What Would It Take to Eliminate Storm-Related Power Outages?

Hundreds of thousands of households, mostly in the Southeast United States, were without power when a dangerous cold snap hit this week, just days after the previous weekend’s winter storm buffeted large swathes of the country. Officials in several of the affected states have warned that these outages could linger for some time—in Mississippi, one emergency management coordinator told CNN that they might last “weeks, not days.”

Power outages during severe weather events are increasingly common. And they can easily be fatal, particularly when paired with extreme temperatures. What would it take to at least reduce the frequency of these outages, even as the severe weather driving them increases?

“There are several points of failure that lead to these kinds of widespread power outages,” Gudrun Thompson, senior attorney and energy program leader at the Southern Environmental Law Center, told me by phone. She pointed not just to the most recent storm but also to Winter Storm Elliott, which hit the Southeast hard in 2022, and Winter Storm Uri, which devastated Texas in 2021.

Getting electricity into homes happens in a few stages: It begins with power generation, then transmission (where it goes to substations), and finally distribution to the homes themselves. Here, the amount of power demand also plays a role. “Each of these need to be tackled, and some of the solutions won’t address all three of these,” said Adam Kurland, a federal energy attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund.

But both Thompson and Kurland pointed to a few things that could make a difference. “On the supply side, the biggest thing is just having a portfolio of diverse resources,” Kurland said. Renewables aren’t just good from a climate and environment perspective, he said, “they are also usually the most reliable during extreme weather events, and that’s been proven out by a number of studies that have found that both gas and coal have resulted in bottlenecks during extreme weather events.”

That’s particularly true in some of the regions suffering from outages this week. “You’ve got this legacy power system where the electric grid is still in this very twentieth-century model of big central station power plants,” said Thompson. “You’ve still got coal plants running in the South, you’ve got some nuclear plants, you’ve got a lot of new and old gas plants.” And “in some of these winter storms, we’ve literally seen these piles of coal freeze, so they couldn’t run the coal-fired plants.”

Gas supply networks are similarly vulnerable, and were a major factor in the Texas outages in 2021. Initial analysis from the energy and climate policy firm Energy Innovation suggests gas generation within PJM Interconnection—the country’s largest grid operator, serving over 65 million people across the mid-Atlantic to the upper South and Midwest—fell by 10 gigawatts during this most recent storm.

This contradicts everything that conservative politicians, in particular, tend to say in the wake of these events—certainly after the Texas outages in 2021. “I often get asked by reporters, ‘What do you say to what the electric utility is saying about how this winter storm event just proves they need more gas?’” Thompson said. “It’s a false narrative. Clean energy resources are more reliable, more affordable, less risky for consumers, when you kind of put them all together as a portfolio. You can’t rely on any one source, so you’ll hear fossil industry apologists saying, ‘Well, the sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow.’ That’s true,” she said, but no one’s advocating relying on a single source.

And that points to another thing that could be done to eliminate these outages: a more interconnected grid. This was one of the main factors in 2021 in Texas, Kurland noted. “Texas’s power grid, ERCOT, is primarily islanded from the rest of the United States, so there weren’t a lot of connections there to be able to bring power into Texas during that storm.” If the goal is to build resilience to severe weather events, we need “an electrical grid that’s bigger than the weather,” Kurland said. With better transmission lines connecting different regions, it won’t matter if the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing or severe cold is kneecapping fossil fuel generation in a particular location, because “you’re now able to dispatch power from one side of the United States to the other.”

Microgrids tied into the main grid, as well as better power storage, could also play a role. And then there’s the option of burying power lines, which would address the problem not only of the lines sagging under ice in the winter but also of stray sparks causing wildfires in other seasons. This isn’t feasible everywhere, Kurland emphasized, pointing to water tables and local geology. But even for such inhospitable locales, there are different, more advanced types of wires that are less vulnerable to sagging and the like. “There are some incentives that the federal government and the states can apply to be able to unlock those types of advanced technologies on the transmission system.”

When it comes to federal incentives, though, both Kurland and Thompson noted that a lot of the policies that could make households and the electrical grid less vulnerable in severe weather have been recently reversed, or the associated funds delayed. That’s true not just for, say, offshore wind projects but also for the weatherization programs that could both help reduce strain on the grid during cold snaps and help people survive brief outages when they occur. “As of last month, there were still a number of states trying to get that funding for cold snaps and extreme weather events like this,” said Kurland. He pointed to funds already designated to states via the Weatherization Assistance Program, slated to be released in June 2025, which still hadn’t arrived as of late December. Under the Trump administration, the Department of Energy has proposed scrapping the program altogether.

