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

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

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

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

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

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      Hundreds of staff at California national parks to unionize amid Trump turmoil

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      Hundreds of staff at two of California’s most popular national parks have voted to unionize, a move that comes during a troubled summer for the National Park Service, which has seen the Trump administration enact unprecedented staff and budget cuts.In an election held between July and August, more than 97% of workers at Yosemite and Sequoia & Kings Canyon national parks voted in support of organizing a union, according to a statement from the National Federation of Federal Employees. The Federal Labor Relations Authority certified the results last week.“I am honored to welcome the Interpretive Park Rangers, scientists, biologists, photographers, geographers, and so many other federal employees in essential roles at both Yosemite and Sequoia & Kings Canyon to our union,” said Randy Erwin, the NFFE national president.“By unionizing, hundreds of previously unrepresented employees have obtained a critical voice in their workplace and now have the power to make significant changes to benefit themselves and their colleagues.”The vote means 600 workers at the parks, including park rangers, researchers, educators, fee collectors and first responders, among others, will be represented by the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE).Labor organizers have been trying to form a union at the parks for years but did not have the necessary support until this year when the Trump administration’s mass firings left the parks service in turmoil, the Los Angeles Times reported.“It comes as no surprise workers in the National Park Service are overwhelmingly in favor of unionizing, as federal employees across the country have been faced with reductions in force, threats to workplace protections, and slashed agency budgets under this administration,” Erwin said.Since Trump took office this year the National Park Service, which manages 85m acres (34m hectares) of America’s public lands, has lost a quarter of its permanent staff, seasonal hiring is down and the administration is seeking to slash more than $1bn from the NPS budget.The US interior secretary, Doug Burgum, has said the cuts were “clearing out the barn”. Despite the upheaval, the federal government has ordered parks to stay open to the public. That has left staffers scrambling to manage the parks amid the peak summer season, and, as the Guardian reported last month, archeologists are managing ticket booths while park superintendents have cleaned bathrooms.At Yosemite, scientists were also cleaning public bathrooms because there were no other workers to do it. Amid the turmoil this year, NPS employees told the Guardian earlier this summer they had received unsigned emails from the office of personnel management urging them to resign and find a job in the private sector.“Every day you come to work and you have no idea what is going to happen next. It’s like we are all being subjected to psychological warfare,” a staffer said this spring.Earlier this year at Yosemite, laid-off employees hung a US flag upside down, a symbol of distress, at the park’s El Capitan to bring attention the cuts.Erwin with the NFFE said the union would take “every step possible” to increase staffing and resources, and defend employees. More

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

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

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

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

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

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      A report tied Iowa’s water pollution to agriculture. Then the money to promote it mysteriously disappeared

