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    Trump signs executive orders to spur US ‘nuclear energy renaissance’

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    Donald Trump signed a series of executive orders on Friday intended to spur a “nuclear energy renaissance” through the construction of new reactors he said would satisfy the electricity demands of data centers for artificial intelligence and other emerging industries.The orders represented the president’s latest foray into the policy underlying America’s electricity supply. Trump declared a national energy emergency on his first day in office over and moved to undo a ban implemented by Joe Biden on new natural gas export terminals and expand oil and gas drilling in Alaska.Nuclear does not carry oil and gas’s carbon emissions, but produces radioactive waste that the United States lacks a facility to permanently store. Some environmental groups have safety concerns over the reactors and their supply chain.Trump signed four orders intended to speed up the approval of nuclear reactors for defense and AI purposes, reform the Nuclear Regulatory Commission with the goal of quadrupling production of electricity over the next 25 years, revamp the regulatory process to have three experimental reactors operating by 4 July 2026 and boost investment in the technology’s industrial base.“Mark this day on your calendar. This is going to turn the clock back on over 50 years of overregulation of an industry,” the interior secretary, Doug Burgum, said at an Oval Office event where Trump signed the orders.“President Trump here today has committed to energy dominance, and part of that energy dominance is that we’ve got enough electricity to win the AI arms race with China.”High-profile accidents at nuclear plants in the United States and abroad stirred public opposition to nuclear energy in decades past, but Trump described the technology as “very safe”.However, the effort of the “department of government efficiency” to downsize the federal workforce has created snafus like the temporary firings of some employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the US nuclear arsenal. It is also feared to hamper a long-running nuclear waste cleanup operation in Washington state.In Congress, Trump’s Republican allies have moved to implement his energy policies and repeal Biden’s.A sprawling tax-and-spending bill the House of Representatives passed this week changes the rules for tax incentives created under Biden for renewable energy power plants to make them available only for projects that begin construction within 60 days of the bill’s enactment, and are completed by 2028.But nuclear plants only have to be under construction by 2028, a less strict guideline. More

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      in Elections

      Senate Republicans Kill California’s Ban on Gas-Powered Cars

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      In 50 years, California’s authority to set environmental rules that are tougher than national standards had never been challenged by Congress. Until now.The Senate on Thursday blocked California’s landmark plan to phase out the sale of new gasoline-powered vehicles, setting up a legal battle that could shape the electric car market in the United States.The 51-44 vote was a victory for the oil and gas industry and for Republicans who muscled through the vote by deploying an unusual legislative tactic that Democrats denounced as a “nuclear” option that would affect the way the Senate operates way beyond climate policy.The repeal deals a blow to California’s ambition of accelerating the nation’s transition to electric vehicles. But the consequences will ripple across the country. That’s because 11 other states intended to follow California’s plan and stop selling new gas-powered cars by 2035. Together, they account for about 40 percent of the U.S. auto market.The resolution, which had already been approved by the House, now goes to President Trump’s desk. Mr. Trump, who opposes clean energy and has taken particular umbrage at California’s efforts to reduce the use of fossil fuels, is expected to sign it into law.California leaders have promised to challenge the Senate vote and try to restore the ban.“This Senate vote is illegal,” said California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Democrat of California. “Republicans went around their own parliamentarian to defy decades of precedent. We won’t stand by as Trump Republicans make America smoggy again — undoing work that goes back to the days of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan — all while ceding our economic future to China.“California’s auto policy was allowed under permission granted by the Biden administration. The 1970 Clean Air Act specifies that California can receive waivers from the Environmental Protection Agency to enact clean air standards that are tougher than federal limits because the state has historically had the most polluted air in the nation. Federal law also allows other states to adopt California’s standards under certain circumstances.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Fury as Republicans go ‘nuclear’ in fight over California car emissions