The entire grid feels the effect when homes aren’t weatherized, Kurland said. Weatherization is “one way that you can reduce that demand so there isn’t a big draw on the system.” If homes are drawing a large amount of energy, it can actually prolong outages. “When you have all the customers with the thermostats turned all the way up waiting for the power to come on, that can just trip that system again.”

Thompson also pointed to the Trump Environmental Protection Agency “unlawfully” canceling grants that had already been awarded for community solar programs and similar projects, in the Southern states where she works. “The Trump administration, even though they say they have this energy affordability agenda, is actually working to undermine successful policies and programs that would actually help households to afford their electricity bills,” Thompson said.

Stat of the Week
61%

Survey results released this week by Yale Climate Communication find 61 percent of Americans underestimate how worried their fellow Americans are about global warming.

What I’m Reading

Time for some courage in the climate fight, too

I’ve been reading a lot of good essays from climate writers watching and troubled by the events in Minnesota in the last few weeks. Emily Atkin’s essay, over on Heated, is definitely worth your time, as is Bill McKibben’s reflection on just how wrong politicians have been, time and time again, when guessing what ordinary people care about.

… it’s not just the Trump administration that those brave people faced down, it’s the pundit class too, who insisted over and over that progressives should avoid talking about immigration because it wasn’t politically popular. The other subject we’ve been told to sideline is “climate change,” for fear of offending voters more interested in “affordability.” (Former energy secretary Jennifer Granholm told an industry audience Monday that “on Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, climate does not rise as much as how much I’m paying for my electricity bill,” which is one of those things that sounds clever until you meet someone who lost their home to a wildfire.)

I actually have no problem with the advice to focus on electric bills—as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I think affordability, especially of electricity, is an issue that helps both elect Democrats and reduce carbon emissions, since anyone interested in the cost of power is going to be building sun and wind. But I also don’t think that talking about global warming is a mistake—most Americans, polls show, understand the nature of the crisis, and want action to stem it. It isn’t the single most salient issue because all of us live in this particular moment (and in this particular moment the fact that federal agents are executing citizens who dare to take cellphone pictures of them is definitely the most salient issue) but it is nonetheless a net plus for politicians, especially in blue states.

Read Bill McKibben’s full newsletter at The Crucial Years.

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

On Wednesday, President Trump traveled to Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum and delivered a speech that was unusually unhinged, even by his standards.

He claimed to have solved the energy requirements of the AI boom. He said, “There are windmills all over Europe, there are windmills all over the place, and they are losers.” He claimed would-be drillers had come to him asking for his help against the radical left so they could extract oil in the North Sea. He said China sells wind turbines to fools, but “I haven’t been able to find any wind farms in China.… They sell them to the stupid people, but they don’t use them themselves.”

He claimed the United States deserved to get Greenland now after defending it in World War II. He said the U.S. has even better battleships now than it did then. He mixed up Greenland and Iceland, saying Iceland “loved me. They called me Daddy.” He said the U.S. needed ownership of Greenland because “you can’t defend it on a lease.… Psychologically, who the hell wants to defend a license agreement or a lease which is a large piece of ice in the middle of the ocean, where, if there is a war, much of the action will take place on that ice? Think of it, the missiles will be flying right over the center of that piece of ice.”

He talked about young soldiers’ heads being “blown off” in the war in Ukraine. He threatened to prosecute people over the results of the 2020 election. He boasted about his chauffeur being able to do a better job than NATO generals, “and he makes slightly less than 50[k].” He mentioned Emmanuel Macron’s sunglasses, and affected a French accent while relating a conversation he and Macron had about prescription drug pricing. He said he was working “to ensure the U.S. remains the crypto capital of the world.” He said Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar “comes from a country that’s not a country.” He said he could destroy the U.S. housing market if he wanted to.

It wasn’t so long ago that traditional media outlets felt obligated to pretend that the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos had something to do with saving the world. Even after financial executives crashed the economy into the Great Recession, the technocratic optimism of the Obama years drove the myth forward. (U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was treated like something between a genius and a Hollywood philanthropist.) We were meant to believe that the CEOs weren’t there to lobby politicians, the politicians weren’t there to shop for lucrative post-political gigs, and the academics weren’t there for the caviar or to see Charlize Theron. Instead, all of them were there to solve malaria—or global poverty, war, HIV, and the climate crisis.

The climate crisis was always the issue that most thoroughly exposed the absurdity of this conceit. With malaria, poverty, HIV, and world peace, leaders could at least pretend that getting everyone together in the same ski town for a big party was like buying a lot of athletic wear for a New Year’s resolution to go to the gym.

