Boston’s Election Results Are the Big, Untold Story This Week

All progressive eyes are on New York City this week, after democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani cruised to victory amid voter turnout not seen since the 1960s. New York City could now become a testing ground for left-wing policies including widespread rent control, free buses, universal childcare, public school rooftop solar, and public grocery stores.

TNR writers have previously written about how significant some of these could be as a form of climate policy, reducing emissions while helping offset the costs (for example, with food prices) associated with rising temperatures. But Mamdani may yet face stiff headwinds on getting these policies implemented. And that’s why another, far less publicized result on Tuesday night is significant: 200 miles to the north, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu secured the City Council seats she needed to proceed with an ambitious vision for climate and housing policy.

As The Boston Globe’s Sabrina Shankman noted this summer, Wu initially seemed slow to implement her lofty Green New Deal campaign proposals. But free bus routes, net-zero requirements for new buildings, and a “very, very detailed” and aggressive climate plan released this summer reversed that impression. She then won the September preliminary election so definitively that her competitor dropped out and Wu ran uncontested on Tuesday—a stunning result given that her opponent was extremely well funded and business interests and particularly the real estate industry don’t like Wu. That kind of stuff often sinks politicians in this country.

The one obvious check on Wu going forward would have been if she lost allies in the City Council elections on Tuesday, thus depriving her of majority votes for her policies. Instead, one of her closest and reportedly most precarious allies, Henry Santana, fended off a challenge from former District 3 councillor Frank Baker, ultimately securing a decisive victory, despite facing an—I kid you not—10-to-one campaign-coffer ratio in Baker’s favor as of August. Wu going all in supporting Santana seems to have made a difference.

It will be tempting for non–New Englanders to write this off, as they usually do, believing Massachusetts is so blue that nothing that happens there is relevant for politics elsewhere in the country. But progressive policies don’t always fly in Massachusetts, for the same reason they fail elsewhere. “Polls confirm that Bay State voters are resolutely progressive on a range of issues,” Robert Kuttner wrote in The American Prospect in 2023. “But on policy, Massachusetts continues to lag far behind other Democratic trifecta states. If you unpack why this is the case, you appreciate that it isn’t only right-wing Republicans who undermine both democracy and popular faith in democracy. It’s also corporate Democrats in one-party states.” At the wider state level, Kuttner argued, governors and legislators assiduously avoid pissing off the business lobby.

Granted, Boston is well to the left of the wider state. But there’s also another reason Wu cementing power is significant: Climate policy needs testing grounds.

This is why congestion pricing in NYC has been so closely watched by climate activists and so disproportionately attacked by the right, including President Trump, TNR’s Liza Featherstone argued in March. Not only do serious climate proposals—of which there are many, but precious few implemented in full—need pilot programs in American politics; in a world where the primary rhetorical attack on climate policies is that they’re unrealistic, expensive, and will make people’s day-to-day lives worse, successful ones offer proof of concept for cities, states, and countries everywhere. The right-wing obsession with congestion pricing is not an accident, Liza wrote, and it has implications far beyond even climate policy: “It’s important to them to stop this bold government solution to improve our lives because real solutions and positive experiences with government endanger the entire right-wing project.”

Michelle Wu now has the council majority needed to proceed with testing more of these policies. And she has it because she and her allies are somehow winning the battle against business interests. Boston’s election results won’t get top billing this week. But ignoring them would be a mistake.

Stat of the Week
2.8 degrees Celsius (5 degrees Fahrenheit)

This is the U.N.’s projection, released last week, on how much the Earth is expected to warm relative to preindustrial levels if we stay on our current trajectory. Most experts, as well as the Paris climate agreement, say warming needs to be limited to “well below” two degrees Celsius, and ideally 1.5, to manage risk.

What I’m Reading

EU countries weaken 2040 climate plan in eleventh-hour deal

In a dampening result ahead of the UN COP30 climate conference in Brazil next week, the EU scaled back its climate plan to appease member states that wanted “to delay a landmark carbon pricing system and to allow governments to outsource emissions reductions to other countries.”

It’s a troubling sign, from the climate standpoint, that the impact of Trump’s presidency is starting to snowball abroad:

The EU has traditionally been among the most ambitious negotiators at COP, but with its climate agenda under pressure from both rightwing politicians and trading partners such as the US, campaigners fear that the weakened target will undermine its diplomatic arguments as it tries to keep other countries on board with reducing emissions sufficiently to avoid devastating climate events in future.

Read the full report at the Financial 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.

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.

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.