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    Judge dismisses suit by young climate activists against Trump’s pro-fossil fuel policies

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    A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by young climate activists that aimed to halt Donald Trump’s pro-fossil fuel executive orders.The dismissal by US district judge Dana Christensen on Wednesday came after 22 plaintiffs, ages seven to 25 and from five states, sought to block three of the president’s executive orders, including those declaring a “national energy emergency” and seeking to “unleash American energy” – as well as one aimed at “reinvigorating” the US’s production of coal.According to the plaintiffs, the executive orders amount to unlawful executive overreach and breach the state-created danger doctrine – a legal principle designed to prevent government officials from causing harm to their citizens.Among the plaintiffs were also several young individuals who had previously been part of the landmark 2023 Held v Montana case – the first constitutional climate trial in the United States. In that case, a judge ruled in favor of the youth plaintiffs who argued that the Montana state government had violated their constitutional right to a healthy environment.In Wednesday’s ruling, Christensen said that the plaintiffs have presented “overwhelming evidence that the climate is changing at a staggering pace, and that this change stems from the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide, caused by the production and burning of fossil fuels”.However, Christensen went on to say: “Yet while this court is certainly troubled by the very real harms presented by climate change and the challenged [executive orders’] effect on carbon dioxide emissions, this concern does not automatically confer upon it the power to act.”He added: “Granting plaintiffs’ injunction would require the defendant agencies, and – ultimately – this court, to scrutinize every climate-related agency action taken since” the start of Trump’s second presidency on 20 January 2025.“In other words, this court would be required to monitor an untold number of federal agency actions to determine whether they contravene its injunction. This is, quite simply, an unworkable request for which plaintiffs provide no precedent,” Christensen continued.According to a new report from Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy and ethics non-profit, Trump has picked more than 40 people who were directly employed by coal, oil and gas companies to be part of his administration.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSince taking office, Trump has launched broad attacks on both sustainable energy alternatives and climate science. In August, his administration released a report that said “climate change is a challenge – not a catastrophe”, a claim that drew sharp criticism from climate experts who called the report a “farce” filled with misinformation. More

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      Make green great again: Can appeals to the wallet make climate policy an election-winner?

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      At stuffy United Nations press conferences, in swanky auditoriums and at sticky socialist dance parties, one word was on everyone’s lips at this year’s Climate Week NYC: affordability.The US energy secretary, Chris Wright, said under that under President Trump the United States is “returning to commonsense energy policies that focus on affordability”. The former energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, said Democrats must focus on renewable power’s ability to shrink power bills to win elections. And supporters of the almost certainly soon-to-be New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, trumpeted their efforts to link green policies with efforts to lower city residents’ rent and make transit affordable.The attempt to link everyday cost issues to global warming is not new. The concept was a key part of the Green New Deal, a progressive policy platform popularized by youth-led climate group the Sunrise Movement and New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018. Joe Biden picked up the framing in the White House, naming his signature green carbon-cutting policy the Inflation Reduction Act, from 2022.Now, as utility bills soar around the country, Americans on every part of the political spectrum are framing their energy and climate proposals as ways to protect ordinary people’s pocketbooks.More on that after the most important reads from the week.Essential reads

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      In focusView image in fullscreenEvery year, Climate Week in New York City brings together government officials, corporate actors, scholars and activists for a vast array of climate-focused events, timed to coincide with the United Nations general assembly.This year, the Trump administration’s anti-environmental blitz cast a massive shadow over the event. In appearances through the week, White House officials aimed to peg its deregulatory agenda as a win to lower Americans’ bills, with Trump calling green energy a “scam” and Wright saying: “The more people have gotten into so-called climate action, the more expensive their energy has become.”Climate advocates attempted to expose those statements as false while getting Americans on board with green policies on the grounds that they can cut costs. For instance, two Democratic representatives, from Illinois and California, unveiled a proposal to speed new power-line construction and restore green energy incentives which Trump repealed earlier this year. Its name: the Cheap Energy Act.It’s a framework that Jennifer Granholm, who served as US energy secretary under Biden, said she expected as climate slips down the list of political concerns for Americans, while economic worries rise. “My guess is you’re not going to see a lot of politicians using the word ‘climate’, because people see that as a nice-to-have [concern], not a must-have, and right now they’re in the must-have mode,” she told reporters over avocado toast one morning. “Affordability is key.”Those well to Granholm’s left also called for a focus on affordability in the climate fight. But many called for more ambitious solutions that deliver more immediate benefits. Instead of merely tinkering with the tax code to incentivize green technology buildout – a hallmark of Biden’s climate efforts – politicians should prioritize less wonky, “green economic populist” campaigns such as fare-free transit and the build-out of decarbonized public housing.“These kinds of programs do have decarbonization benefits, but they’re extremely important for starting to build up a mass base [who have] trust in public institutions and trust in the government,” Batul Hassan, labor director at the left-leaning thinktank Climate and Community Institute, said at a panel.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMamdani, the socialist who achieved a stunning win in the New York City mayoral primary this summer, embodies this kind of agenda, said Hassan. On Wednesday of Climate Week, progressives gathered for a dance party at the legendary Sounds of Brazil music venue to celebrate the candidate’s success.“It has long been understood that if we’re going to build a mass movement, people need to see the connection between the transition to renewable energy and spending less money,” New York City comptroller Brad Lander said in an interview with the Guardian at the party, shouting over the thrum of Charli xcx.Messaging is important, but merely talking about affordability is not enough, Alexa Avilés, a New York City council member and democratic socialist, told the Guardian at the Mamdani event. Trump, for instance, has failed to deliver on his promise of lowering bills while handing massive benefits to oil giants and other corporations. And many Democrats are also guilty of prioritizing their corporate donors’ interests, Avilés said.“Some people talk about working-class folks, but then they make policies that are designed for the rich. We’ve been living with that frustration for a long time,” she said. “We need to focus on actually bringing relief to people. And we see that when we really center people over profit, people respond to that. People can tell who is for real.”Read more:

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      US is violating human rights laws by backing fossil fuels, say young activists in new petition