With climate change, however, it was more like buying a lot of athletic wear and then taking a cab across town in the opposite direction from the gym. Oil companies were formal partners for the event, which was marketed as being carbon-neutral while it involved a bunch of corporate and governmental executives flying via private jet to an Alpine town whose signature sport climate change is currently decimating. The confab hyped “solutions” like carbon credits and carbon capture that would allow corporations to keep polluting as usual—even as rigorous reporting showed a lot of carbon credits weren’t backed by real reductions and carbon capture wasn’t yet feasible at scale. Panelists who pointed out the problems with this approach, as TNR’s Kate Aronoff noted in 2023, were patronized and dismissed. The companies that were bragging about their net-zero goals in those years have now abandoned them altogether.

Now Trump has dropped this wild, threat-filled tirade into the mix. He’s demanding ownership of Greenland, threatening catastrophic trade wars, hinting at military takeover, all while asking world leaders to pay $1 billion to join some sort of security racket that’s presumably intended to replace NATO, which he seems determined to destroy. There’s a rich tradition in media of treating Davos as an entertainment story, but that may be hard when there’s a credible risk of armed conflict or economic destruction.

Yet as off-the-wall as Trump’s speech was, it’s hard to argue that he fundamentally misunderstood the assignment. Yes, this is different in kind from what has gone before. But Davos has always been a racket—albeit one that’s usually a little more veiled by civil discussion and closed doors. Maybe this is the year that finally exposes the Davos myth. Trump’s tirade was terrifying, but we all should have been scared much, much earlier.

Stat of the Week
100 million acres

That’s how much extra land would be needed, according to a recent estimate reported by The Guardian, if Americans were to modify their diets even part of the way toward RFK Jr.’s new food pyramid—increasing meat consumption by 25 percent.

What I’m Reading

A California Climate Expert Is Working to Restore Climate Risk Scores Deleted by Zillow

Last fall, the real estate platform Zillow quietly stopped publishing climate risk ratings on its listings. Having one’s home wiped out tends to ruin people when it doesn’t kill them, but talking about that is apparently too much of a bummer for the real estate industry. Now, Inside Climate News reports, there may be a way to DIY it:

Neil Matouka, who previously managed the development and launch of California’s Fifth Climate Change Assessment, is developing a proof of concept plugin that provides climate data to Californians in place of what Zillow has removed. When a user views a California Zillow listing, the plugin automatically displays data on wildfire and flood risk, sea level rise and extreme heat exposure.

“We don’t need perfect data,” Matouka said. “We need publicly available, consistent information that helps people understand risk.” … Both independent academic research and research conducted by Zillow has found that disclosing flood risk can decrease the sale price of a home. “Climate risk data didn’t suddenly become inconvenient. It became harder to ignore in a stressed market,” First Street said.

Read Claire Barber’s full report at Inside Climate News.

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

The Trump administration will stop counting lives saved in its cost-benefit analyses of air pollution regulations, and instead will only consider the cost to businesses. “It’s a seismic shift that runs counter to the [Environmental Protection Agency]’s mission statement, which says the agency’s core responsibility is to protect human health and the environment,” The New York Times reported this week. “The change could make it easier to repeal limits on [fine particulate matter and ozone] from coal-burning power plants, oil refineries, steel mills and other industrial facilities across the country.”

Declaring the demise of climate policy is practically a weekly media event these days. “The climate agenda’s fall from grace over the past year has been stunning—in scale and scope,” wrote Axios’s Amy Harder in this week’s installment, noting that the president recently withdrew from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. “Whether this collapse in climate-change ambition proves permanent or temporary will shape the planet—which is still warming in unprecedented ways—and trillions of dollars in global energy investment.”

Of course, the “collapse” has not been stunning in any way: It is precisely what the Trump team promised, and the international repercussions are precisely what experts predicted. But more importantly, can one even call it a collapse? The vague phrase “the climate agenda” is doubtless intended to conjure Greta Thunberg and the Green New Deal, and yes, that agenda has been summarily abandoned by a lot of politicians of late. But Trump does have a climate agenda. It’s just a negative and bloody one, as it’s intertwined with his authoritarianism.

Consider the U.S. military invasion of Venezuela. However murderous and abusive Maduro’s regime, killing some 75 people to kidnap him and having no clear plan to stabilize the country—except to exploit oil reserves that would blow 13 percent of the global carbon budget by 2050, making life costlier and more precarious for everyone but oligarchs—is clearly not a humanitarian intervention. It’s an intervention, albeit a very clumsy one, on behalf of the business interests Trump’s chummy with.

It’s the same principle on display with Greenland. Trump is proposing a forced takeover of a sovereign territory in order to dictate the terms of extraction of rare earths and fossil fuels, while seizing a slice of the rapidly melting Arctic pie. The administration claims this is a matter of national security, but it’s hard to see how overturning the NATO table and smashing it to smithereens will make ordinary people safer—particularly if this unleashes Russia and China to pursue similarly imperialist plans. What it will do is enrich the companies that get lucrative contracts.

