My step-grandmother was ferocious during our visits about keeping me and my teenaged cousins from uttering words that she said were just disguises for swears. “Gosh” and “golly” were out because, she said, these were substitutes for “God.” We weren’t allowed to say “shoot” because it was a replacement for you-know-what. “Darn,” “dang,” and even “doggone it” were literally verboten territory, although we were allowed to imitate her childhood German “Ach du lieber Himmel” (good heavens!). So I learned to sanitize my speech and it’s still mostly prim compared with my peers of whatever ideological persuasion or age.
But Ach du lieber Himmel won’t cut it so long as these goosestepping motherfuckers are on the march in Washington. As Elon Musk showed the other day with his Hitlergruß, the gap between our oligarchs in charge and guys in uniforms and armbands is narrowing. It should never be forgotten that those latter guys used the laws to get where they got and then changed the laws to keep themselves there.
That, obviously, is what Donald Trump has in mind as he showed with the deluge of extremist executive orders carved right out of the 900 pages of cultural, political, economic, and societal upending in Project 2025, the authoritarian manifesto No. 47 claimed in the campaign he had nothing to do with. I have lived long enough to know better than to make absolutist predictions. How successful the new administration will be clearly cannot be judged when it’s not even half-a-week in office. Despite the understandable fear, rage, and panic, there are obstacles to Trumpian victory. But just how much successful oppositional litigation and other kinds of resistance can be mustered is obviously unknown.
Known is that the prescribed upending now in the infant phase of implementation could have a giant negative impact on tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of Americans and thousands of millions of other humans. From crushing reproductive rights to enshrining royalist, racist, sexist privilege and xenophobic foreign policy, from kneecapping federal agencies to shoveling more money into the plutocrats’ maw, the administration is ready to give American governance a dark makeover. While its early tendrils were forged decades ago in the Heritage Foundation kiln, Project 2025 marks a sharp break with past incremental Republican weakening of federal policies and posits a revolution, or rather a counter-revolution since so much of the agenda is devoted to dismantling or reversing what exists.
The environment is, no surprise, one of the Project 2025 blueprint’s many targets. That the Donvict-President has taken up the cause makes happy the ideologues who’ve long been out to eviscerate if not eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency, gut science and health-related agencies, and force a retreat when it comes to penalizing companies for “leaking” methane, spilling oil, and the like. If Trump were to get his way with chopping the Inflation Reduction Act, it would among so many other things end assistance to states for shutting and decontaminating oil and gas wells orphaned by corporate abandonment, leaving clean-up to the taxpayers. Just one benefit to the fossil fuel companies that provided $445 million to Trump’s presidential campaign. There’ll be many more benefits to come if Trump has his way and Exxon, et al. have theirs.
One favored target is the EPA’s endangerment finding. Trump’s wide-ranging Unleashing American Energy executive order mandates (§6f) a report in 30 days "on the legality and continuing applicability" of the agency’s 2009 ruling that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threaten human health and can thus be regulated. The finding was made possible by a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling in 2007. It has since formed the legal foundation for the EPA’s climate restrictions for vehicles and power plants. Since these emissions are harmful to health given that human-caused climate change sickens and kills people, experts have argued that it would be hard to kill the endangerment ruling because, you know, facts.
But there is another fact. None of the five justices who ruled to authorize the EPA to assess whether greenhouse gases endangered people are now on the court. Three of the justices who voted against the EPA’s jurisdiction in the matter are still there.
In the months to come, Earth Matters will be looking at the impacts of the administration’s assault on the environment and the resistance against Trump, his minions, and the monied forces that put him back where he can help them harm the rest of us.
—Meteor Blades
WEEKLY ECO-VIDEO
(Given all the horrid news, I almost converted all of Earth Matters to cute animal videos today. But you’ll just have to settle for this.—MB)
RESOURCES & ACTION
- What does the Federal Emergency Management Agency do, and how is it funded
- Civil Eats’ Food Policy Tracker
- Sabin Center Climate Backtracker (monitoring Trump administration’s retreat on green transition.