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      California has long been one of the nation’s preeminent eco-warriors, enacting landmark environmental standards for cars and trucks that go much further than those mandated by the federal government. Vehicles across the country are cleaner, more efficient and electric in greater numbers because of it.But that could all change if Donald Trump and his Republican allies manage to revoke the state’s ability to set its own, stricter emissions standards amid a White House crusade to combat climate-friendly policies.The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sets and updates its own federal standards for all states on smog and emissions from cars and trucks, which the Biden administration made even stricter last year, saying they will save American drivers thousands in fuel costs and maintenance over the life of a vehicle.But for decades, California has been granted the ability to make those rules even stricter to help address some of the worst smog and air quality issues in the nation, which are linked to a host of health effects that disproportionately affect people of color.On Wednesday, the Senate voted to reverse the waivers, in move that prompted fury from Democrats who call it a “nuclear” option, calling it an unprecedented, and illegal, use of the statute. The Government Accountability Office and the Senate parliamentarian have agreed, saying EPA waivers are not subject to the review law.The House approved similar resolutions earlier this month. The resolutions now go to the White House, where Trump is expected to sign them.“This move will harm public health and deteriorate air quality for millions of children and people across the country,” said senators Alex Padilla, Sheldon Whitehouse and the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, in a statement.“This Senate vote is illegal. Republicans went around their own parliamentarian to defy decades of precedent. We won’t stand by as Trump Republicans make America smoggy again,” California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, said in a statement on Thursday. “We’re going to fight this unconstitutional attack on California in court.”Kathy Harris, the director of clean vehicles at the Natural Resources Defense Council, emphasized California’s ability to mandate strict emissions standards for cars, trucks and buses had existed for nearly 60 years, noting the state had been granted more than 75 waivers under Republican and Democratic presidents.Among the waivers include rules to increase the share of electric vehicles each year among all new car and truck sales, as well as mandates that auto companies introduce progressively cleaner vehicles.She described the waivers as a “quadruple win”, benefiting public health, air quality, drivers’ pockets and the economy as a whole.“These waivers are not new or novel,” Harris said in an interview. “California has historically been innovators in systems to help produce cleaner air and stymying California’s ability is a direct attack on our ability to limit pollution and health harming pollutants in the air.”View image in fullscreenShe added revoking the waivers would immediately lead to an increase in pollution on the nation’s roadways.More than a dozen states follow California’s lead on emissions standards, according to the California air resources board. The standards now cover nearly 40% of new light-duty vehicle registrations and more than a quarter of heavy-duty vehicles like trucks across the entire US.Automakers have largely followed California’s emissions standards as well so they can continue to sell cars there, as the state equates to the fourth-largest economy on the planet.Newsom upped the ante in the nation’s environmental future in 2020, declaring his state would ban the sale of all new gas-powered vehicles by 2035. Eleven states have also joined California’s plan to ban the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by the 2035 deadline, a reality that has spooked major car companies.Joe Biden’s administration approved the plan at the end of his term. Trump, however – a vehement opponent to many of the nation’s climate efforts – has vowed to see them reversed.“California has imposed the most ridiculous car regulations anywhere in the world, with mandates to move to all electric cars,” Trump said during his campaign last year. “I will terminate that.”Newsom on Wednesday cast the battle as a nail in the coffin for the American car industry and decades of public health advancements.“The United States Senate has a choice: cede American car-industry dominance to China and clog the lungs of our children, or follow decades of precedent and uphold the clean-air policies that Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon fought so hard for,” he challenged Republicans in a statement. “Will you side with China or America?”The Senate’s decision may have sweeping effects far beyond the state’s borders.Harris said she recently pulled up pictures of what air quality looked like in cities around the country in the 1960s before the Clean Air Act, the seminal environmental law that regulates the nation’s air quality, was in effect. She described normal levels of smog in California as blanketing the state similar to the apocalyptic clouds of wildfire smoke that have descended during recent fire seasons.The American Lung Association also found last month that Los Angeles remained the country’s smoggiest city for the 25th time in 26 years of tracking, despite decades of improvements in air quality.“I think we have forgotten about what our air used to look like,” Harris said. “We take it for granted because it’s a policy that’s been around for so long we don’t really recognize those direct benefits.“There is still a long way to go, we have not succeeded in fully cleaning up our air yet,” she added. “These types of policies help ensure we are moving in a positive direction.” More

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      in US Politics

      ‘Plenty of time’ to solve climate crisis, interior secretary tells representatives

