Earth Matters: Zealots seek to gut the EPA for the sake of fossil fuel interests; climate change could cut GDP by a third

Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland: “If Vladimir Putin had a plan to foul our air and water, wreck public health and drive America over the cliff of irreversible lethal climate change, it would look exactly like [EPA chief] Lee Zeldin’s plan. This is a plan for self-inflicted environmental disaster.”

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Amid the wreckage our Outlaw Prez and his gang are inflicting on the nation, it’s tempting to wonder what measures are the most terrible when we’ve got an internal kind of extraordinary rendition going on, the cozying up to Vladimir Putin, the upending of post-World War II alliances, the corrupting and weaponizing of the Department of Justice, the attacks against universities, the threats against the media, the promise of devastation to Medicaid, the crippling of the Veterans Administration, and the flipping-off of judges. Not to mention the daily tyrannizing by the unfettered DOGE, which apparently has been given the keys and passwords of every federal agency, bureau, department, and other workplace coast to coast, with the mission being to do-your-worst. 

There was a time when the Environmental Protection Agency wasn’t a target of Republican ire. For instance, President Ronald Reagan generally had a decent environmental record as governor of California. But he did a turnaround when he arrived in the White House. Two of his hires — Interior Secretary James Watt and EPA Administrator Anne Gorsuch — were practically anti-environment caricatures. Scandals soon forced them out of office.

The bad optics associated with them spurred Reagan, with an early eye on reelection, to try and restore public trust by bringing William Ruckelshaus back to the EPA in 1983. He had been the agency’s first administrator after it was established in 1970. As Seema Kakade and Robert Percival wrote in 2018, Ruckelshaus “accomplished Reagan’s goal of restoring trust in the agency because he cared about being faithful to the environmental protection mission Congress had entrusted to it.” Since then, a new generation of elected Republicans have become rabidly anti-environment and, especially, anti-EPA. (Needless to say, but I will anyway: #notallRepublicans.) 

Just how intensely this sentiment has become was exemplified when Project 2025 was made public by the Heritage Foundation two years ago next month. The organization’s 900-page blueprint-cum-manifesto for dystopia makes 1,908 mentions of the EPA. Most media and all too many progressives downplayed the whole document as boilerplate rightwing fantasy. And it would have been had Trump not been elected. As soon as he was, he froze federally funded environmental projects, moves that are in various stages of judiciary review. And though Trump has often invoked the idea that the EPA should focus exclusively on clean air and water, included in his funding freeze are 132 air monitoring projects in 37 states.

This month, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin got rolling making clear that the intent — unlike with the planned wholesale demolition of the Department of Education — is to hollow out the EPA by cutting 65% of its budget and sabotaging its mission with a regulatory retreat and fossil-fuel-friendly enforcement regime. Last week, in announcing an end to 31 regulations, Zeldin said in a hyperbolic press release: “Today is the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen. We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S. and more.” 

It’s quite the hoot when devoted worshipers at the altar of fossil fuels dare call climate science a religion.

Said Abel Russ, director of the Environmental Integrity Project’s Center for Applied Environmental Science: “EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin is driving a dagger straight into the heart of public health. His gleeful lack of regard for the health and well-being of U.S. communities is a disgrace to EPA’s mission. EPA is charged with ensuring we all have access to clean air and water, not growing corporate profits for the oil and gas industry.”

Legally speaking, those regulations can’t just axed on executive branch whims. There’s a complicated process that includes public comment and thorough vetting. In addition to this first phase of eviscerating federal scrutiny of the car, oil, and gas industries, Zeldin has also terminated $20 billion in grants to Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, spurring a growing number of lawsuits, and eliminated all environmental justice offices.

An analysis by The Guardian found that the regulatory retreat would mean an additional 200,000 premature deaths by 2050:

The regulations slated for repeal, affecting coal plants, cars, trucks and other sources of pollution, had been set to deliver at least $254bn in economic benefits annually via lowered healthcare costs and fewer sick days, among other improvements. By contrast, the cost of complying with the regulations is around $40bn a year.

“The costs of these regulations are a fraction of their benefits,” said Jeremy Symons, a former EPA staffer, now senior adviser to the Environmental Protection Network (EPN), a group made up of former EPA employees.

