Earth Matters: On the environment, some good news, some not-so-good news, some effing Trump news

No way can all the tears triggered by the ongoing evisceration of federal programs, agencies, and departments be counted. The potential toll — including the childhood death toll — just from smashing USAID programs abroad and Medicaid at home could be immense. And there is, of course, so much more, a daily litany of items the DOGE gang is taking their machete to. If you don’t know someone who is or fears becoming a victim of this onslaught, you’re living a sheltered life.

The environment is also going to get it in the neck. Whether it’s kneecapping the Environmental Protection Agency,  trashing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, sabotaging the transition to renewable energy while giving the fossil fuel industry whatever leeway it wants, or using “emergency” powers to evade rules that protect endangered species and require polluters to pay, the administration is filled with appointees determined to curb what they label “regulatory overreach” and open the door to reckless exploitation.

The already understaffed Forest Service and America’s public forests are among the targets. The Forest Service oversees 154 national forests and 20 grasslands on 193 million acres, about 8% of the total land in the United States. In addition to forest management, it’s responsible for fire-fighting and fire mitigation, managing fisheries, and monitoring impacts of climate change. Its mission requires it to combine conservation with extraction of minerals and other resources like timber. Policywise, there has long been a tug-of-war between those who want to lean heavily toward one or the other of those purposes.

Shi Em Kim at High Country News writes:

Forest Service employees generally tackle arduous, unglamorous work that, if done correctly, is invisible to most of those who benefit from it. Every winter, when visitor numbers dip along with the temperature, snowstorms and avalanches topple trees and wreck infrastructure. Come spring, agency personnel begin clearing trails and repairing structures to prepare for the summer crowds. In designated wilderness areas, where mechanized tools are prohibited, not even power drills or wheelbarrows are allowed. Licensed trail managers like [Matt[ Ross clear routes using crosscut saws, axes and occasionally an explosive or two.

This kind of backbreaking work forges camaraderie. Many described this inherent sense of community as another perk, on top of knowing that they’re working toward improving public access to the outdoors as mandated by The National Trails System Act of 1968. “This is a job I absolutely love,” Ross said. “It was stripped away from me by somebody who wasn’t even in our organization, let alone in the chain of command.”

Before 3,400 mostly probationary employees were summarily fired last month, the Forest Service had about 35,000 on the payroll, including seasonal workers who will not be hired next year. That’s a 30% smaller workforce than 30 years ago.

In a story from Grist and its partners, Anders Reynolds with the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit that litigates environmental issues in the southeastern U.S., said, “It’s catastrophic. We are losing an entire generation of talent and passion.”

That may not be all that is lost. Taze Henderson was a Forest Service employee in Washington state’s Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest until he was fired last month. He told Jeremy Lindfeld at Capital & Main, “I think we’re going to lose our federal government land. I think in the next four years, the Forest Service just won’t be around anymore.”

Raymond Beaupre worked as part of the Okanogan-Wenatchee’s wilderness trail staff before getting fired. Profit-driven timber harvesters will be more “bloodthirsty,” potentially endangering the ecosystem, according to Beaupre. “It’s like letting the fox into the hen house,” he said.  

Beaupre warned that a downsized Forest Service would also limit recreational opportunities, as many trails require consistent upkeep to stay accessible. Without regular maintenance, fallen logs and erosion ultimately lead to trail loss.

Even before the firings, staffing and funding shortages had already led to trail loss. “Our district used to have 1,200 miles of trails. Now we fight as hard as we can to maintain 450 of those miles,” Beaupre said.

President Trump himself has given good reason for alarm. Last Saturday he issued an executive order calling for stepped-up logging on 280 million acres of national forests and other public lands. He asserted that this is a matter of national security, and the U.S. is too dependent on other nations for timber resources. In fact, it got nearly 50% of its timber from Canada in 2021, but it also exported $10 billion worth of forest products to Canada.

