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The Trump administration is sabotaging your scientific data | Jonathan Gilmour
United States science has propelled the country into its current position as a powerhouse of biomedical advancements, technological innovation and scientific research. The data US government agencies produce is a crown jewel – it helps us track how the climate is changing, visualize air pollution in our communities, identify challenges to our health and provide a panoply of other essential uses. Climate change, pandemics and novel risks are coming for all of us – whether we bury our heads in the sand or not – and government data is critical to our understanding of the risks these challenges bring and how to address them.Much of this data remains out of sight to those who don’t use it, even though they benefit us all. Over the past few months, the Trump administration has brazenly attacked our scientific establishment through agency firings, censorship and funding cuts, and it has explicitly targeted data the American taxpayers have paid for. They’re stealing from us and putting our health and wellbeing in danger – so now we must advocate for these federal resources.That’s why we at the Public Environmental Data Partners are working to preserve critical environmental data. We are a coalition of non-profits, academic institutions, researchers and volunteers who work with federal data to support policy, research, advocacy and litigation work. We are one node in an expansive web of organizations fighting for the data American taxpayers have funded and that benefits us all. The first phase of our work has been to identify environmental justice tools and datasets at risk through conversations with environmental justice groups, current and former employees in local, state, and federal climate and environment offices, and researchers. To date, we have saved over a hundred priority datasets and have reproduced six tools.We’re not fighting for data for data’s sake; we’re fighting for data because it helps us make sense of the world.The utility of many of these datasets and tools comes from the fact that they are routinely updated. While our efforts ensure that we have snapshots of these critical data sources and tools, it will be a huge loss if these cease to be updated entirely. That’s why we are “life rafting” tools outside of government – standing up copies of them on publicly accessible, non-government pages – hoping that we can return them to a future administration that cares about human and environmental health and does not view science as a threat.The second phase is to develop these tools, advocate for better data infrastructure, and increase public engagement. There’s a question of scope – if the government stops sharing National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration data, we don’t have the resources to start monitoring and tracking hurricanes. For many of these critical data sources, the government is the only entity with the resources to collect and publish this data – think about the thousands of weather stations set up around the world or the global air pollution monitors or the spray of satellites orbiting the earth. On the other hand, we do have the expertise to build environmental justice tools that better serve the communities that have borne the brunt of environmental injustice, by co-creating with those communities and by building from what we have saved from the government – like the Council on Environmental Quality’s CEJST, the Environmental Protection Agency’s EJScreen, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Social Vulnerability and Environmental Justice tools.A common refrain of the saboteurs is that if these functions that they are targeting are important enough, the states or the private sector will step in to fill the gap. While some of these functions of the federal government are replicable outside of government, privatization will render them less accessible, more expensive and subject to the whims of the markets. The states can also step in and fill some gaps – but many of the biggest challenges that we’re facing are best tackled by a strong federal government. Furthermore, many states are happily joining this anti-science crusade. The climate crisis and pandemics don’t stop politely at state borders. If data collection is left up to the states, the next pandemic will not leave a state untouched because it dismantled its public health department – but such actions will leave a gaping hole in our understanding of the risks to the residents of that state and its neighbors. What’s more, some states do not have the resources to stand up the infrastructure required to shoulder the burden of data collection. Coordination between federal and state governments is essential.Data is being stolen from us; our ability to understand the world is being stolen from us. Americans will die because the Trump administration is abdicating its responsibility to the people – this censorship regime will have dire consequences. That’s why we must stand up for science, we must be loud about the importance of federal data and we must put the brakes on Trump’s un-American agenda.
Jonathan Gilmour is a data scientist at Harvard’s TH Chan School of Public Health, a fellow at the Aspen Policy Academy, and coordinator at the Public Environmental Data Partners. More
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‘All of his guns will do nothing for him’: lefty preppers are taking a different approach to doomsday
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View image in fullscreenOne afternoon in February, hoping to survive the apocalypse or at least avoid finding myself among its earliest victims, I logged on to an online course entitled Ruggedize Your Life: The Basics.Some of my classmates had activated their cameras. I scrolled through the little windows, noting the alarmed faces, downcast in cold laptop light. There were dozens of us on the call, including a geophysicist, an actor, a retired financial adviser and a civil engineer. We all looked worried, and rightly so. The issue formerly known as climate change was now a polycrisis called climate collapse. H1N1 was busily jumping from birds to cows to people. And with each passing day, as Donald Trump went about gleefully dismantling state capacity, the promise of a competent government response to the next hurricane, wildfire, flood, pandemic, drought, mudslide, heatwave, financial meltdown, hailstorm or other calamity receded further from view.Our two-hour live video session was taught by Alex Steffen, a 56-year-old author, speaker, podcaster and “foresight consultant”, who was addressing us from his home in the Bay Area.For many years, Steffen worked as an environmental reporter. He wrote several acclaimed books that explored technological solutions to the climate crisis, served as “futurist in residence” at the design firm IDEO, and taped a couple Ted Talks, gradually gaining a reputation as one of the foremost thinkers on the sustainability circuit. Meanwhile, he watched in horror as the window for action narrowed and governments and institutions dithered. “I still find it staggering and heart-rending that we blew this so badly,” he said in an interview.Having eventually concluded that the worst consequences of a heating climate had become inevitable, Steffen made a pivot. He now advises individuals, as well as businesses and localities, on how to gird themselves for impact. Interest in his classes and one-on-one consultations had roughly doubled every year since 2021, he said, and he expected 2,000 participants this year.Steffen bucks the image of the prototypical end times prepper, most of whom are creatures of the right. Emerging in the 1950s, preppers were animated by a variety of often overlapping fears: some were troubled by the increasingly networked, and therefore fragile, nature of contemporary life. Others perceived a divine warning in biblical references to the Tribulation, the ultimate scriptural nightmare fuel. Still others, alarmed by the superpower brinkmanship of the cold war, sought a refuge from nuclear annihilation. Finally, there was the widespread conviction that the turbulence of the 1960s presaged a full-blown civil war. Kurt Saxon, the author often credited with inventing the term “survivalist” in the mid-1970s, had been a member of the American Nazi party and the John Birch Society, and the need to guard against a vaguely racialized horde animates some of his writings.Originally known as “retreaters” (a term Saxon rejected due to its association with weakness), early adopters of what we now think of as the prepper philosophy went off-grid; hoarded provisions, firearms and ammunition, and sometimes constructed hidden bunkers. They championed individual fortitude over collective welfare. Wary of being vilified as violent crackpots (not to mention one day finding a throng of desperate neighbors banging on their steel-reinforced concrete door), many kept their hobby secret. As a result, researchers have long struggled to quantify the movement’s reach.Prepperism took a reputational hit in the 1990s, when it was linked with the militia movement, along with incidents such as the deadly standoffs at Ruby Ridge and Waco and the Oklahoma City bombing. But it re-emerged with renewed force after 9/11, the first assault by a foreign adversary on the US homeland in decades. Among the many casualties of the World Trade Center attack was Americans’ long-unquestioned sense of safety. In 2005, after Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans, George W Bush’s assertion that his Fema director was “doing a heck of a job” – even as thousands of storm refugees huddled in the Superdome without food or water – seemed to validate a central pillar of the prepper ethos: relying on government was the height of folly.View image in fullscreenIn the ensuing years, the philosophy went mainstream, fueling radio shows and YouTube channels as well as an ecosystem of regional conventions and wilderness survival trainings. Meanwhile, Americans began devouring survival-oriented programming, from Lost and The Walking Dead to Doomsday Preppers and Naked and Afraid, which played to our darkest eschatological nightmares. Though accurate demographic figures on preppers remain elusive, surveys taken after the worst of the Covid pandemic suggest that more than 20 million Americans are now taking steps to prepare for cataclysm – assembling go-bags and stocking up on food, water and first aid supplies – more than double the estimated