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      New England states vow to fight Trump administration order to halt work on offshore wind farm that’s nearly complete

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      The Democratic governors of Rhode Island and Connecticut promised on Saturday to fight a Trump administration order halting work on a nearly complete wind farm off their coasts that was expected to be operational next year.The Revolution Wind project was about 80% complete, with 45 of its 65 turbines already installed, according to the Danish wind farm developer Ørsted, when the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management sent the firm a letter on Friday ordering it to “halt all ongoing activities”.“In particular, BOEM is seeking to address concerns related to the protection of national security interests in the United States,” wrote Matt Giacona, the agency’s acting director, adding that Ørsted “may not resume activities” until the agency has completed a review of the project.Giacona said that the project, which had already cleared years of federal and state reviews, now needs to be re-examined in light of Donald Trump’s order, on the first day of his second term, to consider “terminating or amending any existing wind energy leases”.Giacona, whose prior work as a lobbyist for the offshore oil industry alarmed consumer advocates, also said that the review was necessary to “address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States”. He did not specify what those national security concerns are.Rhode Island’s governor, Dan McKee, criticized the stop-work order and said he and Connecticut’s governor, Ned Lamont, “will pursue every avenue to reverse the decision to halt work on Revolution Wind”, which was “just steps away from powering more than 350,000 homes”.Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, connected the decision to Trump’s reported pitch last year to oil industry executives to trade $1bn in campaign donations for regulatory favors. “When the oil industry showed up at Mar-a-Lago with a set of demands in exchange for a $1 billion of campaign support for Trump, this is what they were asking for: the destruction of clean energy in America,” Murpy said in a statement.“This is a story of corruption, plain and simple. President Trump has sold our country out to big corporations with the oil and gas industry at the top of the list,” the senator added. “I will work with my colleagues and Governor Lamont to pursue all legal paths to get this project back on track.”Since returning to office, Trump has taken sweeping actions to prioritize fossil fuels and hinder renewable energy projects. Throughout his time in public office, Trump has repeatedly brought up his visceral hatred for wind power, apparently prompted by his belief that offshore turbines spoil the views at his golf courses, and his embrace of the bizarre theory that “the noise causes cancer”.Trump recently called wind and solar power “THE SCAM OF THE CENTURY!” in a social media post and vowed not to approve wind or “farmer destroying Solar” projects.Rhode Island’s attorney general, Peter Neronha, said in a statement on Saturday that, without the Revolution Wind project, the state’s Act on Climate law, which aims to use renewable energy to battle global warming, “is dead in the water”.Scientists agree that nations need to rapidly embrace renewable energy to stave off the worst effects of climate change, including extreme heat and drought; larger, more intense wildfires and supercharged hurricanes, typhoons and rainstorms that lead to catastrophic flooding.Construction on Revolution Wind began in 2023, and the project was expected to be fully operational next year. Ørsted says it is evaluating the financial impact of stopping construction and considering legal proceedings.Revolution Wind is located more than 15 miles (24km) south of the Rhode Island coast, 32 miles (51km) south-east of the Connecticut coast and 12 miles (19km) south-west of Martha’s Vineyard. Rhode Island is already home to one offshore wind farm, the five-turbine Block Island Wind Farm.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRevolution Wind was expected to be Rhode Island and Connecticut’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm, capable of powering more than 350,000 homes. The densely populated states have minimal space available for land-based energy projects, which is why the offshore wind project is considered crucial for the states to meet their climate goals.Wind power is the largest source of renewable energy in the US and provides about 10% of the electricity generated in the nation.Green Oceans, a non-profit that opposes the offshore wind industry, and sued in federal court last year to stop the 83,798-acre (33,912-hectare) Revolution Wind project on environmental grounds, applauded the decision. “We are grateful that the Trump Administration and the federal government are taking meaningful action to preserve the fragile ocean environment off the coasts of Rhode Island and Massachusetts,” the non-profit said in a statement.This is the second major offshore wind project the Trump White House has halted. Work was previously stopped on Empire Wind, a New York offshore wind project, but construction was allowed to resume after New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, and senator Chuck Schumer intervened.“This administration has it exactly backwards. It’s trying to prop up clunky, polluting coal plants while doing all it can to halt the fastest growing energy sources of the future – solar and wind power,” Kit Kennedy, managing director for the power division at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement. “Unfortunately, every American is paying the price for these misguided decisions.”The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Scientists rush to bolster climate finding Trump administration aims to undo