“For every million dollars of favors that Trump’s EPA is handing out to corporate polluters, the public suffers $6m in public health costs through asthma attacks, cancers and heart and lung disease. That’s a great deal for the wealthy corporate polluters who backed Trump but it’s a bad deal for anyone else who breathes.”

The latest in this dark assault is a plan to deep-six the Office of Research and Development, the EPA’s main science operation. Of the 1,540 employees, the talk is that the jobs of up to 1,155 of them, 75%, could be eliminated, with survivors assigned to other parts of the agency. 

Showing just how untransparent the administration is in this matter as in so many others, the paywalled E&E News reported that at an ad hoc meeting Tuesday to discuss the layoffs, career EPA managers “appeared to be blindsided by those plans” and couldn’t answer employees’ questions. One employee who attended the meeting said the managers “didn’t really know anything.” Another said managers informed workers they had been not consulted on the plans.

California Rep Zoe Lofgren, who is the ranking Democrat on House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, said in a statement that since Congress established the EPA science office, it can’t be axed by the executive branch.

“EPA’s Office of Research and Development is in statute. Eliminating it is illegal. Every decision EPA makes must be in furtherance of protecting human health and the environment, and that just can’t happen if you gut EPA science, Last time around, Trump and his cronies politicized and distorted science — they knew the value of ORD, and they sought to weaken it. Now, this is their attempt to kill it for good. EPA cannot meet its legal obligation to use the best available science without ORD, and that’s the point. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are putting their polluter buddies’ bottom lines over the health and safety of Americans.”

Science is the enemy of these zealots. Defunding, undermining, and sabotaging the EPA serves the interests of the powers who bought them. If they can find a way to circumvent or ignore the law, they will. 

—Meteor Blades

Related: 

• Trump EPA Chief’s Assault on Environmental Justice Means Those With the Least Will Get Hurt the Most
• What’s happening to EPA-funded community projects under Trump?
• The end of the EPA’s fight to protect over-polluted communities
• Eliminating EPA Office of Research and Development Would Harm Public Health and the Environment
• Trump EPA Unveils Aggressive Plans to Dismantle Climate Regulation
  

THE WEEKLY ECO-VIDEO

RESOURCES & ACTION

• Introduction: (Almost) everything you wanted to know about tipping points, but were too afraid to ask
• Climate Action Tracker is an independent scientific project that tracks government climate action and measures it against the globally agreed Paris Agreement aim of "holding warming well below 2°C (3.6°F), and pursuing efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C (.2.7°F)
• 10 unique community-led conservation solutions in the face of environmental despair

GREEN BRIEFS

Climate change could mean a loss of a third of global GDP by 2100

Extreme weather events are already causing billions of dollars of damage, at least some of which can be attributed to global warming, with last year being the hottest on record. The events can be expected to worsen as average global temperature rises. Right now, national emissions-cutting pledges aren’t being met, which has us on a path to a devastating 3°C (5.4°F) rise in temperatures by century’s end. This means horrific harm to people, nature, economic productivity, and economic assets. 

Researchers at the Boston Consulting Group, the University of Cambridge’s ClimaTraces Lab, and Cambridge’s Judge Business School concluded that with such a rise in temperature, cumulative gross domestic product could be reduced as much as a third by 2100. And that doesn’t count damage that would be caused if we go past various tipping points. 

The team argues that climate-caused economic damages can be greatly minimized with heavy investments in mitigation (cutting emissions) and adaptation (reducing vulnerability to physical impacts of climate change). Heavy, as in 1% to 2% of cumulative economic output for the next 75 years. On the other hand, the net cost of inaction comes in at a loss of 11% to 27% of cumulative economic output. 

Standing in the way are five barriers, according to the researchers. First is a lack of wide and deep understanding of the case for climate action among leaders. Second is that many of the costs of action come before 2050 and most of the payback comes in the second half of the century. That means leaders “must be prepared to accept payback periods measured in decades,” no easy matter politically. Third, the costs and benefits of action are not spread evenly among nations, which has exacerbated the long-standing tension between the Global North and South. Fourth is that without a transition built around equitable economic development, there will be winners and losers. Many leaders invoke a “just transition,” but implementing one has its own set of obstacles, including ideological ones. In the United States, for instance, all of the Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental justice offices are being shuttered, as if there is no such thing as environmental injustice. Fifth: many economists have an underdeveloped understanding of the economic damages climate will bring. 

