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      in Elections

      Trump Administration Aims to Eliminate E.P.A.’s Scientific Research Arm

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      The Environmental Protection Agency plans to eliminate its scientific research arm, firing as many as 1,155 chemists, biologists, toxicologists and other scientists, according to documents reviewed by Democrats on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.The strategy is part of large-scale layoffs, known as a “reduction in force,” being planned by the Trump administration, which is intent on shrinking the federal work force. Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the E.P.A., has said he wants to eliminate 65 percent of the agency’s budget. That would be a drastic reduction — one that experts said could hamper clean water and wastewater improvements, air quality monitoring, the cleanup of toxic industrial sites, and other parts of the agency’s mission.The E.P.A.’s plan, which was presented to White House officials on Friday for review, calls for dissolving the agency’s largest department, the Office of Research and Development, and purging up to 75 percent of the people who work there.The remaining staff members would be placed elsewhere within the E.P.A. “to provide increased oversight and align with administration priorities,” according to the language shared with The New York Times by staff members who work for Democrats on the House science committee.Molly Vaseliou, a spokeswoman for the E.P.A., said in a statement that the agency “is taking exciting steps as we enter the next phase of organizational improvements” and stressed that changes had not been finalized.“We are committed to enhancing our ability to deliver clean air, water and land for all Americans,” she said, adding, “While no decisions have been made yet, we are actively listening to employees at all levels to gather ideas on how to increase efficiency and ensure the E.P.A. is as up to date and effective as ever.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Why I quit my homestead dream just as farmer tradwives became mainstream

