What Does Kristi Noem’s Firing Mean for a Hobbled FEMA?

In the days since President Trump announced that he was firing Kristi Noem as homeland security secretary and replacing her with Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin, much of the focus has understandably been on what this means for the brutal, chaotic, and lawless immigration policy that Noem has spearheaded. But there’s another area within DHS where Noem’s departure raises rather urgent questions about a possible change in policies. And that’s at FEMA.

Noem was in the middle of a project to shrink the Federal Emergency Management Agency significantly, having announced large staffing cuts in January. She’d also floated the idea of dismantling it entirely.

Her firing last Thursday came only a day after Senate Democrats released a report showing that Noem’s policy of requiring sign-off on any expenditure over $100,000 had resulted in “at least 1,034 FEMA contracts, grants, or disaster assistance awards” being held up—among them, disaster aid for survivors of Hurricane Helene and Texas’s deadly floods last summer (which killed at least 135 people, including 27 at a girls’ summer camp). And the day after Noem’s firing was announced, a judge gave FEMA 14 days to inform states about the status of their Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grants, a multibillion-dollar program that a court in December ordered reinstated—with no sign of compliance from FEMA.

Meanwhile, FEMA remains largely shuttered due to the DHS shutdown. And the administration recently spent “more than half of the balance in the nation’s disaster relief fund,” according to Politico, “pointing to that dwindling aid as [a] means to pressure Democrats into yielding in Department of Homeland Security funding negotiations.”

What exactly does Markwayne Mullin intend to do about all this? I asked two experts what they would be watching for in the coming weeks to determine whether Mullin would represent a serious shift from Noem’s policies, and whether FEMA would be able to handle disasters this year.

“Shutdowns come and go,” said Bryan Koon, president and chief executive officer at global emergency management consulting firm IEM and former director of the Florida Division of Emergency. “We tend to find ways to work around whatever issues are associated with that.” But he pointed to the FEMA Review Council report that the president ordered last year to determine policy changes at the agency. “It’s been now a year of uncertainty,” Koon said. “We’ve heard ideas about what might be in it, but frankly I would like to have some certainty, some insight into what the council’s going to recommend.” He noted that Trump already extended the timeline through the end of March. “I’m concerned that the transition between Noem and Mullin as secretary, combined with the shutdown, is going to delay that even further or even potentially render it moot,” he said.

Koon would consider the release of the report as one indicator of FEMA’s overall health at present. “A second would be an actual emergency or disaster that required FEMA to be all in. We were remarkably, as a nation, pretty lucky in 2025, and thus far in 2026—I mean, we had no landfalling hurricanes.”

Tim Manning, a former deputy administrator at FEMA, agreed. “I think they dodged a bullet,” he said, regarding last year’s hurricane season. “I and most of the emergency management community have great concerns for FEMA’s readiness. It is a collection of the most selfless, dedicated people in the government,” he said, “but there’s no getting around that they’ve been decimated over the past year and a half.” He pointed to layoffs, the firing of most senior leadership, the “onerous level of review” for grants, and more. “At every turn, the Noem administration has made decisions that dramatically degrade FEMA’s readiness and capabilities.”

If Markwayne Mullin is formally nominated and sits for confirmation—a big if, given that Trump’s first administration was marked by an unprecedented number of acting Cabinet secretaries working without Senate confirmation—Manning suggested that senators ask him about that directly. “I think the question I would ask Mullin during his confirmation hearing would be a question that I’ve tried to get people to ask Noem for the last year: The law explicitly says that the secretary does not have the authority to degrade FEMA’s mission or move resources,” he said. “I would be curious to get any nominee on the record: Will you follow the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act and restrict yourself from impacting the FEMA budget?” And as a secondary question: “Will you rescind any of the policies that have prevented the deployment and travel of FEMA’s employees to disaster sites?”

In the meantime, the current readiness of state and federal emergency agencies has people worried. “I went through at least one shutdown as a state director,” Manning said. And state directors need to know of FEMA, “Will they be on the other end of the phone when I need them?”

This is also hurricane preparation season. “Most states are going to do a state-wide hurricane exercise,” said Koon. “They’re going to do a large-scale event that allows them to test their plans and processes and coordinations and look at who their partners are and contracts are and who’s going to do what in what scenarios.” In Florida, where he has experience, it’s “a weeklong event sometime in May,” which requires some advance planning.