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      The US has “plenty of time” to solve the climate crisis,” the interior secretary, Doug Burgum, told a House committee on Tuesday.The comment came on his first of two days of testimony to House and Senate appropriators in which he defended Donald Trump’s proposed budget, dubbed the “one big, beautiful bill”, that would extend tax reductions enacted during Trump’s first term, while cutting $5bn of funding for the Department of the Interior.In addition to slashing spending on national parks, historic preservation, and other key interior department programming, the budget proposal would cancels billions of dollars in infrastructure investments, environmental programs and research grants. It would also gut funding for renewable energy, including by rolling back clean tax credits from Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.Maine representative Chellie Marie Pingree, the ranking member of the House appropriations committee, said this would amount to “effectively gutting this critical this critical sector”.“This disregards the climate change concerns that we have,” she told Burgum at Tuesday’s hearing.Scientists have long warned that world leaders must urgently phase out fossil fuels and boost green technology to avert the worse possible consequences of the climate crisis. But Burgum said that is not the threat the Trump administration is worried about.“The existential threats that this administrations is focusing on are: Iran cannot get a nuclear weapon, and we can’t lose the AI arms race to China,” he said. “That’s the number one and number two. If we solve those two things, then we will have plenty of time to solve any issues related to potential temperature change.”Despite Burgum’s reference to “potential” warming, there is scientific consensus that the climate crisis is already reshaping global weather patterns and ecosystems, increasing the severity and frequency of extreme weather events, and costing the US billions of dollars a year.During Trump’s first four months in office, the interior department has already seen massive cuts to staff, including the firing of 2,300 probationary employees and the resignation of 2,700 workers who accepted buyout packages.“How you can sit there and hold somebody’s feet to the fire when there’s a whole bunch of empty desks,” asked Republican representative Mark Amodei of Nevada.Representative Pingree said she was “disappointed” by the changes to the agency.“In just four months, the department has been destabilized, and there’s been a stunning decline in its ability to meet its mission,” she told Burgum.Burgum’s firing-happy approach to leading the interior department, as well as his fossil fuel boosterism, have sparked outrage among activists in Washington DC. Ahead of his Tuesday testimony, consumer advocacy group Public Citizen unveiled a new video criticizing Burgum’s efforts to sell off public lands to the oil, gas and mining industries, which is being played on a mobile billboard circulating outside the Capitol.“Americans want clean air, access to nature, and a future where public lands stay public,” Alan Zibel, a research director with Public Citizen, said. “Instead, they’re getting a secretary more interested in pleasing big oil than protecting our shared resources.” More