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      Our homesteading experiment began before tradwives, before Donald Trump, before Covid-19. It was the summer of 2015 when we were all sure no one would vote for a former reality TV star. I was 25 years old and desperate for a security blanket, working a sales job and looking for excuses not to return to college.My husband, Patrick, and I had talked about farming since our first date. We wanted goats. At his 2-acre property in a quiet suburb of Portland, Maine, we kept a few chickens and a scrawny vegetable garden.One morning, Patrick texted me: “I found the place. You’re going to love it. It’s uber cute.”Ninety-three acres in midcoast Maine, with an abandoned farmhouse and huge barn. Overgrown fields, alders encroaching across a pool of fetid swamp water to scratch against the door, no floor in the kitchen, and a single pipe gravity-feeding spring water from the mountain side. A three-hole outhouse was the extent of the plumbing.It was perfect.View image in fullscreen“What’s your end goal, man?” asked Patrick’s old college roommate. “What are you imagining in five years? Her barefoot and pregnant in the garden?”It was 2015 and you could still buy a piece of rural heaven for less than a small fortune – if you were willing to put in some sweat equity. We put a deposit down on some goats and signed our mortgage.Back-to-the-land wasn’t a political statement then. Sure, your urban friends would think you’d lost it, but not in an anti-vax, don’t-tread-on-me way. I had no desire to be barefoot, nor pregnant. But we were still in the honeymoon phase of our relationship, and building a life together from scratch had its romantic draw.I told myself I was sucking the marrow out of life, as Henry David Thoreau had once done. I even wore a T-shirt that said “Resistance is Fertile”. I thought of homesteading as an overtly political – even rebellious – act.Homesteading was in my blood. My mother had gone back-to-the-land with her first husband in the early 1970s, inspired by Helen and Scott Nearing, hippie icons who taught a generation to “live simply and sanely in a troubled world” with their book, Living the Good Life (1954). Scott Nearing was an outspoken pacifist, communist and protester. He and his wife, Helen, ate raw foods, tended their own land and railed against capitalism long before there were TikTok trends on the subject.Before my mother moved to Maine, she went to her grandparents to share the news of her move. They had grown up on a hardscrabble Missouri farm during the dust bowl. They had moved to town for a reliable job and to give their deaf daughter, my grandmother, the opportunity to study.When my mother told Daddy Kays, as she knew him, about her plans to go rural, he was horrified. Why do you want to do that? he asked. Why would anyone choose to go back to subsistence living? Why did my mother insist on denying what my great grandfather saw as progress?My mother left her homestead in the late 1980s. She moved to town to provide a better education for her young daughters, to seek more stable employment, and to leave a Sisyphean list of chores. By this time, many homesteaders were joining her in shifting back to a less isolated existence.The few who remained largely credited not a deeper sense of political motivation, but a strong community. Where homesteaders had gathered in groups, they seemed to remain. The Nearings had cultivated a following of interns and volunteers who showed up each year and had gradually settled around their homestead in Harborside, Maine. To this day, that area remains a haven for self-sufficient living.It could never be said that Patrick and I did things halfway. For two years, we showered outside in the negative temperatures and biting winds of a Maine winter. We preserved our harvests, bottle fed baby goats, raised pigs and chickens and geese and sheep. Patrick rebuilt our entire home from the studs. Fields were cleared and hayed to feed our animals. All of our equipment came from barters, trades and Craigslist. For what we couldn’t find a good deal on, we made do. Our lives revolved around the movement of firewood, without which we would freeze in winter.View image in fullscreenI wrote a book on our lifestyle – So You Want to Be a Modern Homesteader? – and shared our journey on social media. Through this outreach we connected with others making a similar leap, a community that was tiny and fringe before the interest in rural living sparked during the pandemic and ensuing lockdowns. We greeted each other, in person and online, with the excitement of people into some shared niche hobby. We troubleshot problems, speculated on livestock choices and traded sourdough starters.Even before terms such as “tradwife” became popular, I noticed remarkable consistency in our homesteading friends. When a couple would show up at our farm to buy a goat or lamb, they’d bundle out of their unblemished Volvos with a snot-nosed toddler swaddled in one car seat in the back, the other car seat occupied by a sleeping infant. The mother would have kind, slightly confused eyes and an instant attraction to animals. The men were bearded, in lumberjack plaid.It got to the point I would joke that I could not tell my friends’ husbands apart, so uniform was their charcoal facial hair. The men always knew what they were doing: brimming with the self confidence of someone who recently read Everything I Want to Do is Illegal, possessed of at least one scheme to provide for his family while living off the land.After five years, our routine was set. The farmhouse had electricity and running water. We’d cleared the fields and put in a farm pond. Every spring we welcomed a new batch of goat kids and lambs that we sold, we milked our goats and sheared our sheep. We turned over our land sustainably using pigs, and we collected dozens upon dozens of eggs every day from the chickens, ducks and geese.View image in fullscreenWe were also very tired. We fell into bed every night exhausted, and woke up and did it again. There was little time for hobbies outside of running the farm, and less for intimacy. There was no time for travel – even going down the coast to see our parents had to be planned and limited to a few hours out of the day. When we did have time to sit together, we bickered about chores and finances strained by hungry animals. The addition of an indoor shower did little to remove the grime that stuck in our emotions.Faced with exhaustion and burnout, for a few years we tried to downsize, to reverse out of our headlong rush into self-sufficiency. To make time for occasional date nights and rest, we tried to sell a few animals here and there, but the chores still piled up.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThen in late 2019, Patrick’s son died unexpectedly. In the onslaught of grief, we had to manage feeding dozens of animals and moving firewood in for the winter. Have you ever had to make sure that a funeral would be over in time for evening chores?Soon after, Covid arrived. Within the online homesteading community, jokes made the rounds about how well positioned for a pandemic we were: we did not need supply chains or contact with the outside world to thrive. And yet there is a difference between choosing to stay at home on the farm and having to, particularly when the farm is wrapped in a thick cloak of sorrow.By the end of the first year of the pandemic, we were ready to get off the farm. And then our entire flock of more than a hundred birds succumbed to bird flu, which at the time was a new avian disaster. Our abundant flock of friends and entertainers disappeared overnight, culled in the wake of a burgeoning pandemic.Community can save a homestead from failing under this kind of stress. But as we tended to our tragedies, the community around us had shifted.People had started making careers out of being influencers and content creators. The homesteading world was no less full of social media personalities than the rest of the internet. And when Covid lockdowns hit in 2020, anyone who was online talking about self-sufficiency had an opportunity. Those of us who had shared our homesteading journeys since we first shot up on Instagram’s algorithm in 2013 were getting phone calls from places including the New York Times asking us about our lifestyle. Our follower counts had exploded. We – the fringes, the freaks – were the popular kids now.Leaning in to the popularity of from-scratch living was a recipe for success. Hannah Neeleman’s Ballerina Farm, once home to rough-and-ready farm life and now curated to a perfect prairie-wife aesthetic, has 10 million followers. All of my other contacts who leaned into the buzz around self-sufficiency in 2020-2021 now have hundreds of thousands of followers.Unfortunately for my pocketbook, I was wrapped up in several blankets worth of troubles at that time, forgetting to reply to emails and sometimes forgetting to just get out of bed.Not all of my friends went full “tradwife”. Some simply began to prothetize more about organic methods, no till gardens, and permaculture practices. They DIYed themselves crazy. How many of them had outside help to manage a menagerie of animals and a list of home improvement projects? Far more than ever mentioned help.Thoreau had brought his laundry into town for his mother. Now, today’s homestead influencers have perfected promoting a from scratch lifestyle while utilizing invisible helping hands at every turn.A less welcoming community grew around these very online homesteaders. When a follower would realize my political views swung left, they’d pepper my pictures with comments about how they’d thought they liked me until they found out I was a radical lefty. Several new homesteading festivals have sprung up around the country, including the popular Homesteaders of America Conference, which draws almost 10,000 homesteaders annually and welcomes speakers such as Joel Salatin, an outspoken libertarian linked to possible roles in the Trump administration and Nick Freitas, a far-right state delegate from Virginia who has referred to the Affordable Care Act as a “cancer”.View image in fullscreenFor those reasons, the embrace of traditional living gave me pause. In between the grief and the daily grind, my community – online and in real life – was becoming more hostile. There were subjects that could not be talked about, loud unfollows when opinions became known, and a lifestyle that had been fun and alternative was warped by ugly exclusion.It felt as if a curtain had been pulled back from my lifestyle choice. I had enjoyed the connection to my food and the land through sustainable living, but I had never thought of my lifestyle as a step backwards in time. I had laughed at the idea I might someday be barefoot and pregnant in the garden. But, with a never ending list of homestead to-dos, I was as tied to the wood stove and the milking routine as an 1800s woman before me.The happiest “homesteaders” I know continue to thrive in semi-urban environments, with neighbors who stop by to check on the ducks if they want a break from the farm. Most of them are minimally online, disengaged from the performative fetishization of the lifestyle. They keep one foot in the garden, and one on the pavement of society.Today, Patrick and I keep a few goats and a garden in the backyard. We have the ability to leave the farm now and then for a trip, and we’re in the process of moving closer to family and culture. We are taking steps to ensure that our hard work is preserved, working with a land conservation group to keep the property in farmland long after we are gone.We have no aspirations towards self-sufficiency, but a desire to experience varied aspects of life while remaining connected to our food sources. I now have a set of skills I can draw on if I find myself in the kind of calamitous situation that sections of the homesteader community are prepping for. I feel a deep appreciation for the labor of food production. I’ve also learned to embrace the freedom of progress. Today, I run, I read, I write, I take the time to walk in nature and sit and converse with my husband.Today, I am able to slow down and live. More