To overcome these barriers, the researchers recommend reframing the discussion on the costs of climate change, creating transparency on the cost of inaction, strengthening national climate policies to speed mitigation and adaptation, and bolstering international climate cooperation. 

—Meteor Blades

Trump Spreads More BS About Coal

On the first day of his second presidency, Donald Trump declared an “energy emergency,” providing himself with extra powers whose parameters have not been fully tested by the current Supreme Court. Underlying the declaration is a payoff to the fossil fuel interests that spent $100 million helping Trump get elected. For those who thought that only meant favors to the oil and gas industry, he put that to rest with a Truth Social pronouncement Monday that he was authorizing his underlings "to immediately begin producing Energy with BEAUTIFUL, CLEAN COAL." 

Trump noted that this was to deal with the economic advantages he claims other nations get from coal burning. He wrote "after years of being held captive by Environmental Extremists, Lunatics, Radicals, and Thugs, allowing other Countries, in particular China, to gain tremendous Economic advantage over us by opening up hundreds of all Coal Fire Power Plants." 

To which Sierra Club Director of Climate Policy Patrick Drupp responded in a statement: “This is yet another completely delusional statement by Donald Trump. There is no such thing as clean coal. There is only coal that pollutes our air and water so severely that nearly half a million Americans have died prematurely from coal in the last two decades.” His organization has for years run the Beyond Coal campaign to shutter coal-fired power plants. But cheaper natural gas has had at least as much if not more to do with the shutdowns. 

Coal production and the use of coal to generate electricity in the United States has been plummeting for two decades. The last time the U.S. produced more than a billion tons of coal was 2014. In 2023, production decreased to 578 million tons. About 40% of that total comes from surface mines in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming, almost all of it from public land. In 2023, the last year for which there is complete data, coal was used to generate 16.2% of U.S. electricity, according to the federal Energy Information Administration. Twenty-five years ago, that figure was more than 50%. 

Given the administration’s moves to open more public land to additional mining, logging, and drilling, support for digging more coal on public land was to be expected. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told Bloomberg Television Monday, “Under the national energy emergency, which President Trump has declared, we’ve got to keep every coal plant open. And if there had been units at a coal plant that have been shut down, we need to bring those back.”

Burgum claimed President Joe Biden’s energy policies favoring renewables were making the U.S. power grid unreliable and dealing with this requires emergency action. Nearly 20 years ago, Vice President Dick Cheney, at the head of an energy task force, pushed the reliability assertion in calling for building 200 new coal plants. Otherwise, he said, the whole country would be subject to blackouts as California had been. (See Enron.) Data obtained from the Global Energy Monitor by Bloomberg shows that, since 2000, some 770 individual coal-fired units have retired, mostly giving way to natural gas plants and renewables.

—Meteor Blades

RESEARCH & STUDIES

• Climate Change Threatens Earth’s Major Crops was the conclusion of a study conducted by researchers at Aalto University in Finland and published in the journal Nature Food.
• More than 150 ‘unprecedented’ climate disasters struck the world in 2024 says the World Meteorological Organization’s report on 2024, the hottest year on record. More than 800,000 people were displaced and made homeless, the highest yearly number since records began in 2008.
• An Arctic “beyond recognition” by 2100 is what we have to look forward to at +2.7°C global warming says a report published in Science.
• Grass-Fed Beef No Better for Climate Than Industrial Beef say researchers who modeled the emissions from grazing and feedlot cattle in the U.S. and found that even in the best-case scenario, grazing cattle are no better than their industrial counterparts. Their study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
• The impact of heat on heart health. A study led by the University of Ottawa and partner universities and published in Nature Communications has revealed critical insights into testing extreme heat's impact on heart function.
• Widespread health co-benefits from all-of-society clean energy actions in the U.S., according to a Princeton-led study published in One Earth. Reducing emissions from power plants, buildings, and vehicles not only mitigates climate change, but it also leads to significant improvements in air quality and reduces harmful pollutants like fine particulate matter.
• Microplastics hinder plant photosynthesis and threaten millions with starvation according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 
• 70 petrochemical plants send millions of pounds of pollutants into waterways each year, including 30 in Texas. Their pollution is a product of are sending millions of pounds of weak or nonexistent regulations, according to a report published by the Environmental Integrity Project.