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      By continuing to fund and support a fossil fuel-based energy system, the US is violating international law, a group of young people have argued to an international human rights body.The petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), filed late on Tuesday and shared exclusively with the Guardian, says the government’s actions have violated the petitioners’ human rights.“The US’s actions over the past 50 years constitute an internationally wrongful act that implicate its international responsibility,” the petition to the Washington DC-based commission says.The IACHR, part of the Organization of American States, is a quasi-judicial body that reviews and investigates complaints about human rights violations, then issues reports with findings and recommendations to the accused states. Its recommendations are not legally binding.The plea comes after the publication of two strongly worded advisory opinions on the climate crisis from two top international courts. It was filed by 15 of the 21 youth climate activists who previously brought the groundbreaking federal climate lawsuit Juliana v US, which was effectively dismissed last year.“This petition is about truth and accountability,” said Levi, an 18-year-old petitioner who was eight years old when the Juliana case was filed. “For over 50 years, the US government has knowingly protected fossil fuel interests while putting people, especially young people, in harm’s way.”View image in fullscreenLike Juliana, the new filing details the myriad ways the climate crisis has caused the young petitioners to suffer. Levi, for instance, grew up in Florida on the Indialantic barrier island. He and his family were frequently forced to evacuate amid dangerous hurricanes; eventually, they became so severe and frequent that his parents decided relocating was the only option.“Part of why we left was so that my baby sister could grow up in a home with a smaller risk of flooding,” he said. “One of the most difficult moments was losing my school after it was permanently closed due to storm damage.”Levi and the other young activists accuse the US of breaching international human rights law, customary international law and the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man – an international human rights instrument that guarantees economic, social and cultural rights, as well as equality under the law.The bid comes just after the release of an early July advisory opinion from the inter-American court of human rights (I/A court HR), a separate human rights body which can issue binding recommendations but which the US does not recognize. The opinion said that the climate crisis carries “extraordinary risks” felt most by already-vulnerable populations, and that the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man requires countries to set ambitious greenhouse gas-cutting targets.“Before that happened, we had already been planning to file this,” said Kelly Matheson, deputy director of global strategy at the non-profit law firm Our Children’s Trust, which is representing the petitioners. “The timing is pure serendipity.”The I/A court HR opinion is non-binding, and the US does not recognize the jurisdiction of the top court from which it came. However, international courts and commissions can draw on the opinions to interpret the law.By denying the plaintiffs “access to justice” – and by expanding fossil fuel production – the US is violating an array of rights guaranteed to the young activists, including the right to life, liberty and security; the right to health; the right to benefits of culture; and special protections for children.“We are bringing our case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights because domestic courts would not hear the full story,” said Levi. “This petition is a statement that what has happened to us is not just unfortunate or political but that it is a violation of our human rights.”The petitioners also accuse the US of violating their right to a healthy climate, referencing another recent nonbinding advisory opinion on greenhouse gas emissions from the international court of justice – a United Nations top court. The young activists have been trapped in that violation since birth, Matheson said.“These young people were born into a climate emergency, they were born into a rights violation, and they have lived every single day with their right to a healthy climate system being infringed upon,” she said. “We could get to a healthy climate system by 2100 if we make changes, but even then, these young plaintiffs will live their entire lives without ever being able to fully enjoy and exercise their right to a healthy climate system … Their hope is that their children or their grandchildren might.”Filed in 2015, Juliana v US argued that the government violated the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights with pro-fossil fuel policies. Our Children’s Trust, which brought the case, made its final attempt to revive the case last year by asking the supreme court to allow the suit to proceed to trial in a lower court; its bid was denied in March.By denying the young challengers access to effective remedies to the climate crisis and thereby continually causing them harm, the courts failed to fulfill its international legal obligations, the new filing says.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe US is also breaching its obligations by continuing to perpetuate a fossil fuel-based energy system, argues the petition to the IACHR.“The US government, the leading cumulative contributor to climate change, has caused real harm to our health, our homes, our cultures and our futures,” said Levi.With the new petition, the young activists are demanding “precautionary measures” aimed at protecting their rights and obligations, as well as a hearing. In their best-case scenario, the IACHR would visit the US to hear the stories of the petitioners, then hold a public hearing to allow them to present their evidence to the world, and finally declare that the US has committed “wrongful acts” and make recommendations to push the country to improve its behavior.“We want the commission to declare that these systemic actions have violated our rights under the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man,” said Levi. “This would carry legal weight across the Americas and help set a precedent that governments can’t continue to violate our rights without consequences.”Michael Gerrard, an environmental law expert at Columbia University, said the commission the activists are petitioning tends to act slowly. The body took five years to review one pollution-focused complaint from a Louisiana community filed in 2005.If the commission issues strong recommendations for the US, he said, US officials will be under no obligation to follow it.“The Trump administration wouldn’t care what this commission says, but the next administration might,” he added.The petition follows news that planet-warming pollution from the US rose in the first half of 2025. It also comes amid widespread attacks on climate protections by the Trump administration, which has launched more than 150 anti-environmental and anti-renewable energy actions since retaking the White House in January.“We are bringing this petition forward now because the science is urgent, the harm is accelerating and our rights are still being violated,” said Levi.Our Children’s Trust has represented young people in an array of state and federal lawsuits. During a two-day hearing in Montana this month, young plaintiffs in one federal case argued that three of Trump’s pro-fossil fuel executive orders should be blocked. The law firm in 2023 notched a landmark win in the lawsuit Held v Montana, when a judge ruled that the state’s pro-fossil fuel policies violated a group of youth plaintiffs’ rights under the state’s constitution.Just hours before Our Children’s Trust filed the petition, Trump addressed the United Nations claiming that the climate crisis was the “greatest con job perpetrated on the world” and “a hoax made up by people with evil intentions”.“This courageous action aims to tell the truth and do something about it,” said James R May, of counsel to Our Children’s Trust. More

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      How Trump’s assault on US wind industry threatens jobs and power for nearly 5m homes

