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    ‘An outlier’: why does the US rank low on demands for climate action?

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    Over the last 12 months, the United States has endured a rash of disasters worsened by the climate crisis: devastating wildfires in southern California, a catastrophic hurricane in western North Carolina, and deadly heatwaves across the country.Americans increasingly believe global heating is a serious threat that will affect them personally – and 74% want to see more climate action. Yet while that sounds high, it is still lower than most other countries around the world. What explains this disparity?New insights into this question have emerged from recent research that examines attitudes toward the climate crisis across the world and in the US specifically.A report published by Nature Climate Change last year found 89% of the world’s population wanted to see more climate action, and 69% even said they would be willing to contribute 1% of their personal income to the cause.But on all counts, the United States – the world’s largest economy and its second largest carbon polluter – ranked among the lowest in terms of willingness to contribute, demand for action and belief that others would contribute.“The climate debate in the US was always very specific in international comparison,” said Peter Andre, a behavioral economist at Safe and the Goethe University Frankfurt and a coauthor of the Nature report. He pointed to research that has found “it was always more partisan, the media landscape is structured differently than in many European countries, and many [climate misinformation campaigns] also originated in the US.”Andre and his colleagues reviewed data from 130,000 people in 125 countries and found that respondents’ willingness to contribute part of their income to the fight against climate change was highest in poorer countries. In Myanmar, which has a GDP of $1,233 per capita, 93% of respondents’ said they would contribute; in the United States, where incomes are about 70 times higher, only 48% did.“One very plausible hypothesis is that, of course, the extent that you are exposed to climate risk makes you more willing to act against it. The richer you are, the easier it is for you to adapt,” Andre said. “The other story is resistance to change. Current economies are run on fossil fuels, so the bigger the economy, the more things need to change in order to become climate neutral.”The data, which was pulled from surveys conducted by Gallup in 2021 and 2022, showed respondents in France, Japan and Canada were about as willing as Americans to contribute financially to climate action but were more likely to demand political action. Danes, on the other hand, were about as likely as Americans to demand political action but much more willing to contribute income.“We’re kind of an outlier on the global scene,” said Jennifer Marlon, a research scientist and lecturer at Yale University. “I think it’s driven in large part by strong fossil fuel interests and the close associations they have with elected officials.”The oil and gas industry spent about $220m in campaign and political action committee donations in the 2024 US election, according to a recent Yale Climate Connections analysis. About 88% of donations went toward Republican candidates, including nearly $23m toward Donald Trump and groups supporting him.According to Marlon, Americans’ “strong sense that individuals can take care of everything” also hampered support for collective climate action.Marlon’s most recent analysis of public attitudes toward climate change, published last month, found 63% of Americans said they were worried about climate change yet fewer than half (45%) thought they would be personally and significantly harmed by it.She said that even though a majority of Americans support climate action, that didn’t necessarily translate into votes. “It has not been the primary motivating factor. People are just prioritizing other issues – education, healthcare or government overreach,” she said.Carey Funk, a senior adviser with the Aspen Institute, pointed to the United States’ deep political divisions over climate policy. “Other places with a more ideological division over climate action tend to be in western Europe and in English-speaking countries, such as Canada, Australia,” she said. “The [US’s] two-party system makes the polarization over issues like this more pronounced.”Funk said distrust in traditional journalism was another important factor. Only about one-third of Americans say they trust mass media. In 2023, Funk conducted in-depth interviews with Americans who did not see climate change as a major threat, and she said many respondents expressed skepticism of legacy media. She also said messaging from climate groups does not always have its intended effects. “The more the advocates are hyping up the problem, the more skeptical people feel they need to be,” she said.Peter Fisher, a professor of political sociology at the University of Oxford and an author of The Peoples’ Climate Vote, a climate survey of 1.2 million people, said the Nature findings largely tracked with what he found: widespread support “nearly across the board” for a rapid transition away from the burning of fossil fuels. He pointed to a few notable exceptions, including Russia, the US, Canada, Australia and, to a lesser extent, the UK. Like Funk, he attributed these exceptions, in part to “partisan divisions on climate issues”.However, he stressed, even in these countries a majority of respondents favored a transition away from fossil fuels. “There is concern about climate change and people want to see action,” he said.One thing respondents across the globe had in common? A tendency to underestimate their fellow citizens. In the United States, nearly half of respondents in the Nature study were willing to contribute some of their income to fighting climate change, but respondents believed only 33% of the rest of the country were willing to do so.Fisher and other experts said making people aware that they are in fact in the majority could help them put pressure on elected officials to act against climate change.“Politicians often have much more political space than they think they do on climate change and other issues,” he said. “And so I would say this, along with climate science, provides compelling reasons for actually acting on climate.”This story is part of the 89% Project, an initiative of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now More