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

Will Local Food Survive Trump’s USDA? by Lisa Held at Civil Eats. n November, after months of finishing complicated paperwork, developing infrastructure, and building relationships, the pieces were finally in place for Emma Jagoz to start fulfilling a new contract to sell fresh fruits and vegetables to Maryland schools. IIt was terrible timing. Jagoz, owner of Moon Valley Farm, grows organic vegetables on 70 acres near Frederick, Maryland, while also acting as an aggregator of produce from about 50 other small farms in the region. By November, the bulk of the Mid-Atlantic harvest had been sold. Despite that, in the months since, she managed to move more than 300,000 pounds of apples and pears, about 10,000 heads of lettuce, and more than 30,000 pounds of broccoli, carrots, sweet potatoes, and squash into hundreds of schools in 12 Maryland counties. “What this means from a bigger picture is that people are not going to have access to as much local food, and our farmers are already going into debt.” All of it was enabled by a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) initiative called the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program, which had active contracts in 43 states and was meant to make it easier for schools to serve students fresh food from small farms. The USDA had also funded a related initiative set up to move local farm harvests into food banks, called the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program. The agency had invested more than $1 billion in the two programs since 2020 and was queued up to spend another $1 billion. Last week, President Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, canceled both.

California unveils first state plan to unleash heat pumps by Alison F. Takemura at Canary Media. California has big heat-pump dreams. Now, it’s got a road map to realize them. Last week, the California Heat Pump Partnership announced the nation’s first statewide blueprint to achieve the state’s ambitious goals for deploying heat pumps, a critical tech for decarbonizing buildings and improving public health. The plan draws on recommendations from the public-private partnership’s members, which include government agencies, heat pump manufacturers, retailers, utilities, and other stakeholders. “We hope it serves as a national model,” said Terra Weeks, director of the partnership. In 2022, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) set a goal for the world’s fifth-largest economy to deploy 6 million heat pump units by 2030. That includes heat pumps for building heating and air-conditioning needs as well as for water heating. An estimated 1.9 million have been installed so far, according to the blueprint report.

The smell of toasted rock could spell victory for geothermal energy by Julian Spector at Canary Media. Startups are looking to revolutionize geothermal energy production. The U.S. built its biggest geothermal power-plant complex in 1960, but construction has stagnated for decades. Geothermal serves a mere 0.4% of U.S. electricity generation; its nearly 4 gigawatts of capacity amounts to roughly the solar and battery capacity Texas installs in four months these days. The way out of this decades-long malaise may simply be down. The more subterranean heat a geothermal plant can access, the more energy it can generate, and the Earth gets hotter closer to the core. But the intense conditions below a few miles deep rapidly wreck conventional drill bits. Quaise Energy CEO Carlos Araque figured that if he could build a strong enough drill bit, it could harness this super-deep heat and deliver cheap, clean, and abundant geothermal power, pretty much anywhere. So he left a career in oilfield drilling and formed Quaise in 2018 to do exactly that. Or, more precisely, the company adapted the gyrotron, a tool honed by the nuclear fusion industry that emits millimeter waves, which fall on the electromagnetic spectrum between microwaves and infrared waves. Fusion researchers use them to heat plasma to unfathomably high temperatures. But these waves exert a dramatic effect on rock, so Quaise leadership repurposed them to bore through depths that would demolish conventional drill bits, and perhaps unlock a new golden age of geothermal.

A Cookbook From the Host of ‘Outdoor Chef Life’ Entices Us to Fish, Forage, and Feast by Momo Chang at Civil Eats. In a Pacific tidepool in Northern California, Taku Kondo squats down, seawater sloshing around his ankles, and examines the rocks below the water. Kondo, a fisherman and forager, uses a knife to detach a purple sea urchin from a large rock. He cuts open the spiky shell, splits the urchin, and discovers a perfect sliver of orange roe, or uni—worth at least $80 a pound. “Let’s try it,” he says to the camera, then slurps up the roe. A smile spreads across his face. Success. This was Kondo’s first YouTube video, “Camping + Coastal Foraging for Uni,” uploaded in May 2018. It’s hard to know whether Kondo foresaw what other successes awaited him and his channel, “Outdoor Chef Life.” “When you’re off the grid, especially camping and you have no reception, you’re focused on who you’re with and what you are doing—making food or fishing, or focused on stoking the fire.” Today, though, the former sushi chef, 33, has guided millions of viewers on his journeys, whether he’s throwing a fishing line from a rocky coast or pedaling a hands-free kayak to catch king salmon. He’s clearly built a business from what he loves. In most of his videos, Kondo spends nearly a whole day catching seafood—digging for clams, foraging sea urchins, catching crabs—then setting up an outdoor kitchen. There, he’ll create meals like crab ramen or fried-fish sandwiches, dressed with pickles made from foraged kelp.