Authoritarianism is a response to climate change, as numerous people have warned for years. That includes imperialism and the race to secure resources, the criminalization of protest, and anti-immigration policy. It’s not an attempt to prevent global warming, but rather an attempt to protect a chosen few—to build a wall, whether figurative or literal, around a certain class of people.

The new EPA policy, which explicitly rejects lives saved as a lesser concern than business profits, exposes this line of thinking. You’ve heard it before, though. Fighting climate change would be too costly, so the narrative goes. Costly to whom? Not fighting climate change is already very costly to everyone else, whether in terms of affordability or lives lost.

Insofar as there is hope in all this, it lies in the mounting body of evidence that this approach is in fact extremely unpopular. Voters overwhelmingly oppose the Trump administration’s moves to shut down climate research. They oppose gutting the regulations limiting pollution. And they increasingly see the connection between the climate crisis and the cost-of-living crisis. The authoritarian sales pitch has always been about convincing voters that they are to be a part of the protected class. More and more people are now saying they’re not convinced.

Stat of the week
13 percent

Current U.S. plans to exploit Venezuelan oil reserves would burn through 13 percent of the global carbon budget needed to keep warming under 1.5 degrees, the Guardian
reports.

What I’m Reading

RFK Jr. Forgot What Makes Us Healthy

The recently released inverted food pyramid has a lot of problems. Emily Atkin cuts to the heart of the matter.

This is my biggest problem with the new food pyramid. It treats food as a purely biological input rather than a public ecological choice—as if health exists on a separate plane from the land, water, and climate that make nourishment possible in the first place. Thinking this way may make sense for individual bodies in the short term. But in the long term, and in the aggregate, it’s deeply irresponsible.

You cannot build a healthy society on top of an unhealthy biosphere. The climate, water, soil, and land that produce our food are as important to our health as the food itself. Without them, all our talk of “healthy eating” becomes a kind of denial—pretending we can thrive while the systems that keep us alive break down.

Read Emily Atkin’s full essay at Heated.

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’d need a full-screen infographic with live updates to keep track of all the MAGA infighting these days. President Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is trashing him in a new Vanity Fair interview. Stephen Miller wants to get rid of Kristi Noem. Marjorie Taylor Greene has called Trump’s comments on Rob Reiner’s death “classless” and “wrong,” and warns that the “dam is breaking” in GOP support for the president. Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, and Tucker Carlson are brawling over their conspiracy theories concerning Charlie Kirk’s death, and also Israel, a topic that likewise divides Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro. Shapiro has in turn denounced Heritage Foundation leader Kevin Roberts for defending Carlson after Carlson hosted white nationalist Holocaust-denier Fuentes on his show. Heritage staffers are also angry about this.

But there’s also another feud that’s been simmering quietly for months: The Make America Healthy Again movement has beef with EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin. This was in theory predictable, given that Zeldin has packed the Environmental Protection Agency with chemical- and ag-industry veterans, while MAHA wants to rid the world of environmental toxins. But the fight was brewing for a while, so it’s interesting to see it finally break out in public. And the exact outcome of the conflict remains to be determined.

The MAHA movement associated with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has always had, shall we say, an above-average rate of producing strange bedfellows. In their pursuit of healthy lifestyles, these groups and influencers advocate vaccine and pharmaceutical skepticism; ridding the nation’s water supplies of both fluoride and the abortion drug mifepristone; returning to raw milk; regenerative agriculture; eliminating soda and sweets from SNAP; and stricter regulation or outright bans of food dyes, preservatives, pesticides, PFAS, microplastics, and other pollutants.

Zeldin’s EPA, however, has been steadily rolling back various chemical regulations and clearing the way for expedited pesticide approvals. In late October, several MAHA advocates met with top EPA officials to “express concerns” about pesticide use and contamination of food. “The response,” according to a post by attendee John Klar at The MAHA Report, “was less than impressive.” Then, two weeks ago, MAHA activists put together a petition calling for Zeldin to be fired, writing that he had “prioritized the interests of chemical corporations over the wellbeing of American families and children.”

This got Zeldin’s attention, leading him to go on what The New York Times’ Hiroko Tabuchi described as a “charm offensive.” First, “he made a surprise appearance at a MAHA holiday reception,” reported Tabuchi. “There, he invited activists to visit him at E.P.A. headquarters the following day. There, he introduced them to senior department heads and promised that the agency would adopt a ‘MAHA agenda.’”

This seems to have earned him at least some goodwill. At The MAHA Report, Klar wrote that Zeldin’s MAHA critics were “encouraged” by his efforts, particularly Zeldin’s insistence that he “remains committed to opposing PFAS” and that the EPA favors “​​a polluter pays model for cleaning up PFAS.”