- Sabin Center Inflation Reduction Act Tracker
- Sabin Center Silencing Science Tracker
- Mapped: Donald Trump’s Transatlantic Anti-Green Network
- How to Make Your Home and Yard Safe for Hummingbirds
- 17 Ways Trump’s Executive Orders Change U.S. Policy on Energy and the Environment
GREEN BRIEFS
Mayors react to Trump withdrawing U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement
Nearly 100 mayors of some of the world’s leading cities have joined C40 in a global network united in their efforts to confront the climate crisis. They have committed themselves to “using an inclusive, science-based and collaborative approach to cut their fair share of emissions in half by 2030, help the world limit global heating to 1.5°C [2.7°F], and build healthy, equitable and resilient communities.”
Mayors from Chicago, Phoenix, Seattle, London, and Paris responded to the news that Donald Trump, who has long made clear that he thinks climate scientists don’t know what they’re talking about, is withdrawing the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement, just as he did the last time he occupied the White House. Mark Watts, the C40 executive director, called Trump’s action “climate vandalism.” Here’s Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson:
“Chicago and our peer cities are, and will remain, at the forefront of climate action. As the new federal administration abandons its duty to protect the planet from environmental collapse, Chicago will not waver from our duty to protect our communities’ health, safety and well-being. This means making low-cost, clean energy accessible to all, creating good-paying jobs in the green economy and preparing our neighborhoods to withstand more frequent and extreme weather events. Regardless of federal action, Chicago reaffirms our commitment to our planet, our people and our neighborhoods and vows to make every effort to drastically reduce carbon emissions, minimize our reliance on fossil fuels and leverage every opportunity to enhance the quality of life of our residents.”
—Meteor Blades
Wildfires and Climate Change
The Union of Concerned Scientists put together some charts about the impact of the climate crisis on wildfires. Here’s one of them:
Global warming is causing snow to melt sooner and soils, forests, and plants to dry out more. The results: kindling. The weirding of the climate is producing more and more severe droughts, unusual rain and other weather patterns, and insect outbreaks like the pine beetle scourge that has spread big swaths of dead trees throughout much of the American and Canadian West. All these factors make wildfires more likely.
—Meteor Blades
China Achieved Another Record in 2024 with its renewable energy expansion
Let’s start with how much the United States increased renewable energy installations last year. That came in at 40.5 gigawatts of solar, three quarters of it in utility-scale projects, 14.2 GW of battery storage capacity, and (an estimated) 7.1 GW of wind power. For comparison, the installed U.S. electricity-generating capacity from ALL sources is about 1,300 GW.
Meanwhile, China added 277 GW of new solar installations and 80 GW of wind turbines. That brought China’s cumulative generating capacity from solar and wind to 1,408 GW, nearly 10% more than the total U.S. generating capacity from all sources. In 2020, President Xi Jinping announced a goal of 1,200 GW of renewables by 2030, a goal that was passed last year, six years early. China has built nearly twice as much solar and wind as every other country combined.
China also added in 2024 more hydropower, more nuclear power, and, sadly, more thermal power, which was most likely some form of fossil fuels, including coal.
For 2025, China expects to equal last year’s new installations, with the addition of another 273 GW of solar and 94 GW of wind. Raise your hand if you know what superpower is being left in the dust. d
—Meteor Blades
HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ (OR LISTEN TO)
Rural Minnesota counties work together to simplify clean energy development and maximize local benefits by Frank Jossi at Energy News Network. A long-running local government collaboration in southwestern Minnesota is helping to insulate the region from the kind of controversies and misinformation that have plagued rural clean energy projects in other states. The Rural Minnesota Energy Board has its origins in a regional task force that was set up during the mid-1990s as the state’s first wind farms were being built. The task force was instrumental in persuading state legislators in 2002 to create a wind energy production tax, which today generates millions of dollars in annual revenue for counties and townships that host wind projects. The group’s scope and membership has since gradually expanded to include 18 rural counties that pay monthly dues for support on energy policy and permitting. [...] “The rural energy board has been a critical, important body and one of the major reasons why renewable energy has been successful in southwestern Minnesota,” said Adam Sokolski, director of regulatory and legislative affairs at EDF Renewables North America. “Their policies have encouraged good decision-making over the years and led to a stable and productive region for energy development.”