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      Donald Trump has jettisoned Republicans’ long-standing “all of the above” approach to energy by using the US government to aggressively stamp out clean energy projects – particularly offshore wind turbines.The scale of the intervention is remarkable – a total of nine already permitted offshore wind projects that were set to provide electricity to nearly 5m households and create around 9,000 jobs in the US are under investigation or have already been paused by the Trump administration.Trump has barred any new solar and wind projects from federal land and waters, eliminated incentives for clean energy and, almost uniquely for a US president, called for an entire industry to be stopped in its tracks.“Windmills – we’re just not gonna allow them, they are ruining the country,” Trump said last month. On Tuesday, Trump told the United Nations, without evidence, that “countries are on the brink of destruction because of the green energy agenda.”The president has a long distaste for wind turbines, calling them “ugly”, “disgusting” and “garbage” and calling any support for wind and solar to help ameliorate the climate crisis “the scam of the century.”This grudge has been aimed most pointedly at the US’s nascent offshore wind sector, with the Trump administration currently halting, delaying or investigating nine already permitted projects off the east coast – five of which are already under construction. In the past two weeks alone, officials have filed a legal motion to stop a wind project off Maryland and review another off Massachusetts.Officials also halted Revolution Wind off the coast of Rhode Island, which is 80% complete, although work was allowed to resume by a federal judge on Monday.“Under this administration, there is not a future for offshore wind because it is too expensive and not reliable enough,” Doug Burgum, Trump’s interior secretary, told a conference in Italy this month.The interior department, Burgum said at the conference, is “taking a deep look” at the five under-construction offshore wind farms – Revolution Wind off the coast of Rhode Island, Vineyard Wind 1 off Massachusetts, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, and Sunrise Wind and Empire Wind, both off New York.Officials have taken additional steps to impede certain projects. In a court filing this month, lawyers for the administration asked a federal judge to cancel the approval of the Maryland Offshore Wind Project, saying they had identified an error.Last week, they moved to block the SouthCoast Wind project off Massachusetts, and earlier they also announced they are reconsidering approvals for another wind farm off the Massachusetts coast, called New England Wind.In order to squash projects that had already been approved, the Trump administration has variously claimed offshore wind turbines disturb whales, pose national security risks and impede search and rescue efforts, despite presenting little to no evidence of such harms.A Department of Interior spokesperson said that work on Revolution Wind will resume but it will still be investigated over “possible impacts by the project to national security”.The department ‘“remains committed to ensuring that prior decisions are legally and factually sound”, the spokesperson added.This crackdown has rattled businesses and imperiled a sizable amount of power that was to flow from the offshore wind farms.In total, the nine wind projects were set to deliver around 12.5GW of energy capacity, enough to provide power to almost 5m households. More than 9,000 direct and indirect jobs flowing from the projects are also at risk should they be halted, according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress.“At least a third or maybe 40%, of building trade members, we are pretty sure, voted for this President and his administration … now thousands are losing work,” said David Langlais, who leads the Ironworkers Local 37, whose members were among the more than 1,000 workers whose jobs were threatened by the attempt to halt Revolution Wind in Rhode Island.“The administration came out saying they’re supportive of working people, working Americans, but they just continue to show the opposite of that.”The administration’s war on wind has had spurred chaos among developers. In June, the company behind a planned wind farm off New Jersey’s coast, Atlantic Shores, asked the state to cancel its contract after Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency yanked a necessary air permit for the project. The firms behind Empire Wind 2 off New York in January also cancelled their contract, citing economic concerns and supply chain issues.It is unusual for the US government to attempt to shut down a project it has previously approved, even under a different administration. A further six offshore wind projects, promising a further 11.6GW of power, are still in the permitting phase and so will be even more vulnerable to being scrapped by the administration.Experts have pointed out that renewables like wind and solar are often the cheapest sources of electricity, with a slowdown in US deployment set to further raise energy costs for American households. In New England, the grid operator has warned of potential power shortfalls, too, if the targeted offshore wind projects are scrapped.“Halting construction and revoking permits on approved projects after years of thorough agency review will raise electricity prices for millions across the country, jeopardize billions of dollars in private investment, threaten our national shipbuilding, steel, and manufacturing supply chains, and undermine our nation’s energy security,” said Liz Burdock, CEO of Oceantic, the offshore renewable energy-focused organization formerly known as the Business Network for Maryland Offshore Wind.The attack on wind is especially concerning amid the rising demand for energy caused by the growth of AI data centers, said Michael Sabitoni, general secretary-treasurer of the Laborers International Union of North America.That strain has also raised energy prices, including for workers whose jobs are under threat. And no other power projects in New England are slated to bring more energy or jobs online, Sabitoni added.“If you said you wanted to bring, for instance, a new nuclear plant online, do you know how long it would take to site that? It would take years.”The fallout will take a major toll on local economies, said Sabitoni.The onslaught on wind power has bewildered some conservatives who still adhere to ‘all of the above’, a term widely used by Republicans, including the Trump administration in its first term, over the past decade to denote an agnostic, free-market approach to energy.Scientists have warned that fossil fuels must be steadily phased out to avert disastrous climate impacts. By contrast, Trump, who received large donations from the oil and gas industry during his election campaign, has invoked emergency powers, shredded regulations and boosted subsidies to force through more fossil fuel projects.“It’s different from the first term,” said Heather Reams, chief executive of Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions (Cres), a conservative group that advocates for clean energy. “There’s no real precedence for this and it’s having a chilling effect across energy projects in general.”Right-leaning Americans still overwhelmingly back the all of the above approach, polling released by Cres this week shows. A total of 85% of Republican voters support all of the above, the poll found, with nearly three-quarters wanting the US to use clean energy to help cut planet-heating pollution.“We are seeing a big difference between ordinary voters and what’s happening inside the Beltway,” said Reams. “There’s this harsh turn against renewable energy from the White House, particularly offshore wind. We haven’t heard an economic reason for this, although we know that President Trump has not liked wind for a long time. It sounds like it is personal.” More

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      Jump in US greenhouse gas pollution pushed global emissions higher – report

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      A jump in greenhouse gas pollution in the US helped push global emissions higher in the first half of this year. This could be an omen of what’s to come, with Donald Trump’s pro-fossil fuel agenda set to significantly slow down the emissions cuts required to avoid disastrous climate impacts, a new forecast has found.The “most abrupt shift in energy and climate policy in recent memory” that has occurred since Trump re-entered the White House will have profound consequences for the global climate crisis by slowing the pace of US emissions cuts by as much as half the rate achieved over the past two decades, the Rhodium Group forecast states.The US is still expected to reduce its planet-heat emissions by between 26% and 35% by 2035 compared with 2005 levels, according to the report. But this is well down from a 38% to 56% reduction by 2035, which Rhodium forecast just last year during Joe Biden’s presidency.None of these scenarios will be sufficient to allow the US, the world’s largest historic emitter of carbon pollution, to play its full part in helping the world avert a worsening climate breakdown coming from 2C (3.6F) or more in global heating.The US and other governments agreed a decade ago in Paris to avoid this threshold but are badly off-track in required emissions reductions, ahead of a key UN climate meeting in Brazil in November to thrash out new targets.Even under the best-case scenario, whereby fossil fuels become much more expensive and cheap renewable energy is swiftly deployed, the US will cut its emissions by just 43% by 2040, Rhodium found – well below Biden’s own pledged target, since jettisoned by Trump.In the worst case, in which clean energy is severely constrained by economic and political factors, US emissions could even tick up slightly at the end of 2030s, the report states.“That is very different to where we were before; it’s more than halving the pace of decarbonization we’ve had over the last two decades,” said Ben King, a director at Rhodium.“The US was already off-track in meeting its contribution to emissions cuts and this is now a fairly big step in the wrong direction. The emissions trajectory is now a lot worse because of this policy whiplash.”Under Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda, the federal government has thrown open vast areas of land and waters to drilling and mining, ditched the Paris targets and shredded almost all regulations that aim to limit greenhouse gas pollution and the emissions of other air toxins that harm people’s health.Trump has sought to hobble the clean energy sector in the US, signing a Republican spending bill that kills off incentives for new solar, wind and battery projects and instructing his administration to halt new renewables facilities, even if they were previously approved and nearly completed.“We don’t allow windmills and we don’t want the solar panels,” the president said recently. Trump, who has a longstanding animus towards wind after objecting to viewing “ugly” wind turbines from his Scottish golf course, has conversely praised “beautiful clean coal” and encouraged fossil fuel producers to bypass pollution rules.This stance towards renewables, despite the administration demanding more supply to meet growing electricity demand, has already had a tangible impact. Offshore wind farms have been halted, while plans for a battery factory in North Carolina have been canceled and a plant in Michigan has recently been closed.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn all, nearly 65,000 clean energy jobs have been lost or stalled since Trump’s election, according to the Climate Power group, with household power bills rising as a result of the cuts to cheaper renewables.“Unfortunately, federal policy obstacles and restrictive mandates are threatening hundreds of billions in planned energy investment,” said Jason Grumet, chief executive of the American Clean Power Association, which last week reported solar installations had plummeted by a quarter in the first half of 2025.“The uncertainty created by new bureaucratic delays and unclear demands is having a chilling effect on the pipeline for future energy projects, stalling growth precisely when our nation needs more energy to power a growing economy.”The emissions impact of all of this will become obvious over the next couple of years, Rhodium’s King said. A preview of this can be seen in the first six months of the year, during which US emissions rose by 1.4% compared with the same period last year, according to Climate Trace.This bump in emissions, aided by a similar rise in Brazil, ensured that global emissions were slightly higher than the first half of 2024, a stark sign of the task ahead for governments in tackling the climate crisis without the leadership of the US, the world’s second largest emitter.“We won’t see the impacts of the Trump administration in the emissions data for a couple of years, I think,” said King.“But we are already seeing a slowdown in renewables installations and, to be honest, even a flatlining of emissions is a pretty bad indicator of the trajectory we need to be on.” More