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      in US Politics

      This land is their land: Trump is selling out the US’s beloved wilderness

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      View image in fullscreenIn 1913, on a remote, windswept stretch of buffalo-grass prairie in western North Dakota, Roald Peterson was born – the ninth of 11 children to hardy Norwegian homesteaders.The child fell in love with the ecosystem he was born into. It was a landscape as awe-inspiring and expansive as the ocean, with hawks riding sage-scented winds by day and the Milky Way glowing at night.As a young adult, he decided to study the emerging field of range science in college, which led him to Louisiana – where he was so appalled by the harsh conditions faced by sharecroppers that he volunteered with a farmers’ union. After serving stateside in the army air forces during the second world war, he took a job in Montana with the US Forest Service, monitoring cattle and sheep grazing on public lands. He took to his work with high morale.Unfortunately for Peterson, his career took off at the height of anti-communist hysteria, at which time the second red scare, also known as the McCarthy era, was well under way.In the midst of this culture war, Peterson’s environmental advocacy and concern for exploited workers made him a glaring target, a man with a bullseye on his back. In 1949, two anonymous informants falsely accused Peterson of having been a communist, setting off an invasive loyalty investigation.View image in fullscreenMontanans from across the political spectrum rallied to his defense. So did the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and conservationist Bernard DeVoto, who was so moved by the case that he penned the most controversial column of his 20-year run at Harper’s Magazine: Due Notice to the FBI.In it, DeVoto delivered a bold defense of civil liberties in the face of growing authoritarianism – one of the earliest national articles to openly criticize both FBI director J Edgar Hoover and senator Joseph McCarthy.As the red scare escalated, Peterson’s loyalty was investigated a second time, and then a third when another informant told the FBI he was “behaving like a homosexual”.Peterson was fired from the Forest Service in early 1953. He lost his family’s ranch in Montana’s Bitterroot valley (not far from where the show Yellowstone is filmed). Peterson’s wife left him and was committed by her family to an asylum. A judge awarded custody of his three children to the state, placing them in foster care.A granddaughter, whom I located and interviewed, told me the children were repeatedly sexually abused; the two youngest later died by suicide.Peterson’s 2004 obituary, penned by his surviving daughter, states that he was “blacklisted by the infamous Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn and J Edgar Hoover group of legal thugs”.That the one in the middle was Donald Trump’s mentor underscores the connection between then and now.Peterson was targeted during a low chapter in American history – one that feels eerily familiar today.It was a time when reactionaries in Congress plotted to sell off public lands – just as they do now. When the US Forest Service was under intense pressure to clear-cut more trees – just as it is now. When public lands faced destruction in the name of energy production – just as they do now. More than 14,000 people were forced out of government jobs during the red scare – a mass purge that mirrors the targeted layoffs we’re witnessing now.Meanwhile, the Trump administration has made no secret of its ambitions: a ramp-up of logging and drilling across public lands, and a sweeping plan to shrink up to six national monuments in the south-west.View image in fullscreenTaken together, a larger strategy comes into focus: Republicans are laying the groundwork to sell off some of the nation’s most treasured public assets. And it begins with gutting the numbers and the morale of the very people who protect them.Bill Wade boasts nine decades of perspective on the US’s public lands. The son of a ranger, the 84-year-old was raised inside Mesa Verde national park in Colorado and went on to have a long career in the agency, eventually serving as supervisor at Shenandoah national park in Virginia.Now retired, Wade serves as the executive director of the Association of National Park Rangers, which makes him an excellent ear to have on the ground. He has a bracing take on conservation workers and our public lands.Morale, he says, is probably the lowest he’s seen in his 58-year career.That’s a reasonable take, given that the message from the Trump administration is, to paraphrase the novelty slogan: “Purging will continue until morale improves.”February 2025 brought the “Valentine’s Day massacre”, when the misnamed “department of government efficiency” fired 1,000 National Park Service employees and 3,400 from the US Forest Service. In March, courts ruled the firings lawless. More buyouts followed. In May, the administration signaled it would slash the agency’s budget by 40% – the biggest cut in its 109-year history.With parks having boasted record visitation in 2024, this year they are already reporting shortages in visitor center hours; campground accessibility; sanitation; interpretation, such as ranger-led hikes; and environmental stewardship, such as trail maintenance and wildfire prevention programs with youth conservation volunteers.View image in fullscreenNone of the personnel cuts make good business sense. The National Park Service oversees resources that cost $3.5bn annually to manage, yet generate more than $55bn in revenue. Protecting such a profitable national asset should be a no-brainer. Despite that, conservation workers have been in effect barred from buying new supplies costing more than $1.Already, the National Park Service has about one employee for every 17,000 visitors, said Timothy Whitehouse, the executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. “They’re breaking the system,” he said. “They’re traumatizing the workforce.” Many worry about the brain drain that will follow.That younger generation’s malaise was touched on in a poignant letter by the US Forest Service chief, Randy Moore, who announced his resignation in March. “If you are feeling uncertainty, frustration or loss, you are not alone,” Moore wrote. “These are real and valid emotions that I am feeling, too. Please take care of yourselves and each other.”Read between the lines: I understand the damage this all does to morale.His leaving was conspicuous, coming at the start of Trump’s anti-diversity zealotry. Moore is the first Black person to lead the forest service. Was his replacement, Tom Schultz, chosen because he is the same race as every other chief in the service’s 116-year history? Or because the former timber industry executive is the first chief never to have served in the forest service? (Or both?)Whitehouse explained that it wasn’t just that the conservation workers were fired, it was how they were fired: the dismissed employees had received a form letter which stated that they “failed to demonstrate fitness or qualifications for continued employment”.Conservation workers deal in hard, natural truths: the forest is on fire, the river is in flood, the bear is there. The “failed to demonstrate fitness” letters are false by any degree of objective measurement.Wade, the experienced ranger, described it with a phrase used for totalitarian propaganda.