How Four Years of Biden Reshaped Food and Farming by Lisa Held at Mongabay. During his first presidential term, Donald Trump attempted to cut funding to hunger programs, implemented agricultural tariffs, tax cuts, and record-setting payments to commodity farmers, and rolled back regulations affecting environmental pollution, labor standards, food safety, and nutrition. Despite no big changes to agricultural policy as a result of a farm bill still stalled in Congress, Biden’s governing of the food system looked very different. Over the past four years, the Biden administration’s priorities have centered on spending billions of dollars on food and farm infrastructure, paying farmers to implement climate-smart practices, finalizing new regulations related to the environment, labor, food safety, and nutrition, and distributing more dollars to food insecure families.
Traditional ecological knowledge isn’t dying — it’s adapting and transforming by Anna Juliet Stephens at Mongabay. As the tide of homogenizing globalization rises, traditional Indigenous lifestyles and knowledge come under threat. Today, these communities occupy a significant portion of the Earth’s territory containing vast amounts of the world’s biodiversity. Nevertheless, approximately one Indigenous language dies out every other week. In a paper extolling the virtues of traditional medicine amid its rapid decline in the year 2000, U.S. ethnobotanist Paul Alan Cox posed a thought-provoking question: Will tribal knowledge endure into the new millennium? During my visit to one of roughly 200 Ashaninka communities living in and around the Peruvian Amazon, this question weighed on my mind: How will traditional ecological knowledge continue to survive in our rapidly changing, modernizing and globalized world? But in this region, I witnessed how traditional knowledge is not dying out, but is rather adapting and transforming. Ancient knowledge of nomadic hunting and living in the rainforest, for example, is now being used for shifting agricultural systems, tourism and to generate jobs for the local youth. Near Tournavista district, the Naranjal are building contemporary livelihoods centered on land management, artisanal products and a strong cultural identity.
As Oceans Warm, Predators Are Falling Out of Sync with Their Prey by Andrew S. Lewis at Yale Environment 360. In the sea as on land, climate change is driving shifts in the abundance and distribution of species. Scientists are just beginning to focus on why some fish predators and prey— like striped bass and menhaden on the U.S. East Coast—are changing their behavior as waters warm. Phenology is the seasonal timing of lifecycle events, like spawning and migration. Think of how honeybees emerge from their hives just as spring flowers bloom, or how in autumn, the monarch butterfly migrates south to Mexico as milkweed begins to die off in the United States. Phenological mismatch, however, occurs when these intricate, interspecies relationships fall out of sync due to changes in the environment. Terrestrial cases of phenological mismatch have been well documented. For example, detailed analysis has shown that, over the past 29 years, monarch migration has been delayed by six days due to warming temperatures, triggering mismatches with food availability during the journey and failures to reach overwintering sites. But in the oceans, phenological mismatch has been far less studied. Every scientist interviewed for this story noted that while there has been good research on single-species phenology in marine environments, there remains precious little understanding of multispecies phenological mismatch.
2025 Renewable Energy Outlook: Full speed ahead as second Trump administration begins by Diana DiGangi at Utility Dive. After decades of flat load growth, U.S. electricity demand could rise 128 [gigawatts] over the next five years, according to a report last month from Grid Strategies. (That’s about 10% of the current U.S. generating capacity from all energy sources—MB.) At the same time, the number of new transmission interconnection requests has risen by 300% to 500% over the last decade, with 2.5 terawatts of clean energy and storage capacity currently waiting to connect to the grid, said an October report from the Department of Energy. However, Heather O’Neill—president and CEO of Advanced Energy United—said “the macro trends are incredibly positive … We are in the middle of an energy transformation.” She attributed some of her optimism to the scale of investment and growth that the industry has been seeing. The energy storage sector is especially dynamic right now, O’Neill said: “A few years ago, [there was] very little in the way of storage capacity showing up, but with so much innovation in the technology, the cost curves are coming down. When we think about how to manage load, storage plays a key role in that.”
We Will All Be Paying for L.A.’s Wildfires by Lois Parshley at The Lever. To summarize: California’s FAIR Plan, the state-backed insurance program, is struggling under $450 billion in liabilities, far exceeding its reserves of $385 million, putting homeowners on the hook for costs. Commissioner Ricardo Lara’s reforms allow insurers to pass costs to consumers while using controversial risk models, raising concerns about fairness and transparency. Similar insurance crises are spreading nationwide as climate disasters outpace states' ability to cover damages, threatening the U.S. economy. (Some activists have been saying for years that a lot of climate science deniers will have their belated epiphany when the insurance crisis strikes. It’s here, folks.)