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      When a team of scientists embarked two years ago on a $1m landmark study of Iowa’s persistent water-quality problems, they knew that the findings would be important to share. High cancer rates amid the state’s inability to stem the tide of pollutants flowing into rivers and lakes was a growing public concern.But now, after the completed study pointed to agricultural pollution as a significant source of the key US farm state’s water problems, public officials have quietly stripped funding from plans to promote the study findings, according to sources involved in the project.The report, the results of two years of data analysis, has been highly controversial in Iowa because of the large amount of evidence it cites linking water pollution – and resulting human and environmental health risks – to the state’s economically and politically powerful farm industry.Supporters of the report said the agricultural industry and allied public officials have tried to downplay the findings for months, and they fear this move is another impediment to change.‘Zeroed out’When the report was finalized earlier this year, there was a little more than $400,000 left in the budget, with some of that money earmarked for communications and “public awareness” work, travel and other costs associated with promoting the findings, records show.Jennifer Terry, the project lead on the water report, had planned in-person meetings with scientists and community groups to focus on recommendations made in the report.But those funds were recently “zeroed out” with no explanation, according to email communications.Funding for the water report and related public outreach came from Polk county, Iowa’s most populous county and home to the state capital city of Des Moines. County leadership has changed since the report was commissioned.“The intent was that at the conclusion of the report to make sure it was seen widely in a public education effort,” said former Polk county administrator John Norris, who led support for the water report in 2023. “That was a big part of the value of it – that the public learns from it.”Norris, who agreed to leave office earlier this year as part of a legal settlement with the county, said he hoped the county would use some of the money in some way for water-quality work.Frank Marasco, who replaced Norris, did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did Polk county spokesperson Jon Cahill. Terry also declined to comment.The water report, authored by a team of 16 scientists, focuses on pollution patterns in two “essential” rivers fed from a watershed running from southern Minnesota through the central part of Iowa to Des Moines. The rivers are the primary source of drinking water for roughly 600,000 people and considered important recreational state assets, but they’re commonly laden with harmful contaminants that include phosphorus and nitrogen, bacteria from animal and human waste, pesticides and other chemicals.This summer, nitrate levels in key drinking-water sources were measured in quantities far higher than is allowed under federal safety standards.Much, though not all, of the contamination is tied to agriculture, according to the report. Among multiple recommendations, the report calls for the top US corn-growing state to diversify into production of crops that require fewer chemical inputs, and for limits on the density of livestock.The water report comes alongside growing concerns about the prevalence of cancer across the state. For the last few years, Iowa has had the second-highest rate of cancer in the nation, and is one of only two US states where cancer is increasing. Pesticides and nitrates both are scientifically shown to cause cancers.Kerri Johannsen, senior director of policy and programs at the Iowa Environmental Council, said all allocated funds should be fully utilized to educate the public.“People in Polk county and across the state are facing a water crisis but we cannot begin to make progress until all Iowans, including decision-makers, understand the urgency of this moment,” she said.“The importance of accessible, transparent public education and awareness cannot be understated,” Johannsen added. “The current resources available for addressing our water issues are a drop in the bucket, and our elected officials have a responsibility to do everything they can to find a way forward for the sake of the health of the people of this state.”Feds add to worriesThe issues over how to address water-quality problems in Iowa, which has nearly 87,000 farms and ranks first in the nation for corn, pork and egg production, comes as the Trump administration and Republican allies in Congress are moving to dismantle regulations aimed at protecting water quality, including those that work to limit discharges of pesticides and other farm-related chemicals into waterways.One chief concern for environmental advocates is the Permit Act, which is actually a package of more than a dozen bills that would streamline permitting requirements. The legislation would cut protections for many waterways, limit requirements for updated pollution-control measures and exempt pesticide spraying and agricultural runoff from permitting and accountability, according to the advocacy group Beyond Pesticides.If the measures become law, it will make it that much harder for Iowans to clean up their waterways.In another blow to efforts to address the state’s water-quality problems, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently reversed a decision made under the Biden administration that found additional areas of four Iowa rivers should be designated as impaired.When waters are classified as impaired, it triggers stricter regulatory measures to limit pollutants entering the waterways and other enhanced measures aimed at reducing the inflow of harmful contaminants.The reversal angered environmental groups across the state as well as the utility providers tasked with cleaning up the water. But farm groups, including the Iowa Farm Bureau, which had opposed the impairment designations, cheered the news.News of the reversal broke the same week that the EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, visited Iowa to meet with farmers and others and attend the Iowa state fair to serve as a grill master at the Iowa Pork Producers Association tent.When asked what drove the decision to reverse the impairment decision, an EPA spokesperson said only that the agency had been tracking the levels of nitrates this spring and summer in the waterways and is “ensuring that all of the information and data collected by the cities, universities, and other groups is provided to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources for evaluation”.The agency is “not currently aware” of any “exceedances” of nitrates at public water systems “using surface waterbodies in Iowa”, the spokesperson said. The agency is working with state officials to “understand and resolve the issues forming the basis for EPA’s reconsideration of its 2024 decision”.Adam Shriver, director of wellness and nutrition policy at the Harkin Institute at Drake University, said the recent events are disheartening.“I think it shows just how far we still have left to go,” Shriver said. “The farm bureau opposed the initial impairment designation and was taking a victory lap with the recent EPA announcement. As long as they continue to get whatever they want from every level of government while other stakeholders are ignored, public health is going to suffer.”This story is co-published with the New Lede, a journalism project of the Environmental Working Group More