But it’s hard to believe Zeldin will follow through on any of this. The Trump administration was pretty clear from the get-go that it was out to gut environmental regulation and give chemical companies free rein. As Civil Eats’ Lisa Held noted when reporting on MAHA advocates’ October meeting, all of the top officials whom MAHA advocates met with to demand tighter pesticide regulations had “worked for chemical or agriculture industries in the past.” The EPA just approved two new PFAS pesticides in November and has proposed various regulatory rollbacks for the chemicals.

Where does this go next? It might be tempting to respond derisively to a group going by “Make America Healthy Again” whose complaint seems to be that the Trump administration is poisoning the country with pesticides and PFAS faster than it’s bringing back measles by undermining vaccines. But this tension between MAHA and Zeldin is part of a genuine vulnerability in the MAHA-MAGA alliance—as much as they may agree, disturbingly, on other things. Will MAHA ultimately knuckle under, deciding to hold their noses on pesticides while being placated by RFK Jr.’s vaccine rollbacks and food policies? Maybe—they did ally with Trump in the first place, despite having no reason to believe he would do anything other than gut environmental protections.

But then again, they might yet try to take Zeldin out rather than make nice with the MAGA crowd. And that could be why Zeldin’s suddenly in appeasement mode: In Trump’s administration, no appointee is indispensable.

Stat of the Week
Warmest in 125 years

Temperatures in the past year were the highest on record in the Arctic, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s latest report.

What I’m Reading

Michigan Lawmakers Introduce Bill to Repeal Data Center Tax Incentives

Backlash to data centers and AI is brewing. On Tuesday, democratic socialist Representative Dylan Wegela and Republican Representative Jim DeSana of the Freedom Caucus jointly introduced a new bill into Michigan’s legislature to repeal the tax incentives instituted in 2024 to entice large tech companies to build data centers in the state. These tax incentives were supported by both Democratic legislators and Governor Gretchen Whitmer. But as concern spreads that data centers may threaten the clean energy transition, strain the grid, increase energy bills, pollute water, and more, it seems some are hoping for a mulligan:

Wegela said it is “absurd to be subsidizing some of the wealthiest corporations in the country.”

“If they’re going to be coming here—and I don’t think most people want them coming here, especially at this scale—then at the bare minimum we should be taxing them the same as everyone else,” Wegela said.

The existing data center laws provide sales and use tax exemptions for big tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Related and others that are behind many centers. The tax revenue would otherwise go to the state’s school aid or general fund.

Read Tom Perkins’s full report at Inside Climate News.

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

What should we make of billionaire Tom Steyer’s reinvention as a populist candidate for California governor, four years after garnering only 0.72 percent of the popular vote in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, despite obscene spending from his personal fortune? Is it evidence that he’s a hard man to discourage? (In that race, he dropped almost $24 million on South Carolina alone.) Is it evidence that billionaires get to do a lot of things the rest of us don’t? Or is it evidence that talking about climate change is for losers and Democrats need to abandon it?

Politico seems to think it’s the third one: Steyer running a populist gubernatorial campaign means voters don’t care about global warming.

“The billionaire environmental activist who built his political profile on climate change—and who wrote in his book last year that ‘climate is what matters most right now, and nothing else comes close’—didn’t mention the issue once in the video launching his campaign for California governor,” reporter Noah Baustin wrote recently. “That was no oversight.” Instead, “it reflects a political reality confronting Democrats ahead of the midterms, where onetime climate evangelists are running into an electorate more worried about the climbing cost of electricity bills and home insurance than a warming atmosphere.”

It’s hard to know how to parse a sentence like this. The “climbing cost of electricity bills and home insurance” is, indisputably, a climate issue. Renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuels, and home insurance is spiking because increasingly frequent and increasingly severe weather events—driven by climate change—are making large swaths of the country expensive or impossible to insure. The fact that voters are struggling to pay for utilities and insurance, therefore, is not evidence that they don’t care about climate change. Instead, it’s evidence that climate change is a kitchen table issue, and politicians are, disadvantageously, failing to embrace the obviously populist message that accompanies robust climate policy. This is a problem with Democratic messaging, not a problem with climate as a topic.

The piece goes on: “Climate concern has fallen in the state over time. In 2018, when Gov. Gavin Newsom was running for office, polling found that 57 percent of likely California voters considered climate change a very serious threat to the economy and quality of life for the state’s future. Now, that figure is 50 percent.”

This may sound persuasive to you. But in fact, it’s a highly selective reading of the PPIC survey data linked above. What the poll actually found is that the proportion of Californians calling climate change a “very serious” threat peaked at 57 percent in 2019, fell slightly in subsequent years, then fell precipitously by 11 points between July 2022 and July 2023, before rising similarly precipitously from July 2024 to July 2025.