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      After losing homes and businesses, LA wildfire victims face a hurdle to rebuilding: Trump’s tariffs

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      Cory Singer, co-owner of the homebuilding firm Dolan Design & Build, raced to start construction as quickly as possible in the wake of the Los Angeles wildfires. He was determined to stay ahead of the demand surge he saw coming and eager to help his clients begin to rebuild their lives.The firm broke ground in the Pacific Palisades on Saturday – one of the first companies to do so.But by that time, Singer had a new crisis to contend with: tariffs.Singer, whose firm is currently working on 10 homes in the Palisades, is in talks with clients to place shipping containers on their burned lots and store construction materials there, allowing him to order and stockpile materials in bulk before tariff price increases hit the market.“I’m definitely nervous,” he said.The Trump administration announced, walked back, and continually modified tariff policies in recent weeks, throwing the global stock market into chaos. The tariffs are widely expected to substantially increase construction costs in California and across the country.Singer is already dealing with tariff-related price hikes. One of his tile vendors placed a tariff surcharge on an order on 2 April, the same day the Trump administration announced sweeping tariffs, even though the materials had already been imported. Singer is especially worried about materials like plumbing, tiles and fixtures, which are often imported from China, and he is advising clients to factor in a 10% contingency to their budgets in anticipation of the costs.“If you don’t spend it, great,” he said, “but at least mentally prepare.”Three months after the worst wildfires in Los Angeles’s recent history flattened miles of city blocks and killed 30 people, signs of life are emerging. Insurance payouts have begun arriving. Contractors have plastered streets in Altadena and the Palisades with flyers and signs advertising their services. The Army Corps of Engineers is slowly clearing and flattening lots, replacing the charred and toxic mess of cars, washing machines and chimneys with the blank canvases of empty lots.View image in fullscreenBut homeowners, contractors, architects and developers across fire-ravaged Los Angeles are girding themselves for the tariffs. For homeowners seeking to rebuild, the tariffs add a new layer of stress to the uncertainties of navigating insurance, mortgages, short-term housing and piecing together plans for the future.The Trump administration is currently levying a 10% tariff on most countries, a 25% tariff on steel, aluminum and cars and car parts, and a massive 125% tariff on Chinese goods. The administration on Wednesday retreated on further planned global hikes after news of the tariffs prompted trillions in stock market losses worldwide, but Angelenos remain uncertain about what this means for their homes and plans.In Altadena, a middle-class neighborhood with fewer resources than the wealthy Palisades, the strain is especially acute. Homeowners worry tariffs will hinder their ability to afford rebuilding and exacerbate already widespread issues with underinsurance.“It’s really scary,” said Ken Yapkowitz, a longtime Altadena resident who lost his home and two rental income properties in the Eaton fire.Yapkowitz is waiting to see what his final insurance payouts will be and starting to map out how to rebuild his properties. He had already been factoring in a 25% bump in materials costs before the tariffs were announced, he said, and figured there would be a surge in demand for materials and labor. He expects tariffs to add substantial costs, and wonders if he will be able to rebuild on his lots as planned.Jose Flores, owner of JV Builders & Development, a small business in Pasadena, said many of his Altadena clients want to rebuild. But he worries that tariffs, paired with a painfully slow permitting process and other skyrocketing costs, will cause them to change their minds. He has three clients in the process of drawing up plans with architects, but many others have called him for estimates only to disappear.“By the time people are ready to start construction, I believe the prices are going to be higher,” he said. Flores has noticed the prices of lumber, copper and roofing tick up in recent months. But he can’t afford to stockpile materials, he said, and has no place to store them even if he could. He has no choice but to wait and see what happens.“I think that’s the case for most of us contractors in the area,” Flores said.Following the tariffs’ announcement, the California governor, Gavin Newsom, asked his administration to pursue independent trade relationships with other countries and to explore ways to protect access to construction materials in the wake of the California wildfires. But he did not specify what measures the state could deploy to do that.Flores, the contractor, said he doubted that the governor’s office could actually rein in prices.Newsom’s office did not respond to a request for comment.‘We just don’t know right now’Some residents and business owners are already seeing the tariffs affect wildfire response. Brett Taylor, an Altadena resident who owns a local window and door supplier and who lost his home in the Eaton fire, said his suppliers mostly manufacture domestically, but that many of them source parts from abroad. In late March, he reached out to approximately 10 window vendors to ask whether they would be open to providing package discounts to fire victims. Almost all of them said yes.But before the deals could be finalized, the administration announced tariffs. At least one of Taylor’s vendors walked back their commitment, citing price uncertainty, and Taylor anticipates others will do the same in coming days.View image in fullscreenOthers are tapping personal connections and devising makeshift plans to try to defray costs. James Peddie, an Altadena realtor who lost his home, has been helping develop plans for a group of homeowners hoping to rebuild collectively. He knows from his years in construction that a substantial portion of southern California’s lumber is imported from Canada, and when tariffs were announced, he understood that meant increased costs.Peddie went to high school in Montana, and has friends in the lumber industry there. He also knows a builder who personally went to Oregon to source lumber when prices soared during the rebuilding of Paradise, California, after the devastating 2018 Camp fire.So he called up his high school friends with a question: can you help me source lumber for LA?They were eager to help. They promised to keep their commissions low and to keep him updated on price fluctuations. “They’re people I can trust,” he said. “We can probably get the lumber for a really good deal.”This shift – from purchasing overseas to domestically – is exactly what the administration hopes the tariffs will prompt.But with the rebuilding process still in its earliest phases, and plans and permits far from finalized and approved, it felt premature to put a deposit down and commit to the lumber, Peddie said. Doing so would mean needing to find and pay for long-term storage, as well as betting that the cost of lumber was only going to increase.“Where is it going to be stored? Is it going to be more expensive to ship it in?” he said. “We just don’t know right now.”He estimated it would be seven months before he would be ready to order. It’s anyone’s guess what the tariff landscape – and market – would look like by then. More