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      in US Politics

      US weather forecasts save lives and money. Trump’s cuts put us all at risk

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      Across the United States, from rural communities to coastal cities, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) is an integral part of our daily lives, safeguarding communities and fostering economic vitality.Whether it is tracking the path of hurricanes, managing our nation’s fisheries, providing critical information to air traffic controllers and airlines, or helping farmers plan for weather extremes, Noaa’s science, services and products have a significant impact on every American.Having served as the deputy administrator of Noaa and before that its general counsel, I have witnessed first-hand the indispensable role this agency plays. The Trump administration’s proposed draconian, reckless and, in many cases, unlawful budget and personnel cuts to the agency should alarm us all.These cuts will do little to achieve their stated goal of reducing the size and cost of government. They instead jeopardize the safety, economic prosperity and overall wellbeing of our nation.I should add that the administration’s assault on science is not limited to my former agency. Government-wide cuts are sparking outrage and demonstrations across the country.Each year, Noaa’s National Weather Service (NWS) issues more than 1.5m forecasts and 50,000 weather warnings. By providing critical lead time ahead of hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires and severe storms, Noaa’s forecasts save billions of dollars in economic losses annually and thousands of lives.Noaa’s continuing efforts to improve the accuracy of hurricane track forecasts have reduced the area of uncertainty for coastal evacuations, helping local governments, businesses and families avoid unnecessary costs. A recent study estimated that improvements in forecasting have resulted in an annual per-hurricane cost reduction of $5bn.In the aviation industry, Noaa forecasts and data-monitoring systems help ensure safe and efficient operations. Accurate weather information is essential for planning flight routes, avoiding severe weather and ensuring safe takeoffs and landings. Noaa also tracks weather in space, including solar flares and geomagnetic storms that can disrupt or interfere with technologies essential to safe air travel: satellite communications, GPS navigation and aircraft communication systems.The importance of Noaa’s work extends beyond public safety and economic savings to a range of private-sector applications. Private weather providers such as AccuWeather and the Weather Channel depend on Noaa’s open data to offer localized forecasts, while insurance companies use it to assess risk and set policy rates.The US commercial seafood industry supports roughly 1.7m jobs and generates more than $300bn annually in total sales. Noaa’s fisheries management, research and inspection programs are critical to sustaining these jobs, preserving ecosystems, ensuring robust seafood supplies, and guaranteeing that safe seafood is sold throughout the United States.Additionally, saltwater recreational fishing is a significant economic driver in coastal communities, supporting tens of thousands of jobs and contributing billions annually to local economies. All of this is reliant on well-managed fisheries and healthy marine habitats.Moreover, Noaa marine sanctuaries protect critical habitats, support biodiversity and provide opportunities for research, education and tourism, contributing billions of dollars to local economies. For instance, the Florida Keys national marine sanctuary, one of 18 in the US, is estimated to contribute $4bn annually to Florida’s economy and supports 43,000 jobs.Farmers and ranchers depend on Noaa’s seasonal and sub-seasonal forecasts to make decisions about planting, harvesting, irrigation and risk management. A single drought or flood forecast can mean the difference between profitable harvests and financial ruin.Similarly, the US Department of Transportation reports that more than $5.4tn of commerce crosses US ports annually. Noaa’s nautical charts, tide tables and navigation services are essential for keeping these ports and waterways running safely and efficiently, thereby supporting global trade and local jobs.Furthermore, urban planners and emergency managers at all levels rely on Noaa’s climate data and long-range forecasts and projections to design roads, bridges and flood defenses capable of withstanding rising sea levels and stronger storms. By ensuring that infrastructure investments are based on accurate, up-to-date data, billions of dollars in future repair and disaster costs can be avoided.From safeguarding families in the path of severe storms to supporting the economic health of fishing towns and agricultural communities, Noaa’s programs are indispensable. Efforts by the Trump administration to hobble the agency through budget and wholesale staff reductions are not only misguided but also dangerous. If President Trump and his administration are serious about making America great, they will recognize that funding Noaa is an investment that saves lives, guides critical industries, strengthens our economy and reinforces our nation’s global leadership in innovation and science.