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      The climate solution both the right and the left can get behind | Bill McKibben

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      View image in fullscreenAs I write these words, the No 1 trending story on the Guardian is titled: “The history and future of societal collapse”. It is an account of a study by a Cambridge expert who works at something ominously called the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk; he concludes that “we can’t put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely”.I can’t claim to have done a study, though I have been at work on climate change for almost 40 years and I gotta say: seems about right. So it’s maybe not the worst moment for a bit of worry about how you would fare in the case of a temporary breakdown of our civilization. Perhaps you have noticed that extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and violent. Or you read the stories that Donald Trump was shutting down the Federal Emergency Management Agency and surmised you’ll have to take care of yourself going forward. Or hey, maybe you think a cabal of pedophiles might try and use black helicopters to herd you into a 15-minute city where a communist mayor will make you spend the rest of your life riding a scary subway.Whatever. I am not telling you what to prep for – I’m just here to talk about the energy supply for your bunker. And in the process, make the case that maybe it’s time for rightwing nutjobs to join us leftwing nutjobs in embracing solar energy. Not because it’s nice for the environment – heaven forbid. But because it works. Including under adverse conditions when everything goes to hell.It’s not the obvious choice, perhaps. At least in the US, conservatism is heavily identified with fossil fuel; the Trump administration has spent the last months doing everything it can think of to stymie solar and wind power and to boost hydrocarbons, going so far as to shut down an 80% finished windfarm off the coast of Rhode Island. So, it’s understandable that in a lot of cases, your diehard prepper will be inclined to use what he knows and trusts. It’s not just Trump, of course – there’s also the work that big oil has done to pitch itself as manly, the idea that the climate change is a hobbyhorse of those scientific “elites”, and so on.View image in fullscreenThat is why you can go on Reddit and find long exchanges about, say, how to keep jerrycans of diesel fuel fresh over the years. (It turns out that diesel can grow algae – the consensus on the forum is that if you store it in metal cans in the dark you are probably good for a couple of years, though you may want to buy some “diesel biocide” just in case. Here’s some available online, just $185 a gallon.)But say you imagine the emergency might last a little longer – then things just keep getting harder. Here’s how one prepper on the forum outlined his dilemma:
      I currently have three 275 gallon fuel oil tanks. 2 are in my basement and filled with diesel. One will be put somewhere outside with gasoline. I just picked up 3 70s-80’s vintage gas pumps that are supposedly in working order. What is everyone doing for home refueling? Concrete pads for the pumps and tanks? What are you doing to protect the pumps from getting run into or damaged from snowplows? How are you ensuring 250+ gallons of gas gets turned over and refilled before it goes bad? I was thinking of selling to close friends and neighbors either at cost or at a slight loss to make sure the fuel is always fresh.
      I guess that might be workable – running your own gas station for your neighbors, albeit at a slight loss. (If they’re old like me, you could lure them in with free drinking glasses.)But say the emergency goes on longer than that, and you have to refill your tanks. At some point you are likely to realize what an incredibly complicated system you have tied yourself into, with multiple failure points everywhere. To get oil these days you basically need a company sophisticated enough to drill a couple of miles below the ocean; to get natural gas you need drillers able to detonate explosives miles beneath the Earth’s surface to “frack” the deposits into flowing. And then you need to be able to pipe your crude to a massive refinery where it can be separated into various components, and then a fleet of trucks to carry it to gas stations and so on. Once you have it, the engine that it goes in has to be properly maintained – there’s a lot of engineering involved in making a flammable liquid burn at a steady pace and, say, move power to wheels, which is why there are about 2,000 parts in the drivetrain of an internal combustion vehicle. Any of them can and do break, at which point you would better have a pretty good stock in your bunker unless you are absolutely sure your local Pep Boys is going to be up and running.Or – and bear with me here a minute – you could go solar. Again, I understand that Trump hates it. “It’s all steel and glass and wires,” he told a California gathering shortly before the last election. “It looks like hell. And you see rabbits get caught in it … It’s just terrible.” But maybe aesthetics is not your primary concern and maybe you hunt rabbits, anyway – in that case, solar has a lot to recommend it for us average paranoiacs. In fact, I think you could go so far as to say that it is the one form of power that matches up almost perfectly with a rational conservative outlook: if you look at it one way, it is energy for hyper-individualists.View image in fullscreenFor one thing, it works – for a really, really long time. My oldest solar panels have been up on the roof for a quarter century and they are still going strong; the oldest solar array in France was just tested and 30 years later it was still at 80% of its original output. And you can now easily connect solar panels to batteries – some even come from that Nazi-adjacent billionaire Elon Musk (though there are also plenty of competitors now, in case you want non-fascist electron storage). Once you have got a battery in the basement, the afternoon’s sunshine can last all day. Indeed, if you have thought ahead and bought, say, a Ford F-150 Lightning, the electric version of America’s most popular vehicle, you have battery enough to keep your house running for days and days.But best of all there is no complicated system to plug into. It’s just you and the sun, and the sun is currently predicted to go on burning for 5bn years (after which, admittedly, you’re on your own).Similarly, the stuff you can get to use all that electricity to is super-duper simple. Take that Ford Lightning, or indeed any electric vehicle: it has about 20 moving parts in the drivetrain. I know that good red-hatted Americans are supposed to be a little suspicious of EVs – our president has explained that they “only drive for 15 minutes before you have to get a charge”. (You would think he would have more respect, the golf carts at his courses are electric and carry his considerable bulk for 18 holes). But in fact EVs are now high-performance vehicles (if you must, you can actually get an electric Hummer), and they are incredibly self-supporting. When I was buying mine – again, early on – the salesman offered me six free oil changes. I looked at him for a little while, and then he blushed and offered me free floor mats instead. Tires need changing, but that’s about it.And here’s the thing: you just plug your EV into the solar panels and the batteries in your house. You never need to worry about the gas station running out of gas, or running out power. And you know, just in case, I would get an e-bike too; the manual backup (they’re called pedals) is already in place.I think back often to the first couple of Mad Max movies, especially the ever popular Mad Max 2, which came out in 1981. Mel Gibson is wandering a post-apocalyptic Australian outback (energy crisis, environmental collapse, never really specified) and his main quest is for oil. In a major plot point, he helps defend a besieged refinery in return for some petrol (gyrocopters, deadly steel boomerang). Even in this desperate future, it is all about the oil.View image in fullscreenThat made sense at the time, because when the movie was made, solar panels were still basically a toy – they were most likely to be found in calculators and wrist watches; a roof full of panels would have been prohibitively expensive. You had no choice in a 1980s-era apocalypse to try to live off whatever oil still remained (especially if you wanted to drive around the desert in a souped-up dune buggy). But since 1981, the price of a solar panel has dropped about 99% and so has the price of a battery. In Australia, as a result, about 40% of homes now have solar panels on the roof. It is so easy and cheap it is almost incredible. As the electrification guru Saul Griffith wrote recently:
      Our rooftops generate over 10% of total energy supply. For an individual household with a large rooftop, it pays to install more than you need. My friend Fred’s house produces 141% of the electricity it needs in a year to run an entirely electric life including 2 cars and a heated pool. This is true abundance.
      An Australian system costs a third of what it will currently run you in America. That’s largely because we raise the price with a lot of unnecessary permitting, which is another place where left and right could easily meet. Why should the government be keeping you from harvesting the electrons that fall on your roof? It’s a conspiracy! Actually, it kind of is: it suits the utilities to keep us hooked to the current ways of doing business.That is why we are staging Sun Day later this month: a big nationwide celebration of clean energy with some pretty pointed efforts to make local governments change their ways. If we can’t move Washington right now, we can at least pressure blue city halls and state legislatures, and maybe some red ones too: earlier this spring deep-red Utah became the first state to allow European-style “balcony solar”, those apartment-scale solar panels you just hang from your veranda and plug into your wall.What I’m saying is, Mad Max was good entertainment but bad prepping. Even if you find an oil tanker to hijack, you’re still going to run out of fuel pretty fast; it seems likely there is a finite number of old oil tankers. Whereas the sun, the sun just keeps rising. Why not just kick back and enjoy the easy life with your solar panels? No need to be Mad Max – you can be Chill Max, running your fridge and your piña colada machine and every other appliance you can imagine.Do I think prepping for a disaster is the best reason to put up solar panels? I do not. I think avoiding a disaster is the best reason: the rapid buildout of solar and wind and batteries is the first scalable solution to the climate crisis that has emerged in all these decades I have been at work. If we put up enough of it quickly enough (say, at the pace China is currently going), then we would take some of the sting out of global heating. We cannot stop climate change, but maybe we can stop it short of the place where it cuts civilization off at the knees.But I know plenty of people who think more individually than societally, whose main concern is the fate of themselves and their families. So it pleases me that for them the answer is the same: a solar panel makes your home truly your castle. If you want to defend it with an AR-15 – well, now you have got something worth defending.That is why, I think, that Sun Day seems to be drawing in all types, from unreconstructed hippies to entrepreneurs to evangelical pastors who are setting up hundreds of events across the country. In a moment when our incredibly polarized society makes it hard to do much of anything, that is worth at least a modest celebration. So come out on 21 September to celebrate the rise of clean energy, to make it easier to put up panels – and to meet your neighbors. And by the way, knowing your neighbors is a pretty good survival technology too.