number in 2017.Not all of them are conservatives. Liberals make up about 15% of the prepping scene, according to one estimate, and their numbers appear to be growing.One private Facebook group dedicated to preparedness for liberals has more than tripled in size since the election. Here, one finds no tradwife panegyrics, gun porn or “TEOTWAWKI” (the End of the World as We Know It) merch. Instead, participants offer advice on maintaining one’s online anonymity under a potential fascist regime, advocate the stockpiling of anxiety meds and reading material (ahead of expected bans), and debate the moral dilemma of buying a first aid kit from a company that caters to law enforcement. Liberal preparedness podcasters and newsletter writers I spoke to also reported a notable uptick in subscribers since Trump’s election.Liberal preppers differ from their rightwing counterparts because the calamities they anticipate have different characteristics. Rightwing bugbears like civil unrest and globalist tyranny lead to a focus on the stockpiling of weapons to defend one’s property and family from hostile adversaries. But concerns about global heating point to different notions of readiness. Climate breakdown – the destabilization of the entire ecological system on which our lives depend – is not a fleeting crisis one can ride out with a well-stocked arsenal and a few pallets from Costco. As Margaret Killjoy, who launched the prominent anarchist-prepper podcast Live Like the World Is Dying at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, put it: “There’s not much preparedness you can do for the end of the world.”While Steffen, who considers himself “moderately progressive”, believes it’s only prudent to have a reserve of basic items – water, food, medical supplies and the like – on hand in case of emergencies, his approach to preparedness differs markedly from the version promoted on the right. “I would put to you that if you find yourself in a situation where you’re having to let off some rounds to protect your canned goods, you’ve already failed,” he told our class. “You have not understood the assignment.”Eric Shonkwiler, author of the When/If newsletter, which focuses on prepperism with a leftist spin, agreed. “The first time this guy in his Maga hat falls down the stairs and breaks his leg and it gets gangrenous and neither him nor anyone in his family are doctors, he’s done,” Shonkwiler predicted. “And that’s a month into the apocalypse, and all of his guns did nothing for him.”For Steffen and other preppers on the left, threat analysis begins with an understanding of network effects: how various social and economic systems work together to support our ongoing survival, or undermine it. Bald and bespectacled, with headphone wires dangling from his ears, he explained that the effects of climate collapse will be experienced as a series of localized disasters – flooding here, wildfire there – each requiring planning and forethought.“Every piece of infrastructure, every home, every community, every business, every industry, was built to work in a world that no longer exists,” he told us, adding that this ever-widening gap will be “ripping through every single person’s life”.Steffen’s prescription was “ruggedization”, a term borrowed from the military. Ruggedization, he explained, was “the design of a system such that it can take unexpected punishment and retain its core functions”. Its opposite he termed brittleness – “the condition of a thing being subject to sudden failure”. Our primary goal ahead of climate chaos was to recognize brittleness in the systems around us – from failing infrastructure to political ineptitude – and either remedy it or avoid it altogether.Steffen shared a map on the screen of the US Climate Vulnerability Index, which is operated by the Environmental Defense Fund and Texas A&M University, and noted that some places would be harder hit than others. “If I lived there,” he told the class, referring to the Gulf and the south-eastern coast, exceptionally high-risk areas, “I would already be thinking about how to get out.” Extreme heat will make much of the Sun belt inhospitable as well, and if the Atlantic meridional ocean current, or Amoc, collapses, as some models predict, New England could soon look more like Siberia.As the reality of climate collapse hits home, those with the means to do so will beeline for safer locales, Steffen predicted. (Though is anywhere really safe? Sleepy Duluth, Minnesota, for example, had been identified as an especially attractive destination before a “generational storm” associated with warmer temperatures destroyed 100,000 acres of forest around the city and knocked out power for tens of thousands of residents in the area.) “Some very smart people believe it is going to be the largest human migration in history,” he said. While his $149 introductory course is short on specifics, he also offers a more detailed 12-hour Crash Course in Personal Ruggedization, as well as individual consultations.For some on the left, steeped in the mutual aid framework of the anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin, Steffen’s vision of migratory musical chairs smacks of the all-against-all gospel of the right. “Not everybody can do that,” Shonkwiler said of relocating, calling it “a ridiculous solution”.View image in fullscreenSteffen is all too aware uprooting is far from ideal even for those who can afford it. For one thing, it will tend to weaken the family and community ties that help keep us safe. Moreover, he noted that the exodus of people with money, resources and skills from endangered areas would tend to amplify the crisis for those left behind.Then again, nobody said the apocalypse would be pretty.Killjoy, who lives in rural West Virginia, thinks her identity as a trans woman may have contributed to her interest in preparedness. “Queer people have always had to look out for each other,” she said. Which highlights another important way in which liberal prepperism differs from the rightwing version: a rejection of individualism and an emphasis on community building and mutual aid. When Hurricane Helene hit, Killjoy, who had previously lived in western North Carolina, loaded her stash of dry goods, water jugs and solar generators into a van and drove to the hard-hit area to help out her former neighbors.The typical survivalist fantasy of isolating oneself in an off-grid cabin deep in the woods is unlikely to offer much protection, Steffen said. “Most people who try to use distance as their means of providing safety don’t succeed,” he said. “We still have this idea that we can just move out into the middle of rural Kentucky, put up some solar panels, drill a well, and we’re good, but it’s really not that easy. You can learn those skills, but you’re still going to have to work really hard on physical tasks compared to people who have common infrastructure that they’re sharing.”Elizabeth Doerr, co-host of the Cramming for the Apocalypse podcast, agreed: “Researchers talk a lot about how your ability to survive a disaster or thrive post-disaster is contingent on really knowing your neighbors – because when they don’t see you, they’re gonna come check on you.”The vast majority, Steffen believes, would be safer in urban settings – especially cities that are taking the threats seriously and developing resilience plans. “You are better off choosing to move towards systems that are used by a lot of people,” he told us. He admitted the idea may sound counterintuitive; a steady diet of zombie movies have taught many of us to associate proximity to other people with increased peril. “But the more people who are using the same set of infrastructure, the more money you have to keep those things well repaired and the more easily you can devote resources to it.”Another distinctive characteristic of liberal prepperism is an increasing focus on the emotional and even spiritual aspect of facing catastrophe. Given the damage we’ve already done to the atmosphere and the alarming lack of collective will to address the issue, those seeking to prepare have begun talking about what acceptance looks like.For them, the question is less whether we survive than how we maintain our humanity in the face of calamity, how we cope with loss, and how we use the time we have.David Baum spent years volunteering for the Community Emergency Response Team in Seattle. But when he learned how much of the preparedness budget had been earmarked for police equipment – “you know, armored trucks and weapons and handcuffs and sound cannons” – he began to question an approach to crisis response more suited to violent repression than communal wellbeing. He changed course after encountering the influential academic paper Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy by Jem Bendell, a professor of sustainability leadership and one-time darling of Davos, who has come to believe that our addiction to fossil fuels will soon bring about the destruction of civilization.After participating in online forums devoted to Bendell’s thinking, Baum started his own group. Three times a week, he and several colleagues host free online meetups where participants from around the world assemble to talk through their emotional responses to the prospect of human extinction. They call it Collapse Club.I participated in one session, and came away persuaded that genuine prepping requires not only “outer resilience”, as Baum puts it, but an inner kind as well.“Survival is not the goal,” he told me afterward. “It is impossible, given what’s happening. The relationship and the wisdom and the love that one discovers by approaching nature with respect – that’s the goal.”Despite his dismal prognosis, Baum is no doomer. “Even though it’s a global collapse we’re talking about, it really is possible in the company of others to metabolize these feelings and find stability in your life,” he promised. “You can imagine new ways to live, and you can find a purpose to go on.”Or as Bendell put it in his 2023 book Breaking Together: “Humanity is really screwed, so let’s slow down, help each other, be nicer to animals and nature, defend freedom, grow food, play more, be open-minded about what might help, and forgive ourselves.”For the last few years, Bendell told me in an email, he has done exactly that. He quit his full professorship, moved to Indonesia, and launched a school to teach sustainable agricultural practices to local farmers.He is under no illusion that the small, volunteer effort will have any real impact on a global crisis. And by no means would he refer to it as prepping. Rather than an effort to defend himself and his adopted community against a nightmare future, it’s a part of a commitment to living meaningfully in the present. “I know we could get washed away next week,” he wrote in a blogpost not long ago. “Or we could run out of money next year. Or we could get shut down due to a bureaucratic hitch. But it would still have been great for a time.” More