      Terry Garcia served as the assistant secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and as deputy administrator of Noaa. He also served as its general counsel More

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      in US Politics

      Trump officials to reconsider whether greenhouse gases cause harm amid climate rollbacks

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      Donald Trump’s administration is to reconsider the official finding that greenhouse gases are harmful to public health, a move that threatens to rip apart the foundation of the US’s climate laws, amid a stunning barrage of actions to weaken or repeal a host of pollution limits upon power plants, cars and waterways.Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued an extraordinary cavalcade of pollution rule rollbacks on Wednesday, led by the announcement it would potentially scrap a landmark 2009 finding by the US government that planet-heating gases, such carbon dioxide, pose a threat to human health.The so-called endangerment finding, which followed a supreme court ruling that the EPA could regulate greenhouse gases, provides the underpinning for all rules aimed at cutting the pollution that scientists have unequivocally found is worsening the climate crisis.Despite the enormous and growing body of evidence of devastation caused by rising emissions, including trillions of dollars in economic costs, Trump has called the climate crisis a “hoax” and dismissed those concerned by its worsening impacts as “climate lunatics”.Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, said the agency would reconsider the endangerment finding due to concerns that it had spawned “an agenda that throttles our industries, our mobility, and our consumer choice while benefiting adversaries overseas”.Zeldin wrote that Wednesday was the “most consequential day of deregulation in American history” and that “we are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age”.Environmentalists reacted with horror to the announcement and vowed to defend the overwhelming findings of science and the US’s ability to address the climate crisis through the courts, which regularly struck down Trump’s rollbacks in his first term. “The Trump administration’s ignorance is trumped only by its malice toward the planet,” said Jason Rylander, legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute.“Come hell or high water, raging fires and deadly heatwaves, Trump and his cronies are bent on putting polluter profits ahead of people’s lives. This move won’t stand up in court. We’re going to fight it every step of the way.”In all, the EPA issued 31 announcements within just a few hours that take aim at almost every major environmental rule designed to protect Americans’ clean air and water, as well as a livable climate.The barrage included a move to overturn a Biden-era plan to slash pollution spewing from coal-fired power plants, which itself was a reduced version of an Obama administration initiative that was struck down by the supreme court.The EPA will also revisit pollution standards for cars and trucks, which Zeldin said had imposed a “crushing regulatory regime” upon auto companies that are now shifting towards electric vehicles, consider weakening rules limiting sooty air pollution that’s linked to an array of health problems, potentially axe requirements that power plants not befoul waterways or dump their toxic waste and will consider further narrowing how it implements the Clean Water Act in general.The stunning broadside of actions against pollution rules could, if upheld by the courts, reshape Americans’ environment in ways not seen since major legislation was passed in the 1970s to end an era of smoggy skies and burning rivers that became the norm following American industrialization.Pollutants from power plants, highways and industry cause a range of heart, lung and other health problems, with greenhouse gases among this pollution driving up the global temperature and fueling catastrophic heatwaves, floods, storms and other impacts.“Zeldin’s EPA is dragging America back to the days before the Clean Air Act, when people were dying from pollution,” said Dominique Browning, director of the Moms Clean Air Force. “This is unacceptable. And shameful. We will oppose with all our hearts to protect our children from this cruel, monstrous action.”The EPA’s moves come shortly after its decision to shutter all its offices that deal with addressing the disproportionate burden of pollution faced by poor people and minorities in the US, amid a mass firing of agency staff. Zeldin has also instructed that $20bn in grants to help address the climate crisis be halted, citing potential fraud. Democrats have questioned whether these moves are legal.Former EPA staff have reacted with shock to the upending of the agency.“Today marks the most disastrous day in EPA history,” said Gina McCarthy, who was EPA administrator under Obama. “Rolling these rules back is not just a disgrace, it’s a threat to all of us. The agency has fully abdicated its mission to protect Americans’ health and wellbeing.”The Trump administration has promised additional environmental rollbacks in the coming weeks. The Energy Dominance Council that the president established last month is looking to eliminate a vast array of regulations in an effort to boost the fossil fuel industry, the interior secretary, Doug Burgum, told the oil and gas conference CeraWeek in Houston on Wednesday. “We will come up with the ways that we can cut red tape,” he said. “We can easily get rid of 20-30% of our regulations.”Additional reporting by Dharna Noor More