      Bill McKibben is the author of the forthcoming Here Comes the Sun, and the founder of Sun Day More

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      in US Politics

      Why Trump’s undermining of US statistics is so dangerous | Daniel Malinsky

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      In 1937, Joseph Stalin commissioned a sweeping census of the Soviet Union. The data reflected some uncomfortable facts – in particular, the dampening of population growth in areas devastated by the 1933 famine – and so Stalin’s government suppressed the release of the survey results. Several high-level government statistical workers responsible for the census were subsequently imprisoned and apparently executed. Though the Soviet authorities would proudly trumpet national statistics that glorified the USSR’s achievements, any numbers that did not fit the preferred narrative were buried.A few weeks ago, following the release of “disappointing” jobs data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Donald Trump fired the commissioner of labor statistics, Dr Erika McEntarfer, and claimed the numbers were “rigged”. He also announced his intention to commission an unprecedented off-schedule census of the US population (these happen every 10 years and the next one should be in 2030) with an emphasis that this census “will not count illegal immigrants”. The real goal is presumably to deliver a set of population estimates that could be used to reapportion congressional seats and districts ahead of the 2026 mid-term elections and ensure conditions favorable to Republican control of Congress – though it is not clear there is sufficient time or support from Congress to make this happen. The administration is also reportedly “updating” the National Climate Assessments and various important sources of data on topics related to climate and public health have disappeared. In addition to all this, Trump’s justice department launched an investigation into the crime statistics of the DC Metropolitan police, alleging that the widely reported decline in 2024 DC violent crime rates – the lowest total number of recorded violent crimes city-wide in 30 years – are a distortion, fueled by falsified or manipulated statistics. One might say that the charge of “fake data” is just a close cousin of the “fake news” and all of this is par for the course for an administration that insists an alternate reality is the truth. But this pattern may also beget a specifically troubling (and quintessentially Soviet) state of affairs: the public belief that all “political” data are fake, that one generally cannot trust statistics. We must resist this paradigm shift, because it mainly serves to entrench authoritarianism.It was eventually a common sentiment in the Soviet Union that one could never trust “the official numbers” because they were largely manipulated to serve political interests. (At least, this is the sentiment reported by my parents, who grew up in the Soviet Baltic states during the 1960s and 1970s – I was an infant when we left in the late 80s so I cannot report much first-hand.) One upshot of this kind of collective belief, if it were to take hold, is that it can make one’s informational world quite small: if you can only trust what you can verify directly, namely what you experience yourself or hear from trusted friends and family, it is difficult to broaden your view to include experiences of people in circumstances very different from yours. This kind of parochial world with few shared reference points is bad for democracy and building solidarity across groups. It also makes it easier for an oppressive state to plant false and divisive “facts” to serve its goals; we’ll have a fake crime wave here and a booming economy there, and though maybe most people disbelieve this they do not quite believe the opposite either. No one can credibly claim or contest any socially relevant trends because all numbers are fake, so the activities of claiming and contesting things become pointless – just do what you can get away with.A political culture with no trust in data or statistics is also one that will rely more heavily on opaque decisions made by elites behind closed doors. In his influential historical study of the rise of quantitative bureaucracy, the historian Thomas Porter points out that basing policy decisions on calculated numerical costs and benefits reduces the role of “local” discretion and can have a homogenizing effect, which can strengthen centralized state control. The flip side of this coin is that it also divests people in power from part of their authority by enabling a degree of public transparency and scrutability: if a huge government project must be justified by reference to some cost-benefit calculations, these calculations can be cross-checked and challenged by various parties. If a government agency requires documentation of progress on initiatives, proof that public funds are being spent appropriately, and evidence on who benefits and by how much, there is substantially less room for plain corruption and mismanagement provided that independent parties have access to the relevant information. Without credible data that reflects the facts on the ground, how can the public push back against an invented “crisis” narrative, concocted to justify the invocation of emergency powers?Anyone who spends any time working with data is acutely aware that there are lots of choices to be made in the collection or processing of data – there are numerous “decision points” about what to include, how to precisely define or measure things, and so on. Indeed, insofar as data is used to tell stories about complex things such as the state of the economy or the health of a population, different data collection or analysis choices can to some extent lend support to different narratives, including predetermined narratives if an unscrupulous analyst is set on it. But it does not follow from this that “anything goes” or that statistics are meaningless. There are better and worse ways to collect and analyze data, both reasonable and preposterous ways to answer empirical questions such as “are crime rates in DC going up or going down?” Most importantly, when government statistics are managed by qualified and non-partisan officials and the relevant numbers can be challenged, debated and contested, then we have a democratic basis for guiding our institutions to better policy decisions. Data of public importance must be publicly accessible, not hidden from view.Trump’s assault on the integrity of data is not the worst of his ongoing abuses – the public should be more immediately outraged by the masked agents disappearing people on the streets and the national guard occupying city centers – but this pattern of actions vis-a-vis official statistics should be extremely alarming. It is a slow boil: if we reach the point where nobody trusts numbers because it’s all “fake data”, it will be too late to resist and too difficult to undo the damage. The opposition must block appointments of unqualified and clearly biased nominees to lead the BLS and other agencies responsible for data stewardship. We must resist undue interference in data gathering, whether that is at the level of the US census or at the level of city government. On the contrary, we should be investing in initiatives that strengthen public trust in and understanding of the social, economic and environmental data that can be used to guide decisions that affect our communities’ wellbeing.

