Trump Wins Another Fake Award—but He Actually Deserves This One

Last month, Energy Secretary Chris Wright convened the National Coal Council for the first time since the organization was disbanded under President Biden. He extolled the administration’s work forcing aging coal plants to stay open, and hinted at further handouts to come. Now we’re starting to get a sense of what those handouts might look like.

This week, the Trump administration announced that it would, as promised last summer, revoke the so-called “endangerment finding”—a key scientific finding from 2009 on which almost all federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions is based. It will also order the Defense Department to purchase electricity from coal-fired power plants, and the industry will get a 33-month extension on cleaning up coal-ash dumps containing mercury, arsenic, and other toxins (all of which are expected to seep into groundwater in the meantime). Administration officials speaking to The Wall Street Journal ahead of the Wednesday announcement additionally said the administration would “award funding to five coal plants in West Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina and Kentucky to recommission and upgrade the facilities” and that “Trump will be awarded the inaugural ‘Undisputed Champion of Coal’ award by the Washington Coal Club.”

Trump famously covets fake awards that stroke his ego, but it’s hard to argue that he doesn’t deserve this one.

The revocation of the endangerment finding, which determined that greenhouse gases harm public health, is the biggest news. But propping up coal is societally consequential in its own right, and few think it’s a good idea. It’s economically unsustainable, and aside from warming the planet, coal combustion has been linked to respiratory problems, heart problems, cancer, cognitive impairment and decline, and death. In 2023, a study from George Mason University found that exposure to fine particulate pollution from coal combustion was associated with more than twice the mortality rates linked to fine particulate pollution from other sources.

In fact, pretty much everything that the Trump administration has proposed doing this week polls poorly—and not just with Democrats.

In 2023, Data for Progress found that 65 percent of all likely voters supported proposed Environmental Protection Agency regulations restricting coal- and gas-fired plant pollution—and half of Republicans did too. More recent polling conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the GMU Center for Climate Change Communication found that 66 percent of all registered voters, including a majority of moderate Republicans (57 percent), favor transitioning the economy to 100 percent clean energy by 2050. Shockingly, even 26 percent of conservative Republicans support this. And 74 percent of registered voters want to see carbon dioxide regulated “as a pollutant”—including 76 percent of moderate Republicans and 45 percent of conservative Republicans.

This is the data you should keep in mind when reading New York Times reporters Lisa Friedman and Maxeline Joselow’s meticulous story about the small, behind-the-scenes team that has been working for years to overturn the endangerment finding. While “conservative groups and businesses immediately fought to dismantle” the finding in 2009, they write, most corporations had given up by 2017 “as they lost legal challenges and public concern about global warming began to grow.” Officials in the first Trump administration actually rejected calls to revoke the finding, even during their wild dash to undo as many environmental regulations as possible on their way out the door in January 2021.

But a few key people—specifically Trump allies Russell Vought and Jeffrey Clark, as well as “lesser-known conservative attorneys” Mandy Gunasekara and Jonathan Brightbill—refused to give up, and during the Biden administration they began drafting “a comprehensive strategy for reversing the finding on ‘Day 1’ of the next Republican administration,” working “in secret ‘to prevent media and other conflicted sources from shaming participants and undercutting the work before it is done.’”

Businesses weren’t pressing for it anymore, most mainstream Republicans weren’t pressing for it anymore, and, to hear Joselow and Friedman recount the opinion of one former Trump transition adviser, “the years of work of conservative activists might have gone nowhere if a different Republican had won the presidency.”

Or, to put it another way, almost no one wanted this. Instead, both the polling data and the Times report show that a handful of extremely dedicated ideologues—not even fossil-fuel executives—toiled in secret and found, in Trump, a useful random-number generator who was willing to turn their incredibly unpopular position into policy. Cue the rejoicing from coal companies and the like, who weren’t even aware something this politically implausible was an option.

On the one hand, the fact that no one wants these handouts for coal means that the potential for backlash—as with almost everything else this administration seems to be pursuing—is significant. On the other hand, not all of this damage will be easy to undo.

Stat of the Week
6.4 degrees Fahrenheit

That’s how much February temperatures have risen since the last time Cortina, Italy, hosted the Winter Olympic Games, in 1956. Unsurprisingly, climate change is creating challenges for this year’s games.

What I’m Reading

Why this country declared an ocean current collapse a national security risk

This detailed report on what the collapse of the Atlantic Ocean’s current system could mean for Iceland was published Tuesday, six days after reporter Chico Harlan was told he was being laid off after 17 years at the Post, as part of layoffs that cut almost half of staff at the storied newspaper.

Sometime over the next 100 years, human-driven warming could disrupt a vital ocean current that carries heat northward from the tropics. After this breach, most of the world would keep getting hotter—but northern Europe would cool substantially, with Iceland at the center of a deep freeze. Climate modeling shows Icelandic winter extremes plunging to an unprecedented minus-50 degrees Fahrenheit. Sea ice could surround the country for the first time since it was settled by Vikings.

“At that point, Iceland would be one giant glacier,” said Hildigunnur Thorsteinsson, the director general of the Icelandic Meteorological Office.…

In October, the government classified the AMOC collapse as a national security risk. It amounts to a reckoning with national survival, as the country begins to absorb the idea that climate change won’t necessarily unfold linearly or predictably, and could bring changes beyond the scope of what a nation can cope with.

Read Chico Harlan’s full report at The Washington Post.