- in US Politics
‘Shock to the system’: farmers hit by Trump’s tariffs and cuts say they need another bailout
Farmers across the United States say they could face financial ruin – unless there is a huge taxpayer-funded bailout to compensate for losses generated by Donald Trump’s sweeping cuts and chaotic tariffs.Small- and medium-sized farms were already struggling amid worsening climate shocks and volatile commodities markets, on top of being squeezed by large corporations that dominate the supply chain.In recent weeks, farmers in Texas and across the midwest have suffered millions of dollars of crop losses due to unprecedented heavy rainfall and flooding.The climate crisis-fueled extreme weather is compounded by the US president’s looming trade war and the administration targeting popular federal programs and staff, leaving farmers reeling and resigned to needing another bailout.“There’s a lot of uncertainty around and I hate to be used as a bargaining chip. I am definitely worried,” said Travis Johnson, who lost more than 1,000 acres of cotton, sorghum and corn after a year’s rain fell within 48 hours in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) in southern Texas last month, turning parched fields into lakes.RGV farmers sell sorghum, wheat, corn and vegetables to Mexico among other crops, while buying fertilizer and equipment – and relying on Mexican farmhands for cheap labor. Mexico is the US’s largest trading partner, while China is the main buyer of American sorghum and cotton. All US products destined for China face a 125% tax thanks to Trump’s tariff war, and could cut farmers off from core markets.View image in fullscreen“I can see how some tariffs might help us compete with Mexico but are we really getting targeted by every other country or are we on the wrong side of this? We’ve already had two years of absolute disaster with falling prices and weather patterns … no farmer wants this but without a bailout this could be devastating and a lot more people could go under,” Johnson said.Rural counties rallied behind Trump in 2024, giving him a majority in all but 11 of the 444 farming-dependent counties last year, averaging 78% support, according to analysis by Investigate Midwest.Trump’s vote share rose among farming communities, despite his last trade war which required a $23bn taxpayer bailout for farmers in 2018-19.Yet anxiety is mounting among the agricultural base.First came widespread cuts to oversubscribed and chronically underfunded federal climate and conservation schemes designed to reduce costs and greenhouse gases, and improve yields and environmental health.Trump is also shuttering local food programs which provide farmers with stable domestic markets like public school districts and food banks, helping make farms more resilient to global economic shocks. The USAID, which purchased about $2bn every year in agricultural products particularly wheat, sorghum and lentils for humanitarian aid programs, has been dismantled.The loss in federal programs alone would have been tough to cope with, but then came the trade chaos. Trump’s tariff announcements began when most farmers already had spring crops in the ground – or at the very least had prepared the land and purchased inputs such as seeds and pesticides, making it impossible to switch to crops that could potentially find a market domestically.View image in fullscreenConsensus is growing among experts that the turmoil represents an opportunity for rival agriculture economies – and disaster for US farmers.“It’s all happening so fast and in the middle of the growing season, it’s a shock to the system that’s going to be tough for farmers, especially those growing commodities for export,” said Ben Lilliston, director of rural strategies and climate change at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP). “Tariffs are not magical, they need to be used strategically as part of wider reforms to the domestic economic agenda.”“The volatility of the tariff policy decisions, with new tariffs frequently being announced, paused and placed will take a toll on the American agricultural industry,” writes economist Betty Resnick in an article for Farm Bureau, a right-leaning lobby group. “Without direct support from USDA or a farm bill with an updated safety net, farmers will almost certainly bear the brunt of these tariffs.”Ben Murray, senior researcher with the consumer advocacy group Food and Water Watch, said: “Without a bailout, we can only imagine how bad this will be for farmers and what an opportunity for Brazil – and this is all being done for a tax cut for the wealthy.”For decades now, US farmers have been heavily incentivized through the Farm Bill to grow commodity crops destined for export such as wheat, corn, soy, sorghum, rice and cotton, rather than produce for domestic consumption. The price of commodities is tied to the global market, even if sold domestically. Meanwhile US imports of fruits and vegetables mostly from Latin America have risen, now accounting for more than 50% of consumption, according to USDA data.This globalized agricultural system favors large and corporate-owned operations, as smaller farms struggle more with boom and bust prices, and access to government subsidies and other credit. The number of farms continues to decline, while the average size continues to rise. Market consolidation and corporate profits tend to surge in the agriculture industry after every economic shock including the Covid pandemic, Trump’s last trade war and the banking crisis.Biden implemented a range of modest, imperfect policies to try to ease the pain for smaller-scale farmers including a greater focus on anti-trust, local and regional food systems, and climate resilience – all of which are under attack by the Trump administration.The vast majority of a $19.5bn funding package by the Biden administration for evidence-based conservation practices that improve soil health, air quality and reduce the use of costly fertilizers, pesticides and water will not be honored. The 10-year fund allocated through the Inflation Reduction Act was an addendum to money ring-fenced in the Farm Bill for four oversubscribed programs, after years of pressure from farmers to expand access to the initiatives.Two Biden-era healthy eating schemes worth a combined $1bn to local farmers have been canceled: the Local Food Purchase Assistance (LFPA) program matching producers to food banks, and the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program which helped public schools add healthy, locally grown produce on to lunch menus. (The USDA recently agreed to unfreeze funding for existing contracts.)View image in fullscreen“My farm will survive because we’ve been working with school districts for 20 years, but for others in our coalition the funding cliff is very real,” said Anna Knight, who owns an 80-acre citrus farm in southern California.Piling on further misery are mass layoffs within the USDA that were seemingly orchestrated by the billionaire Trump donor Elon Musk.More than 10% of USDA staff have already reportedly agreed to voluntary buyouts, with more expected in coming weeks. This is in addition to several thousand probationary employees who were laid off last month – a move which disproportionately hit local offices beefed up under the Biden administration, and is being challenged in the courts.USDA field offices play a crucial role in rural communities, the place where farmers go for tailor-made technical help from agencies including the National Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) and the Farm Service Agency (FSA) on the latest pest control and planting practices, conservation programs, loans and disaster assistance programs.“It makes no sense taking billions of dollars off the table for programs that improve long-term farm viability and resilience – and which farmers have been lining up for years for – and then spend billions bringing back farmers from financial collapse,” said Jesse Womack, policy expert at the National Sustainable Agricultural Coalition. “It’s looking really bleak with a lot of pain ahead for farmers.”A coalition of environmental and agricultural groups is suing the USDA after it purged an array of climate-related online resources including information on the NRCS website helping farmers access federal grants for conservation practices, and technical guidance on cutting emissions and strengthening resilience to extreme weather like floods and drought.Even if there is a bailout, getting the money to farmers in time to avoid bankruptcy will be much more complicated this time, according to Lilliston from IATP.“Another bailout seems inevitable but there are serious questions about how quickly it could be implemented with such a dysfunctional Congress, local USDA offices shuttered and fewer staff. It’s a very messy situation and farmers are already experiencing harm.”And in the medium and long term: “The US reputation has taken a huge hit. We can no longer be considered a reliable trading partner which is terrible for farmers,” added Lilliston.Even before the current mayhem, almost two-thirds of US rural bankers surveyed in March expected farmer income to decline in 2025, with farm equipment sales dropping for the 19th straight month, according to the latest Rural Mainstreet Economy survey by Creighton University. Grain and cotton prices have plummeted since 2022.View image in fullscreen“We were already in a precarious situation but now, unless there’s a bailout or this trade war is resolved by harvest time, it will be disastrous and a critical mass of farmers could go out of business,” said Adam Chappell, 46, a commodities farmer growing corn, cotton, soybean and rice in Arkansas, where dozens of local USDA staff have reportedly been furloughed or fired in recent weeks.Chappell’s town Cotton Plant was hit with 13in of rain in early April, causing crop losses for many farmers. Chappell’s fields survived the rain but he spent a nervous few weeks after the USDA froze all conservation funds, unsure whether the government would reimburse him, as agreed, for an upfront investment in cover crops and a compost operation. Eventually, after a backlash, the administration backtracked and agreed to honor existing contracts.