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      The unlikely alliance pressing Trump to regulate Pfas on US farms: ‘This is a basic human right’

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      An unlikely alliance of farmers, bikers, truckers, a detective and scientists from across the political spectrum are working to pressure the Trump administration and Republican leadership to rein in the use of toxic sewage sludge as fertilizer on the nation’s farmland.Sludge often teems with Pfas, or “forever chemicals”, which present a health risk to farmers and the public, and have destroyed farms and contaminated water across the country. The issue has touched the groups’ lives in different ways, highlighting its broad risks to health.“We can all sit down and agree that we and our children shouldn’t be fed literal poison,” said Dana Ames, a Johnson county, Texas, detective who is investigating contamination from sludge on local farms.In Oklahoma, farmer Saundra Traywick lives in an area where she says toxic sewage sludge is spread as fertilizer. Her family and animals get sick, and the potent stench can be unbearable.Mike “Lucky” Pruitt, a biker who lives in a dairy- and oil-producing region in Texas, wonders whether Pfas from sludge contributed to the rare brain cancer that killed his six-year-old son; in Johnson county, Texas, Ames took the unprecedented step of opening a criminal investigation, which is ongoing, over sludge that polluted local farms and water.Billy Randal, a trucker, just learned about the sludge’s dangers, and fears that people hauling the substance are exposed to toxic waste. And in Massachusetts, Kyla Bennett, a former US Environmental Protection Agency scientist and cancer survivor, is part of a lawsuit that could lead to sludge being banned.The alliance has a real chance of success, those involved say, because it includes everyone from liberal scientists to people on the far right – they are willing to set aside political differences for the fight.“The American people are smart – once we figure out what’s occurring, we have a whole lot more in common than we don’t, and this is a basic human right,” said Ames, the Texas detective. “We all deserve safe and clean food and water.”The alliance is aiming to hold rallies thatit hopes will draw thousands of people in Austin, Texas, and Washington DC in the coming months. Those involved are aiming to get Trump’s attention and to pressure the Texas legislature to act.Getting Trump’s attentionSludge is a mix of human and industrial waste, and a byproduct of the wastewater treatment process that regulators allow to be used as fertilizer because it’s rich in nutrients that help plants grow. It also virtually always teems with Pfas and other dangerous chemicals, which contaminate water, crops and livestock, while also sickening farmers and contaminating the nation’s food supply.Maine became the first state to ban sludge, also called biosolids, after it found Pfas had contaminated crops or water on at least 73 farms where the substance had been spread. The state established a $70m fund to bail out affected farmers.Pfas are a class of about 15,000 compounds that are dubbed “forever chemicals” because they don’t naturally break down. The chemicals are linked to a range of serious health problems like cancer, liver disease, kidney issues, high cholesterol, birth defects and decreased immunity.View image in fullscreenIn the Biden administration’s final days, the EPA issued a draft risk assessment for Pfas in sludge that could in effect ban the substance, but Republicans in Congress slipped a rider into the current appropriations bill that would essentially kill the process by withdrawing key funding. The rider was inserted just a few weeks after the EPA met with a sludge industry trade group to hear its grievances about the assessment.Ames said the EPA “has gone rogue” and she suspects Trump is unaware of the situation. The president has publicly said he wants clean water and food, Ames said, and she suspects he will act if alerted.