WEEKLY BLUESKY POST
ECOPINION
Will L.A.’s Fires Permanently Disperse the Black Families of Altadena? by Emily Witt at The New Yorker. In a Los Angeles suburb, multigenerational families like the Benns found affordable housing and a deep sense of connection. After the devastating fires, many wonder whether they’ll be able to rebuild what they’ve lost. The first member of the Benn family to settle in Altadena, California, was Charles Benn, who had grown up outside of Atlanta and served in the Korean War. In the late 1950s, Charles was transferred by the Army to California and bought a house on Glenrose Avenue, north of Loma Alta Drive. Most of his 15 siblings, including his brothers Herman and Oscar, soon followed him. They were among a wave of Black people who left the Jim Crow South to seek opportunity elsewhere. At the time, much of Altadena, a suburb north of Pasadena in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, was neither wealthy nor in high demand, and its bungalows and ranch houses were affordable. Some of the first Black families to move there settled in an area of west Altadena called the Meadows, whose residents included the artist Charles White and the first Black firefighter in Pasadena, Wilfred Duncan. “If you wanted to buy a nice house that was larger, that had a pool or some of the nicer amenities that you were expecting, you would come to Altadena,” Anton Anderson, who grew up in Altadena and is descended from the Benns on his mother’s side, told me. “It was the Black middle class.”
I’m an economist. Here’s why I’m worried the California insurance crisis could trigger broader financial instability by Gary W. Yohe at The Conversation.It’s been widely accepted for more than a decade that humanity has three choices when it comes to responding to climate risks: adapt, abate or suffer. As an expert in economics and the environment, I know that some degree of suffering is inevitable — after all, humans have already raised the average global temperature by 1.6 degrees Celsius, or 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s why it’s so important to have functioning insurance markets. While insurance companies are often cast as villains, when the system works well, insurers play an important role in improving social welfare. When an insurer sets premiums that accurately reflect and communicate risk — what economists call “actuarially fair insurance” — that helps people share risk efficiently, leaving every individual safer and society better off. But the scale and intensity of the Southern California fires — linked in part to climate change, including record-high global temperatures in 2023 and again in 2024 — has brought a big problem into focus: In a world impacted by increasing climate risk, traditional insurance models no longer apply.
Oil and Gas Companies Should Pay for the Los Angeles Fires by Dave Jones, former insurance commissioner for California in a New York Times guest essay. The disaster in Los Angeles, driven by climate change, has killed at least 27 people, destroyed more than 15,000 structures and caused up to an estimated $275 billion in damage. Insurers alone could face $30 billion in claims, increasing the likelihood that more companies will stop covering properties in California and other climate-affected states. As insurance costs soar, more homeowners may struggle to keep up with mortgage payments, risking widespread defaults. [...] Major oil and gas companies have known for decades that burning their products could lead to “potentially catastrophic events,” like the higher temperatures and abnormally dry conditions that fed the fires still being battled in Los Angeles. Exxon scientists warned about this internally starting in the 1970s. Instead of disclosing these risks, big oil companies deliberately misled the public, policymakers and investors. According to a years-long congressional investigation, even as these companies publicly pledged to meaningfully contribute to a transition away from fossil fuels, they were privately working to continue production for decades to come. We should require these highly profitable companies to compensate communities, homeowners, businesses and even insurers for the losses. And while this might sound like a big lift, there are ways that states and local governments can start taking action today.
China Will Be Thrilled if Trump Kills America’s Green Economy by Jennifer Granholm in a guest essay at The New York Times. The United States’ electricity demand will grow 15 percent over the next decade because of new data centers, factories and transportation. If the Trump administration forces the loss of wind, solar and other clean energy jobs, we’ll lose access to the technologies that help make up our energy mix. Monthly utility bills will rise, and brownouts and blackouts will become regular experiences. The administration is also deluding itself if it believes “drill, baby, drill” will create a jobs boom. The United States is already the world’s largest oil producer and gas exporter. A combination of tepid oil prices and subdued market demand has left many industry leaders weary of making major investments to increase output.
OTHER GREEN STUFF
We Needed More Time’: As Biden Leaves Office, His Climate Legacy Remains Incomplete
Cycle of coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef now at 'catastrophic' levels
Shlock and Awe: The Los Angeles fires shine a light on the wretched excess of the very rich.
Southern California wildfires likely outpace ability of wildlife to adapt
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