“The weather is getting stranger and more challenging to deal with every year, while big monopoly corporations are allowed to manipulate the system and squeeze us at every part of the supply chain. Farmers like me lean heavily on the NRCS conservation programs to improve soil health and reduce input costs,” said Chappell. “The tariffs are like adding salt on the wound.”Despite last week’s partial U-turn, Trump’s ongoing and increasingly chaotic trade war risks causing irreparable harm to international markets for farmers, especially but not exclusively China, as well as pushing up the cost of agricultural imports such as pesticides, fertilizer and machinery.China is the US’s third biggest agricultural export market, worth $24.7bn in 2024, down 15% from 2023, as soybean, corn and sorghum sales fell amid rising competition from South America, according to USDA data. China’s top imports from the US are oilseeds and grains. US exports to China supported almost a million US jobs in 2022, according to the US-China Business Council, mostly around agriculture and livestock production.As of Friday, at least 15 agricultural department programs worth billions of dollars to American farmers and rural communities remain frozen, according to Politico, more than two months after they were halted for review to ensure compliance with Trump’s priorities opposing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts as well as his crackdown on climate change initiatives.This includes the Biden-era partnerships for climate-smart commodities (PCSC) program – a five-year $3.2bn real-life study into the effectiveness of conservation practices such as cover cropping and reduced tillage for commodity farms.“PSCS was about increasing our evidence base on climate benefits that also help commodity farmers improve soil health, air and water quality – and their bottom line,” said Omanjana Goswami, a scientist with the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Abandoning this will come at a cost to American farms and the taxpayer.”On Monday, the agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, defended dismantling PSCS, claiming it amounted to a Biden-era “climate slush fund” of which less than half the money went to farmers.A spokesperson added: “The USDA has a variety of programs available to producers who have been impacted by recent disasters … [and] is currently building a framework to deliver over $20bn in congressionally appropriated funds to producers who suffered losses during the 2023/2024 crop year. With 16 robust nutrition programs in place, USDA remains focused on its core mission: strengthening food security, supporting agricultural markets, and ensuring access to nutritious food.”And some Trump supporters are keeping the faith.“There are some concerns out there but our farmers are willing to make sacrifices for long-term gains,” said Sid Miller, the Texas agriculture commissioner. “Tariffs are a temporary tool, they won’t be permanent, China needs our grains, they are prideful but will come around like last time.” More
- in US Politics
The rise of end times fascism | Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor
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View image in fullscreenThe movement for corporate city states cannot believe its good luck. For years, it has been pushing the extreme notion that wealthy, tax-averse people should up and start their own high-tech fiefdoms, whether new countries on artificial islands in international waters (“seasteading”) or pro-business “freedom cities” such as Próspera, a glorified gated community combined with a wild west med spa on a Honduran island.Yet despite backing from the heavy-hitter venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, their extreme libertarian dreams kept bogging down: it turns out most self-respecting rich people don’t actually want to live on floating oil rigs, even if it means lower taxes, and while Próspera might be nice for a holiday and some body “upgrades”, its extra-national status is currently being challenged in court.Now, all of a sudden, this once-fringe network of corporate secessionists finds itself knocking on open doors at the dead center of global power.The first sign that fortunes were shifting came in 2023, when a campaigning Donald Trump, seemingly out of nowhere, promised to hold a contest that would lead to the creation of 10 “freedom cities” on federal lands. The trial balloon barely registered at the time, lost in the daily deluge of outrageous claims. Since the new administration took office, however, would-be country starters have been on a lobbying blitz, determined to turn Trump’s pledge into reality.“The energy in DC is absolutely electric,” Trey Goff, the chief of staff of Próspera, recently enthused after a trip to Capitol Hill. Legislation paving the way for a bevy of corporate city-states should be complete by the end of the year, he claims.Inspired by the political philosopher Albert Hirschman, figures including Goff, Thiel and the investor and writer Balaji Srinivasan have been championing what they call “exit” – the principle that those with means have the right to walk away from the obligations of citizenship, especially taxes and burdensome regulation. Retooling and rebranding the old ambitions and privileges of empires, they dream of splintering governments and carving up the world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies.View image in fullscreenOne might assume that it is contradictory for Trump, elected on a flag-waving “America first” platform, to lend credence to this vision of sovereign territories ruled over by billionaire god-kings. And much has been made of the colorful flame wars between the Maga mouth-piece Steve Bannon, a proud nationalist and populist, and the Trump-allied billionaires he has attacked as “technofeudalists” who “don’t give a flying fuck about the human being” – let alone the nation state. And conflicts inside Trump’s awkward, jerry-rigged coalition certainly exist, most recently reaching a boiling point over tariffs. Still, the underlying visions might not be as incompatible as they first appear.The startup country contingent is clearly foreseeing a future marked by shocks, scarcity and collapse. Their high-tech private domains are essentially fortressed escape pods, designed for the select few to take advantage of every possible luxury and opportunity for human optimization, giving them and their children an edge in an increasingly barbarous future. To put it bluntly, the most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.That is not so far away from the more mass-market vision of fortressed nations that has gripped the hard right globally, from Italy to Israel, Australia to the United States: in a time of ceaseless peril, openly supremacist movements in these countries are positioning their relatively wealthy states as armed bunkers. These bunkers are brutal in their determination to expel and imprison unwanted humans (even if that requires indefinite confinement in extra-national penal colonies from Manus Island to Guantánamo Bay) and equally ruthless in their willingness to violently claim the land and resources (water, energy, critical minerals) they deem necessary to weather the coming shocks.Interestingly, at a time when previously secular Silicon Valley elites are suddenly finding Jesus, it is noteworthy that both of these visions – the priority-pass corporate state and the mass-market bunker nation – share a great deal in common with the Christian fundamentalist interpretation of the biblical Rapture, when the faithful will supposedly be lifted up to a golden city in heaven, while the damned are left to endure an apocalyptic final battle down here on earth.If we are to meet our critical moment in history, we need to reckon with the reality that we are not up against adversaries we have seen before. We are up against end times fascism.Reflecting on his childhood under Mussolini, the novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco observed in a celebrated essay that fascism typically has an “Armageddon complex” – a fixation on vanquishing enemies in a grand final battle. But European fascism of the 1930s and 1940s also had a horizon: a vision for a future golden age after the bloodbath that, for its in-group, would be peaceful, pastoral and purified. Not today.Alive to our era of genuine existential danger – from climate breakdown to nuclear war to sky-rocketing inequality and unregulated AI – but financially and ideologically committed to deepening those threats, contemporary far-right movements lack any credible vision for a hopeful future. The average voter is offered only remixes of a bygone past, alongside the sadistic pleasures of dominance over an ever-expanding assemblage of dehumanized others.And so we have the Trump administration’s dedication to releasing its steady stream of real and AI-generated propaganda designed solely for these pornographic purposes. Footage of shackled immigrants being loaded on to deportation flights, set to the sounds of clanking chains and locking cuffs, which the official White House X account labeled “ASMR”, a reference to audio designed to calm the nervous system. Or the same account sharing news of the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a US permanent resident who was active in Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian encampment, with the gloating words: “SHALOM, MAHMOUD.” Or any number of homeland security secretary Kristi Noem’s sadism-chic photo ops (atop a horse at the US-Mexican border, in front of a crowded prison cell in El Salvador, slinging a machine gun while arresting immigrants in Arizona …).View image in fullscreenThe governing ideology of the far right in our age of escalating disasters has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism.It is terrifying in its wickedness, yes. But it also opens up powerful possibilities for resistance. To bet against the future on this scale – to bank on your bunker – is to betray, on the most basic level, our duties to one another, to the children we love, and to every other life form with whom we share a planetary home. This is a belief system that is genocidal at its core and treasonous to the wonder and beauty of this world. We are convinced that the more people understand the extent to which the right has succumbed to the Armageddon complex, the more they will be willing to fight back, realizing that absolutely everything is now on the line.Our opponents