Tom Schultz, the guy freshly in charge of the Forest Service after former chief Tom Moore resigned in frustration, is a former timber lobbyist who was vice president of resources and government affairs at Idaho Forest Group. There he ran timber procurement operations and was a liaison with government officials. He also was previously director of the Idaho Department of Lands, a post from which he could and did grease the skids on mineral extraction from millions of acres of the state’s public lands. Like the oil lobbyist Kathleen Sgamma, who Trump has named to lead the Bureau of Land Management, Schultz is no doubt poised to do the bidding of people and corporations who long have complained about “heavy-handed” federal control over so much land in the West.

Anna Medema, Sierra Club’s associate director of legislative and administrative advocacy for forests and public lands, said in a written statement: “The timber industry is jumping for joy with this nomination. Let’s be clear, Tom Schultz is no outsider — he is the consummate logging industry insider. He’s not going to turn over a new leaf with this role, but will continue to serve the interests of that industry as the head of the Forest Service. Naming a corporate lobbyist to run the agency tasked with overseeing the last old growth left in the U.S. makes it clear that the Trump administration’s goal isn’t to preserve our national forests, but to sell them off to billionaires and corporate polluters.”

—Meteor Blades

Related: 

Trump’s Executive Order on Forests ‘A Devastating Blow,’ Activists SayCuts Could

Close Campsites and Trails in California, Forest Service Memo Says

WEEKLY ECO-VIDEO

GREEN BRIEFS

Women’s Day Renewables Webinar 

For their part in celebrating International Women’s Day, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and Global Women’s Network for the Energy Transition are co-organizing a webinar, titled Accelerate Action: Rights, Equality, Empowerment for All Women and Girls through Renewable Energy on Tuesday, March 11, at 5 p.m. GST (that’s 5 a.m. Pacific time). The online panel will look at how to ensure all women and girls “have the skills, opportunities, and access needed to thrive in the energy sector. Considering that the renewable energy workforce is predicted to grow to about 39 million in 2050, the attraction and retention of female talent will be crucial to ensure a thriving sector, and requires targeted actions.” 

Federal Whale Watchers Purged

Last week, the Trump-Musk crew summarily fired 800 employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Among its many tasks is monitoring offshore wind projects to mitigate any harm to marine life, including whales. Many of those laid off include climate and wildlife scientists whose jobs included certifying that offshore wind development doesn’t violate wildlife protection laws. A biologist who monitors the endangered North Atlantic right whale said she got one of DOGE’s notorious termination emails late on the afternoon of February 27. When she spoke with the energy-focused Canary Media five hours later, her access to NOAA’s email server had already been cut off.

She was part of a three-person team that NOAA Southeast Fisheries Science Center set up to monitor and protect North Atlantic right whales at their calving grounds. It’s estimated fewer than 375 of the giant creatures remain, so every death counts. NOAA seeks to ensure vessels constructing wind turbines as well as other ships and boats avoid the animals. Clare Fieseler reports:

Right whales have also been central to influential misinformation campaigns aimed at stopping offshore wind developments. Advocacy groups, some with backing from right-leaning think tanks like the Caesar Rodney Institute, have brought lawsuits to halt permitting on the false premise that offshore wind turbines are harmful to right whales.

36 Fossil Fuel Companies Spew More than Half the World’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions

In a new report, InfluenceMap, using its Carbon Majors database, found that just 36 companies, many of them state-owned, were responsible for 20 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2023. That year, the total of global CO₂ emissions hit a record-breaking 37.4 million tons.

The companies include Saudi Aramco, Shell, ExxonMobil, Coal India, and several Chinese firms. The report calculated emissions from the burning of coal, oil, and gas by 169 major fossil fuel companies. Ninety-three of them increased their total emissions compared to 2022.

Included in the report is data from 1854 to 2023, which shows that two thirds of carbon emissions have come from 180 companies since then. A third of these historic emissions have come from just 26 companies.

Costa Rican diplomat Christiana Figueres, who has a monumentally extensive climate-related résumé, said: “The Carbon Majors are keeping the world hooked on fossil fuels with no plans to slow production. While states drag their heels on their Paris Agreement commitments, state-owned companies are dominating global emissions—ignoring the desperate needs of their citizens. The science is clear: we cannot move backwards to more fossil fuels and more extraction. Instead, we must move forward to the many possibilities of a decarbonized economic system that works for people and the planet.”