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      in US Politics

      US exits fund that compensates poorer countries for global heating

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      The Trump administration has withdrawn the US from a global agreement under which the developed nations most responsible for the climate crisis pledged to partly compensate developing countries for irreversible harms caused by global heating.The loss and damage fund was agreed at the Cop28 UN climate summit in late 2023 – a hard-won victory after years of diplomatic and grassroots advocacy by developing nations that bear the brunt of the climate crisis despite having contributed the least to greenhouse gas emissions. The fund signalled a commitment by developed, polluting countries to provide financial support for some of the irreversible economic and noneconomic losses from sea level rise, desertification, drought and floods already happening.The US has a long record of delay tactics and obstructionism, and had so far pledged only $17.5m (£13.5m) to the loss and damage fund, which became operational on 1 January this year. Now the US, the biggest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, will no longer participate in the initiative.“On behalf of the United States Department of the Treasury, I write to inform you that the United States is withdrawing from the board for the fund for responding to loss and damage, effective immediately,” said Rebecca Lawlor, the deputy director at the US Office of Climate and Environment, in a letter to the fund.The decision to abandon the loss and damage fund was condemned by climate advocates from the global north and south.“The US decision to step away from this commitment at such a crucial moment sends the wrong message to the global community and to those in dire need of assistance,” said Mohamed Adow, a climate policy analyst and director of the thinktank Power Shift Africa. “We urge the United States to reconsider its position in the interest of the planet and future generations … this regrettable decision risks undermining collective progress and erodes the trust necessary for effective international cooperation.”Rachel Rose Jackson, a research director at Corporate Accountability, said: “Let’s be clear – the US has never been a climate champion. Yet the Trump administration’s anti-climate action agenda – including its withdrawal from the loss and damage fund board – is a wrecking ball made of dynamite. It’s dangerous, it’s malicious and it will destroy lives.“We cannot allow the Trump administration, and the greedy corporations pulling the strings, to get away with destroying the planet. It’s time for the United States to pay up its climate debt and do its fair share of climate action.”Ali Mohamed, the chair of the African Group of Negotiators, a coalition of African nations participating in UN climate negotiations, said: “This decision, made by the nation with the largest historical responsibility for climate change, jeopardises vital support for vulnerable countries facing irreversible climate impacts.”Trump has already pulled out of the 2015 Paris climate accords – for the second time after the US was reinstated under Joe Biden – claiming the international agreement on cutting greenhouse gas emissions and preventing climate catastrophe ripped off the US.“I’m immediately withdrawing from the unfair, one-sided Paris climate accord rip-off,” he said, signing the executive order on his first day in office. “The United States will not sabotage our own industries while China pollutes with impunity.”China currently ranks as the top greenhouse gas emitter but is also the global leader in the manufacture and deployment of renewable energy. The US is the largest historical emitter and, while emissions have fallen alongside reductions in coal, it has become the world’s largest oil and gas producer by a huge margin in recent years.Record-breaking ocean and atmospheric temperatures have caused chaos around the world and across the US, including devastating wildfires in Los Angeles and deadly flooding across Florida and southern Appalachia. Meanwhile, several of Trump’s policies, including his pledge to “drill, baby drill”, dismantle federal agencies, and impose tariffs that threaten a trade war, risk derailing the burgeoning US renewables sector.The loss and damage fund is a work in progress. As of late January, 27 countries had pledged a combined total of $741m – the equivalent of about 0.2% of the irreversible losses developing countries are facing from global heating every year.The US withdrawal appears to be another rejection of global diplomacy and the reality of the climate crisis.Harjeet Singh, a climate activist and founding director of the Delhi-based Satat Sampada Climate Foundation, said: “The decision by the Trump administration exemplifies a longstanding pattern of obstruction by the US government in securing necessary finance for addressing climate impacts, [and] undermines global efforts to deliver climate justice.“As the largest historical emitter, the United States bears a significant share of the blame for the climate adversities affecting vulnerable populations worldwide. We must hold them accountable and ensure they contribute their fair share towards global climate reparations.” More