“All of this amounted to,” he said, “a big lie.”We have been here before.The question goes, why are there public lands? Why protect them?The start of the answer is put nowhere better than the Bible. Genesis, 2:10:And a river went out of Eden to water the garden …When Europeans reached the eastern shores of North America, they found a climate with rain amounts similar to the lands they had left. Land ownership in Europe was feudal, with kings and lords controlling vast expanses. In democratic opposition, Americans distributed small farms and plantations to a far wider array of its citizenry.As the nation expanded westward from the original 13 colonies, Thomas Jefferson maneuvered the public domain into the control of the federal government, so states would not war with each other over land.View image in fullscreenSo far as the rainfall remained similar to Europe, this American settlement system was tenable. But when settlers crossed the Mississippi River in the 1800s, they confronted a new climate: desert.Across vast expanses of the US west, the majority of the precipitation collects as wintertime snow on the tops of high mountains. As was figured out by the ancestral Puebloans, who irrigated farmland and built towns and cities in the American south-west for centuries before Columbus sailed, the key to survival is getting the summertime meltwater from mountain snowpack safely and cleanly down into the valleys where lie the farms, ranches, towns and cities.For this to happen – for our national garden to be watered – there must be healthy mountain forests and grasslands. These mountains and prairies, the vast majority of which were never claimed by homesteaders and never belonged to any state, would become the bedrock of public lands conservation.It is a wonderful fact of nature that some of the most magnificent scenery is where rivers begin: at the tops of mountain ranges. This is why our awe-inspiring national parks – Yosemite, Yellowstone – became the modern world’s first protected public lands. It’s always worth remembering the words of writer Wallace Stegner: national parks are America’s best idea.But national parks proved far too small to protect all the water the dry west needs. At the turn of the 20th century, President Theodore Roosevelt made the US the first modern nation to enshrine public lands conservation as a national priority. He created 150 national forests in the west to ensure a consistent supply of water and timber. Soon followed the first national wildlife refuges and the first national monuments.Protecting only parks and forests proved tragically insufficient. Come the 1930s, farmers over-plowing dry prairies and deserts caused the Dust Bowl – the worst single-event environmental disaster yet in the nation’s history. To protect the soil-saving, deep-rooted native grasses, in the 1930s President Franklin Roosevelt created the Grazing Service. The protection of grasslands, prairies, deserts and canyonlands heralded a completeness of conserved landscapes.View image in fullscreenThe counterattack to undo public lands conservation began at that point. By the 1940s, some western cattle kings and sheep barons, historically used to monopolizing western ranges, attacked the Grazing Service. Their tool was the Nevada senator Pat McCarran – a role model for senator McCarthy. McCarran toured the US west staging hearings about public lands in which he brazenly gave priority and preference to cattle kings and sheep barons.A McCarran aide explained that a purpose of these hearings was to affect conservation workers “psychologically” – to hurt their morale. McCarran would order employees to attend his hearings and forbid them to speak, while encouraging his curated audiences to shout insults at them.Mass layoffs followed – similar to the purge we saw this February. Disparaged and defunded, the service was amalgamated in 1946 into a new, enfeebled and industry-friendly agency called the Bureau of Land Management.The political exploitation of fear, paranoia, conspiracy, false accusations, show trials, refusal of fair play and apocalypticism could be called McCarranism as accurately as McCarthyism.McCarran’s work still fills our headlines today: it was he who legalized peacetime concentration camps in the case that the president declares an emergency – which Trump does frequently. And it was he, over President Harry Truman’s veto, who passed the 1952 law that Trump is using to jail foreign-born students without arrest warrants.If history offers any hope, it may be worth looking at what happened after McCarthy was shamed off the national stage.In the 1960s and early 1970s came an American renaissance in conservation, and with it the passage of historic environmental legislation. With broad, bipartisan support came laws like the Clean Air Act, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, the Wilderness Act and the Endangered Species Act.Federal conservation workers today may prove as resilient as those who withstood the red scare – who themselves proudly showed they had the same tenacity and psychological toughness as their forebears in other times of national duress.We only have to look back in time to see plenty of examples. In 1910, the forest service was in its infancy when its understaffed and under-equipped employees battled a deadly Northern Rocky Mountains forest fire as big as the state of Connecticut.In earlier decades, members of the army’s famous all-Black cavalry, the “Buffalo soldiers”, showed the mettle to protect western national parks through an era of resurgent white supremacy.View image in fullscreenDuring the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps put more than 3 million poor, jobless and hungry young men to work planting 3bn trees. The morale and spirit they developed in those hard times is reflected in the unofficial motto they developed: “We can take it!”But we are also running out of time. Trees take centuries to grow, ecosystems take millennia to congeal, and this climate is the only livable one humankind has ever known. An unmerciful fact about public lands is, like some store signs say: all sales are final.A few years after Peterson was fired, his case was re-examined; he was found never to have joined the Communist party. He was offered his old job back.Because of the way he had been treated, he refused. They had broken his morale.This is the point of what is going on. At stake is our Eden. The Bible also has a story about what happens if we lose that.