“As his voters and his base, we want his ear, and we want to make sure that the president knows what’s going on,” Ames said.In Massachusetts, Bennett, the scientist, who is now with the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (Peer) non-profit, has been frustrated with the Biden and Trump administrations’ policies on sludge, and has sued the EPA under the Clean Water Act to force the agency to regulate the substance. Peer is assisting with letters for the action, though it is not directly involved with organizing the rallies.It’s not often that Peer works with folks on the right, but the “strange bedfellows” are a hopeful development, Bennett said.“This is an issue that should transcend politics because it affects human health and people are humans before they’re Republicans and Democrats,” Bennett said.‘We’ve got to make a change’In 2021, doctors diagnosed six-year-old Rylan Pruitt with a rare and aggressive brain cancer. After 30 rounds of radiation treatment and several months of chemotherapy, he died, leaving behind distraught parents looking for answers.There was no family history of cancer, and his father, Mike “Lucky” Pruitt, began to hear about the risks of Pfas. He turned his attention to the huge dairy and oil operations – both known sources of Pfas and other chemical pollution – in the rural community in which he lives.Only about 50 other people have developed the type of cancer that killed Rylan – and one of them was a young girl who lived about 11 miles (17km) away, Pruitt said. He said he put together the pieces, like family history, how the cancer was “stupidly and exceedingly rare”, and the research that has connected sludge and Pfas to rare pediatric cancers.“For me it’s: ‘This is why this is happening, and we’ve got to make a change,’” Pruitt said.View image in fullscreenHis 15,000-member motorcycle group, the Rylan Strong Network, pressures lawmakers on issues around pediatric cancer and health insurance. He contacted every Texas legislator asking them to support a bill that would require measuring Pfas in sludge. So far, very few have responded, and previous versions of the legislation were killed.“It’s all about who has the biggest checkbook,” Pruitt said.In Oklahoma, Traywick’s non-profit, Save Oklahoma Farms and Ranches, has had similar results in pressuring lawmakers. Her kids’ immune disorders, the flies that gnaw her donkeys’ legs raw and the unmeasured effects of suspected Pfas on land and water – none of it has so far convinced state legislators to act.But, she said, she is more optimistic as “a growing movement of people is waking up to the fact that this is not Democrats versus Republicans or left versus right – we all want our children to have a healthy future,” Traywick said.In New Jersey, Randal, founder of the national Truckers Movement for Justice, just learned about the sludge from Ames, and worries about what people hauling the waste are exposed to.The truckers, with thousands of members in the US and Mexico, recently worked with environmental groups to petition the US Department of Transportation to strengthen regulations around hauling fracking waste. The problem with sludge is similar, Randal said. Many drivers have to clean their trucks, there are few protections and they are not made aware of the Pfas and other risks in what they are hauling.“We have truck drivers handling this shit and they don’t have a clue about what they’re working around,” Randal said. “Industry laughs all the way to the bank and it’s time for it to stop.” He plans to mobilize truckers to join the rallies.In Johnson county, Texas, Goldman Sachs-owned Synagro, sold local farmers the tainted sludge that a lawsuit alleges polluted local waters and destroyed the land. The farms’ drinking water was found to be contaminated at levels more than 13,000 times higher than the federal health advisory for Pfos, one kind of Pfas compound, and affected meat was as much as 250,000 times above safe levels, the federal lawsuit against Synagro alleges. Synagro denies that the Pfas came from its sludge.Last year, Ames opened the first-ever criminal investigation into the situation, and Johnson county joined Peer’s Clean Water Act lawsuit. “We’re coming together and we’re saying: ‘No, this isn’t a third-world country, and there’s no reason why in America our food should be poisoned like this,’” Ames said. More

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

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      Fema staff warn Trump’s cuts risk exposing US to another Hurricane Katrina