“Chaos and panic” as US slashes funds for small farmers and food assistance by Carey Gillam at The New Lede. Farmers and food assistance groups around the country were reeling this week amid a series of moves by the Trump administration to cut funding for programs that support small and disadvantaged farmers and provide food for low-income families. The loss of funding, which totals more than $1 billion, was sending shock waves through a system set up to provide reliable markets and consistent income for farmers who supply healthy, unprocessed, locally grown fruits and vegetables and other foods to hunger assistance organizations and public schools. Funding was spread through every US state but some of the largest amounts of program money were earmarked for farmers in California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Michigan and Georgia. “This is a huge deal for small farmers,” said Ellee Igoe, co-owner of Solidarity Farm in southern California and director of operations for Foodshed, a San Diego County network of regenerative and organic farms supplying food to families in need. “We’re growing healthy food and providing it to local communities. And they are cancelling contracts without real reason. Out here, it feels like it is very politically motivated.”

Global solar installations could reach 1 terawatt next year by John Fitzgerald Weaver at PV Mag. BloombergNEF said the world installed 599 gigawatts of solar power in 2024 and projects 698 GW in 2025. The 599 GW installed in 2024 was 35% higher than what was installed in 2023, which itself jumped by 77% over 2022’s deployment. The 2025 projection of 698 GW represents a more modest 16% growth rate. If that figure holds, it would mark the lowest global growth rate since 2018 and 2019, when deployments rose by 5% and 11%, respectively, according to BloombergNEF data. However, BloombergNEF’s initial projections have tended to be conservative, while the solar industry has repeatedly outpaced most growth forecasts. This raises the question: What will 2025’s final deployment figure look like, and will it be enough to keep us on track for 1 terawatt per year? For comparison, total electricity generating capacity from all energy sources is currently 8,600 GW, about 15% of which is installed in the United States. 

FROM BLUESKY

ECOPINION

The Climate Crisis Demands Youth Leadership—And We Must Provide It by Aliza Avaz at Common Dreams. The stereotype that youth-led climate initiatives are too risky to fund is outdated and, in fact, severely limits the opportunities for talented young entrepreneurs and activists. It stifles the very innovation needed to create a sustainable future. As we grapple with the pressing realities of the climate crisis, it is no longer a matter of whether we should support young leaders; it’s a matter of urgency. To succeed in addressing our environmental challenges, we need to tap into the energy, creativity, and bold leadership that young people bring to the table. [...] despite their passion and fresh ideas, youth-led environmental action remains massively underfunded. Less than 1% of institutional climate funding currently goes toward young people. Many, like myself, have struggled to secure the necessary resources to bring our ideas to life. As the next generation holds the key to solving the climate crisis, failing to support these leaders only exacerbates the problem. The global climate crisis is urgent, and so is the need to empower young people with the funding, mentorship, and platforms they need.

Cutting ‘boots-on-the-ground, getting-it-done stuff’ could harm the West’s fish and wildlife for decades by Christine Peterson at High Country News. The scientists responsible for crucial fish and wildlife research projects in the West involving species like elk, mule deer, sage grouse and wild horses might be next in line for the Trump administration’s chopping block to improve government efficiency. Like many of the federal workforce cuts that include biologists, trail crews and even waste-water treatment managers, experts say rather than improving government efficiency, laying off employees from the U.S. Geological Survey Cooperative Research Units could actually end up costing taxpayers more. It’s still unclear exactly how deep the cuts could be, although the Department of Interior told the USGS and cooperative units to present plans to slice their budgets by 10%, 25% and even 40%, said Ed Arnett, CEO of The Wildlife Society.