know full well that we are entering an age of emergency, but have responded by embracing lethal yet self-serving delusions. Having bought into various apartheid fantasies of bunkered safety, they are choosing to let the Earth burn. Our task is to build a wide and deep movement, as spiritual as it is political, strong enough to stop these unhinged traitors. A movement rooted in a steadfast commitment to one another, across our many differences and divides, and to this miraculous, singular planet.View image in fullscreenNot so long ago, it was primarily religious fundamentalists who greeted signs of apocalypse with gleeful excitement about the long-awaited Rapture. Trump has handed critical posts to people who subscribe to that fiery orthodoxy, including several Christian Zionists who see Israel’s use of annihilatory violence to expand its territorial footprint not as illegal atrocities but as felicitous evidence that the Holy Land is getting closer to the conditions under which the Messiah will return, and the faithful will get their celestial kingdom.Mike Huckabee, Trump’s newly confirmed ambassador to Israel, has strong ties to Christian Zionism, as does Pete Hegseth, his secretary of defense. Noem and Russell Vought, the Project 2025 architect who now leads the office of budget and management, are both staunch advocates for Christian nationalism. Even Thiel, who is gay and notorious for his party lifestyle, has been heard musing about the arrival of the antichrist of late (spoiler: he thinks it’s Greta Thunberg, more on that soon).But you don’t need to be a biblical literalist, or even religious, to be an end times fascist. Today, plenty of powerful secular people have embraced a vision of the future that follows a nearly identical script, one in which the world as we know it collapses under its weight and a chosen few survive and thrive in various kinds of arks, bunkers and gated “freedom cities”. In a 2019 paper titled Left Behind: Future Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth, the communication scholars Sarah T Roberts and Mél Hogan described the longing for a secular Rapture: “In the accelerationist imaginary, the future is not about harm reduction, limits or restoration; rather it is a politics driving toward an endgame.”View image in fullscreenElon Musk, who dramatically grew his fortune alongside Thiel at PayPal, embodies this implosive ethos. This is a person who looks up at the wonders of the night sky and apparently sees only opportunities to fill that inky unknown with his own space junk. Though he burnished his reputation warning about the dangers of the climate crisis and AI, he and his so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) henchmen now spend their days escalating those same risks (and many others) by slashing not only environmental regulations but entire regulatory agencies, with the apparent end goal of replacing federal workers with chatbots.Who needs a functioning nation state when outer space – now reportedly Musk’s singular obsession – beckons? For Musk, Mars has become a secular ark, which he claims is key to the survival of human civilization, perhaps via uploaded consciousnesses to an artificial general intelligence. Kim Stanley Robinson, the author of the sci-fi Mars Trilogy that appears to have partially inspired Musk, is blunt about the dangers of the billionaire’s fantasies about colonizing Mars. It is, he says, “just a moral hazard that creates the illusion we can wreck Earth and still be okay. It’s totally not true.”Much like religious end-timers who long to escape the corporeal realm, Musk’s drive for humanity to become “multiplanetary” is made possible by his inability to appreciate the multispecies splendor of our only home. Evidently uninterested in the vast bounty that surrounds him, or in ensuring Earth can continue buzzing with diversity, he instead deploys his vast fortune to bring about a future that would see a handful of people and robots eke out survival on two barren orbs (a radically depleted Earth and a terraformed Mars). Indeed, in a strange twist on the Old Testament tale, Musk and his fellow tech billionaires, having arrogated god-like powers to themselves, aren’t content to just build the arks. They appear to be doing their best to cause the flood. Today’s rightwing leaders and their rich allies are not just taking advantage of catastrophes, shock-doctrine and disaster-capitalism style, but simultaneously provoking and planning for them.What of the Maga base, though? Not all are sufficiently faithful to earnestly believe in the Rapture, and most certainly don’t have the cash to buy a spot in a “freedom city” let alone on a rocket ship. Fear not. End times fascism offers the promise of many more affordable arks and bunkers, these ones well within reach for lower-level foot soldiers.Listen to Steve Bannon’s daily podcast – which bills itself as Maga’s premier media outlet – and you will be barraged with a singular message: the world is going to hell, the infidels are breaching the barricades, and a final battle is coming. Be prepared. The prepper message becomes particularly pronounced when Bannon switches to hawking his advertisers’ products. Buy Birch Gold, Bannon tells his audience, because the over-leveraged US economy is going to crash and you can’t trust the banks. Stock up on ready-to-eat meals from My Patriot Supply. Sharpen your target practice using a laser-guided at-home system. The last thing you would want to do is depend on the government during a disaster, he reminds listeners (left unsaid: especially now that the Doge boys are selling off the government for parts).Bannon doesn’t only urge his audience to make their own bunkers, of course. He also advances a vision of the United States as a bunker in its own right, one in which Ice agents stalk the streets, workplaces and campuses, disappearing those deemed enemies of US policy and interests. The bunkered nation lies at the heart of the Maga agenda, and of end times fascism. Inside its logic, the first job is to harden national borders and expunge all enemies, foreign and domestic. This ugly work is now well under way, with the Trump administration, enabled by the supreme court, having invoked the Alien Enemies Act to deport hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants to Cecot, the now infamous mega-prison in El Salvador. The facility, which shaves prisoners heads and packs up to 100 people into a single cell, stacked with bare bunks, operates under the civil liberties-destroying “state of exception” first declared over three years ago by the country’s crypto-loving, Christian Zionist prime minister, Nayib Bukele.Bukele has offered to provide the same fee-for-service system for US citizens the administration would like to drop into a judicial black hole. “I love that,” Trump said recently, when asked about the proposal. No wonder: Cecot is the sick if logical corollary of the “freedom city” fantasy – a zone where everything is for sale and due process does not apply. We should expect much more of this sadism. In a chillingly candid statement, the acting Ice director, Todd Lyons, told the 2025 Border Security Expo that he wanted to see a more “business”-oriented approach to these deportations, “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings”.If policing the boundaries of the bunkered nation is end times fascism’s job one, equally important is job two: for the US government to lay claim to whatever resources its protected citizens might need to get through the tough times ahead. Maybe it’s Panama’s canal. Or Greenland’s fast-melting shipping routes. Or Ukraine’s critical minerals. Or Canada’s fresh water. We should think of this less as old-school imperialism than super-sized prepping, at the level of the national state. Gone are the old colonial fig leaves of spreading democracy or God’s word – when Trump covetously scans the globe, he is stockpiling for civilizational collapse.This bunker mentality also helps explain JD Vance’s controversial forays into Catholic theology. The vice-president, who owes his political career in no small part to the largess of the premier prepper Thiel, explained to Fox News that, according to the medieval Christian concept of ordo amoris (translated both as “order of love” and “order of charity”), love is not owed to those outside the bunker: “You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” (Or not, as the Trump administration’s foreign policy would indicate.) In other words, we owe nothing to anyone outside our bunker.Though it builds on enduring rightwing tendencies – justifying hateful exclusions is hardly new under the ethno-nationalist sun – we simply have not faced such a powerful apocalyptic strain in government before. The “end of history” swagger of the post-cold war era is rapidly being supplanted by a conviction we are in the actual end of times. Doge may wrap itself in the banner of economic “efficiency”, and Musk’s underlings may evoke memories of the young, US-trained “Chicago Boys” who designed the economic shock therapy for Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorial regime, but this is not simply the old marriage of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. It’s a new, money-worshiping millenarian mashup that says we need to smash the bureaucracy and replace humans with chatbots in order to cut “waste, fraud and abuse” – and, also, because the bureaucracy is where the Trump-resisting demons hide. This is where the tech bros merge with the TheoBros, a real group of hyper-patriarchal Christian supremacists with ties to Hegseth and others in the Trump administration.View image in fullscreenAs fascism always does, today’s Armageddon complex crosses class lines, bonding billionaires to the Maga base. Thanks to decades of deepening economic stresses, alongside ceaseless and skillful messaging pitting workers against one another, a great many people understandably feel unable to protect themselves from the disintegration that surrounds them (no matter how many months of ready-to-eat meals they buy). But there are emotional compensations on offer: you can cheer the end of affirmative action and DEI, glorify mass deportation, enjoy the denial of gender-affirming care to trans people, villainize educators and health workers who think they know better than you, and applaud the demise of economic and environmental regulations as a way to own the libs. End times fascism is a darkly festive fatalism – a final refuge for those who find it easier to celebrate destruction than imagine living without supremacy.It’s