On Monday, the Trump administration suffered its fifth consecutive courtroom defeat in its war on offshore wind. All of these cases stem from an order in December in which the Interior Department claimed that a classified Defense Department report had deemed offshore wind a “national security threat” and Interior was therefore “pausing” the leases on five already-under-construction offshore wind projects on the East Coast, “effective immediately.”

How, you may wonder, did offshore wind pose a national security threat? That’s unclear. The Interior order mentioned previous findings of radar interference but seemed to be suggesting that the information in the “Department of War” reports contained something beyond that.

Judge Royce Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, apparently reviewed the new classified report and didn’t buy it. So Sunrise Wind in New York, like the other four wind projects (including Vineyard Wind in Massachusetts, which is already sending power to the grid and was particularly useful during the recent winter storm), is free to proceed as the appeals process continues. “The administration is now 0-5 in its effort to stop wind farms under construction along the East Coast,” The New York Times’ Maxine Joselow noted.

This is not the only embarrassing result of the administration’s odd flurry of late-December energy orders. The administration has long claimed that coal plants have been unfairly demonized by environmentalists, that the country urgently needs fossil fuels, while—in Trump’s words at the World Economic Forum recently—“windmills” are “losers.” But two utilities are now petitioning the administration to, pretty please, let them close their coal plants as planned.

Craig Generating Station’s Unit 1 is one of several coal plants targeted by the administration’s unusual “emergency orders” to remain open past their scheduled retirement. Obviously, environmental groups aren’t thrilled: Previous research has found that some 460,000 deaths in the United States were attributable to coal plant pollution between 1999 and 2020. But reviving coal was always a pretty foolish economic proposition, as well. “Reopening closed coal plants makes no economic sense,” two analysts at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis wrote last summer. The reason is simple: “As coal plants age, maintenance costs rise, pushing up their generation costs, making them uncompetitive.”

This is now precisely what two power utilities are saying in their petition. Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association and Platte River Power Authority, two co-operative utilities that run Craig Unit 1, along with three co-owners, weren’t just planning to close the plant to meet Colorado’s goal of phasing out coal by 2030. They were planning to close it because it’s extremely expensive to run, reports Canary Media’s Jeff St. John. One estimate suggests keeping the plant open merely 90 days could cost $20 million. The utilities are arguing, St. John writes, that “forcing them to operate it past December will require their members to bear unnecessary costs, which constitutes an ‘uncompensated taking’ of their property in violation of the Constitution.”

It’s one thing for environmentalists to point out that propping up fossil fuels makes no sense. It’s another thing for utilities themselves to say it.

Between this and being defeated five-nil on offshore wind, another administration might be feeling embarrassed right now (although not as embarrassed as it should have been for arguing that wind turbines pose a secret national security threat to begin with). And that’s typically the subtext when Bluesky liberals share these news stories—smugly or wryly noting further evidence of the administration’s consistent incompetence.

But this is a bit like Trump’s face-plant over the Kennedy Center—“an implicit admission of defeat,” in the words of The Atlantic’s David Graham. Trump now plans to close the storied D.C. arts institution for a complete reconstruction because, after a year with him at the helm promising to make the arts great again, droves of high-profile artists have canceled their performances and ticket sales have plummeted. It’s not working.

While it’s standard for political opponents to cheer when their adversaries are shown up repeatedly, there’s always a dark undercurrent to these stories when it comes to the Trump administration. The Kennedy Center has been a vital institution, and not just for Western high culture for well-dressed attendees, as originally intended, but through loads of free performances at its smaller stages, making arts from around the world accessible to residents in a way they wouldn’t otherwise have been and giving artists work and exposure they wouldn’t otherwise have had. Shutting it down will be a serious blow to the region’s arts.

This president doesn’t withdraw when humiliated. He just gets more vindictive and aggressive. And it’s worth emphasizing what that means on energy policy. As stupid and damaging as it is, the president’s attempt to revive coal is, to some extent, working. Coal plants aren’t just delaying retirement—they’re polluting more too, thanks to the administration’s environmental rollbacks. The toll of these policies will be measured in extra consumer costs, in health damage, as well as in lives and livelihoods lost in climate disasters.

Wind projects, likewise, may be free to proceed thanks to the courts but will suffer the effects of these delays. Wind investments are complicated. Delays are extremely expensive and have helped sink wind projects before. And it’s foolish to think that the administration will take the five-nil defeat and make its peace with renewables. Trump will just charge forward again like an enraged Don Quixote.

Stat of the Week
565,744 kids

That’s how many live “within 3 miles of a power plant or other corporate polluter that has received a two-year free pass from President Trump to avoid complying with toxic air pollution limits,” according to a new report from the Center for American Progress.

What I’m Reading

EPA set to reapprove dicamba, an herbicide previously banned by courts

The bizarre contradictions in the Make America Healthy Again agenda continue to accumulate. The Washington Post recently reviewed an “unreleased statement” showing the Environmental Protection Agency plans to reapprove dicamba, an herbicide so prone to drifting (even more than a mile) from its area of application that it’s been known to kill loads of crops it was never intended to kill.

The statement also mentioned that the EPA’s review of dicamba found no risk to human health.

Still, the decision could cause tension between the Trump administration and Make America Healthy Again activists who have advocated for more limits on herbicides and pesticides.

“The use of this pesticide has been economically devastating and socially divisive, which is why the courts ruled for its removal,” said Kelly Ryerson, known as “Glyphosate Girl” on social media.

Read Amudalat Ajasa’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.

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.