      Daniel Malinsky is an assistant professor of biostatistics in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University More

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      in US Politics

      ‘It happened so fast’: the shocking reality of indoor heat deaths in Arizona

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      It was the hottest day of the year so far when the central air conditioning started blowing hot air in the mobile home where Richard Chamblee lived in Bullhead City, Arizona, with his wife, children, and half a dozen cats and dogs.It was only mid-June but the heat was insufferable, particularly for Chamblee, who was clinically obese and bed-bound in the living room as the temperature hit 115F (46C) in the desert city – situated 100 miles (160km) south of Las Vegas on the banks of the Colorado River.The family could not afford to immediately replace or repair the AC system, so instead they bought a window unit and installed it next to Chamblee’s bed. They positioned fans, ice packs and cold drinks close by in an effort to keep Chamblee cool and hydrated, checking in on him every couple of hours.But the mobile home is old, open-plan and poorly insulated. Despite their efforts, the temperature hovered close to 100F in the house, according to Chamblee’s son John.Chamblee overheated and struggled to breathe. His core temperature measured 108F when he was rushed to the emergency room, but doctors were unable to cool him down, according to the death report obtained by the Guardian using the Freedom of Information Act (Foia). Chamblee’s heart stopped working.View image in fullscreenHe had died just two days after the AC went out.“It was the end of the day and it was cooling off slightly, so we thought he’d be OK. He thought he would be OK,” said his wife, Sherry Chamblee, who works three jobs including as assistant manager at a local grocery store. “We had no idea the heat could be so dangerous so quickly inside. It just happened so fast.”Chamblee was just 52 years old. He was a devout Baptist, smart and happy-go-lucky, and he loved playing video games.“We did our best to cool him down, but we live a couple of hours from Death Valley, the hottest place on Earth, and my dad couldn’t move,” said John, 21. “My mom lives paycheck to paycheck and if the AC breaks down in the summer and you can’t afford to fix it, you will die here. My dad proves that.”Nationwide, one in five of the lowest-income households have no access to air conditioning, while 30% rely solely on window units, according to exclusive analysis by the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (Neada) for the Guardian.As many as 60% of American households live paycheck to paycheck, while one in three report forgoing basic necessities such as food or medicine to pay energy bills and avoid disconnection.Heat is the deadliest weather phenomenon in the US and globally, killing almost half a million people worldwide each year, according to the World Health Organization. The death toll is rising as human-caused climate crisis drives more frequent, more brutal and longer heatwaves.Last month marked 30 years since what was then an unprecedented five-day heatwave in Chicago that killed more than 730 people and sent thousands to hospital. The majority were elderly, Black, isolated, low-income residents either lacking air conditioning or the money to run it.Since then, deadly heat domes have hit every corner of the country, including northern states unaccustomed to extreme heat, such as Oregon and Massachusetts. Yet the US has failed to implement a robust methodology to count and understand the scale of the heat-related illnesses and deaths.View image in fullscreenAs the planet heats up, experts warn that indoor heat deaths among elderly, sick and low-income people could surge amid deepening financial hardship driven by Donald Trump’s energy policies, trade wars and his administration’s dismantling of the social safety net.“The United States is being governed by a regime that depends on denying scientific findings from climate science to economics and medical science to sociology,” said Eric Klinenberg, the author of Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University.“We’re not just failing to protect vulnerable people, we’re actively making life here more precarious. And while some will be able to buy their way out of the problem, most people can’t. This is an existential crisis,” said Klinenberg.Energy poverty in the world’s richest countryOne in three American households experiences energy poverty – the inability to access sufficient amounts of energy due to financial hardship, according to one recent study.And it’s getting worse. The average household electric bill during the summer months, when cooling drives up usage, will reach $784 in 2025 – a 6.2% rise from $737 last year, according to analysis by Neada for the Guardian. This will be the highest recorded in more than a decade, and will place a disproportionate burden on low-income Americans. Families in the south and south-west are disproportionately affected.The Chamblee family experienced severe energy poverty until 2023, when they saved $1,000 to install residential solar panels that qualified for tax credits, and cut the family’s summer electricity bills from around $400 to $60 a month. The federal solar tax credit included in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act ends in December, however, thanks to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act – a decade earlier than planned.Trump’s budget will lead to residential electricity bills in Arizona increasing by $220 on average by 2035, by truncating the development of new, cost-effective solar energy capacity in the sunny state, according to analysis by Energy Innovation. Trump’s signature legislation will also slash access to food stamps and healthcare, relied upon by millions of low-income households, in order to fund tax cuts for the wealthy.View image in fullscreenNationwide, meanwhile, his unprecedented and chaotic rollback of federal incentives and permits led to the cancellation of $22bn of clean energy projects in the first six months of 2025, more than half in Republican states.Earlier this month, Arizona’s Republican-controlled regulator also voted to begin the process of repealing the state’s renewable standard, which required that at least 15% of utility energy supplies should come from renewable sources by 2025. Consumer and environmental advocates – and the state’s attorney general – warn the move will further drive up energy bills.And in Arizona and across the country, private utilities have submitted proposals for multibillion-dollar rate increases, in order to cover infrastructure upgrades, inflation and new fossil fuel projects – driven, at least partially, by the unchecked expansion of massive datacentres promoted by the Trump administration.“Families are already struggling with high energy bills, and forcing them to cross-subsidize some of the world’s wealthiest corporations violates both fairness and common sense,” said Mark Wolfe, an energy economist and director of Neada.“It will worsen energy poverty, erode public trust, and turn utilities into vehicles for corporate welfare.”Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, dismissed criticism of Trump’s energy policy as “fearmongering”.“The best source of energy in a heat wave is baseload energy from coal and natural gas, which the president has unleashed and made more affordable, not intermittent energy sources like solar,” Rogers said. “By increasing energy production, eliminating burdensome regulations, and streamlining permitting, President Trump is ensuring that US energy meets the energy demands for heat waves, data centers, and grid stability.”Energy … on the credit cardHousehold utility debt is reaching crisis levels, jumping from $17.5bn in January 2023 to $21bn in June 2025 and forecast to climb as high as $25bn by the end of this year. Currently, only 26 states and the District of Columbia have rules restricting some utility shutoffs over the summer, and disconnections could hit 4m by the end of 2025, according to Neada.Amid soaring energy costs, shrinking federal aid, hotter summers and a zip code lottery when it comes to utility disconnection rules, health experts warn that households on fixed incomes and those with medical issues such as diabetes, heart disease, obesity and addictions will be most vulnerable.“These are preventable deaths, and the situation is going to get worse as bills go up and hardship increases,” said Vjollca Berisha, a former senior epidemiologist at the Maricopa county department of public health who tracked energy insecurity and indoor deaths. “It only takes a little push to knock down people with underlying conditions if they don’t have options.”View image in fullscreenIn Maricopa county, which includes Phoenix, last year, almost a quarter of the 608 confirmed heat-related fatalities happened inside, with people over 50 accounting for the vast majority of those who died at home.A quarter of the county’s indoor deaths took place in RVs or mobile homes, a popular source of affordable housing, especially for retirees, but which are often poorly insulated and too rundown to qualify for weatherization programs.The vast majority of those indoor heat victims had AC at home, but the unit was broken in 70% of cases – while one in 10 had no electricity to run even a fan, according to Maricopa county’s 2024 report.Patricia Miletich, a 70-year-old woman with memory issues, died in June 2024 at a 55+ RV resort with pickleball courts, a golf course and bistro in the hot and dusty city of El Mirage north-west of Phoenix. According to her autopsy report obtained by the Guardian, a neighbor told death investigators that Miletich had forgotten to pay her bills on multiple occasions, resulting in her electricity being turned off in the past.The power was on when she died, but the AC was not functioning. Like Chamblee’s, it blew hot air from the vents, between 109F and 117F. The resort’s manager confirmed to the Guardian that Miletich’s power had been disconnected several times, but declined to answer further questions about what support the retiree received.“It’s a sad situation that should never have happened, but she wanted to be left alone and the family didn’t know” about her memory decline and electricity shutoffs, said her brother Michael Miletich.In nearby Mohave county, a Guardian analysis of death reports obtained under Foia found that 70% of the 67 confirmed heat-related deaths in 2024 occurred indoors – of which the vast majority lived in RVs or mobile homes.This includes Stephen Patterson in Lake Havasu City, a 69-year-old with multiple health challenges tied to a childhood road traffic accident, chronic pain and alcohol addiction. Patterson relied on his $1,000 monthly social security check – the sole source of income for around 40% of seniors, according to one 2020 study.According to Regina, his sister and main carer, Patterson rationed his AC use because he believed he could cope with the heat but not without alcohol. He also incorrectly blamed the AC for a mold issue.When he died, the temperature inside Stephen’s house was 102F, according to the medical examiner’s report. The daily high in Lake Havasu City was 116F.View image in fullscreen“I begged him to turn on the AC,” said Regina, who is 75 and, like her brother, is also on a fixed social security income. “I would have paid his bill on my credit card, but my brother was a stubborn man. It was like a furnace when I found him.”Regina uses credit cards to pay her electric bill, currently $211 a month, as well as her water, trash, car insurance and cable. The cards charge as much as 35% interest. Around 60% of her monthly income covers the house payment, and the rest goes to service the credit card debt, which currently stands at more than $12,000 – in addition to almost $1,000 owed to the energy company.She diligently documents each month’s payments and remaining credit in an A4 notebook that sits on the coffee table next to the TV remote.View image in fullscreenRegina has been disconnected multiple times over the years, but has received some financial help from the Salvation Army and Goodwill to avoid a shutoff. Yet she was unaware of the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (Liheap), the chronically underfunded federal program to help families pay their energy bills, which the Trump administration proposed cutting after firing the entire workforce in April.In Arizona, 24,000 households received Liheap assistance in the 2025 fiscal year. A third of recipients included a household member with a disability or children under six, while 16% included an older adult. Liheap was saved amid bipartisan protests, but its future remains uncertain. Arizona, where heat deaths are known to occur from April to November, currently only has enough funds to help struggling families through the end of September.On his first day back in the White House, Trump declared a national energy emergency, promising to lower prices by boosting fossil fuels and rolling back Joe Biden’s renewable energy ambitions. To Regina Patterson, it all now rings hollow.“The price of everything keeps going up and I get into more debt every month. Trump is evil and only cares about the rich,” she said.“If I were to lose my electric in this heat, I would lose my head.” More