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      Donald Trump’s attacks on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) risk exposing the US to another Hurricane Katrina, staff at the agency have warned Congress in a withering critique that also takes aim at its current leadership.Writing in the run up to this week’s 20th anniversary of the devastating 2005 storm that killed 1,833 people and caused widespread destruction in New Orleans and the Gulf coast, more than 180 current and former Fema employees say the Trump administration’s policies are ignoring the mistakes that led to it.The letter, sent to members of Congress and a council formed to examine the agency’s future, follows months of criticism of Fema from Trump and senior administration officials, who have threatened to close it, prompting more than 2,000 staff – about one-third of its permanent workforce – to depart, leaving it short of institutional expertise in key positions.It comes after last month’s deadly flooding in Texas that left at least 135 – including 37 school children – dead. Experts said the death toll may have been inflated by the upheaval at Fema, claiming it diminished its capacity to respond quickly.The letter, entitled The Katrina Declaration, accused the Trump administration of disregarding the Post-Katrina Emergency Reform Act (PKERMA), passed in 2006 with the intention of absorbing the lessons of the disaster.“Hurricane Katrina was not just a natural disaster, but a man-made one,” the signatories wrote.“The inexperience of senior leaders and the profound failure by the federal government to deliver timely, unified, and effective aid to those in need left survivors to fend for themselves.“Two decades later, Fema is enacting processes and leadership structures that echo the conditions PKERMA was designed to prevent.”It is also scathing about Kristi Noem, who as homeland security secretary, has overall responsibility for Fema, and about two administrators who have been placed in charge of the agency since Trump’s inauguration.“Since January 2025, Fema has been under the leadership of individuals lacking legal qualifications, Senate approval, and the demonstrated background required of a Fema administrator,” the signatories said.The letter identifies the current Fema acting administrator, David Richardson, who has no previous experience in disaster management, and his predecessor, Cameron Hamilton, who was appointed by Trump only to be fired after publicly saying he opposed plans to abolish the agency.“Decisions made [by Noem, Richardson and Hamiltion] … hinder the swift execution of our mission, and dismiss experienced staff whose institutional knowledge and relationships are vital to ensure effective emergency management,” it said.Noem has angered seasoned officials by demanding that contracts worth more more than $100,000 be personally approved by her – a stipulation specialists say significantly slowed the response to the Texas floods.Richardson’s suitability was questioned after he told staff that he did not know the US had a hurricane season – which lasts from the start of May till 30 November. His office later insisted he was joking.The letter states: “Our shared commitment to our country, our oaths of office, and our mission of helping people before, during, and after disasters compel us to warn Congress and the American people of the cascading effects of decisions made by the current administration.”Six statements of opposition in the letter include condemnation of “the ongoing failure to appoint a qualified FEMA administrator, as required by law”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt also includes criticism of the administration’s “censorship of climate science”.“This administration’s decision to ignore and disregard the facts pertaining to climate science in disasters shows a blatant disregard for the safety and security of our nation’s people and all American communities regardless of their geographic, economic or ethnic diversity,” the signatories write.A petition at the end of the letter demands that Fema be given full cabinet level agency status and defended from interference from the Department of Homeland Security. The department recently ordered Fema agents to assist Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (Ice) agents in immigration raids, threatening to fire those who refused.Trump, who has set up a review council headed by Noem to consider Fema’s future, has repeatedly said he favors its abolition, though he softened his rhetoric following the Texas floods, amid suggestions that it could be “rebranded” with more of its functions being devolved to the states.Thirty-six of the signatories – including some currently working at the agency – attached their names, leaving them open to possible retribution. Another 144 withheld their identities.One signatory, Michael Coen, a former Fema chief of staff under Joe Biden and Barack Obama, told the Guardian in a statement: “I am proud of the current and former FEMA employees for having the courage to speak up. Lessons were learned from Katrina and Congress took action. Those lessons and actions are being disregarded by the Trump administration.”Daniel Llargués, Fema’s acting press secretary, dismissed the criticisms voiced in the letter.“It is not surprising that some of the same bureaucrats who presided over decades of inefficiency are now objecting to reform,” he told the New York Times. He said the Trump administration “is committed to ensuring Fema delivers for the American people” and to cutting “red tape, inefficiency and outdated processes” in the agency. More