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      Veteran climate scientists are organizing a coordinated public comment to a US Department of Energy (DOE) report that cast doubt on the scientific consensus on the climate crisis.The report, published late last month, claimed concerns about planet-warming fossil fuels are overblown, sparking widespread concern from scientists who said it was full of climate misinformation; it was an attempt to support a proposal from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to undo the “endangerment finding”, which forms the legal basis of virtually all US climate regulations.“A public comment from experts can be useful because it injects expert analysis into a decision-making process that might otherwise be dominated by political, economic, or ideological considerations,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate researcher at Texas A&M University who is organizing the response to the report. “Experts can identify technical errors, highlight overlooked data, and clarify uncertainties in ways that improve the accuracy and robustness of the final policy or report.”The response comes as part of a broader wave of experts’ attempts to uphold established climate science as the Trump administration promotes contrarian and unproven viewpoints.The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (Nasem), the country’s top group of scientific advisers, has launched a “fast-track” review of the latest evidence on how greenhouse gases threaten human health and wellbeing – a move announced following the proposed endangerment-finding rollback.Nasem, which advises the EPA and other federal agencies, plans to release their findings in September, in time to inform the EPA’s decision on the endangerment finding. The initiative will be self-funded by the organization – a highly unusual practice from the congressionally chartered group, which usually responds to federal bodies’ calls for advice.“It is critical that federal policymaking is informed by the best available scientific evidence,” said Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences, in a statement.Trump administration efforts to block access to data have also inspired pushback. This month, the president ousted the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after baselessly saying the data it publishes is “rigged”.In earlier weeks, federal officials have also deleted key climate data and reports such as the national climate assessments and the US Global Change Research Program from government websites. The administration has changed 70% more of the information on official environmental websites during its first 100 days than the first Trump administration did, according to a report the research group Environmental Data and Governance Initiative published last week.In light of these actions, research organizations such as the Public Environmental Data Project and Cornerstone Sustainability Data Initiative have worked to safeguard and publicize data that the federal government is hiding from the public.“Attacks on science are dangerous because they erode one of society’s most effective tools for understanding the world and making decisions in the public interest,” said Dessler. “When political or ideological forces undermine scientific institutions or discredit experts, they weaken our ability to harness this powerful tool.”Asked for comment about the Nasem review, an EPA spokesperson repeated a comment offered earlier this month: “Congress never explicitly gave EPA authority to impose greenhouse gas regulations for cars and trucks.”The Clean Air Act authorizes the EPA to set emission standards for cars if the EPA administrator determines that their emissions endanger public health or welfare. That includes greenhouse gas emissions, due to the endangerment finding.Asked for comment on the DOE report supporting the EPA’s position, Department of Energy spokesperson Ben Dietderich also repeated an earlier comment. “This report critically assesses many areas of ongoing scientific inquiry that are frequently assigned high levels of confidence – not by the scientists themselves but by the political bodies involved, such as the United Nations or previous presidential administrations,” he said.The UN and the US have regularly convened top scientists to produce scientific climate reports, which warn that urgent action to curb emissions is needed.Dietderich also said officials “look forward to engaging with substantive comments” on the report.However, “the real question is whether they’ll listen to us”, said Dessler. More

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      Court overrides Trump officials’ rollback and blocks fishing in Pacific Islands monument