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      View image in fullscreenDarren McKinney grew up in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward. When Hurricane Katrina struck 20 years ago this week, he watched his neighborhood wash away. From his second-floor apartment, he saw flood waters rise up to his window.“I had no food at all, no water, no electricity,” he recounted one rainy day this month, while taking a break from his job leading home restoration in the neighborhood as field operations director of the non-profit lowernine.org.After being trapped inside for four days, city officials rescued McKinney in a boat and dropped him off on a nearby bridge. He was told a military truck would bring him to an emergency shelter in the city’s Superdome, but a vehicle never arrived because the shelter reached capacity. He was forced to walk to an evacuation point downtown.“You had to fend for yourself,” he said. “There just wasn’t enough shelter, wasn’t enough support.”Friends helped McKinney evacuate to Houston, Texas. Months later, when he returned to the city, he found his home in “real bad condition”. He eventually settled into a trailer provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema).During his stay in the temporary home, he began to hear news reports that some Fema trailers were found to have high levels of the harmful chemical formaldehyde. With nowhere else to stay, he tried to ignore those reports.“What could you do?” he asked.The federal response to Katrina, particularly by Fema, came under intense scrutiny after the hurricane, which killed at least 1,833 people. In New Orleans, residents spray-painted curses at Fema on their boarded-up homes and wore T-shirts around the city that bore the slogan: “FEMA – Federal Employees Missing in Action.”Some on the right have called to shrink the agency or even abolish it. In recent months, the Trump administration has picked up on those calls, defunding key Fema programs, laying off hundreds of staffers, and threatening to dismantle the agency completely. But McKinney believes the administration’s policies will leave New Orleans worse prepared for future hurricanes.“You don’t know when you’re gonna have another disaster like that,” he said. “For people that don’t have money, without Fema, how you going to help them out?”In recent weeks, Donald Trump has walked back promises to abolish Fema. But disaster management experts fear the changes he has made will still leave the US just as underprepared to take on a hurricane like Katrina as it was in 2005.“It has been so demoralizing to realize how closely aligned we have become again to what Fema looked like pre-Katrina, and how quickly we’ve backslid on the progress of the last 20 years,” said Samantha Montano, a disaster response expert at Massachusetts Maritime Academy and author of the book Disasterology.‘State-led, federally supported’Since re-entering the White House in January, Trump has repeatedly called for states to bear more responsibility for disasters, signing a March executive order saying municipalities should “play a more active and significant role” in national resilience and preparedness.“If they can’t handle it, they shouldn’t be governor,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office in June, as he spoke about a plan to “wean” states off Fema assistance.But states have always led disaster response, said Craig Fugate, who directed Fema between 2009 and 2017.“The current administration says states should lead, we should support, [but] that’s what it’s always been,” he said. “The federal government, at the direction of the president, through Fema, supports the governor.”Cuts at Fema could have particularly negative implications for poor, climate-vulnerable states like Louisiana, which received the most direct assistance from Fema between January 2015 and April 2024, according to data collected for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Disaster Dollar Database.“For states that are oftentimes underresourced, Fema gives the support that is needed to navigate disasters, both in the form of financial assistance and providing technical expertise,” said Reggie Ferreira, who directs the disaster resilience leadership academy at Tulane University in New Orleans.But even wealthier states will probably struggle to weather disasters without the agency’s support, said Montano.“The importance of Fema really just can’t be overstated. They’re the last line of defense that we really have in moments of crisis,” she said. “We know that our state and local capacity to respond to disasters in most parts of the country is relatively limited. And we know that our needs related to disasters are increasing in the context of climate change.”‘Brain drain’After Katrina struck New Orleans in August 2005, the support Fema was able to provide had dwindled due to policies enacted by former president George W Bush.“When Katrina happened, it’s really important to remember that Fema had just gone through a shock of their own,” said Montano. “Going into Katrina, Fema was deeply unprepared as an agency, which is a huge reason for the failure in the response.”In the wake of the 2001 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration launched a government-wide reorganization to focus on the threat of terrorism, cutting disaster programs and, in 2003, stripping Fema of its independent, cabinet-level status. The agency was then absorbed into the newly created Department of Homeland Security.“The attention was only on terrorism at the expense of anything else,” said Fugate.The shifts at Fema led to a mass exodus of staff. Some – including senior leadership – were relieved of their duties and reassigned to terrorism-related posts, while others who were reportedly frustrated with the restructure resigned.That “brain drain” was a key reason that Fema was not able to provide an adequate response to Katrina, said Montano.Fugate said what is happening at the agency today was “very similar” to that moment. Under Trump, an estimated one-third of Fema’s workforce has been eliminated due to layoffs, firings and voluntary buyouts.In recent weeks, the Trump administration has also reportedly sent some remaining Fema staff to help speed the hiring of immigration enforcement agents. Lt Gen Russel Honoré, who led the military response to Hurricane Katrina, had choice words about the decision. “That adds insult to injury,” he said. “I really think these fucking people are stuck on stupid.”The staffing cuts threaten the relationships between state and federal officials, said Stephen Murphy, former planning section chief for New Orleans’s homeland security and emergency preparedness office. That could make disaster response less efficient.