also a self-reinforcing downward spiral: Trump’s furious attacks on every structure designed to protect the public from diseases, dangerous foods and disasters – even to tell the public when disasters are headed their way – strengthen the case for prepperism at both the high and low ends, all while creating myriad new opportunities for privatization and profiteering by the oligarchs powering this rapid-fire unmaking of the social and regulatory state.View image in fullscreenAt the dawn of Trump’s first term, the New Yorker investigated a phenomenon that it described as “doomsday prep for the super-rich”. Back then, it was already clear that in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, the more serious high-end survivalists were hedging against climate disruption and social collapse by buying space in custom-built underground bunkers and building escape homes on high ground in places like Hawaii (where Mark Zuckerberg has downplayed his 5,000 sq ft underground pad as a “little shelter”) and New Zealand (where Thiel purchased nearly 500 acres but found his plan to build a luxury survivalist compound rejected by local authorities in 2022 for being an eyesore).This millenarianism is bound up with a suite of other Silicon Valley intellectual fads, all premised on an end-times-inflected belief that our planet is headed towards a cataclysm and it’s time to make some hard choices about which parts of humanity can be saved. Transhumanism is one such ideology, encompassing everything from minor human-machine “enhancements” to the quest to upload human intelligence into a still illusory artificial general intelligence. There is also effective altruism and longtermism, both of which skip over redistributive approaches to helping those in need in the here and now in favor of a cost-benefit approach to doing the most good in the long term.Though they can appear benign at first glance, these ideas are shot through with dangerous racial, ableist and gender biases about which parts of humanity are worth enhancing and saving – and which could be sacrificed for the supposed good of the whole. They also share a marked lack of interest in urgently addressing the underlying drivers of collapse – a responsible and rational goal that a growing cohort of figures now actively shun. Instead of effective altruism the Mar-a-Lago regular Andreessen and others have embraced “effective accelerationism”, or the “deliberate propulsion of technological development” without guardrails.Meanwhile, even darker philosophies are finding a wider audience, like the neoreactionary pro-monarchy rants of the coder Curtis Yarvin (another one of Thiel’s intellectual touchstones), or the “pro-natalism” movement’s obsession with dramatically increasing the number of “western” babies (a Musk fixation), as well as the exit guru Srinivasan’s vision of a “tech zionist” San Francisco where corporate loyalists and police join forces to politically cleanse the city of liberals to make way for their networked apartheid state.View image in fullscreenAs the AI scholars Timnit Gebru and Émile P Torres have written, though the methods may be new, this “bundle” of ideological fads “are direct descendants of first-wave eugenics”, which also saw a small subset of humanity making decisions about which parts of the whole were worth continuing and which needed to be phased out, cleared out, or terminated. Until recently, few paid attention. Much like Próspera, where members can already experiment with human-machine mergers such as having their Tesla keys implanted into their hands, these intellectual fads seemed to be the marginal hobby horses of a few Bay Area dilettantes with money and caution to burn. No longer.Three recent material developments have accelerated end times fascism’s apocalyptic appeal. The first is the climate crisis. While some high-profile figures might still publicly deny or minimize the threat, global elites, whose ocean-front properties and datacenters are intensely vulnerable to rising temperatures and sea levels, are well-versed in the ramifying perils of an ever-heating world. The second is Covid-19: epidemiological models had long predicted the possibility of a pandemic devastating our globally networked world; the actual arrival of one was taken by many powerful people as a sign that we have officially arrived at what US military analysts forecasted as “the Age of Consequences”. No more predictions, it’s going down. The third factor is the rapid advancement and adoption of AI, a set of technologies that have long been associated with sci-fi terrors about machines turning on their makers with ruthless efficiency – fears expressed most forcefully by the same people who are developing these technologies. All of these existential crises are layered on top of escalating tensions between nuclear-armed powers.None of this should be written off as paranoia. Many of us feel the imminence of breakdown so acutely that we cope by entertaining ourselves with various versions of life in a post-apocalyptic bunker, streaming Apple’s Silo or Hulu’s Paradise. As the UK analyst and editor Richard Seymour reminds us in his recent book, Disaster Nationalism: “The apocalypse is no mere fantasy. We are living in it, after all, from deadly viruses to soil erosion, from economic crisis to geopolitical chaos.”Trump 2.0’s economic project is a Frankenstein’s monster of the industries driving all of these threats – fossil fuels, weapons and resource-ravenous cryptocurrency and AI. Everyone involved in these sectors knows that there is no way to build the artificial mirror world that AI promises to construct without sacrificing this world – these technologies consume too much energy, too many critical minerals, and too much water for the two to coexist in any kind of equilibrium. This month, the former Google executive Eric Schmidt admitted as much, telling Congress that AI’s “profound” energy needs are projected to triple in the next few years, with much of it coming from fossil fuels, because nuclear can’t come online fast enough. This planet-incinerating level of consumption is necessary, he explained, to enable an intelligence “higher” than humanity, a digital god rising from the ashes of our relinquished world.And they are worried – just not about the actual threats they are unleashing. What keeps the leaders of these entangled industries up at night is the prospect of a civilizational wake-up call – of serious, internationally coordinated government efforts to rein in their rogue sectors before it’s too late. From the perspective of their ever-expanding bottom lines, the apocalypse is not collapse; it’s regulation.The fact that their profits are predicated on planetary devastation helps explain why do-gooder discourse among the powerful is giving way to open expressions of disdain for the idea that we owe each other anything by right of our shared humanity. Silicon Valley is done with altruism, effective or otherwise. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg pines for a culture that celebrates “aggression”. Alex Karp, Thiel’s business partner at the surveillance firm Palantir Technologies, rebukes the “losing” “self-flagellation” of those who question American superiority and the benefits of autonomous weapons systems (and, by association, the lucrative military contracts that have made Karp’s vast fortune). Musk informs Joe Rogan that empathy is “the fundamental weakness of western civilization” and he vents, after failing to purchase a supreme court election in Wisconsin: “It increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence.” Meaning we humans are nothing but grist for Grok, the AI service he owns. (He did tell us he was “dark Maga” – and he’s not the only one.)In arid and climate-stressed Spain, one of the groups calling for a moratorium on new datacenters calls itself Tu Nube Seca Mi Río – Spanish for “your cloud is drying my river”. The name is fitting, and not just for Spain.An unspeakably dismal choice is being made before our eyes and without our consent: machines over humans, inanimate over animate, profits over all else. With stunning speed, the big tech megalomaniacs have quietly rolled back their net-zero pledges and lined up by Trump’s side, hellbent on sacrificing this world’s real and precious resources and creativity at the altar of a vampiric, virtual realm. This is the last great heist, and they are getting ready to ride out the storms they themselves are summoning – and they will try to defame and destroy anyone who gets in their way.Consider Vance’s recent European sojourn, where the vice-president harangued world leaders for “handwringing about safety” in relation to job-destroying AI while demanding Nazi and fascist speech go uncurtailed online. At one point he made a telling aside, expecting a laugh that never came: “If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.”View image in fullscreenHis comment echoed those made by his equally humorless patron Thiel. In recent interviews focused on the theological underpinnings of his far-right politics, the Christian billionaire has repeatedly compared the indefatigable young climate activist to the antichrist – a figure he warns was prophesied to come bearing a misleading message of “peace and safety”. “If Greta gets everyone on the planet to ride a bicycle, maybe that’s a way to solve climate change, but it has sort of this quality of going from the frying pan into the fire,” Thiel intoned.Why Thunberg, why now? In part, it’s clearly the apocalyptic fear of regulation eating into their super-profits: according to Thiel, the science-based climate action Thunberg and others demand could only be enforced by a “totalitarian state”, which he claims is more dire a threat than climate breakdown (most distressingly, the taxes under such conditions would be “quite high”). There may also be something else about Thunberg that frightens them: her steadfast commitment to this planet and the many life forms who call it home – not to simulations of this world generated by AI, or to a hierarchy of those deserving of life and those who are not, nor to any of the various extra-planetary escape fantasies the end times fascists are selling.She is committed to staying, while the end times fascists have, at least in their imaginings, already left this realm, ensconced in their opulent shelters or transcended to the digital ether, or to Mars.Shortly after Trump’s re-election, one of us had the opportunity to interview Anohni, one of the few musicians who have attempted to make art that wraps its arms around the death