Perhaps it’s better, Koon said, for the impact of the shutdown to be felt now, in March, rather than in May or when a hurricane hits. But there’s never an ideal time. Wildfire season isn’t a season anymore. Earthquakes and other disasters can happen at any time, Manning noted. “There’s no seasonality to disasters,” he said. “Preparedness is a year-round thing.”

Stat of the Week
0.35 degrees per decade

That’s the rate of warming we’ve been experiencing since 2015, according to a new paper. It’s almost twice the previous rate—0.2 degrees per decade. In other words, as several scientists have warned, climate change is accelerating—although exactly how much is the subject of some debate.

What I’m Reading

How Trump’s EPA rollbacks give states new tools in climate suits

The Guardian’s Dharna Noor reports on a fascinating implication of the administration’s decision to kill the so-called “endangerment finding”—it may actually help state-based climate laws in court:

Trump’s justice department has asked a judge to kill a first-of-its-kind 2024 Vermont “climate superfund” policy requiring major polluters to pay for damages caused by their past planet-heating pollution, partly on the grounds that federal law, not state law, governs greenhouse gas emissions. But last month, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) repealed the endangerment finding, the scientific determination giving federal officials the authority to control those very pollutants.

“They’re trying to talk out of both sides of their mouths,” said Kate Sinding Daly, senior vice-president for law and policy at the environmental legal non-profit Conservation Law Foundation (CLF).

Read Dharna Noor’s full report at The Guardian.

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

As some see it, the Texas Republican primary for U.S. Senate is a battle for the future of the party: Longtime incumbent John Cornyn represents the conservative establishment, while Attorney General Ken Paxton is a rising MAGA firebrand. After Tuesday’s election, that battle will continue, as neither candidate broke 50 percent, and therefore they will face each other in a runoff in May. While Cornyn is a staunch fossil fuel ally—no one would mistake him for an environmentalist—Paxton has gone a step further, pioneering an unorthodox attack on renewable energy that upends a long-standing conservative principle.

Paxton’s ascent is notable for a few reasons. Coverage of the race typically notes his impressive array of scandals and legal imbroglios, such as being indicted for securities fraud in 2015; being successfully sued by four of his own deputies in 2020 after he allegedly fired them for reporting him to the FBI for abusing his office to help a wealthy donor; dropping $2.3 million in campaign money on private lawyers to defend him in his impeachment trial; and being accused of infidelity by his wife, state Senator Angela Paxton, who filed for divorce shortly after the launch of his Senate campaign. Paxton has also made headlines for his hard-line positions as attorney general, such as declaring in 2022 that his office would consider gender-affirming health care for trans kids to be a form of “child abuse” and threatening multiple Texas hospitals with legal consequences if they were to provide a court-approved abortion to a Texas mother of two with elevated medical risks.

But it’s arguably in his environmental actions that Paxton most clearly exemplifies the growing battle over what the Republican Party stands for. And it’s not because of the industries his work has typically championed (coal) or demonized (renewable energy, particularly wind power). It’s because of the way he’s pursued his goals.

Paxton has been one of the foremost crusaders in recent years in the growing conservative war on ESG—short for “environmental, social, and governance” principles, which may be adopted by companies or used in investing decisions. In this camp’s view, ESG is part of a “woke agenda” to discriminate against fossil fuels.

In late 2024, Paxton and 10 other Republican state attorneys general sued three large asset managers—Vanguard, Blackrock, and State Street—alleging a “conspiracy” to “artificially constrict the market for coal through anticompetitive trade practices.” As TNR’s Kate Aronoff noted at the time, this was a striking argument, given that coal use was declining for purely economic reasons and “the three financial firms Paxton is suing, moreover, have never given the impression of being all that committed to environmental goals.”

But the suit also indicated a move away from the Republican Party’s typical championing of free-market ideology. “Traditionally the conservative legal movement has been very in favor of investor choice,” said Yale law professor Joshua Macey. The “typical” conservative position on ESG investing might be to say that if corporate and personal investors “don’t like Vanguard’s approach to ESG they can go to a different fund. But Paxton decided to work with the power of the state to be incredibly prescriptive about what mutual funds and index funds can do.”

Last week, Vanguard settled the suit for $29.5 million. BlackRock and State Street continue to fight it.

Vanguard’s settlement was more likely driven by political strategy than a belief that it would lose the case, two experts I spoke to said. The suit in general “did not make strong legal arguments,” said Macey, although he noted that the case raised an “intellectually interesting problem” that academics have previously identified about when investor ownership of publicly traded corporations could potentially start to raise antitrust concerns. “To my knowledge, there has never been evidence brought that would satisfy the Sherman or Clayton acts that this is occurring,” Macey said, “but it’s the one legal argument that was both interesting and would not have been dismissed out of hand.”