Why did it fall so quickly from 2022 to 2023? Sure, maybe people stopped caring about climate change. Or maybe instead, the month after the 2022 poll, Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, the most significant climate policy in U.S. history, and people stopped being quite so worried. Why did concern then rise rapidly between July 2024 and July 2025? Well, between those two dates, Trump won the presidential election and proceeded, along with Republicans in Congress, to dismantle anything remotely resembling climate policy. The Inflation Reduction Act fell apart.

I’m not saying this is the only way to read this data. But consider this: The percentage of respondents saying they were somewhat or very worried about members of their household being affected by natural disasters actually went up over the same period. The percentage saying air pollution was “a more serious health threat in lower-income areas” nearby went up. Those saying flooding, heat waves, and wildfires should be considered “a great deal” when siting new affordable housing rose a striking 12 percentage points from 2024 to 2025, and those “very concerned” about rising insurance costs “due to climate risks” rose 14 percentage points.

This is not a portrait of an electorate that doesn’t care about climate change. It’s a portrait of an electorate that may actually be very ready to hear a politician convincingly embrace climate populism—championing affordability and better material conditions for working people, in part by protecting them from the predatory industries driving a cost-of-living crisis while poisoning people.

This is part of a broader problem. Currently, there’s a big push from centrist Democratic institutions to argue that the party should abandon climate issues in order to win elections. The evidence for this is mixed, at best. As TNR’s Liza Featherstone recently pointed out, Democrats’ striking victories last month showed that candidates fusing climate policy with an energy affordability message did very well. Aaron Regunberg went into further detail on why talking about climate change is a smart strategy: “Right now,” he wrote, “neither party has a significant trust advantage on ‘electric utility bills’ (D+1) or ‘the cost of living’ (R+1). But Democrats do have major trust advantages on ‘climate change’ (D+14) and ‘renewable energy development’ (D+6). By articulating how their climate and clean energy agenda can address these bread-and-butter concerns, Democrats can leverage their advantage on climate to win voters’ trust on what will likely be the most significant issues in 2026 and 2028.”

One of the troubles with climate change in political discourse is that some people’s understanding of environmental politics begins and ends with the spotted owl logging battles in the 1990s. This is the sort of attitude that drives the assumption that affordability policy and climate policy are not only distinct but actually opposed. But that’s wildly disconnected from present reality.

Maybe Tom Steyer isn’t the guy to illustrate that! But his political fortunes, either way, don’t say much at all about climate messaging more broadly.

Stat of the Week
3x as many infant deaths

A new study finds that babies of mothers “whose drinking water wells were downstream of PFAS releases” died at almost three times the rate in their first year of life as babies of mothers who did not live downstream of PFAS contamination. Read The Washington Post’s report on the study here.

What I’m Reading

More than 200 environmental groups demand halt to new US datacenters

An open letter calls on Congress to pause all approvals of new data centers until regulation catches up, due to problems such as data centers’ voracious energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and water use. From The Guardian’s report:

The push comes amid a growing revolt against moves by companies such as Meta, Google and Open AI to plow hundreds of billions of dollars into new datacenters, primarily to meet the huge computing demands of AI. At least 16 datacenter projects, worth a combined $64bn, have been blocked or delayed due to local opposition to rising electricity costs. The facilities’ need for huge amounts of water to cool down equipment has also proved controversial, particularly in drier areas where supplies are scarce.

These seemingly parochial concerns have now multiplied to become a potent political force, helping propel Democrats to a series of emphatic recent electoral successes in governor elections in Virginia and New Jersey as well as a stunning upset win in a special public service commission poll in Georgia, with candidates campaigning on lowering power bill costs and curbing datacenters.

Read Oliver Milman’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.

Climate advocates “worry they are losing the information war,” The New York Times reported this week. Climate disinformation is pervasive, and “only 21 of the nearly 200 countries that signed the Paris Agreement” signed a declaration at this year’s U.N. climate conference about trying to address that. While polls show the public is concerned about climate change, bogus claims about clean energy being unreliable or damaging are “steadily growing, amplified by social media,” and those urging policy responses to the climate crisis are increasingly “labeled ‘alarmists’ who propose radical solutions,” wrote reporters Lisa Friedman and Steven Lee Myers.

This is depressing, maddening stuff. TNR has been covering climate obstructionists’ transition from straightforward “denial” to these more elaborate forms of disinformation since at least 2020, and in recent years the problem has only gotten worse.

But I have a quibble: Climate advocates aren’t losing the information war. They’re losing the money and power war. That’s an important distinction—not least because it requires a different approach, one focused on radically curbing the influence of money in politics. And while losing the money and power war might seem even grimmer than losing the info war, there’s actually a ray of hope in all this.