RESEARCH & STUDIES

• After 120 years of conservation efforts, Yellowstone bison are a single breeding population, researchers discover. Texas A&M University study published in Journal of Heredity
• New Research Exposes Shocking Health Risks of Chemicals Found in Popular Everyday Products. Green Science Policy Institute study published in Nature Sustainability
• Global Warming Will Weaken Earth’s Strongest Ocean Current study published in Environmental Research Letters.
• Over-planting of GM corn costing farmers billions published in Science.
• New data show widespread chemical contamination of drinking water as analyzed by the Environmental Working Group.

HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ (OR LISTEN TO)

The Fate of EV Tax Credits. At his top-notch Volts newsletter, veteran environmental journalist David Roberts interviewed Al Gore III, executive director of the Zero Emission Transportation, about the EV tax credit that Donald Trump has vowed to kill. From Roberts’ intro: “On one hand, the manufacturing tax credits have helped build a ton of EV battery and manufacturing capacity in red states. On the other hand, it has practically become conventional wisdom that the consumer EV tax credit is doomed. My guest today disagrees with that prediction. He certainly disagrees with the prescription. Albert Gore leads the Zero Emission Transportation Association, a trade group representing companies up and down the EV supply chain. Naturally, he has many thoughts on these matters. We are going to talk all about the credits — their history, the effects they've had so far, the amount of bipartisan support they maintain, and what might become of them in the coming years. So, let's get into it.”

Climate change is harming the health of Americans, and they know it by Keerti Gopal at Inside Climate News. In the past decade, Americans have become increasingly aware that climate change is harming the health of people in the U.S., according to a new survey. The survey, which was conducted in December and released Friday, also shows increased trust in physicians, climate scientists, federal agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency, local public health departments and the World Health Organization for providing information about the health harms of global warming. These sources of information are under threat: President Donald Trump’s administration has proposed cutting most of the EPA’s budget and initiated mass firings at the CDC, taken down climate and health information from government websites, frozen or revoked funding for some climate research and interventions, stalled environmental justice initiatives and proposed rescinding a 16-year-old federal finding that mandates government action on greenhouse gases. Trump also withdrew the U.S. from the World Health Organization and the Paris climate accord.

Trump’s Return Prompts Companies to Stifle Climate Talk With ‘Greenhushing’ by Coco Liu and Olivia Rudgard at Bloomberg Green. As CEO of Caelux, Scott Graybeal runs a California startup that makes high-efficiency glass for solar panels. For years, climate change had been a crucial part of Graybeal’s business conversations — until Trump was re-elected. “We have very quickly shifted gears to the other type of conversations,” Graybeal says. By that, he means to downplay his company’s role in producing carbon-free electricity and instead, highlight its contributions outside sustainability, such as domestic job creation, onshore manufacturing and energy independence — all of which resonate with the new administration’s priorities. “It is not being manipulative; it is the actual truth,” says Graybeal of his new talking points. “With any messaging, you have to tailor your message to the audience and to gain the most receptivity you can.” Against the backdrop of Trump’s moves, Graybeal and other U.S. execs are dropping the mention of “climate change” in meetings, even as they continue developing or deploying climate-friendly solutions.

Israel’s bombing of Gaza caused untold environmental damage − recovery will take effort and time by Lesley Joseph at The Conversation. According to an interim damage assessment released by the World Bank, U.N. and E.U. in March 2024, an estimated $502.7 million of damage was inflicted on the waste, sanitation, and hygiene sector in Gaza in the initial months of bombing, including damage to approximately 57% of the water infrastructure. The U.N. reported that water desalination plants in Gaza, 162 water wells and two of the three water connections with Israel’s national water provider had been severely damaged. The air quality in Gaza has been drastically impacted. NASA satellite imagery from the first few months of the war found that approximately 165 fires were recorded in Gaza from October 2023 to January 2024. In the first six months of bombardment, more than 39 million tons of debris were generated, much of it likely to contain harmful contaminants, including asbestos, residue from explosives and toxic medical waste. Human remains are also mixed in with this debris, with estimates that over 10,000 bodies remain under the rubble. Moreover, the three main landfills in the Gaza Strip have been closed and are unable to receive waste or conflict-related debris.