“When you have a strong team, a network, everybody has built trust in one another because they’ve been out there together, they’ve bled for one another,” said Murphy, who now leads Tulane University’s disaster management program. “When you disrupt that, you’re playing with fire.”View image in fullscreenThe federal changes are difficult to witness, said Murphy, who said Katrina inspired his career in disaster response. When it struck, he had moved to New Orleans only six weeks earlier to pursue a graduate degree in bioterrorism. Classes had not even started when, as Katrina was gaining strength over the Gulf of Mexico, he decided to evacuate his new home.“As I was pulling out of my neighborhood, some new friends that I’d met in town said: ‘Hey, where are you going? We’re going to have a party,’” he remembered from his New Orleans office. “I had my kayak in my truck, and I asked: ‘OK, you want me to leave this for you?’ I didn’t realize how terrible a joke that would be.”In its aftermath, Murphy decided to devote his life to better managing disasters like Katrina, as did many others in the field.“There’s been tremendous improvements and growth since then,” said Murphy. “To dismantle a lot of what has been done does feel like a little bit of a gut punch.”Cutting funding, undercutting progressAfter Katrina, Fema also increased funding for disaster relief and mitigation. But under Trump, billions of those dollars have dried up.“A lot of the federal grants and money that helped fortify some of the most vulnerable areas, including New Orleans, are getting clawed back,” said Murphy. “You can’t just turn the spigot off and expect the system to still work.”View image in fullscreenSome of the Trump administration’s actions at Fema directly violate policies enacted by lawmakers to prevent future botched disaster responses, said Honoré. That includes the president’s January appointment of a new administrator for the agency.The Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act, which Congress passed in 2006, requires all Fema administrators to have experience in disaster management. The provision was inspired by Bush’s Fema administrator, Michael Brown, who was critiqued for his limited background in the field.In the 19 years since the bill’s passage, only “seasoned emergency managers” have succeeded Brown, said Honoré. But that all changed when Trump picked David Richardson – who appears to have no disaster management experience – for the post, he said.Before leading Fema, Richardson oversaw a Department of Homeland Security program focused on weapons of mass destruction. In a June briefing, Richardson told personnel he was unaware that the US had a hurricane season, which the White House later said was a “joke”.The 2006 policy also empowered Fema to act with greater flexibility and clearer authority in emergency management, and designated its administrator as a principal presidential adviser. Trump does not appear to be following those provisions, Honoré said.As deadly floods overwhelmed Texas last month, Fema officials told CNN they were not able to pre-position search and rescue crews in the region because Trump’s homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, insisted upon personally approving all agency contracts and grants over $100,000 before funds were disbursed.“Genius,” Honoré said sarcastically.This week, Fema employees wrote to Congress warning that the Trump administration’s changes at the agency could lead to another “catastrophe” on the scale of Hurricane Katrina. “The agency’s current trajectory reflects a clear departure from the intent” of the 2006 legislation, they wrote.View image in fullscreenDaniel Llargués, Fema’s acting press secretary, dismissed the criticisms voiced in the letter telling the New York Times the Trump administration “is committed to ensuring Fema delivers for the American people” and to cutting “red tape, inefficiency and outdated processes” in the agency. Fema did not respond to questions from the Guardian for this article.Equity threatenedIn the absence of federal support after Katrina, many advocacy groups worked to fill the gaps, particularly in the low-income communities of color that found it disproportionately difficult to rebuild.Even those non-governmental efforts have been undermined by Trump’s policies, said McKinney, the field operations director of lowernine.org.The organization has for years hosted international volunteers, but fewer want to travel to the US amid Trump’s immigration crackdown, he said.In May, the president also gutted AmeriCorps, leaving lowernine.org with fewer hands to help with their home construction efforts.“They cut the AmeriCorps funding [one] afternoon in the middle of a workday,” said Laura Paul, executive director of lowernine.org. “Our team had just taken a wall down on someone’s house that they were living in, and they just put their tools down and walked off site.”View image in fullscreenTrump has also ended grants to some environmental justice groups, including in New Orleans, further threatening efforts to promote equitable disaster recovery, while gutting Biden-era equity-focused government initiatives, including within Fema.“Fema, obviously, was not perfect in any way after Katrina,” said Montano. “But a lot of the progress on equity is just gone.”‘More support, more help’The scrutiny federal disaster response has received since Katrina is warranted, but Trump has moved in the wrong direction, said Betina James, a resident of New Orleans’s Hollygrove neighborhood.View image in fullscreen“We want more support, more help, not for them to take all that help away,” she said.From a senior citizens community meeting at the Hollygrove-Dixon Neighborhood Association’s Life Transformation Community Center this month, James recounted her experience after Katrina destroyed her house: Fema denied her request for a temporary shelter for two months, and when they finally approved it, the agency provided her with a trailer that had “no floor in the bedroom”.“It was just covered with carpet with nothing under it, so if you stepped on it, you’d go straight through to the ground,” she said.Officials provided a replacement, but living in it made her feel nauseated with burning eyes and itchy skin. She believes it was contaminated.At the senior citizens meeting, a dozen other residents chimed in with their harrowing Katrina experiences: stepping over human corpses in the streets and being left without shelter and financial aid. Some said they had even failed to receive adequate assistance during more recent disasters such as 2021’s Hurricane Ida.View image in fullscreenBut those experiences should push officials to improve Fema, not gut it, said Terry Caesar, another senior attending the meeting.“It used to be when things broke, we took it to the shop to fix it,” he said. “You’re not supposed to throw it out.” More