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      A federal judge in Hawaii has ruled that commercial fishing is illegal in the Pacific Islands Heritage marine national monument, a federally protected area in the central Pacific Ocean.The decision from judge Micah WJ Smith overturns an April letter released by the National Marine Fisheries Service’s (NMFS) – also known as National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) Fisheries – that allowed fishing in parts of the monument that Barack Obama had protected during his presidency. The letter came about a week after Donald Trump’s presidential proclamation to reverse fishing regulations across the national monument, a world heritage site that includes archeological treasures, marine mammals, seabirds and coral reefs.Regulations banning commercial fishing in the area remain in effect, according to Friday’s ruling. The court said “no commercial fishing operators may reasonably rely on” the April letter, meaning fishing in waters 50 to 200 nautical miles around Johnston Atoll, Jarvis Island, and Wake Island must halt immediately.“The Fisheries Service cannot ignore our perspectives as the native people who belong to the islands and to the ocean that surrounds us,” said Solomon Pili Kaho’ohalahala, founding member of the non-profit group Kāpaʻa, the Conservation Council for Hawaii and the Center for Biological Diversity. “The law guarantees a process where we can advocate for protecting the generations of our children’s children who are yet to be born.”The environmental conservation group Earthjustice, representing the non-profits in Hawaii, filed its lawsuit in May and argued NMFS violated federal law by bypassing the formal process for changing fishing rules, which requires public notice and comment.“The court forcefully rejected the Trump administration’s outrageous claim that it can dismantle vital protections for the monument’s unique and vulnerable species and ecosystems without involving the public,” Earthjustice attorney David Henkin said.Then president George W Bush created the marine monument in 2009. It consists of about 500,000 sq miles (1.3m sq km) in the remote central Pacific Ocean south-west of Hawaii. Obama expanded it in 2014.As part of his push to make the US the “world’s dominant seafood leader”, Trump called the regulations “so horrible and so stupid” – and claimed they force US fishers “to go and travel four to seven days to go and fish in an area that’s not as good”.The Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument is about 370,000 sq nautical miles (1,270,000 sq km), or nearly twice the size of the state of Texas. It is managed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Noaa and the defense department. The monument is home to one of the largest collections of deep ocean coral reef, seabird, and shorebird protected areas on the planet. It provides refuge for species threatened by the climate crisis and other stressors caused by humans.Kingman Reef, considered one of the most pristine coral reefs in US waters, is also part of the monument. Unesco reports it has the highest proportion of apex predators of any studied coral reef worldwide.Its waters are home to several shark species, including grey reef, oceanic whitetip, hammerhead and silky sharks, all of which play an important role in maintaining ecological balance.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlong with the ecological value, the islands and ocean areas in and adjacent to the monument hold great value to Indigenous Pacific Islanders and researchers. The lawsuit says allowing commercial fishing in the monument expansion would harm the “cultural, spiritual, religious, subsistence, educational, recreational, and aesthetic interests” of a group of Native Hawaiian plaintiffs who are connected genealogically to the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific.“This is a huge win for the Pacific’s irreplaceable marine life and for the rule of law,” Maxx Phillips, staff attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said about Friday’s ruling. “These sacred and irreplaceable ecosystems are home to endangered species, deep-sea corals, and rich cultural heritage.”Associated Press contributed to this report More

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      ‘Erasure of years of work’: outcry as White House moves to open Arctic reserve to oil and gas drilling

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      The Trump administration’s plan to expand oil and gas drilling in a 23m acre reserve on the Arctic Ocean is sparking an impassioned response, amid fears it threatens Arctic wildlife, undermines the subsistence rights of Alaska Natives and imperils one of the fastest-warming ecosystems on Earth.More than a quarter of a million people have responded to the 2 June proposal from the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to roll back protections on the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A), the largest tract of public land in the US.A man from Georgia described hearing from an oil company that an employee shot a mother polar bear after encountering her with two cubs in northern Alaska.“I beg you to reconsider … I’m just 18 years old and haven’t had a chance to see the real world yet,” said a teenager from Denmark. “This will make that impossible – if not in the whole world, then at least in the icy areas of our planet.”The staggering number of comments submitted during the two-month comment period showed the public was watching, said Andy Moderow, senior director of policy at the Alaska Wilderness League. “That’s a pretty large turnout of Americans saying this is not the direction we need in the Arctic.”The BLM rollback is part of a broad, rapid-fire regulatory push to industrialize the Alaskan Arctic, particularly the NPR-A. Weeks after proposing to strip protections from the reserve, the Department of Interior signaled it would adopt a management plan that would open 82% of the NPR-A to oil drilling. Two weeks ago, before the public comment period had ended, the BLM rescinded three other Biden-era documents protecting the reserve.The Alaska Wilderness League, an Alaska-focused conservation non-profit, said the administration’s decision to start dismantling protections for the NPR-A before the comment period concluded showed “a lack of interest in meaningfully reviewing any input before taking action to allow unfettered industrialization across this landscape”.Alaska Native groups, some of which have worked for years to secure protections for areas of the NPR-A, also expressed frustration.View image in fullscreenThe rollback is “a coordinated erasure of years of work by Alaska Native communities”, said Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic in a press statement.