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      in US Politics

      Trump administration to drop case against plant polluting Louisiana’s ‘Cancer Alley’

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      The Donald Trump administration has formally agreed to drop a landmark environmental justice case in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” region, marking a blow to clean air advocates in the region and a win for the Japanese petrochemical giant at the centre of the litigation.Legal filings made public on Friday morning reveal that Trump’s Department of Justice agreed to dismiss a long-running lawsuit against the operators of a synthetic rubber plant in Reserve, Louisiana, which is allegedly largely responsible for some of the highest cancer risk rates in the US for the surrounding majority-Black neighborhoods.The litigation was filed under the Biden administration in February 2023 in a bid to substantially curb the plant’s emissions of a pollutant named chloroprene, a likely human carcinogen. It had targeted both the current operator, the Japanese firm Denka, and its previous owner, the American chemical giant DuPont, and formed a central piece of the former administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) efforts to address environmental justice issues in disadvantaged communities. A trial had been due to start in April 2025 following lengthy delays.Community leaders in Reserve had expressed grave concerns about the case’s future following Trump’s return to the White House after the president moved to gut offices within the EPA and justice department responsible for civil rights and environmental justice.On Friday, 84-year-old Robert Taylor, a resident in Reserve who has lost a number of family members to cancer, described the move as “terrible” for his community.“It’s obvious that the Trump administration doesn’t care anything for the poor Black folk in Cancer Alley,” Taylor said. “[Trump’s] administration has taken away what protections we had, what little hope we had.”Filings show that parties involved in the litigation, including lawyers for Denka and DuPont, met on Wednesday and agreed jointly with the US justice department to dismiss the case.The EPA referred all questions about the lawsuit to the US justice department, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.DuPont did not immediately respond to a request for comment.A spokesperson for Denka did not respond to questions from the Guardian but issued a statement thanking the Trump administration and lauding Louisiana’s Republican governor, Jeff Landry, for his “unwavering support”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe chemical firm pointed to a $35m investment in emissions offsets and said “the facility’s emissions are at an historical low”. The company “remains committed to implementing the emissions reductions achieved as we turn the page from this relentless and draining attack on our business”, the statement added.According to the complaint filed in 2023, emissions from the plant pose “an imminent and substantial endangerment to public health and welfare”. The lawsuit had specifically singled out the risk to children living near the plant and those attending an elementary school situated close to the plant’s fence line. It noted that average readings at an air monitor near the school between April 2018 to January 2023 showed that those under 16 could surpass the EPA’s excess cancer risk rate within two years of their life.On Friday, Taylor vowed to continue pushing back against pollution.“We are going to fight them and prepare ourselves to keep going. We were preparing for the worst, and I don’t know how it could get any worse now that the government has totally abandoned us, it seems.” More