drive that has gripped our world. Asked about what connects the willingness of powerful people to let the planet burn and the drive to deny bodily autonomy to women and to trans people like her, she responded by drawing on her Irish Catholic upbringing: it’s “a very long-held myth that we are enacting and embodying. This is the culmination of their Rapture. This is their escape from the voluptuous cycle of creation. This is their escape from Mother.”View image in fullscreenHow do we break this apocalyptic fever? First, we help each other face the depth of the depravity that has gripped the hard right in all of our countries. To move forward with focus, we must first understand this simple fact: we are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world – on its beauty, on its people, on our children, on other species. The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants.Second, we counter their apocalyptic narratives with a far better story about how to survive the hard times ahead without leaving anyone behind. A story capable of draining end times fascism of its gothic power and galvanizing a movement ready to put it all on the line for our collective survival. A story not of end times, but of better times; not of separation and supremacy, but of interdependence and belonging; not of escaping, but staying put and staying faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound.This basic sentiment, of course, is not new. It is central to Indigenous cosmologies, and it lies at the heart of animism. Go back far enough and every culture and faith has its own tradition of respecting the sanctity of here, and not searching for Zion in an elusive ever-distant promised land. In eastern Europe, before the fascist and Stalinist annihilations, the Jewish socialist Labor Bund organized around the yiddish concept of Doikayt, or “hereness”. Molly Crabapple, who has written a forthcoming book about this neglected history, defines Doikayt as the right to “fight for freedom and safety in the places where they lived, in defiance of everyone who wanted them dead” – and rather than be forced to flee to safety in Palestine or the United States. Perhaps what is needed is a modern-day universalization of that concept: a commitment to the right to the “hereness” of this particular ailing planet, to these frail bodies, to the right to live in dignity wherever on the planet we are, even when the inevitable shocks forces us to move. “Hereness” can be portable, free of nationalism, rooted in solidarity, respectful of indigenous rights and unbounded by borders.View image in fullscreenThat future would require its own apocalypse, its own world-ending and revelation, though of a very different sort. Because as the scholar of policing Robyn Maynard has observed: “In order to make earthly planetary survival possible, some versions of this world need to end.”We have reached a choice point, not about whether we are facing apocalypse but what form it will take. The activist sisters Adrienne Maree and Autumn Brown touched on this recently on their aptly named podcast, How to Survive the End of the World. In this moment, when end times fascism is waging war on every front, new alliances are essential. But instead of asking: “Do we all share the same worldview?” Adrienne urges us to ask: “Is your heart beating and do you plan to live? Then come this way and we will figure out the rest on the other side.”To have a hope of combating the end times fascists, with their ever-constricting and asphyxiating concentric circles of “ordered love”, we will need to build an unruly open-hearted movement of the Earth-loving faithful: faithful to this planet, its people, its creatures and to the possibility of a livable future for us all. Faithful to here. Or, to quote Anohni again, this time referring to the goddess in which she now places her faith: “Have you stopped to consider that this might have been her best idea?”Spot illustrations by Sophy Hollington More
- in US Politics
Will global climate action be a casualty of Trump’s tariffs?
Donald Trump’s upending of the global economy has raised fears that climate action could emerge as a casualty of the trade war.In the week that has followed “liberation day”, economic experts have warned that the swathe of tariffs could trigger a global economic recession, with far-reaching consequences for investors – including those behind the green energy projects needed to meet climate goals.Fears of a prolonged global recession have also tanked oil and gas prices, making it cheaper to pollute and more difficult to justify investment in clean alternatives such as electric vehicles and low-carbon heating to financially hard-hit households.But chief among the concerns is Trump’s decision to level his most aggressive trade tariffs against China – the world’s largest manufacturer of clean energy technologies – which threatens to throttle green investment in the US, the world’s second-largest carbon-emitter.‘A tragedy for the US’The US is expected to lag farther behind the rest of the world in developing clean power technologies by cutting off its access to cheap, clean energy tech developed in China. This is a fresh blow to green energy developers in the US, still reeling from the Trump administration’s vow to roll back the Biden era’s green incentives.Leslie Abrahams, a deputy director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington DC, said the tariffs would probably hinder the rollout of clean energy in the US and push the country to the margins of the global market.Specifically, they are expected to drive up the price of developing clean power, because to date the US has been heavily reliant on importing clean power technologies. “And not just imports of the final goods. Even the manufacturing that we do in the United States relies on imported components,” she said.The US government’s goal to develop its manufacturing base by opening new factories could make these components available domestically, but it is likely to take time. It will also come at considerable cost, because the materials typically imported to build these factories – cement, steel, aluminium – will be subject to tariffs too, Abrahams said.“At the same time there are broader, global economic implications that might make it difficult to access inexpensive capital to build,” she added. Investors who had previously shown an interest in the US under the green-friendly Biden administration are likely to balk at the aggressively anti-green messages from the White House.Abrahams said this would mean a weaker appetite for investment in rolling out green projects across the US, and in the research and development of early-stage clean technologies of the future. This is likely to have long-term implications for the US position in the global green energy market, meaning it will “cede some of our potential market share abroad”, Abrahams added.Instead, countries like China are likely to divert sales of their clean energy tech away from the US to other countries eager to develop green energy, Abrahams said. “So on the one hand, that should help to accelerate adoption of clean energy in those countries, which is good for emissions, but for the US, that is future market share that we’re ceding,” she said.‘Clean energy is unstoppable, with or without Trump’It’s important to distinguish between the US and the rest of the world, according to Kingsmill Bond, a strategist for the energy thinktank Ember.“The more the US cuts itself off from the rest of the world, the more the rest of the world will get on with things and the US will be left behind. This is a tragedy for the clean energy industry in the US, but for everyone else there are opportunities,” he said.Analysis by the climate campaign group 350.org has found that despite rising costs and falling green investment in the US, Trump’s trade war will not affect the energy transition and renewables trade globally.It said the US was already “merely a footnote, not a global player” in the race to end the use of fossil fuels. Only 4% of China’s clean tech exports go to the US, it said, in a trade sector where sales volume grew by about 30% last year.“Trump’s tariffs won’t slow the global energy transition – they’ll only hurt ordinary people, particularly Americans,” said Andreas Sieber, an associate director at 350.org. “The transition to renewables is unstoppable, with or without him. His latest move does little to impact the booming clean energy market but will isolate the US and drive up costs for American consumers.”View image in fullscreenOne senior executive at a big European renewable energy company said developers were likely to press on with existing US projects but in future would probablyinvest in other markets.“So we won’t be doing less, we’ll just be going somewhere else,” said the executive, who asked not to be named. “There is no shortage of demand for clean energy projects globally, so we’re not scaling back our ambitions. And excluding the US could make stretched supply chains easier to manage.”Countries likely to benefit from the fresh attention of renewable energy investors include burgeoning markets in south-east Asia, where fossil fuel reliance remains high and demand for energy is rocketing. Australia and Brazil have also emerged as countries that stand to gain.“In times like these, countries will be increasingly on the hunt for domestic solutions,” Bond said. “And that means clean energy and local supply chains. There are always climate reasons to go green, but there are national security reasons now too.”The challenge for governments hoping to seize the opportunity provided by the US green retreat will be to assure rattled investors that they offer a safe place to invest in the climate agenda.Dhara Vyas, the chief executive of Energy UK, the UK industry’s trade body, said: “Certainty has always been the thing that investors say they need. The UK is seen as a stable country with a stable government, but now more than ever we need to double down on giving certainty to investors.”“Investors do like certainty,” Bond agreed. “But they also like growth and opportunity, so that’s why there is some confidence that they will continue to deploy capital in the sector.”‘The US still matters’Although the green investment slowdown may be largely limited to the US, this still poses concerns for global climate progress, according to Marina Domingues, the head of new energies for the consultancy Rystad Energy.“The US is a huge emitter country. So everything the US does still really matters to the global energy transition and how we account for CO2,” she said. The US is the second most polluting country in the world, behind China, which produces almost three times its carbon emissions. But the US’s green retreat comes at a time when the country was planning to substantially increase its domestic energy demand.After years of relatively steady energy demand, Rystad predicts a 10% growth in US electricity consumption from a boom in AI datacentres alone. The economy is also likely to require more energy to power an increase in domestic manufacturing as imports from China dwindle.In the absence of a growing energy industry, this is likely to come from fossil fuels, meaning growing climate emissions. The US is expected to make use of its abundance of shale gas, but it is planning to use more coal in the future too.In the same week that Trump set out his tariffs, he signed four executive orders aimed at preventing the US from phasing out coal, in what climate campaigners at 350.org described as an “abuse of power”.Anne Jellema, the group’s executive director, said: “President Trump’s latest attempt to force-feed coal to the US is a dangerous fantasy that endangers our health, our economy and our future.” More