“To have all the work we’ve done for the last two decades, trying to create important special areas with their unique biological features demonstrated by science, disregarded to allow full-force development is crazy to consider,” said Rosemary Ahtuangaruak, an activist and former mayor of Nuiqsut, Alaska, a village in the NPR-A.The BLM said in a statement it was working through all comments received on the 2024 NPR-A rule rescission, and that it would respond to substantive comments in the final rule.The White House referred the Guardian to the BLM when asked for comment.‘Devastating’ changeUnder Trump, the Department of Interior has embarked on a push to promote resource extraction in the Arctic, vowing to expand oil and gas in the NPR-A, open oil leasing on the coastal plain of the Arctic national wildlife refuge, and advance a controversial mining road in the southern Brooks range.The total land in play from these proposals is nearly 25m acres (10m hectares) of Arctic ecosystem, an area larger than the state of Indiana. The NPR-A comprises the vast majority of this. The reserve supports home grounds for polar bears, calving areas for caribou, and habitat for millions of migratory birds from Africa and Europe, as well as the Americas.In 2023, the Biden administration began consultations with Alaska Native groups and other stakeholders to update existing rules on how the NPR-A should be managed.These consultations led to the 2024 rule which the BLM now aims to rescind. That rule protects key areas in the NPR-A for subsistence use and habitat, including Teshekpuk Lake, the Utukok Uplands and the Colville River.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAhtuangaruak, who participated in the 2023 consultations, said removing these protections could be “very devastating rapidly”. She described a worsening ecological situation across the reserve, partly driven by existing oil development.Caribou herds were declining, she said, and some had shifted their migration patterns away from her village because of oil and gas development to the west of her village. Permafrost was thawing, causing freshwater Arctic lakes to drain. Ice roads separated caribou calves from caribou cows; polar bears struggled to den in the melting snowpack.Tim Fullman, a senior ecologist at the Wilderness Society, a US conservation non-profit, said that already-existing roads in the Alaskan Arctic had been shown to hinder caribou movement, at times delaying migrating animals for up to a month.Then there’s the perennial health impacts on communities from gas flaring in the NPR-A, which Ahtuangaruak said she began to notice in the early 2000s when she was a healthcare worker.“The flares, when there’d be 20 or more, there would be nights where people would have trouble breathing,” she said. “Babies would start to have events. There was one point where we had 20 babies develop respiratory distress and 10 of them were put on ventilators.”Oil for decadesThirty miles east of Nuiqsut, Ahtuangaruak’s village, is the ConocoPhillips Willow project, a drilling operation approved in March 2023 under the Biden administration. Still under construction, it is projected to come online in 2029. Once it begins to produce, Willow will be operational for at least 30 years, according to its environmental impact statement.The project is an example of the timeframe involved in the Arctic oil and gas projects the Trump administration is currently encouraging, says Moderow – spanning decades.“We’re not talking about oil next year. We’re talking about oil in 2050 and 2060 and beyond, when we need to move past it,” he said. The projects “could easily be pumping oil when babies born today are retiring in a climate that’s not livable if that oil is not blocked”.“It’s investing in production that’s going to be going on for decades, well past when we need to be at essentially net zero greenhouse gas emissions if we’re going to have a livable climate,” said Jeremy Lieb, a senior attorney at Earthjustice. More

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      Trump moves to scrap climate rule tying greenhouse gases to public health harm