      Nate Schweber is a journalist and the author of This America of Ours: Bernard and Avis DeVoto and the Forgotten Fight to Save the Wild More

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      Trump Administration to Uphold Some PFAS Limits but Eliminate Others

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      The E.P.A. said it would maintain limits on the two most common “forever chemicals” in tap water. Rules for four others will be rolled back.The Environmental Protection Agency said Wednesday that it would uphold drinking water standards for two harmful “forever chemicals,” present in the tap water of millions of Americans. But it said it would delay deadlines to meet those standards and roll back limits on four other related chemicals.Known as forever chemicals because of their virtually indestructible nature, PFAS are a class of thousands of chemicals used widely in everyday products like nonstick cookware, water-repellent clothing and stain-resistant carpets, as well as in firefighting foams.Exposure to PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, has been associated with metabolic disorders, decreased fertility in women, developmental delays in children and increased risk of some prostate, kidney and testicular cancers, according to the E.P.A.President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had, for the first time, required water utilities to start bringing down levels of six types of PFAS chemicals to near zero. He set a particularly stringent limit of four parts per trillion for two of those chemicals, called PFOA and PFOS, which are most commonly found in drinking water systems.The Trump administration said it would uphold the limits for those two types of PFAS, but would delay a deadline for water utilities to meet those limits by two years, to 2031.The E.P.A. said it would rescind the limits for the other four chemicals.“We are on a path to uphold the agency’s nationwide standards to protect Americans from PFOA and PFOS in their water,” Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, said in a statement. “At the same time, we will work to provide common-sense flexibility in the form of additional time for compliance,” he said. “EPA will also continue to use its regulatory and enforcement tools to hold polluters accountable.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Noaa to stop tracking cost of climate crisis-fueled disasters: ‘Major loss’

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      The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) will no longer track the cost of climate crisis-fueled weather disasters, including floods, heatwaves, wildfires and more. It is the latest example of changes to the agency and the Trump administration limiting federal government resources on climate change.Noaa falls under the US Department of Commerce and is tasked with daily weather forecasts, severe storm warnings and climate monitoring. It is also parent to the National Weather Service.The agency said its National Centers for Environmental Information would no longer update its Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database beyond 2024, and that its information – going as far back as 1980 – would be archived.For decades, it has tracked hundreds of major events across the country, including destructive hurricanes, hailstorms, droughts and freezes that have totaled trillions of dollars in damage.The database uniquely pulls information from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (Fema) assistance data, insurance organizations, state agencies and more to estimate overall losses from individual disasters.Noaa’s communications director, Kim Doster, said in a statement that the change was “in alignment with evolving priorities, statutory mandates, and staffing changes”.In a separate development on Thursday, Fema’s acting administrator, Cameron Hamilton, was pushed out and replaced by another official from the Department of Homeland Security, a day after he testified on Capitol Hill that he did not agree with proposals to dismantle Fema, which Donald Trump has threatened to do.Scientists say extreme weather events are becoming increasingly more frequent, costly and severe with the climate crisis. Experts have attributed the growing intensity of recent debilitating heat, Hurricane Milton, the southern California wildfires and blasts of cold to the climate crisis.Assessing the impact of weather events fueled by the planet’s warming is key as insurance premiums rise, particularly in communities more prone to flooding, storms and fires. The climate crisis has wreaked havoc on the insurance industry, and homeowners are at risk of soaring rates.One limitation is that the dataset estimated only the nation’s most costly weather events.The information is generally seen as standardized and unduplicable, given the agency’s access to non-public data, and other private databases would be more limited in scope and likely not shared as widespread for proprietary reasons. Other datasets, however, also track death estimates from these disasters.Jeff Masters, a meteorologist for Yale Climate Connections, pointed to substitutes from insurance brokers and the international disaster database as alternative sources of information.Still, “the Noaa database is the gold standard we use to evaluate the costs of extreme weather,” Masters said, “and it’s a major loss, since it comes at a time when we need to better understand how much climate change is increasing disaster losses.”These moves also do not “change the fact that these disasters are escalating year over year”, Kristina Dahl, the vice-president of science at non-profit climate organization Climate Central. “Extreme weather events that cause a lot of damage are one of the primary ways that the public sees that climate change is happening and is affecting people.“It’s critical that we highlight those events when they’re happening,” she added. “All of these changes will make Americans less safe in the face of climate change.”The move, reported on Thursday by CNN, is yet another of Trump’s efforts to remove references to the climate crisis and the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on the weather from the federal government’s lexicon and documents.The president has instead prioritized allies in the polluting coal, oil and gas industries, which studies say are linked or traced to climate damage.The Trump administration fired hundreds of weather forecasters and other federal Noaa employees on probationary status in February, part of Elon Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency” efforts to downsize the federal government workforce. It began a second round of more than 1,000 cuts at the agency in March, more than 10% of its workforce at the time.At the time, insiders said mass firings and changes to the agency would risk lives and negatively affect the US economy. Experts also noted fewer vital weather balloon launches under Noaa would worsen US weather forecasts.More changes to the agency are expected, which could include some of those proposed in the president’s preliminary budget.The agency’s weather service also paused providing language translations of its products last month – though it resumed those translations just weeks later. More

