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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

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      Trump’s EPA eliminates research and development office and begins layoffs

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      The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said on Friday it is eliminating its research and development arm and reducing agency staff by thousands of employees. One union leader said the moves “will devastate public health in our country”.The agency’s office of research and development (ORD) has long provided the scientific underpinnings for the EPA’s mission to protect the environment and human health. The EPA said in May it would shift its scientific expertise and research efforts to program offices that focus on major issues such as air and water.The agency said on Friday it is creating a new office of applied science and environmental solutions that will allow it to focus on research and science “more than ever before”.Once fully implemented, the changes will save the EPA nearly $750m, officials said.Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, the top Democrat on the House science committee, called the elimination of the research office “a travesty”.“The Trump administration is firing hardworking scientists while employing political appointees whose job it is to lie incessantly to Congress and to the American people,” she said. “The obliteration of ORD will have generational impacts on Americans’ health and safety.”EPA administrator Lee Zeldin said in a statement that the changes announced Friday would ensure the agency “is better equipped than ever to deliver on our core mission of protecting human health and the environment, while Powering the Great American Comeback”.The EPA also said it is beginning the process to eliminate thousands of jobs, following asupreme court ruling last week that cleared the way for Donald Trump’s plans to downsize the federal workforce, despite warnings that critical government services will be lost and hundreds of thousands of federal employees will be out of their jobs.Total staffing at EPA will go down to 12,448, a reduction of more than 3,700 employees, or nearly 23%, from staffing levels in January when Trump took office, the agency said.“This reduction in force will ensure we can better fulfill that mission while being responsible stewards of your hard-earned tax dollars,” Zeldin said, using a government term for mass firings.The office of research and development “is the heart and brain of the EPA”, said Justin Chen, president of American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, which represents thousands of EPA employees.“Without it, we don’t have the means to assess impacts upon human health and the environment,” Chen said. “Its destruction will devastate public health in our country.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe research office – EPA’s main science arm – currently has 1,540 positions, excluding special government employees and public health officers, according to agency documents reviewed by Democratic staff on the House science panel earlier this year. As many as 1,155 chemists, biologists, toxicologists and other scientists could be laid off, the documents indicated.The research office has 10 facilities across the country, stretching from Florida and North Carolina to Oregon. An EPA spokeswoman said that all laboratory functions currently conducted by the research office will continue.In addition to the reduction in force, the agency also is offering the third round of deferred resignations for eligible employees, including research office staff, spokeswoman Molly Vaseliou said. The application period is open until 25 July.The EPA’s announcement comes two weeks after the agency put on administrative leave 139 employees who signed a “declaration of dissent” with agency policies under the Trump administration. The agency accused the employees of “unlawfully undermining” Trump’s agenda.In a letter made public on 30June, the employees wrote that the EPA is no longer living up to its mission to protect human health and the environment. The letter represented rare public criticism from agency employees who knew they could face retaliation for speaking out.Associated Press contributed to reporting More

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      Trump promised to lower energy costs – his tax bill will raise them for people in red states the most