It’s not just that 65 percent of Americans say they’re at least “somewhat worried” about climate change. Per the latest large-scale survey from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 48 percent say people in the United States are being harmed “right now,” with 46 percent saying “they have personally experienced the effects of global warming.”

If you say you have “personally experienced the effects of global warming,” you are basing that in part on concrete experience—even if you can be influenced in how you interpret that experience. In the Obama years, the percentage of people who said they personally experienced the effects of global warming was in the 20s and 30s, but it has risen steadily since then, and in the 2020s has never dropped below 40 percent.

The experiences of climate change are going to become easier, not harder, to recognize in coming years. Perhaps the fossil fuel industry and its allies are pushing disinformation so wildly right now because they know this is an uphill battle. Arguably, they have already lost it. They cannot possibly win the information war when the information every day becomes more observable with the naked eye—and in people’s finances. Will people easily dismiss climate and affordability policy as “radical” as their homes tank in value, food and insurance costs spiral, and severe weather destroys their homes, finances, and lives? Maybe not.

Where climate obstructionists clearly are winning is the policy arena—the money, the power. The Trump administration is taking a sledgehammer to nearly every climate-friendly policy enacted by the prior administration. Tech titans and big banks are backing off their once-shiny promises to reduce their emissions, and the race to build more data centers for AI is slowing or even reversing the energy transition. Establishment Democrats are backing away from climate policy out of fear of losing elections to Republicans—even though there’s not a ton of evidence that this is a good strategy, and ample evidence for the opposite strategy.

What the climate obstructionists are also in danger of winning is the nihilism war. As Aaron Regunberg and other writers at TNR and elsewhere have pointed out, the fossil fuel industry is, to a certain extent, counting on people’s limited energy and constant discouragement. “Big Oil wants us to succumb to nihilism when it comes to climate change,” Aaron wrote last week. But they’re conspicuously nervous when people refuse to succumb. The moves that companies are now backing away from all emerged after the 2020 election, when people thought Democrats were going to get serious about climate change and media coverage of Greta Thunberg and others seemed to have shifted public opinion. Big companies were scared, and were hoping that flashy pledges could stave off more serious policy.

Fossil fuel interests still have a lot of power and options, of course: They can push for criminalizing protest; they can fund politicians friendly to their interests. They do this regularly, and it may yet prevent action on climate change coming in time to avert utter catastrophe. But when people start to revoke the fossil fuel industry’s so-called social license to operate—by making it socially unacceptable to work for, invest in, or promote planet-destroying polluters, and divesting from these products—that’s the stuff that seems to really unsettle the industry and its political allies. Hence right-wingers going all in on the risible idea that divesting from fossil fuels is a form of discrimination.

Again, the industry can leverage its considerable money on the spin machine (and it helps that it doesn’t seem to care how self-destructive its messaging may be to the wider society). But it’s up against considerable headwinds when it comes to human psychology and what people seem to care about.

Specifically, the industry’s arguments against climate policy have mostly leaned on two items: jobs and affordability. Democrats may have an edge over their more fossil fuel–friendly Republican opponents on energy affordability, and climate policy creates jobs too. More importantly, jobs aren’t the trump card they seem to be. Corny as it may sound, the numbers suggest that love matters more—by a lot. Last year, The New York Times reported on an international poll that found that “protecting the planet for the next generation” was by far the most popular argument for taking climate action—12 times more so than the “promise of creating jobs.”

“At the heart of this is love,” Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, which conducted the study, told the Times. “People love particular people, places and things. And those people, places and things are being threatened.”

Obstructionists don’t have the advantage on all fronts. As Aaron recently wrote, there’s an easy answer to fossil fuel companies’ hope that you will tune out: “Disappoint them: Don’t give in.”

Stat of the Week
51%

That’s how much homeowner’s insurance rates have increased in the past six years in Washington state. Two residents whose rates more than doubled are now suing Big Oil companies and the American Petroleum Institute, accusing the fossil fuel industry of driving these increases via severe weather events associated with climate change.

What I’m Reading

LA Wildfire Survivors Want to Rebuild All-Electric, but a Utility Is Using Customer Funds to Incentivize Gas Appliances

After January wildfires destroyed more than 18,000 buildings in Los Angeles, a growing movement of residents who lost their homes want to rebuild all-electric, recognizing that burning gas in household appliances contributes to the climate-driven increase in the destructiveness of wildfires. An attribution study found that climate change made the January fires 35 percent more likely.

But the country’s largest gas utility, SoCalGas, is using funds from its customers to incentivize wildfire survivors to rebuild with fossil gas instead of going electric.