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      in US Politics

      What is this era of calamity we’re in? Some say ‘polycrisis’ captures it

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      Two months into 2025, the sense of dread is palpable. In the US, the year began with a terrorist attack; then came the fires that ravaged a city, destroying lives, homes and livelihoods. An extremist billionaire came to power and began proudly dismantling the government with a chainsaw. Once-in-a-century disasters are happening more like once a month, all amid devastating wars and on the heels of a pandemic.The word “unprecedented” has become ironically routine. It feels like we’re stuck in a relentless cycle of calamity, with no time to recover from one before the next begins.How do we make sense of any of this – let alone all of it, all at once?A number of terms have cropped up in the past decade to help us describe our moment. We’re living in the anthropocene – the era in which humanity’s impact is comparable to that of geology itself. Or we’re in the “post-truth” era, in which we no longer share the same sense of reality. We’re facing a permacrisis, an endless state of catastrophe.But perhaps the word that best describes this moment is one that emerged at the turn of the millennium, picked up steam in the 2010s and has recently been making the global rounds again: polycrisis.Not to be confused with a “perfect storm” or the perhaps less scientific “clusterfuck”, “polycrisis” – a term coined by the authors Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern – refers to the idea that not only are we facing one disaster after another, but those messes are all linked, making things even worse. Or, as Adam Tooze, a Columbia University history professor and public intellectual who has championed the term, put it: “In the polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts.”Our globalized world is built on interconnecting systems, and when one gets rattled, the others do too – a heating climate, for instance, increases the risk of pandemics, pandemics undermine economies, shaky economies fuel political upheaval. “There’s a kind of larger instability, or a larger system disequilibrium,” the researcher Thomas Homer-Dixon says. To illustrate the situation, Homer-Dixon uses a video of metronomes on a soft surface. Though they’re all started at different times, they end up synchronized, as each device’s beat subtly affects the rest. When people see it for the first time, “they don’t actually see what’s happening properly. They don’t realize the forces that are operating to cause the metronomes to actually synchronize with each other,” Homer-Dixon says.In much the same way, it’s often unclear even to experts how global systems interact because they are siloed in their disciplines. That limits our ability to confront intersecting problems: the climate crisis forces migration; xenophobia fuels the rise of the far right in receiving countries; far-right governments undermine environmental protections; natural disasters are more destructive. Yet migration experts may not be experts on the climate crisis, and climate experts may have limited knowledge of geopolitics.That’s why Homer-Dixon thinks better communication is essential – not just to create consensus around what we call our current predicament but also how to address it. He runs the Cascade Institute, which is fostering “a community of scholars and experts and scientists and policy makers around the world who are using this concept [of polycrisis] in constructive ways”.“Constructive” is a key word here. “You’ve got to get the diagnosis right before you can go to the prescription,” he says. Finding that diagnosis means looking at how stresses on various systems – climate, geopolitics, transportation, information, etc – intersect and identifying what his team calls “high leverage intervention points”: “places where you can go in and have a really big impact for a relatively low investment”.The Cascade Institute’s proposals target what they have identified as key drivers of the polycrisis, such as polarization and climate change, by, for instance, improving school curricula to bolster students’ understanding of disinformation and expanding the use of deep geothermal power.In addition to bringing people with disparate expertise together, the Cascade Institute, part of Royal Roads University in British Columbia, has developed an analytical framework for understanding the polycrisis, and it operates a website, polycrisis.org, which serves as a hub for the latest thinking on the issue – including critiques of the concept, Homer-Dixon says. The site contains a compendium of resources from academia to blogposts that explore the polycrisis, reflecting, for instance, on what’s already happened in 2025 (a tenuous ceasefire in Gaza, California wildfires, Trump upending the global order, an AI-bubble selloff, and the outbreak of bird flu).View image in fullscreenThere has been some backlash to the idea of the polycrisis. The historian Niall Ferguson has described it as “just history happening”. The political scientist Daniel Drezner says its proponents “assume the existence of powerful negative feedback effects that may not actually exist” – in other words, when crises overlap, the outcome might not always be bad (for instance, the pandemic lockdowns might have had some short-lived environmental benefits). Some point to past crises as evidence that what we are experiencing is not new.Homer-Dixon disagrees. “We’ve moved so far and so fast outside our species’ previous experience that many elites don’t have the cognitive frame to grasp our situation, even were they inclined to do so,” he wrote in 2023, when the term was the talk of Davos.It’s all a bit overwhelming, as Homer-Dixon acknowledges. “If you’re not really scared by what’s going on in the world, you’re braindead,” he says.On the other hand, “t​​he crisis can actually be a moment for really significant change,” he says, “because it kind of delegitimizes the existing way of doing stuff, the existing vested-interest stakeholders who are who are hunkered down and don’t want anything to change”. For instance, while Homer-Dixon sees Donald Trump as an “abominable” figure, he also notes that, “like an acid”, the president dissolves norms around him. That creates the risk of disaster but also offers opportunities to change the world for the better.“This really is a critical moment in human history and things can be done,” Homer-Dixon says. “We don’t know enough about how these systems are operating to know that it’s game over.”And the term itself, as terrifying as it is, can also be a strange comfort. “I think that’s useful, giving the sense a name. It’s therapeutic,” Tooze told Radio Davos. When the world feels like a nightmare, identifying the condition gives us something to hold on to – a kind of understanding amid the chaos. More

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      in US Politics

      Federal layoffs hit the deep-red, rural US west: ‘Our public lands are under threat’