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      Los Angeles’s projected $1bn budget shortfall will lead to layoffs, officials say

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      Battered by the aftermath of historic wildfires and worsening economic conditions, the city of Los Angeles is projecting that it will face an estimated $1bn shortfall in its budget next year, which is likely to result in major cuts to city services.Next year’s nearly $1bn budget gap “makes layoffs nearly inevitable”, city administrative officer Matt Szabo told the city council on Wednesday. “We are not looking at dozens or even hundreds of layoffs, but thousands.”In a statement on Wednesday, the Los Angeles mayor, Karen Bass, said that she was preparing a budget for next year that would “deliver fundamental change in the way the City operates”.In her “reform budget”, Bass wrote in a public letter addressed to Szabo: “We must consider no program or department too precious to consider for reductions or reorganization.”The Trump administration’s trade and immigration policies are likely to make Los Angeles’s already bad economic situation even worse in the coming year, Szabo told city officials in Wednesday’s meeting.Inflation and a weakening economy, combined with the disruption and damage of January’s wildfires, have already driven an estimated $141m reduction in revenue from the city’s business tax, sales tax and hotel tax through the end of February, Szabo said.“Federal trade policy is not only likely to spur further inflation, but also to slow growth and dampen international travel, upon which our hotel tax relies,” he added.Donald Trump’s pledges of enacting mass deportations of undocumented people across the country could also have a damaging effect on Los Angeles, and affect the local economy.“Federal immigration policy provides a particular threat to our local economy,” Szabo said. “The construction industry in the state of California is estimated to be about 40% undocumented, and, due to the fires, there is nowhere in the country where demand for construction and construction-related services will be higher than here in Los Angeles.”The city is also struggling with a dramatic increase in lawsuit liabilities over the past three years, with payouts in the past year likely totaling $320m.Szabo said that working with state lawmakers in Sacramento to cap payouts in lawsuits against the city is one strategy to address the city’s ballooning liabilities. He also said that making Los Angeles homeowners pay more for solid waste collection, which he said the city’s general fund is currently subsidizing, could close $200m of the gap in next year’s budget.The extent of the city’s financial problems took some local officials by surprise, the Los Angeles Times reported, quoting councilmember Bob Blumenfield as saying: “There’s no question that all of us are in shock with this number.” More

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      What is this era of calamity we’re in? Some say ‘polycrisis’ captures it