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      Trump reportedly eyes $26m in funding cuts for US national parks

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      The Trump administration is reportedly eyeing dozens of grants across the National Park Service for termination, according to reporting from the New York Times, one of several moves destabilizing the US’s investment in public lands.According to the newspaper, staff members at Elon Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency” have created a spreadsheet of federal grants earmarked for cuts, with total funding cuts amounting to some $26m.The proposed eliminations follow a familiar pattern for the Trump administration, with reasons given for program cuts including “climate change/sustainability”, “DEI” and “LGBQ”. Programs listed for potential elimination include “Scientists in Parks”, which places undergraduate and graduate students as well as early-career scientists across the country in natural resource management-focused positions.The focus on DEI, LGBTQ+ issues and climate change matches cuts “Doge” has made across the federal government, and specifically at the Department of the Interior, which houses the National Park Service. The interior department and the NPS were heavily hit by Doge’s early rounds of layoffs, along with the US Forestry Service, which manages nearly 200m acres (81m hectares) of public land.Since then, the administration has continued to slash at the NPS’s workings. Earlier this spring, the department closed the National Park Service Academy, which was a partnership designed to bring Americans from underrepresented backgrounds into the park service and make a more diverse set of Americans feel comfortable working in and exploring the outdoors.Earlier this week, the Washington Post reported that the administration had suspended air quality monitoring programs at national parks across the country, issuing stop work orders to two companies providing the monitoring. Some park service staffers have requested that the stop work orders be rescinded.More cuts appear to be on the horizon. According to the National Parks Conservation Association, the full cost of proposed cuts could bring a 75% reduction to NPS services in order to meet the goal of more than $1bn in reductions.Critics have said that cuts to the NPS, Department of the Interior and US Forestry Service not only risk the preservation of America’s national parks, but could put land management and fire reduction in jeopardy as well.They also have the potential to hit rural, and often conservative, parts of the country economically the hardest. National parks in particular can be an economic engine, generating more than $55.6bn in economic input, according to the National Park Service.Resistance within the National Park Service to the Trump administration’s plans has been spirited, with more than 300 billboards erected across the country protesting cuts, and protesters rallying in support of parks across the country in recent months. More

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      Democratic-led states sue Trump for blocking wind energy projects

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      A coalition of Democratic state attorneys general sued on Monday in an attempt to block Donald Trump’s move to suspend leasing and permitting of new wind projects, saying it threatens to cripple the wind industry and a key source of clean energy.Seventeen states and the District of Columbia argued, in a lawsuit filed in federal court in Boston, that the decision by the Republican president’s administration to indefinitely pause all federal wind-energy approvals was unlawful and must be blocked.Trump announced the pause on his first day back in office on 20 January when he directed his administration to halt offshore wind lease sales and stop the issuance of permits, leases and loans for both onshore and offshore wind projects.“This administration is devastating one of our nation’s fastest-growing sources of clean, reliable and affordable energy,” the New York attorney general, Letitia James, a Democrat, said in a statement.The lawsuit seeks a court order declaring the indefinite pause unlawful and barring the agencies including the US Departments of Commerce and Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from implementing Trump’s directive.The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Meanwhile, attorneys general in 19 states and DC are challenging cuts to the US Health and Human Services (HHS) agency, saying the Trump administration’s massive restructuring has destroyed life-saving programs and left states to pick up the bill for mounting health crises, the Associated Press reported.The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Rhode Island on Monday, the New York attorney general said.The health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, restructured the agency in March, eliminating more than 10,000 employees and collapsing 28 agencies under the sprawling HHS umbrella into 15, the attorneys general said. An additional 10,000 employees had already been let go by the Trump’s administration, according to the lawsuit, and combined the cuts stripped 25% of the HHS workforce. More