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      Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday proposed revoking a scientific finding that has long been the central basis for US action to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and fight climate change.The proposed Environmental Protection Agency rule rescinds a 2009 declaration that determined that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare.The “endangerment finding” is the legal underpinning of a host of climate regulations under the Clean Air Act for motor vehicles, power plants and other pollution sources that are heating the planet.The EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, announced the proposed rule change on a podcast ahead of an official announcement set for Tuesday in Indiana.Repealing the endangerment finding “will be the largest deregulatory action in the history of America”, Zeldin said on the Ruthless podcast.Zeldin called for a rewrite of the endangerment finding in March as part of a series of environmental rollbacks announced at the same time in what Zeldin said was “the greatest day of deregulation in American history”. A total of 31 key environmental rules on topics from clean air to clean water and climate change would be rolled back or repealed under Zeldin’s plan.He singled out the endangerment finding as “the holy grail of the climate change religion” and said he was thrilled to end it “as the EPA does its part to usher in the Golden Age of American success”.The EPA also called for rescinding limits on tailpipe emissions that were designed to encourage automakers to build and sell more electric vehicles. The transportation sector is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the US.Three former EPA leaders have criticized Zeldin, saying his March proposal would endanger the lives of millions of Americans and abandon the agency’s dual mission to protect the environment and human health.“If there’s an endangerment finding to be found anywhere, it should be found on this administration because what they’re doing is so contrary to what the Environmental Protection Agency is about,” Christine Todd Whitman, who led EPA under the Republican president George W Bush, said after Zeldin’s plan was made public.The EPA proposal follows an executive order from Trump that directed the agency to submit a report “on the legality and continuing applicability” of the endangerment finding.Conservatives and some congressional Republicans hailed the initial plan, calling it a way to undo economically damaging rules to regulate greenhouse gases.But environmental groups, legal experts and Democrats said any attempt to repeal or roll back the endangerment finding would be an uphill task with slim chance of success. The finding came two years after a 2007 supreme court ruling holding that the EPA has authority to regulate greenhouse gases as air pollutants under the Clean Air Act.David Doniger, a climate expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, said it was virtually “impossible to think that the EPA could develop a contradictory finding [to the 2009 standard] that would stand up in court”.Doniger and other critics accused Trump’s Republican administration of using potential repeal of the endangerment finding as a “kill shot’’ that would allow him to make all climate regulations invalid. If finalized, repeal of the endangerment finding would erase current limits on greenhouse gas pollution from cars, factories, power plants and other sources and could prevent future administrations from proposing rules to tackle climate change.“The endangerment finding is the legal foundation that underpins vital protections for millions of people from the severe threats of climate change, and the Clean Car and Truck Standards are among the most important and effective protections to address the largest US source of climate-causing pollution,” said Peter Zalzal, associate vice-president of the Environmental Defense Fund.“Attacking these safeguards is manifestly inconsistent with EPA’s responsibility to protect Americans’ health and wellbeing,” he said. “It is callous, dangerous and a breach of our government’s responsibility to protect the American people from this devastating pollution.” More

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      ‘Shooting ourselves in the foot’: how Trump is fumbling geothermal energy

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      Geothermal is one of the most promising clean energy sources in the US, providing 24/7 renewable power that could meet rising energy demand from AI datacentres. But former Department of Energy officials are alarmed that Donald Trump is fumbling its potential.Compared with other clean energy sources such as solar and wind, geothermal enjoys rare bipartisan support. The US energy secretary, Chris Wright, has praised the technology, calling it “an awesome resource that’s under our feet”. And Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act preserved tax credits for geothermal.But the administration’s slashing of Department of Energy staff, delays in issuing low-interest loans, and tariffs are together creating uncertainty for the industry and investors.The US has an advantage on geothermal over China and must move urgently, said David Turk, who served as the deputy secretary of energy under former president Joe Biden. “Anything that stops our ability to execute on a plan – staffing, other funding – I think, is shooting ourselves in the foot,” Turk said.The White House and Department of Energy did not respond to questions about how their policies are affecting enhanced geothermal.The potential of geothermalGeothermal energy uses the heat from the Earth’s crust to transform water into steam that turns turbines and generates electricity. It has been used for more than a century, but has been limited to places where hot water reached the Earth’s surface, including hot springs.Now there’s a new technique that can generate energy anywhere, known as enhanced geothermal. The same horizontal drilling approach used in fracking can reach hot rock deep below the surface. “It opens up enhanced geothermal all over the country, all over the world,” Turk