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      The cost of electricity is poised to surge across the US in the wake of Republican legislation that takes an axe to cheap renewable energy, with people in states who voted for Donald Trump last year to be hardest hit by the increase in bills.As air conditioners crank up across the US during another sweltering summer amid an unfolding climate crisis, rising energy costs will become even more severe for households due to the reconciliation spending bill passed by Republicans in Congress and signed by Trump, who called it the “big, beautiful bill”, on 4 July.By stripping away support for cheap solar and wind energy production, the legislation is set to cause electricity rates paid by families and businesses, many already struggling to pay their bills, to rise by much as 18% by 2035, according to an analysis by Energy Innovation, an energy and climate policy thinktank.Household energy costs, which span electricity and gas use, will rise by $170 on average every year by 2035, the report finds, with Republican-leaning states bearing the brunt of the increases. Bills in Missouri will spike the most, by $640 a year, with the next largest increases – in Kentucky, South Carolina, Oklahoma, North Carolina and Texas – all also hitting states that voted for Trump in last year’s presidential election.Trump won the election, in part, by promising to lower inflation and cut US energy costs in half within a year. In office, he has sought to boost fossil fuel consumption while slashing incentives for clean energy projects and barring them from federal lands.“I don’t want windmills destroying our place,” the president said last month. “I don’t want these solar things where they go for miles and they cover up a half a mountain that are ugly as hell.”But the Republican bill’s wiping out of tax credits for renewables will stymie wind and solar projects that are typically now cheaper than gas or coal, forcing utilities to rely more heavily on existing, inefficient gas generators, Energy Innovation said. This will push up energy costs across the US, particularly in states that have not enacted their own policies to boost renewables.“Demand for electricity is increasing and without renewables we aren’t able to meet that new demand,” said Dan O’Brien, senior analyst at Energy Innovation and author of the new study.“We’ve seen US power prices generally fall over the past 75 years, but with this bill for the first time we will see sustained increases in power costs. Lower-income folks in rural areas in red states will have compounding impacts from this bill – their states voted to pass this but it will really harm them in the long term.”Environmental groups were scathing of the Republicans who voted for the reconciliation bill. “After an election where cost-of-living was the driving issue that pushed millions of working-class Americans to check the box for Donald Trump, it’s mind-boggling that Republicans just passed a bill that will raise costs across the board,” said Lena Moffitt, executive director of Evergreen Action, a climate change advocacy organization, who called the legislation “one of the most catastrophic bills in a generation”.Electricity prices for American households have already increased above the rate of inflation since 2022, with a slew of new data centers for artificial intelligence helping push up overall demand for power. This trend has placed further strain upon “energy insecure” people who struggle to meet the cost of heating, cooling and lighting their homes. Around 34m households, more than a quarter of all dwellings in the US, reported difficulties in paying energy bills in 2020.“A lot of people are struggling and it’s a hardship that’s often not highlighted,” said Michelle Graff, an energy policy expert at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Lower-income people, as well as those who are Black, Hispanic, elderly, have young children or live in poorly constructed and badly insulated homes, are most at risk of this sort of energy insecurity.“For a lot of these folks, even $10 extra on their bill each month will result in difficult trade-offs, such as forgoing medicines or food for their families,” Graff said. “Increasing those bills month after month will have a big impact upon households on the margins.”Electricity price rises are regulated by the states and some jurisdictions offer help to residents struggling to pay their bills, as Maryland did last month.But such assistance is now being stripped away at the federal level, with the Trump administration seeking to eliminate the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (or Liheap), which aids around 6m US households with their bills. The reconciliation bill also deletes subsidies for the construction of energy-efficient homes and upgrades to home cooling, heating and insulation systems.“That is a lifeline for many, many Americans,” Graff said of the Liheap program. “There is this mismatch where the hardships are getting worse while we are cutting assistance for people to address that hardship.”Across the US, utilities have pushed for $29bn in higher rates so far this year, which is 142% more than the same period in 2024, a recent report found. At least 16 states, meanwhile, allow utilities to cut off power to people during extreme heatwaves if they have not paid their bills. Such cutoffs can prove deadly – last month, Shauna Thomas, a 55-year-old woman, was found dead in her stiflingly hot St Louis, Missouri, apartment after her electricity was halted for non-payment.“Air conditioning and access to electricity is life-saving, but in most states there are very limited protections for these shut-offs,” said Diana Hernandez, a researcher of energy and health inequities at Columbia University. “People are reluctant to put on their AC because of the fear of a high bill. It’s easy for them to get into a debt spiral and hard for them to get out of it. This can end up as a life-or-death matter.”Extreme heat is the leading weather-related cause of deaths in the US, with advancing global temperatures due to the burning of fossil fuels causing longer and fiercer heatwaves. This summer in the US is expected to be hotter than the long-term norm for the season, with explosive demand for cooling causing a strain upon the grid in some places – in June, 110,000 people in New York City lost power due to a surge of electricity use during a hot spell.In the hottest parts of the US, lengthy power blackouts could prove catastrophic. If a prolonged heatwave and a blackout hit Phoenix, Arizona, at the same time, half of the city’s 1.6 million residents would require urgent medical help and 1% of the population would die, a 2023 study warned.“Climate change is upon us and as it gets hotter and hotter, there will be more hardship that people face in trying to keep themselves cool,” said Hernandez.“It used to be that people thought about energy access in the winter months, to help keep them warm, but that has changed now. As we keep getting hotter years, this problem isn’t going away.”The White House was contacted for comment. More