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      Two months into 2025, the sense of dread is palpable. In the US, the year began with a terrorist attack; then came the fires that ravaged a city, destroying lives, homes and livelihoods. An extremist billionaire came to power and began proudly dismantling the government with a chainsaw. Once-in-a-century disasters are happening more like once a month, all amid devastating wars and on the heels of a pandemic.The word “unprecedented” has become ironically routine. It feels like we’re stuck in a relentless cycle of calamity, with no time to recover from one before the next begins.How do we make sense of any of this – let alone all of it, all at once?A number of terms have cropped up in the past decade to help us describe our moment. We’re living in the anthropocene – the era in which humanity’s impact is comparable to that of geology itself. Or we’re in the “post-truth” era, in which we no longer share the same sense of reality. We’re facing a permacrisis, an endless state of catastrophe.But perhaps the word that best describes this moment is one that emerged at the turn of the millennium, picked up steam in the 2010s and has recently been making the global rounds again: polycrisis.Not to be confused with a “perfect storm” or the perhaps less scientific “clusterfuck”, “polycrisis” – a term coined by the authors Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern – refers to the idea that not only are we facing one disaster after another, but those messes are all linked, making things even worse. Or, as Adam Tooze, a Columbia University history professor and public intellectual who has championed the term, put it: “In the polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts.”Our globalized world is built on interconnecting systems, and when one gets rattled, the others do too – a heating climate, for instance, increases the risk of pandemics, pandemics undermine economies, shaky economies fuel political upheaval. “There’s a kind of larger instability, or a larger system disequilibrium,” the researcher Thomas Homer-Dixon says. To illustrate the situation, Homer-Dixon uses a video of metronomes on a soft surface. Though they’re all started at different times, they end up synchronized, as each device’s beat subtly affects the rest. When people see it for the first time, “they don’t actually see what’s happening properly. They don’t realize the forces that are operating to cause the metronomes to actually synchronize with each other,” Homer-Dixon says.In much the same way, it’s often unclear even to experts how global systems interact because they are siloed in their disciplines. That limits our ability to confront intersecting problems: the climate crisis forces migration; xenophobia fuels the rise of the far right in receiving countries; far-right governments undermine environmental protections; natural disasters are more destructive. Yet migration experts may not be experts on the climate crisis, and climate experts may have limited knowledge of geopolitics.That’s why Homer-Dixon thinks better communication is essential – not just to create consensus around what we call our current predicament but also how to address it. He runs the Cascade Institute, which is fostering “a community of scholars and experts and scientists and policy makers around the world who are using this concept [of polycrisis] in constructive ways”.“Constructive” is a key word here. “You’ve got to get the diagnosis right before you can go to the prescription,” he says. Finding that diagnosis means looking at how stresses on various systems – climate, geopolitics, transportation, information, etc – intersect and identifying what his team calls “high leverage intervention points”: “places where you can go in and have a really big impact for a relatively low investment”.The Cascade Institute’s proposals target what they have identified as key drivers of the polycrisis, such as polarization and climate change, by, for instance, improving school curricula to bolster students’ understanding of disinformation and expanding the use of deep geothermal power.In addition to bringing people with disparate expertise together, the Cascade Institute, part of Royal Roads University in British Columbia, has developed an analytical framework for understanding the polycrisis, and it operates a website, polycrisis.org, which serves as a hub for the latest thinking on the issue – including critiques of the concept, Homer-Dixon says. The site contains a compendium of resources from academia to blogposts that explore the polycrisis, reflecting, for instance, on what’s already happened in 2025 (a tenuous ceasefire in Gaza, California wildfires, Trump upending the global order, an AI-bubble selloff, and the outbreak of bird flu).View image in fullscreenThere has been some backlash to the idea of the polycrisis. The historian Niall Ferguson has described it as “just history happening”. The political scientist Daniel Drezner says its proponents “assume the existence of powerful negative feedback effects that may not actually exist” – in other words, when crises overlap, the outcome might not always be bad (for instance, the pandemic lockdowns might have had some short-lived environmental benefits). Some point to past crises as evidence that what we are experiencing is not new.Homer-Dixon disagrees. “We’ve moved so far and so fast outside our species’ previous experience that many elites don’t have the cognitive frame to grasp our situation, even were they inclined to do so,” he wrote in 2023, when the term was the talk of Davos.It’s all a bit overwhelming, as Homer-Dixon acknowledges. “If you’re not really scared by what’s going on in the world, you’re braindead,” he says.On the other hand, “t​​he crisis can actually be a moment for really significant change,” he says, “because it kind of delegitimizes the existing way of doing stuff, the existing vested-interest stakeholders who are who are hunkered down and don’t want anything to change”. For instance, while Homer-Dixon sees Donald Trump as an “abominable” figure, he also notes that, “like an acid”, the president dissolves norms around him. That creates the risk of disaster but also offers opportunities to change the world for the better.“This really is a critical moment in human history and things can be done,” Homer-Dixon says. “We don’t know enough about how these systems are operating to know that it’s game over.”And the term itself, as terrifying as it is, can also be a strange comfort. “I think that’s useful, giving the sense a name. It’s therapeutic,” Tooze told Radio Davos. When the world feels like a nightmare, identifying the condition gives us something to hold on to – a kind of understanding amid the chaos. More