said. “That’s just tremendous.”So far, enhanced geothermal systems are located in the Western US. One of the most promising geothermal projects by Fervo Energy can be found in Utah. But the technology can also work in the east.The US is ahead of other countries on enhanced geothermal because of its shale gas boom over the past 15 years, said Eva Schill, a staff scientist who leads the Geothermal Systems Program at Berkeley Lab. “The reason is that we have a lot of experience here from oil and gas fracking,” she said.The enhanced geothermal industry is nascent, generating only 1% of the US’s electricity. And it’s still too expensive to compete with coal and natural gas.View image in fullscreenBut under the right conditions, it could evolve into a cheap source of power. A January article in the journal Nature Reviews found that it could be cost competitive with the national average cost of electricity generation by 2030.The US is the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter after China, and although US emissions have trended downward for the past two decades, the country is still not on track to meet its climate targets. The rapid growth of AI datacentres is further threatening those targets by fueling rising energy demand; datacentres need to run 24/7, so they tend to rely on fossil fuels.Geothermal can potentially solve that problem. It could create 80,000 megawatts of new power, according to a liftoff report published by the Department of Energy.“To put that in perspective, that could meet 100% of all of the AI datacenter load growth for the next 10 years,” said Jigar Shah, a clean energy entrepreneur who served as the director of the loan programs office at the Department of Energy under Joe Biden. “That’s pretty impressive.”Already, Google and Meta have signed deals that would see geothermal companies power their datacentres.How the Trump administration is fumbling geothermalEnhanced geothermal accelerated under Biden-era policies. But several former energy department officials say the Trump administration is failing to provide the business certainty needed to get the fledgling industry off the ground.“The whole ball game right now is bringing down those costs, proving it for investors,” Turk said.“This is really about feelings,” Shah said. “Do the investors feel like this administration really has their back when it comes to investing in these new technologies? They felt like we actually had their back when I was running the loan programs office, and when secretary [Jennifer] Granholm was running energy. They’re unsure whether this administration has their back on these technologies.”View image in fullscreenUnder the Biden administration, the loan programs office was working on closing a low-interest loan for geothermal. Similar loans previously boosted Tesla and utility-scale solar. However, the Trump administration has yet to close a low-interest loan for geothermal, Shah said.The gutting of energy department staff has lowered its capacity to support geothermal, several former energy department officials said. Thousands of scientists, analysts, engineers and procurement officers took deferred resignation offers or were fired. Politico reported that the administration was considering cutting loan programs office staff by half.The Department of Energy has lost “absolutely indispensable” experts on geothermal and loans, Turk said. “So I would worry about, have we lost some of that capacity to actually execute?”Trump’s zeal for tariffs is adding to the industry’s anxiety. Steel tariffs, now at 50%, are hurting companies that use steel in wells. Enhanced geothermal wells require installing miles of steel pipes.Behind the scenes, geothermal companies are “freaking out” about the steel tariffs, Shah said. “They don’t want to say anything negative, lest the Eye of Sauron find them,” he added.The survival of the Inflation Reduction Act tax credits for geothermal provides some certainty. Geothermal can still access the full tax credit, as long as they begin construction by 2033, when the value of the credit will begin phasing down.But geothermal projects now face strict restrictions on the involvement of “foreign entities of concern,” such as Chinese companies and individuals, known as FEOC requirements. Geothermal projects use rare earth elements in their drill bits, and China dominates the rare earth minerals market, said a former energy department official who requested anonymity.What Trump officials can do to boost geothermal“This is a good enough market opportunity that somewhere in the world is going to come true, and we are really well set up for it, if we’re not stupid,” the official said, talking generally about the industry. “But we’ve unfortunately been pretty stupid, and we’re making it harder on ourselves to win in an area that should be pretty easy to win.”There are actions the Trump administration can take immediately to bring down costs and boost the industry.The government can speed things along by “doing a lot of mapping of resources to make it cheaper and less risky for drilling in this area versus that area”, Turk said.“Close a loan,” Shah said, explaining that it would send a strong signal to investors.“We have the technology, we have the tools – the loan programs office and other tools – and I think now what we really need to do is establish the confidence,” Shah said. 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      Climate advocates outraged at Trump administration plans to fast-track AI sector