The monopoly gas provider in Southern California is offering thousands of dollars’ worth of rebates to wildfire survivors who rebuild with gas appliances. The rebates are paid for by California utility ratepayers through a California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) energy efficiency program.

Read Hilary Beaumont’s full report at Inside Climate News.

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

You can’t throw a pacifier in American discourse without hitting someone talking about how having kids changed them. From Pete Buttigieg to Sarah Palin to the legions of guys who had daughters and realized sexual harassment is bad, many people apparently receive wisdom from parenthood they weren’t getting any other way.

This “as a parent…” talk can sound smug—which is weird, given that these moral revelations come from the humbling experience of having your ass handed to you daily by a creature the size of a marmot. I never thought I would be one of those people. But it’s true, parenthood has changed me in at least one way: I hate robots even more than I did before.

Last week, the internet lit up with giggles as one of Russia’s first humanoid robots was presented in Moscow, marching tentatively onstage to the Rocky theme song, only to face-plant and be hauled off by embarrassed handlers. The video made the rounds, even appearing on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.

I can’t laugh at this stuff. Instead, it enrages me.

Humanoid robots are the perfect symbol for the suicidal absurdity of the AI frenzy. What is the point of making a robot walk like a human—like a toddler for now, but eventually a grown adult? According to robotics industry publications, it’s so they can replace humans more easily. To borrow Nvidia’s creepy phrasing, “Our world is built for humans by humans.” So making a robot look like a human makes it easier to appropriate that world—sorry, “collaborate” with humans, as Nvidia puts it. Those metal toddlers want your job, particularly if you work in manufacturing.

Scratch that. The companies making these metal toddlers want all of our jobs. As Colbert noted, immediately after laughing at the downed robot, the top country song by digital sales last week was written by AI. Social media companies, meanwhile, think they’ve figured out a particularly good way to monetize this technology: AI-generated ads to sell you more stuff.

As Ketan Joshi recently wrote at TNR, “Meta’s push to force-feed advertising slop into every single corner of the massive digital space it controls could not have worse timing.” Despite the company’s stated intent to purchase “renewable energy certificates,” the projected energy needed to power generative AI is breathing new life into the gas and even the coal industry. It’s also pushing our electricity bills higher and higher.

Say any of this to a member of the AI cult, and you’ll inevitably hear something about how AI is going to help humans, not hurt them. It will save lives, they say, pointing to algorithms’ ability to process reams of medical data quickly. Or you get some kind of reheated West Wing monologue about how lots of lifesaving technologies were accidental by-products of other scientific inquiry, so “discovery” is inherently good.

This is the same logical fallacy deployed by the plastics industry, which argues against policies discouraging single-use plastic packaging by pointing to artificial heart valves. While that may sound convincing, it’s important to remember that these two things are not mutually exclusive—it’s like saying policies to reduce car usage will eradicate ambulances—and that this rhetoric is coming from people who make a profit from both products.

That’s why the humanoid robot is the perfect symbol. While algorithmic data crunching might have some good uses, the very expensive push to develop technology that more specifically replicates human skills—think bipedal walking, think creativity—is the world’s worst party trick. It’s slowing or even reversing the energy transition at a time when every extra emission brings us closer to crisis. It’s taking up vital resources like water and critical minerals. It’s creating a bubble that may soon crash the economy. It’s producing a lot of rubbish and misinformation. And it’s doing all of this for the sole purpose of making investors money by replacing human labor.

Those metal toddlers aren’t funny. They’re part of a multibillion-dollar project to make the future uninhabitable for actual toddlers.

Stat of the Week
$20,500

That’s the average drop in home value for the 25 percent of the nation’s homes that are most vulnerable to hurricanes and wildfires, according to analysis from The New York Times. (It’s more than twice that for the most vulnerable 10 percent.)

What I’m Reading

First, the frogs died. Then people got sick.

Frog mortality used to be an academic curiosity. Then researchers realized it was driving a huge increase of malaria in humans. From the Post’s new series on the impact of biodiversity decline:

In the United States, researchers have shown that a collapse of insect-eating bat populations prompted farmers to use more pesticide on crops, which in turn led to a higher human infant mortality rate.

Around the Great Lakes, the reemergence of gray wolves has had the surprising effect of keeping motorists safe. The canines prowl along roads while hunting, spooking deer from crossing and reducing collisions with cars.

Also in North America, invasive emerald ash borers devastated ash trees, contributing to elevated temperatures and an increase in cardiovascular and respiratory deaths.

India may have witnessed the most astounding ecological breakdown of them all. After vultures experienced a mass die-off, the livestock carcasses they once scavenged piled up. Packs of feral dogs took the place of vultures, resulting in a rise in deaths from rabies.

Read Dino Grandoni’s and Melina Mara’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.

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.