GOP owns tariff war pain inflicted on US farmers by Dave Dickey at Investigate Midwest. Here’s a public service announcement to American farmers, particularly those living in GOP-controlled congressional districts: Whatever damages tariffs do to your farming bottom line going forward, you can absolutely, unequivocally, lay blame at the clay feet of the GOP. It has become almost impossible to keep up with the tit for tat, on again-off again tariff war started by the U.S. against a host of nations including Mexico, Canada, Columbia, the European Union, and China. But farmers and ranchers are well aware that American agriculture often bears much of the brunt of trade penalties, a lesson learned during President Donald Trump’s first term in the White House to the tune of an estimated $27 billion in lost exports. Seeking re-election, POTUS handed out billions of dollars in subsidies aimed at offsetting those trade-war losses. That cash didn’t make all farmers fiscally whole.

How U.S. States Can Protect the Environment From Federal Rollbacks and Intervention by Reynard Loki at Wiki Observatory. As the federal government rolls back environmental protections and loosens regulations on polluting industries, it is more crucial than ever for U.S. states to protect the natural ecosystem and public health. They can do this by leveraging their legal authority, promoting local environmental policies, and collaborating with other states to form strong coalitions. “The way that our federalism works is [that] states have quite a lot of power to take action to both reduce carbon pollution and to protect residents from climate impacts,” Wade Crowfoot, head of California’s Natural Resources Agency, told Mother Jones in January 2025. “So regardless of who is president, states like California have been driving forward and will continue to drive forward.” What follows are some key strategies states can employ.

Plastic Pollution: So Much Bigger Than Straws by Jackie Nuñez at The Revelator. Over the past few weeks we’ve seen the current U.S. administration grasping at straws, mocking restrictions on single-use plastics, and trying to distract from the real issue: Plastic poisons people and the planet, and the industries that produce it need to stop making so much of it. When I started “The Last Plastic Straw” movement in 2011, the sole purpose was to bring attention to a simple, tangible issue and raise awareness about the absurdity of single-use plastic items and engage people to take action. So what are the real problems with plastic? Plastics don’t break down, they break up: Unlike natural materials that decompose, they fragment into smaller and smaller pieces, never benignly degrading but remaining forever plastic. All plastic items shed plastic particles called microplastics and even smaller nanoplastics, which we inhale, ingest, and absorb into our bodies. Plastics, depending on their manufacturing composition, contain a mixture of more than 16,000 chemicals, at least 4,200 of which are known hazards to human health. When we use plastic straws, cups, plates, utensils, and food packaging, we are literally swallowing those toxic plastic particles and chemicals.

Is the American Electric Car Already Dead? by Kate Aronoff at The New Republic. The rise of electric vehicles is the most transformative event in automobile manufacturing since Henry Ford invented the moving assembly line to churn out Model Ts. Legacy automakers have failed to adequately confront it. GM and Ford are again struggling to compete against foreign companies, having long prioritized hulking, expensive gas-guzzlers over investments in the cars of the future. Ford lost $5.1 billion on its EV business in 2024. GM faces mounting losses abroad. Both could lose billions if the full scope of the White House’s proposed tariffs on goods from Mexico, Canada, and China, as well as on aluminum and steel, is implemented and ends up sticking. As companies blame workers, consumers, and competitors for their troubles, President Donald Trump and the GOP blame a nonexistent Green New Deal and China, whose firms now dominate EV supply chains. As with the [ill-fated Vega in 1970], however, executives in Detroit mainly have themselves to blame for failing to keep up with the times. The White House, meanwhile, is poised to encourage companies to double down on their shortsighted strategies—and leave autoworkers to deal with the fallout.

OTHER GREEN STUFF

Trump Pushes Corporate Takeover of National Forests to Increase Timber Production Product • Elon Musk’s Scorched Earth Tactics Are Hurting Those Who Live Off That Land — The Farmers •  It’s ‘Virtually Certain’ the World Has Already Breached 1.5C • Trump’s fertilizer tariffs could disrupt US crop production, from tomatoes to corn • DOGE cuts to USDA may open door to invasive species, higher food prices • It’s “Virtually Certain” the World Has Already Breached 1.5C • US Coast Guard Academy Censors ‘Climate Change’ From Its Curriculum • Is the AMOC headed for a tipping point? Interview with Henk Dijkstra