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      The Trump administration has unveiled plans to speed the development of the highly polluting artificial intelligence sector, sparking outrage from climate advocates.Rolled out on Wednesday, the 28-page scheme pledges to remove so-called “bureaucratic red tape” and streamline permitting for datacenters, semiconductor manufacturing facilities and fossil fuel infrastructure.To do so, it will dismantle some environmental and land-use regulations, roll back some Biden-era rules for subsidies for semiconductor plants related to climate requirements, and seek to establish exclusions for datacenters from the National Environmental Policy Act and streamline permits under the Clean Water Act.“We need to build and maintain vast AI infrastructure and the energy to power it. To do that, we will continue to reject radical climate dogma and bureaucratic red tape, as the Administration has done since Inauguration Day,” the plan says. “Simply put, we need to ‘Build, Baby, Build!’”Trump is also expected to sign three AI-related executive orders on Wednesday during a keynote address at a summit in DC. The announcement will be co-hosted by bipartisan lawmakers with the Hill and Valley Forum and a business and technology podcast hosted by four technology investors and businessmen, including Trump’s AI and crypto czar, David Sacks.The AI sector is already depleting land and water resources and taking a massive toll on the climate, with AI-powered large language models such as ChatGPT taking up to 10 times more energy than a regular Google search, according to an estimate by the Electric Power Research Institute. Last year, ChatGPT used more than half a million kilowatts of electricity every day, equivalent to the daily power use of 180,000 US households.The training of a single AI model can lead to an emissions footprint that is almost five times larger than the lifetime carbon footprint of the average American car. Recent research from Food and Water Watch also found that energy demand from AI servers and datacenters in the US is expected to increase up to threefold from 2023 to 2028, which could lead the US sector to, by 2028, annually consume enough water to fill more than 1m Olympic-size swimming pools and enough electricity to power more than 28m American households.“At its core, President Trump’s AI agenda is nothing more than a thinly veiled invitation for the fossil fuel and corporate water industries to ramp up their exploitation of our environment and natural resources – all at the expense of everyday people,” said Mitch Jones, a managing director Food and Water Watch, an environmental advocacy group.The new plan recommends that regulators review states’ AI laws to see whether they interfere with the agency’s authority. It also says federal agencies will “consider a state’s AI regulatory climate when making funding decisions” and “limit funding if the state’s AI regulatory regimes may hinder the effectiveness of that funding or award”.Republicans earlier this year attempted to enact a version of this by placing a moratorium on states’ ability to impose regulations on artificial intelligence into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, but the provision was stripped at the last minute.“Under this plan, tech giants get sweetheart deals while everyday Americans will see their electricity bills rise to subsidize discounted power for massive AI datacenters,” said JB Branch, a big-tech accountability advocate with the consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen. “States are held hostage: either stop protecting their residents from dangerous, untested AI products, or lose federal funding.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs a counterweight to the new Trump plan, a broad coalition of more than 90 advocacy groups – including climate and environmental justice non-profits, consumer protection organizations and labor advocates – published an open letter calling for a “people’s AI action plan” that prioritizes “public wellbeing, shared prosperity, a sustainable future and security”.“We can’t let big tech and big oil lobbyists write the rules for AI and our economy at the expense of our freedom and equality, workers and families’ wellbeing,” the coalition wrote.Research shows that many datacenters used for AI are placed near low-income communities of color, which are already often overburdened by pollution.“People sacrifice their health, their wellbeing and, too often, their future, so that others can benefit,” said Sharon Lewis, executive director of the Connecticut Coalition for Environmental Justice. “We’re told these datacenters are harmless, but even though they might seem like they pose no risk, in reality, these energy-hungry, pollution-intensive facilities are just as damaging to our environment and health.” More

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      ‘Wells Fargo is complicit’: seven arrested at climate protests outside bank’s offices