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      Republican representative McKay Erickson walked through the halls of the Wyoming capitol with a Trump 2024 pin on the front of his suit jacket. Much of Erickson’s home district in Lincoln county falls under the jurisdiction of the Bridger-Teton national forest and Grand Teton national park.With that federal land, comes federal workers. While it appears districts in Wyoming crucial to US energy dominance have been spared the brunt of the layoffs, McKay said his forest-heavy district has not been so fortunate. He’s hearing from his constituents about the layoffs, and he’s troubled about the implications for his district’s future.“These people have a face to me,” Erickson said. “They have a face and a place in either Star Valley or Jackson that I know quite well.”Erickson is a small-government conservative, laments bureaucracy and stands by his belief that there’s a need to “cut the fat” at the federal level. But in his district, he foresees a lack of trail maintenance hurting local outfitting companies and understaffed parks with closed gates.“This way is so indiscriminate, and it doesn’t really drill down on the real issue as to where those cuts need to be,” Erickson said. “I’m afraid that probably all we’re going to lose is services.”Erickson’s district is in a bind that’s playing out across the American west.Wyoming, for the third presidential election in a row, voted for Donald Trump by a wider margin than any other state in the country. Neighboring states Idaho and Montana also swung red with mile-wide margins. All three have high proportions of federal land (Idaho – 62%, Wyoming – 48%, Montana – 29%), and thriving outdoor recreation industries dependent on public lands.Erickson, while watching cuts with apprehension, said that he is still supportive of the president, who won more than 81% of presidential votes cast in Lincoln county in 2024.“It hasn’t really shaken me. It’s concerned me, but not shaken me in my support,” Erickson said.As layoffs under Trump and billionaire Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) bleed out of the Beltway and across the country, local business owners, politicians and federal employees in the rural Mountain West told the Guardian that they feared devastating consequences for their communities.The Guardian reached out to US senators from Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, some of whom have publicly praised Doge’s work, about their constituents’ concerns. None responded to a request for comment.Few towns represent the ties between small town economies and public lands better than Salmon, Idaho. With a population of just over 3,000, Salmon is cradled by a nest of federal lands, including the Salmon-Challis national forest, the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness and a smattering of Bureau of Land Management holdings.Dustin Aherin calls Salmon home, and is the president of Middle Fork Outfitters Association, which represents 27 local businesses. He said that the day-to-day duties of forestry service employees, from river patrol to permitting to conservation, keep businesses like his alive. Recent layoffs put their future in jeopardy.“The team in the field that manages the Middle Fork and Main Salmon river, all but two were terminated. And the two that were left have been reassigned,” Aherin said. “We have no on-the-ground management as of right now.”The urgency caused by the layoffs sent Aherin to Capitol Hill, where he spoke with the Guardian between meetings with federal officials. He held cautious optimism that Idaho’s federal delegation would be able to help craft a solution.A hundred miles south-west of Salmon, in Stanley, Idaho, Hannah, a terminated employee from the Sawtooth national forest who requested anonymity, has a grim outlook for the future of the small mountain town. She said that about 40% of staff was cut, including the entire wilderness and trail crew. She wonders who will handle the public-facing jobs, from cleaning toilets and campgrounds to providing visitor information, and worries about the effects on Stanley, which took a major hit in the 2024 wildfire season.“In a small town like this where you only have a couple good months of a summer season, one hard year and another hard-ish year could be really bad for some local businesses,” Hannah said.Hannah said the termination cost her her health insurance just weeks before a costly surgery, and she expects to have to relocate. In the early stages of her career, she said the experience will likely sour her, and other young civil servants, on public service.“We’re losing the next generation of public land stewards,” Hannah said. “And our public lands are under threat.”Similar anxiety is creeping into communities surrounding the Mountain West’s marquee national parks, which are economic engines for the region. A 2023 report estimated that National Parks generated more than $55bn in economic impact off of a budget of $3.6bn. Many of these dollars went to gateway towns in red states, such as those framing the entrances to Grand Teton national park or Yellowstone national park.Dale Sexton, owner of Dan Bailey’s fly shop in Livingston, Montana, is helping push the revival of the Yellowstone Business Coalition, whose 400-plus members are lobbying Montana’s federal delegation to work to address the effects of federal layoffs. Sexton is pragmatic about the national political climate and is betting that an economics-based argument will move the needle.“I’m envisioning that our delegation currently doesn’t want to abandon the Doge ship,” Sexton said. “But I’m also hopeful that outcry becomes so loud that it garners their attention and affects change.”Livingston city commissioner Karrie Kahle envisions a trickle-down effect from the layoffs.“As we lose federal workers first, if one of them is lost, we’re potentially losing a whole family from our community,” Kahle said. “If that federal worker has a partner, is that partner a teacher or doing other work in our community? Are we going to lose kids out of our school systems?”Andrea Shiverdecker, an archaeologist in Montana’s Custer-Gallatin national forest, lost her job on Valentine’s Day. Along with the impact on her personal life and community, Shiverdecker dwells on potential consequences for Yellowstone.“I don’t think people understand the sheer volume and amount of people that come through our ecosystem every year and the amount of manpower it takes to keep cleaned up,” Shiverdecker said. “This is what we fear with our public lands … We need to be stewards and foster them for future generations.”Shiverdecker said the layoff process has been disorienting. She said she was terminated 25 days before the end of her probationary period, while paperwork was being run for her promotion. She said she believes in “good people” and hopes to somehow return to her job, but right now, she has a lot of frustration.“How am I getting laid off for performance issues when you were processing my promotion?” Shiverdecker said. “It’s heartbreaking as a dedicated public servant, as a disabled veteran, as somebody who loves the fact that they’ve served. That’s the biggest honor you can give.” More