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      LA mayor Karen Bass ousts fire chief after public rift over wildfire response

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      Six weeks after the most destructive wildfire in city history, Los Angeles’s mayor, Karen Bass, ousted the city’s fire chief on Friday following a public rift over preparations for a potential fire and finger-pointing between the chief and city hall over responsibility for the devastation.Bass said in a statement that she was removing Chief Kristin Crowley immediately.“Bringing new leadership to the fire department is what our city needs,” Bass said in a statement.“We know that 1,000 firefighters that could have been on duty on the morning the fires broke out were instead sent home on Chief Crowley’s watch,” Bass claimed. She also accused the chief of refusing to prepare an “after-action report” on the fires, which she called a necessary step in the investigation.The Palisades fire began during heavy winds on 7 January, destroying or damaging nearly 8,000 homes, businesses and other structures and killing at least 12 people in the Los Angeles neighborhood. Another wind-whipped fire started the same day in suburban Altadena, a community to the east, killing at least 17 people and destroying or damaging more than 10,000 homes and other buildings.Bass has been facing criticism for being in Africa as part of a presidential delegation on the day the fires started, even though weather reports had warned of dangerous fire conditions in the days before she left.In televised interviews this week, Bass acknowledged she made a mistake by leaving the city. But she implied that she was not aware of the looming danger when she jetted around the globe to attend the inauguration of the Ghanaian president, John Dramani Mahama. She faulted Crowley for failing to alert her about the potentially explosive fire conditions.Crowley has publicly criticized the city for budget cuts that she said made it harder for firefighters to do their jobs.Crowley was named fire chief in 2022 by Bass’s predecessor at a time when the department was in turmoil over allegations of rampant harassment, hazing and discrimination. She worked for the city fire department for more than 25 years and held nearly every role, including fire marshal, engineer and battalion chief. More

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      ‘Ridiculous blunder’: Trump wades into California’s water wars – and strikes some of his strongest supporters