- in US Politics
White House ends funding for key US climate body: ‘No coming back from this’
The White House is ending funding for the body that produces the federal government’s pre-eminent climate report, which summarizes the impacts of rising global temperatures on the United States.Every four years, the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) is required by Congress to release a new national climate assessment to ensure leaders understand the drivers of – and threats posed by – global warming. It is the most comprehensive, far-reaching and up-to-date analysis of the climate crisis, playing a key role in local and national decision making about agriculture, energy production, and land and water use.The next assessment is due by 2027. But now, Nasa has ended its contract with the consulting firm ICF International, which convened the USGCRP and coordinated the federal agencies that contribute to the quadrennial report.“There’s really no coming back from this, and it means we are all less informed about climate impacts, and won’t have the most up-to-date information on risks and threats,” said one federal staffer who was engaged in USGCRP activities, and who requested anonymity to avoid retribution. “USGCRP helped me to leverage resources from other agencies for use in my own work. But without these networks, I’m left without a support system and the latest science on climate change.”The end of the contract, first reported by Politico and confirmed by multiple sources to the Guardian, imperils the federal government’s climate research, say experts.“The firing of USGCRP staff guts the entire climate research and services ecosystem leaving teetering silos of climate teams, already reeling from federal cuts due to Doge,” the anonymous staffer said.Another federal worker with knowledge of the program, who was also granted anonymity, said the contract’s cancellation will mean “the Sixth National Climate Assessment is effectively destroyed.”USGCRP staff who hailed from the 15 federal agencies had all been told to abandon the body; its only remaining staff were from ICF and have now been fired, the second worker said. “Climate research as a whole will be hobbled because USGCRP’s interagency working groups are essential coordinating bodies across the entire government, including and beyond the 15 USGCRP member agencies.”The move came one day after the rightwing outlet the Daily Wire published an article attacking ICF International saying the firm was “raking in millions to spread climate doom”. Since its publication, the second worker said they had had a “pit in their stomach”.The attack on the USGCRP and national climate assessment did not come as a surprise. In the Heritage Foundation’s far-right policy blueprint Project 2025, Russ Vought – now Trump’s head of the office and management and budget – called to end the USGCRP or fill it with pro-oil industry members.Since Trump’s second term began in January, the monthly meetings of delegates to the body from federal agencies have been cancelled, the anonymous worker said. “We were waiting for new principles to be sent from each agency, which never happened, so that could have been a sign in retrospect,” they added.Andrew Rosenberg, a former Noaa official who is now a fellow at the University of New Hampshire, called the end of the contract “very foolish” and “thoughtless”. National climate assessments provide an important synthesis of “science across fields” – and are not particularly expensive to produce because the authors are all volunteers, he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn February, Trump officials also denied US scientists permission to attend a meeting of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading climate science entity. The federal government also cancelled its contract with ICF International to maintain US support for and involvement in the body.“Extreme weather disasters displaced millions of people and caused billions of dollars in damage in 2024 alone,” said Katharine Hayhoe, a Texas Tech University climate scientist who has served as lead author on three national climate assessments. “Given the accelerating pace and scale of climate impacts today, a sustained and more comprehensive national climate assessment process is so essential,” Hayhoe said. “We need it today, to build a better future tomorrow.”The move is a sign of the Trump administration’s fealty to the fossil fuel industry, said Michael Mann, an eminent US climate scientist. The sector donated in record levels to Trump’s re-election campaign.“It is pure villainy,” said Mann. “A crime against the planet – arguably, the most profound of all crimes.” More
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Labour: changes to EV rules will have ‘negligible’ impact on UK emissions
Labour’s changes to electric vehicle (EV) rules in response to Donald Trump’s tariffs will have a negligible impact on emissions, the transport secretary has said.Keir Starmer has confirmed plans to boost manufacturers, including reinstating the 2030 ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars.But regulations around manufacturing targets on electric cars and vans will also be altered, to help companies in the transition, and new hybrids will be on the market for a further five years.Heidi Alexander said the taxes on imports announced by the US president last week, which spurred reciprocal action by some affected countries, “are bad news for the global economy, because it’s bad for global demand, it’s bad for prices and it’s bad for consumers”.Speaking on BBC Breakfast about the impact on carbon emissions of the government’s changes to electric vehicle rules, she said: “The changes we are making have been very carefully calibrated so as not to have a big impact upon the carbon emissions savings that are baked into this policy. In fact, the impact on carbon emissions as a result of these changes is negligible.”Under the measures, luxury supercar companies such as Aston Martin and McLaren will be allowed to keep producing petrol cars beyond 2030 because they manufacture only a small number of vehicles a year. New hybrids and plug-in hybrid cars will be allowed to be sold until 2035. Petrol and diesel vans will be able to be sold until 2035, as well as all hybrid models.Alexander said the government had “struck the right balance” between protecting British businesses and cutting carbon emissions.Asked whether the retention of a 2030 target for the phasing out of all pure petrol and diesel cars would restrict free markets at a time when the car industry was on its knees, she said: “It is an opportunity for the car industry to remain at the cutting edge of the transition to EVs, but it’s right that we’re pragmatic.“It’s right that we are looking at how we can be flexible in the way in which car manufacturers make this transition, because we want cheaper EVs to be available for consumers. We want people to be able to benefit from those lower running costs as well.“And so it’s important that, as a government, we do everything that we can – not only to support British businesses and manufacturing to grow the economy, but also to cut those carbon emissions, and I think we’ve struck the right balance in the package that we’re announcing today.”Asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme if Starmer was prepared to use the relationship he has built with Trump to ask him to change course, she said: “Obviously when the prime minister has discussions internationally with allies he will be honest about what is in the best interests of the British people.”Challenged that the EV measures were planned before the announcement of the tariffs and were a tweak to policy rather than dramatic change, she told Today: “These are significant changes to the car industry. You are right to say we started the consultation on Christmas Eve and that we closed the consultation in the middle of February.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionShe said Trump’s imposition of tariffs meant the UK government had to look at its EV plans with “renewed urgency”.The Green party MP Siân Berry said: “The government is wrong to apply the brakes on the sale of EV cars. This is just the latest in a series of boosts the Labour government has given fossil fuel industries. We’ve also seen the green light being given to airport expansion and a new road tunnel under the Thames. This suggests Labour is weakening its climate commitments, and its health-related policy goals because all these moves will have a detrimental impact on air quality.“Slowing down the move away from fossil-fuelled transport makes no economic sense either, since green sectors of the economy are growing three times faster than the overall UK economy.”Colin Walker, the head of transport at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, said: “In weakening the mandate elsewhere by extending flexibilities and allowing the sale of standard hybrids between 2030 and 2035, the government risks reducing the competition it has stimulated between manufacturers, meaning prices for families seeking an EV might not fall as fast, and sales could slow.“The growth of the secondhand EV market, where most of us buy our cars, would in turn be stunted, leaving millions of families stuck in petrol and hybrid cars paying a petrol premium of hundreds, and even thousands, of pounds a year.” More