Plants Are Losing Their Ability to Absorb Carbon Dioxide as Emissions Rise Cristen Hemingway Jaynes at EcoWatch. Our planet’s plants and soils reached the peak of their ability to absorb carbon dioxide in 2008, and their sequestration rate has been falling ever since, according to a new analysis by a father-and-son team in the United Kingdom. At first, the added carbon led to warmer temperatures, vegetation growth and a longer growing season. Once a tipping point was reached, however, the combination of heat stress, wildfires, drought, flooding, storms and the spread of new diseases and pests led to a reduction in the amount of carbon plants can soak up. “The rate of natural sequestration of CO₂ from the atmosphere by the terrestrial biosphere peaked in 2008. Atmospheric concentrations will rise more rapidly than previously, in proportion to annual CO₂ emissions, as natural sequestration is now declining by 0.25% per year,” the authors of the study wrote. “This effect will accelerate climate change and emphasizes the close connection between the climate and nature emergencies. Effort is urgently required to rebuild global biodiversity and to recover its ecosystem services, including natural sequestration.”

EPA $20B funding freeze leaves ‘green bank’ nonprofits unable to pay bills by Diana DiGangi at Utility Dive. The EPA has frozen access to $20 billion in Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) grants, leaving the grantees in a precarious financial position, according to a spokesperson for the Climate United Fund. The fund was established to mobilize private capital to address the climate crisis. Last April, it was tapped to manage $6.97 billion from the National Clean Investment Fund, a GGRF program. So far, it has made investments that include a $10.8 million pre-development loan for utility-scale solar projects on tribal lands in eastern Oregon and Idaho and $250 million toward electric truck manufacturing. In a March 3 letter to the EPA Office of Inspector General’s acting inspector general, Nicole Murley, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said the EPA has “launched certain oversight and accountability measures” to investigate the GGRF fund disbursement for “financial mismanagement, conflicts of interest, and oversight failures.”

Related: EPA unfreezes $7 billion Solar for All grant program

ECO-QUOTE

“Effective climate justice work requires true collaboration with those most impacted by economic, racial, and environmental injustice. It’s about people, connection, and partnership. Seattle’s Green New Deal centers our most impacted communities and brings forward meaningful solutions to meet the scale of the climate crisis.”—Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell.

ECOPINION

The social cost of climate change isn’t zero, Mr. President by David Dickey at Investigate Midwest. Among the piles of executive orders Trump has signed is one that could potentially do grave damage to world efforts to get a grip on rising temperatures across the planet. It has to do with something called “the social cost of carbon.” There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of it. The social cost of carbon attempts to estimate the financial economic damage of adding one ton of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Here in the U.S. the EPA is the primary number cruncher. Everybody uses SCC – local, state and federal governmental agencies – to make billions of dollars in policy decisions. And while there are ongoing disagreements about whether the social cost of carbon is too high or too low, just about everyone acknowledges the need to quantify climate change outcomes. Put another way: folks acknowledge climate change causes financial and social havoc and want to measure it.

States Are Doing a Terrible Job Enforcing Laws Meant to Protect Farmed Animals by Reynard Loki at the Independent Media Institute. Farmed animals in the U.S. have minimal legal protections, and much of the abuse they endure is legal. The federal Animal Welfare Act — which establishes protections for pets and nonhuman animals used for exhibition (like in zoos) and research — does not apply to farmed animals. Moreover, the Agriculture Dept. has a poorly conceived regulatory framework regarding animal rights and the enforcement of the few protections that exist for animals raised and slaughtered for human consumption. “The failure of regulatory oversight in the U.S. slaughter industry is actually multifold, negatively affecting workers, animals, and the environment (including the communities that live near slaughterhouses),” wrote Delcianna J. Winders, an associate professor of law and director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute Vermont Law and Graduate School, and Elan Abrell, the vice president of community planning and partnerships at the Phoenix Zones Initiative, in 2021 for the Health and Human Rights Journal. Most state anti-cruelty laws also exempt farmed animals or allow standard practices that are patently cruel. No federal law in the United States explicitly regulates the treatment of animals on farms, except for the small percentage raised organically.