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      Under orders from Donald Trump, billions of gallons of irrigation water were laid waste in California’s thirsty agricultural hub this month, a move that left water experts shocked and local officials scrambling.The water, stored in two reservoirs operated by the army corps of engineers, is a vital source for many farms and ranches in the state’s sprawling and productive San Joaquin valley during the driest times of the year. It will be especially important in the coming months as the region braces for another brutally hot summer with sparse supplies.The reservoirs are also among the few the US president can control directly.Staged to give weight to Trump’s widely debunked claims that flows could have helped Los Angeles during last month’s devastating firestorm and to show that he holds some power over California’s water, he ordered the army corps to flood the channels. Less than an hour of notice was reportedly given to water authorities down-river who rushed to prepare for the unexpected release, which threatened to inundate nearby communities.The move is just the latest in a series of misinformed attempts Trump has made to wade into California’s water wars, adding new challenges and conflicts over the state’s essential and increasingly scarce water resources. But in what now appears to be just a political stunt, Trump has struck some of his strongest supporters. Many counties across California’s rural Central valley – home to much of its roughly $59bn agricultural industry – backed Trump in the last election, forming a red strip at the heart of the blue state.“It is almost mind-boggling that this has happened,” said Thomas Holyoke, a professor of political science and water expert at California State University, Fresno, calling the act a “ridiculous blunder”.Experts, who were left scratching their heads in the aftermath, have found no justification for the order. The reservoirs were not at risk of overflowing and irrigation is not necessary during the wetter winter months. These releases also did not support threatened ecosystems such as those in the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta, where contentious debates continue about flows and diversions.Some have suggested the flows will help bolster groundwater stores, “but a lot of that water will end up evaporating,” said Holyoke. “It’s just going to be water lost – and they know it.”‘Purely a stunt’Governed by agreements between an array of stakeholders and close coordination between federal and local officials, releases from these reservoirs are typically well-planned. Lake Kaweah and Lake Success, the two reservoirs in Tulare county, are part of a sprawling network of channels that do not flow to the ocean or connect to the aqueduct serving the southern part of the state.The water held within them is also largely spoken for. Its distribution isn’t often contentious.But Trump, it seems, saw it differently.“Everybody should be happy about this long fought Victory!” he said in a post on Truth Social the day the release was ordered, boasting that he opened a flow for 5.2bn gallons of water alongside a photo of a nondescript waterway.Acting quickly, local authorities were able to convince federal officials to bring that total down to 2bn, which was released over three days.View image in fullscreenBut Trump’s rhetoric around the issue hasn’t shifted. He has made several false statements about water in California and his ability to direct it including claims that he sent the US military to turn on the water in the aftermath of the deadly fires, his clear misunderstanding about where water supplies originate from and distribute to, and his allusion to a simple valve that can be turned to control water supply.He posted again thanking the army corps of engineers “for their LOVE of our Country, and SPEED in getting this Emergency DONE! [sic]” saying that water was “heading to farmers throughout the State, and to Los Angeles”, even as experts repeatedly debunked this claim.“Those releases had absolutely zero to do with anything to do in Los Angeles,” said Gregory Pierce, a water policy expert and the director of the UCLA Water Resources Group, adding that this also did not benefit anyone in the central valley. “This was a stunt purely so Trump could say that he did something and released the water.”Few have been willing to admonish the administration for the move. Support for Trump and hopes that he will aid agriculture with its water woes is still strong in this region.“I have a conservative mindset. I encourage the trigger-pulling attitude, like: ‘Hey, let’s just get stuff done,’” Zack Stuller, a farmer and president of the Tulare county farm bureau told Politico, admitting that the reservoir release was a little nerve-wracking.The bureau declined to comment to the Guardian, but sent a combined statement from the four water management associations and districts, which attempted to make sense of the puzzling and dangerous release. In it, they said there would be “continued close coordination with the Administration and the Army Corp of Engineers”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSome locals who said they were deeply concerned about the act and its outcome said they were afraid to speak out because their businesses might be targeted by supporters of the administration.While Trump continues to frame the action as evidence that he has taken power over California water, he isn’t able to control much water policy in the state, according to Pierce.“The federal government of course matters for water in California, but not that much,” he said, adding that’s why Trump ordered releases where he was able to, even if they weren’t connected to the overall problem he was claiming to address. The federal government does play a role in funding big projects but “California’s been left on an island with respect to federal support for quite some time,” he said.Trump has tried to exert more control through funding, especially now that the state is depending on the federal government for aid in the aftermath of the Los Angeles wildfires, now considered one of the most costly natural disasters in history with damage estimates climbing above $250bn.View image in fullscreenTrump has cast California’s governor Gavin Newsom as his opponent on the issue, but when it comes to water, and more specifically boosting supplies of it for cities and agriculture, the two might already be on the same page.The state recently issued a fact-check on Trump’s claims, which criticized him for spreading misinformation, but highlighted how supplies have increased since Trump’s first term.Environmental advocates have long criticized the Delta Conveyance, a controversial infrastructure project championed by Newsom that would reroute more water to the south, which could get even more momentum under a Trump presidency.“The governor is actually aligned with Trump on this and I think Trump has only recently figured that out,” Pierce said. “The cards are certainly stacking up that that’s going to be pushed forward.”That doesn’t mean that Trump’s misleading rhetoric won’t leave a mess.“President Trump comes blundering into this complex situation with no understanding at all or no effort at understanding how it works,” said Holyoke.“California is trying to strike a delicate balance,” he added, detailing the challenging and layered issues that come with distributing essential resources to residents, the agricultural industry, and declining ecosystems as the world warms and supplies run short.“Farmers in the valley are hurting from water cutbacks, there is no question about that,” Holyoke said. “The answer isn’t to toss all the laws and court orders aside and throw lots of water at farmers. We simply need to find inventive ways to make the best use of the water that we have.” More