pollution.

The release concludes by saying that “Trump is protecting wildlife,” specifically by “pausing certain wind projects.” Last week, the administration proposed a rule change that would gut the Endangered Species Act by claiming that destroying habitat—the primary driver of endangerment and extinction—doesn’t count as “harming” wildlife.

Anyway, go ahead and take that “plalk.” Earth Day comes but once a year.

Stat of the Week
100 million asthma attacks

That’s the effect the Trump administration’s rollback of just 12 EPA rules could have, E&E News reports.

What I’m Reading

Meet the Trump supporters who love wind energy

“We aren’t going to do the wind thing,” Trump told supporters at a rally on inauguration weekend. But in Iowa, a state that has backed Trump in three out of three of the last elections, wind energy is huge, generating a majority of the state’s energy. Vox’s Benji Jones talks to some of the people benefiting from renewables:

“It’s a real blessing for us,” said Dave Johnson, a livestock farmer in northern Iowa who leases his land to a utility that installed four turbines on his property. He earns about $30,000 a year from the four turbines combined, he told Vox. Johnson’s son also has turbines on his farm.

Johnson, a Republican who says he voted for Trump, had the turbines installed primarily because he wanted his farm—where he raises cattle and hogs—to generate more value. “I never had a 401(k),” he said. “I farmed and stuck everything back into the farm. This is the 401(k) that I never had.”

Read Benji Jones’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.

You could soon be hearing a lot of news about tomatoes. That’s because the Commerce Department announced this week that Mexican tomatoes will be subject to 21 percent tariffs starting July 14. If this goes through, expect tomato prices to rise precipitously: The United States relies heavily on greenhouse-grown tomatoes, of which the Agriculture Department estimates 88 percent are imported, with most coming from Mexico.

Of course, the Trump administration’s tariff policy so far has not exactly been consistent or predictable. The president could drop this tomato tariff tomorrow and announce that he and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum have reached an understanding, brokered by Laura Loomer, that henceforth tomatoes imported from Mexico will be exempt from import duties and be known as “prosperity apples.” (Any publication daring to call them “tomatoes” will be kicked out of the White House press corps.)

But again, if this tariff goes through, then taxing the bejeezus out of the second-most-consumed vegetable in the country will obviously have a noticeable impact on a lot of people’s grocery bills. Yet amazingly, this may be the least of American consumers’ worries right now when it comes to food disruption.

The Guardian reported Tuesday that recent torrential rains have caused “millions of dollars of crop losses” in Texas and the Midwest. When added to the Trump administration’s cuts to farming infrastructure, climate-smart farming initiatives, and various food assistance programs that provided a market for some farmers, plus the trade war jeopardizing export markets in Mexico and China, this means that many U.S. farms are in trouble. “Without a bailout, we can only imagine how bad this will be for farmers,” Food and Water Watch’s Ben Murray told reporter Nina Lakhani. But other experts noted that even with a bailout, delivering the money fast enough might be an issue, and trade relations in particular could take time to rebuild.

All this is in addition to, as this newsletter previously noted, substantial cuts both to the climate adaptation and mitigation efforts vital to long-term food production and to USDA’s operating budget. This week, Government Executive reported that planning documents reveal further cuts. They include firing “thousands” more USDA employees, “consolidat[ing] … local, county-based offices around the country into state committees,” and a 22 percent cut to salaries and expense accounts at the Farm Service Agency (which directly supports farms with loans and disaster assistance programs).

Food safety will also take a hit. The Food and Drug Administration’s Human Foods Program, which works on food safety, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Environmental Health and Science Practice, which headed the response to the applesauce lead-poisoning fiasco in 2023, have both been gutted, Time recently reported. This comes after last month’s news that the Trump administration had axed two USDA committees advising on food safety: the National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods and the National Advisory Committee on Meat and Poultry Inspection, the former of which was busy reviewing last year’s fatal listeriosis outbreak and figuring out how to prevent repeats of the 2022 infant formula contamination that killed babies.

The USDA also announced that it would be increasing line speeds at meatpacking plants and nixing “redundant” worker safety reports. This is deeply troubling on a humanitarian level, given that worker safety at meatpacking plants is already a nightmare, with gruesome injuries affecting a highly vulnerable workforce. (For more on this, read Melody Schreiber’s recent report in The Guardian or Ted Genoways’s award-winning 2023 piece for TNR about the shooting of a worker in an Oklahoma pork-processing plant.) As the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union vice president Mark Lauritsen said recently to the Times: “If the work force is under more pressure for speed, with less safety oversight, that can lead to a miscut on a carcass, bile that could leak out of the intestine, that contaminates the equipment, and then the next carcass and the next and the next.”

Numerous outlets in recent years have reported the growing concerns about insufficient safeguards in the U.S. food system. Just two days after Trump’s inauguration, the Government Accountability Office delivered a report that rebuked USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service for its delays in finalizing rules to reduce pathogens in meat, and issued several recommendations for closing gaps in the agency’s approach to limiting salmonella and campylobacter outbreaks. It’s hard to imagine, given the chaos that has now befallen the entirety of the American food system and regulatory apparatus, that those recommendations are going to be speedily enacted.

Stat of the Week
470

That’s how many wildfires the state of Wisconsin has seen this year, as of Monday this week—”double the average for this time of year,” Wisconsin Public Radio’s Danielle Kaeding reports.

What I’m Reading

Revealed: Meat Industry Behind Attacks on Flagship Climate-Friendly Diet Report

In 2019, a major, long-researched study known as the EAT-Lancet report, which compiles top recommendations for sustainable diets, sparked major backlash over one single recommendation: to cut global red meat consumption in half. Now “new evidence” indicates the backlash “was stoked by a PR firm that represents the meat and dairy sector,” investigative outlet DeSmog reports:

A document seen by DeSmog appears to show the results of a campaign by the consultancy Red Flag, which catalogues the scale of the backlash to the report.

The document indicates that Red Flag briefed journalists, think tanks, and social media influencers to frame the peer-reviewed research as “radical”, “out of touch” and “hypocritical”...

Based on DeSmog’s review of the document, Red Flag’s attack campaign appears to have been conducted on behalf of the Animal Agriculture Alliance (AAA), a meat and dairy industry coalition that was set up to protect the sector against “emerging threats”. The AAA counts representatives from Cargill and Smithfield Foods—two of the world’s five largest meat companies—on its board. Red Flag is known to have previously worked for members of the AAA.

Red Flag’s campaign overview evaluates the success of social media posts from the AAA attacking the EAT-Lancet report, including a paid advertising campaign launched on behalf of the alliance that reached 780,000 people.

The surge of criticism had adverse consequences for the report’s authors.… In some cases, the backlash led them to withdraw from promoting the research in the media, and undermined their academic careers.

Read Clare Carlile’s full report at DeSmog.

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 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.