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      Seven people were arrested as hundreds of climate and Indigenous rights activists participated in non-violent demonstrations at Wells Fargo’s corporate offices in New York City and San Francisco on Wednesday, in what marks the launch of a summer of civil disobedience against billionaires and corporations accused of cowering to Donald Trump.In New York City, dozens of protesters stormed the lobby of the bank’s corporate offices, disrupting employees by blocking the entrance and calling out what they describe as Wells Fargo’s complicity in the climate crisis.Wells Fargo, currently ranked 33rd in the Fortune 500 list, became the first major bank to abandon its climate commitments – just weeks after the president signed a slew of executive orders to boost fossil fuels and derail climate action. The US bank is among the biggest financiers of planet-warming oil and gas companies, with $39bn in fossil fuel investments in 2024 – a 30% rise on the previous year, according to the most recent annual Banking on Climate Chaos report.“As dozens of teenagers die in climate-driven floods in Texas and thousands die in heatwaves around the world, it’s unconscionable that a bank like Wells Fargo would just completely walk away from its climate goals,” said Liv Senghor with Planet Over Profit, the non-profit group that led the New York protests.In San Francisco, seven people were arrested as activists blocked every entrance of the bank’s global headquarters for several hours, with members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribal nation locked themselves to a sleeping dragon tripod.The Standing Rock and Cheyenne River tribes spearheaded the 2016 and 2017 fight against the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL) – the opposed fossil fuel pipeline built through Lakota lands that Wells Fargo helped finance.“DAPL was built through the Lakota Unceded Treaty Territory, without proper consent. That land holds our history, our spirit, and our ancestors. We’re in a time where we should be protecting the Earth, not pushing more oil through it. We owe that to our people and the future generations,” said Trent Ouellettefrom Waste Wakpa Grassroots.Wednesday’s protests were part of the Stop Billionaires Summer campaign – a series of planned civil disobedience to disrupt the tech billionaires and corporations backing the Trump administration’s dismantling of democratic rights and climate action. It follows last year’s summer of heat campaign targeting Citibank, another major fossil fuel funder.This year Wells Fargo is being specifically targeted by a coalition of non-profit organizations, who accuse the bank of capitulating to Trump and supporting the rise of planetary destruction, autocracy and land occupation – in the US and Palestinian territories.In San Francisco, about 150 activists also painted a giant community mural outside the bank’s headquarters with the words “Wells Fargo Funds Genocide”, pointing to the bank’s investment in companies that provide tech and/or AI to the state of Israel including Palantir – which also has contracts with Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).“Today’s actions are just the beginning of a response to Wells Fargo’s enabling of the rise of authoritarianism,” said Leah Redwood with the Oil and Gas Action Network, who helped organize the San Francisco protest. “Wells Fargo is complicit in so many injustices … the climate crisis or union busting or Trump’s mass deportations or the atrocities in Gaza.”Last week, protesters across the US targeted Palantir, accusing the tech company of facilitating Trump’s expanding surveillance, immigration crackdown and Israel’s human rights violations across the occupied Palestinian territories.Wells Fargo is among the US’s largest banks, worth almost $270bn, and with more than 4,000 branches across 39 US states and territories.It is also among the biggest financiers of fossil fuels since 2021 – the year that the International Energy Agency warned the world that there could be no more fossil fuel expansion – if there was any hope of avoiding total climate catastrophe. Since then, the bank’s investments in fossil fuels have topped $143bn, according to Banking on Climate Chaos.In 2021, Wells Fargo’s chief executive, Charles Scharf, described the climate crisis as “one of the most urgent environmental and social issues of our time”.In February, Wells Fargo dropped two key commitments – the sector-specific 2030 financed and facilitated emissions reductions targets and its goal to achieve net zero emissions in its lending and underwriting by 2050.At the time, the bank said: “When we set our financed emissions goal and targets, we said that achieving them was dependent on many factors outside our control,” adding that “many of the conditions necessary to facilitate our clients’ transitions have not occurred.”The announcement comes just months after Wells Fargo quit the world’s biggest climate coalition for banks – the Net-Zero Banking Alliance – followed by the rest of its US banking peers. That exodus started one month after last year’s election victory for Trump.According to a recent investigation by Rolling Stone, the Texas attorney general boasted about how his office “bullied” Wells Fargo into abandoning the alliance and other climate pledges.In addition to dropping its climate pledges, the bank has also abandoned its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) goals – ending policies requiring diverse candidates for senior-level roles.A summer of non-violent disruption is planned for Wells Fargo including a national day of coordinated action on 15 August, in an effort, activists say, to pressure the bank to reinstate its climate targets, stop union busting, and end its financial ties with companies accused of destroying both people and the planet.Climate activists are also preparing to support unionization efforts at the bank, where workers have already voted to unionize at 28 branches. Wells Fargo currently faces more than 30 allegations of union-busting.Wells Fargo declined to comment on the protests or any of the allegations about its investments and policies. More