Rebuild fire-devastated homes all-electric with solar by Mark Z. Jacobson at PVMag. It was devastating driving mile after mile along the scenic Pacific Coast Highway, seeing one burned-out-structure after another. Families displaced. Memories lost. History erased. From the ashes, though, there is an opportunity to do what should be done all over America and the world. That opportunity is to build all new homes and businesses with only electricity and no fossil gas, contrary to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’ January 13 Executive Order allowing residents to rebuild homes “as they were” with fossil gas. Avoiding gas eliminates the chance a ruptured gas pipe will explode, like in San Bruno, California, in 2010, killing 8, injuring 58, and destroying 38 homes. Avoiding underground gas also facilitates the installation of underground electric lines. Underground electric lines are needed to eliminate the chance they will cause sparks like the ones that likely caused the Eaton fire. Not burning gas also eliminates benzene (a carcinogen) and other health-affecting air pollutants from people’s homes and death from carbon monoxide poisoning due to faulty appliances running on gas. It also reduces the need for the Aliso Canyon gas storage facility, which blew open for 112 days from 2015-2016, spewing 97,000 metric tons of methane plus other gases into the air. Lastly, reducing gas reduces the need for the 50,000 new oil and gas wells drilled each year in Central North America.

Organizing the Battery Belt by Amos Barshad at Jacobin. On a bright winter afternoon in Hardin County, Kentucky, I drive through a snowy residential neighborhood, rural enough for a bird of prey with a critter in its talons to fly above my windshield. Then, turning a corner, I come to a massive, sprawling factory actively being built. Smokestacks pump. Bulldozers push dirt. There are actually twin factories going up, side by side. A steady stream of Korean specialists — here from their homes 6,000 miles away to train local workers — throw on hard hats and light cigarettes on their way into the plant. Somber warnings posted in English and Korean forbid anyone from capturing footage inside the plant. I loiter outside the metal detectors and the rest of the beefy security apparatus snapping photos on my phone until a guard hustles out ordering me to delete them. I feel like I’ve wandered into an exclusionary zone where a top-secret military base is being hastily constructed. This is the electric vehicle battery plant BlueOval SK, a joint venture between American car giant Ford and the South Korean electric vehicle battery company SK On. Along with its sister plant in Tennessee, this will be the largest manufacturing project Ford has ever undertaken.

Trump’s offshore wind energy freeze: What states lose if the executive order remains in place by Barbara Kates-Garnick (former under secretary of energy in Massachusetts) at The Conversation. A single wind turbine spinning off the U.S. Northeast coast today can power thousands of homes — without the pollution that comes from fossil fuel power plants. A dozen of those turbines together can produce enough electricity for an entire community. The opportunity to tap into such a powerful source of locally produced clean energy — and the jobs and economic growth that come with it — is why states from Maine to Virginia have invested in building a U.S. offshore wind industry. But much of that progress may now be at a standstill. One of Donald Trump’s first acts as president in January 2025 was to order a freeze on both leasing federal areas for new offshore wind projects and issuing federal permits for projects that are in progress. The order and Trump’s long-held antipathy toward wind power are creating massive uncertainty for a renewable energy industry at its nascent stage of development in the U.S., and ceding leadership and offshore wind technology to Europe and China.

OTHER GREEN STUFF

The USDA’s farm animal welfare research lab — with just one scientist remaining — dismantled by Trump • World's largest iceberg runs aground off remote island • February Was Third Hottest on Record Even Without El Niño Effect • Half of New EU City Buses Were Zero-Emission in 2024 • Pollution from a Pennsylvania landfill caused problems for decades. Fracking waste made it worse • Questions and confusion as Trump pauses key funding for shrinking Colorado River • Offshore Wind Faces Its ‘Worst Case Scenario’ Under Trump • EV Battery Degradation Just Isn't Much Of An Issue • 'Existential Threat': How Tariffs And Uncertainty Could Blow Up The Auto Industry