This lawsuit is one of a few ways that Texas and Paxton have helped lead the conservative fight against ESG investing and the energy transition more broadly. Danielle Fugere, president and chief counsel of As You Sow, a group focused on social and environmental change via shareholder advocacy, pointed to Senate Bill 13, the state’s 2021 law banning investment and contracts with financial institutions deemed to be “boycotting” various energy companies, i.e., fossil fuels. Paxton in 2023 announced that his office would be investigating 21 financial institutions to see whether they were boycotting fossil fuels—a remarkable declaration given that the banks listed included Bank of America, JP Morgan, and Wells Fargo, all of which consistently top the lists of fossil fuel financers. A federal judge ruled last month that S.B. 13 was unconstitutional.

To Fugere, the actions of Paxton and his allies here aren’t just anti-environmental but “anti-capitalist,” in that they go against investors’ financial incentives. “As an investor,” she said, “if you care about your client’s ability to make money on the market, you’re concerned about climate change. If you’re investing in automakers that are behind in electric vehicle technology, you have to ask the question, Is this company going to be in business for the long term if it’s missing out on new technology?”

Both Fugere and Macey noted that coal is hard to defend from a free-market standpoint. “In some ways,” Macey said, “Republicans could be celebrating the Texas electricity market, which has consistently driven down costs in what appears to be the most aggressive free-market approach, and also has the most installed renewable capacity of any market in the country.”

The conservative antipathy to renewable energy isn’t new, of course, but Macey noted that the explicit rejection of free-market ideology is. “Paxton signals a shift in not even the Republican Party or conservative legal movement’s views about environmental protection,” he said, “but how they understand regulation of the corporation and the corporate form—to a more highly prescriptive approach that limits shareholder discretion.” It’s “a 180-degree shift from what they have done for the previous thirty years.”

Paxton’s face-off with Cornyn, then, will be more than merely a conflict between a scandal-ridden hard-liner and a more traditional conservative. It’s also a contest about how far the Republican Party is willing to go, overturning decades of free-market conservatism in its crusade against renewable energy.

Stat of the Week
$43.6 billion

That’s the amount of tax money estimated to be spent on tax credits for carbon sequestration. The number figures prominently in a letter recently signed by over 125 environmental groups, calling for Congress to stop extending these tax credits given to oil and gas companies that capture carbon only to use it in “enhanced oil recovery.” Read South Dakota Searchlight’s coverage of the topic here.

What I’m Reading

Noem’s spending limits have frozen millions in disaster aid, Democratic report charges

Department of Homeland Security head Kristi Noem’s policy of requiring her personal approval for expenditures over $100,000 is holding up huge quantities of disaster aid, according to a new report from Senate Democrats. The Trump administration disputes the claim, but The Washington Post notes that the report, compiled with the help of whistleblowers, “corroborate[s]” accounts the Post has independently received from “numerous current and former Federal Emergency Management Agency officials” about the funding delays:

The report identifies what it says are “at least 1,034 FEMA contracts, grants, or disaster assistance awards” that have been delayed or remain pending, including for victims of July’s deadly flooding in Texas and the catastrophic Hurricane Helene, which hit swaths of the Southeast in the fall of 2024.… It identifies a range of programs it says were affected, including leasing of rental units for Hurricane Helene survivors; urban search and rescue in North Carolina; technical assistance task orders for multiple disasters in Florida; unemployment assistance for Texas, Oklahoma and Kentucky; housing inspections for storm-battered homes; and crisis counseling.

Read Brianna Sacks’s and Brady Dennis’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.

Why is water so different from air? It sounds like the start of a joke. But it’s a fair thing to wonder after the Trump administration last week officially revoked the so-called endangerment finding, a 2009 scientific conclusion that climate change threatens human health and that greenhouse gases were therefore an appropriate subject for federal regulation under the Clean Air Act.

This move paves the way for the elimination of all federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. These rollbacks may kill a lot of people long before the associated climate effects kick in, though, because the emissions that the government has been regulating also reduce general pollution. The Environmental Defense Fund projects that the rollbacks could trigger an extra 37 million asthma attacks between now and 2055.

The Trump administration is not at all concerned about blowback, though, and in fact was making victory laps much of last week, with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum saying that all the extra carbon dioxide in the air would be good for plants.

Contrast that with how eagerly President Trump is trying to blame Democrats for a recent large sewage spill into the Potomac River.

“Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., who are responsible for the massive sewage spill in the Potomac River, must get to work, IMMEDIATELY,” the president posted Tuesday on Truth Social. “If they can’t do the job, they have to call me and ask, politely, to get it fixed. The Federal Government is not at all involved with what has taken place, but we can fix it,” he added. “This is a Radical Left caused Environmental Hazard.”

None of this is true, of course—as Maryland Governor Wes Moore pointed out, the federal government is actually responsible for overseeing the segment of sewer line that failed. And maybe that’s why Trump decided to weigh in.

But this is also an odd issue for Trump to highlight. Although the spill of over 200 million gallons of raw sewage is widely being referred to as the largest in the nation’s history, it hasn’t resulted in any boil-water advisories yet—and water quality is not exactly a signature Trump issue anyway. In his first administration, he scrapped the Clean Water Rule, significantly narrowing the scope of federal water protections. This time around, his administration is also attempting to roll back federal protections.

This isn’t the only story recently suggesting that clean water may have political significance that clean air doesn’t. Last week, Charlie Hope-D’Anieri wrote about the wild-card candidacy of a retired water scientist running for secretary of agriculture in Iowa. Chris Jones almost certainly will not win, Hope-D’Anieri acknowledged. But he’s upending long-standing, almost sacred conventions in Iowa politics by challenging the ethanol industry, and arguing “that farmers should be required to make basic, specific adjustments to their practices to prevent the ruination of the state’s water supply.” And, perhaps surprisingly, he’s getting some traction, including good turnout at campaign events.

On Tuesday, Inside Climate News reported a new poll that suggests Jones’s early success is not just a freak accident. “Eighty-five percent of voters in Iowa’s first and third U.S. House districts,” reports Anika Jane Beamer, “say they would be more likely to vote for an elected official who prioritizes protecting clean water, including cutting industrial agriculture pollution.” These are both “vulnerable, narrowly Republican districts,” Beamer notes. It’s not impossible that these will be some of the districts that determine whether Democrats flip the House in November.

“It’s very clear that Iowa’s water crisis has reached a boiling point,” Food & Water Action political director Sam Bernhardt reportedly said at a press conference announcing the poll results.

Now, you might be inclined to dismiss any single poll along these lines—and it’s worth noting that Food & Water Action did commission this one. But it’s also consistent with prior polling showing that water quality is a strikingly popular issue, which doesn’t seem as vulnerable to the partisan divides seen on other environmental topics. Pew polling from 2023 found that 63 percent of people thought the federal government was doing “too little” to “protect water quality of lakes, rivers and streams,” and only 7 percent said it was doing “too much”—making it the top issue when compared to air quality, climate change, protecting animals and their habitats, and protecting natural parks and nature preserves.

Regular polling from the Value of Water Campaign has also found that the number of voters calling “reliable water access” a “very” or “extremely important” issue has been rising for five years straight.

There are some caveats, of course, to how far political concern over water quality can go. The water crisis in Flint, Michigan, reached appalling levels for years, and it didn’t seem to make a huge political difference. A lot of people are comfortable ignoring quality issues with other people’s water.

Still, the political relevance of water availability and quality doesn’t seem likely to fade in the near future. It’s a key concern for the MAHA segment of Trump’s supporters. And the water crisis playing out in the American West, as the Colorado River dries up, is only getting worse, affecting both blue states and red. This past weekend, the seven states trying to negotiate a solution to this missed their deadline for a second time.

Water might not be a deciding factor in the midterms this November—there are a lot of issues that might take that prize. But as a political issue, it’s not going away.

Stat of the Week
3 degrees Celsius

That’s the level of global warming a new report says governments need to prepare for—double the 1.5 degree Celsius (2.7 degree Fahrenheit) limit that leaders agreed to in 2015.

What I’m Reading

As Trump Obliterates Climate Efforts, States Try to Fill the Gap

As the Trump administration scraps the endangerment finding, Maxine Joselow has a timely report for The New York Times about how some states are trying to step up in the climate fight.

The end of federal greenhouse gas limits is an obstacle, but not a death knell, in the fight against climate change on the state level, experts said.

Colorado helps explain why.

In 2019, Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, set an ambitious goal of reducing the state’s greenhouse gas emissions 50 percent by 2030, from 2005 levels. Colorado is now on track to meet this goal by 2032, a two-year delay for which local leaders have largely blamed the Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks.

Read Maxine Joselow’s full report at The New York Times.

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

Last 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.

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

On Monday, 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.