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      Supreme Court Curbs Scope of Environmental Reviews

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      The question for the justices was whether an agency had complied with a federal law by issuing a 3,600-page report on the impact of a proposed railway in Utah.The Supreme Court unanimously ruled on Thursday that a federal agency had done enough to consider the environmental impact of a proposed 88-mile railway in Utah. The ruling limits the scope of environmental reviews required by federal law in all sorts of settings.The proposed railway would connect oil fields in the Uinta Basin in northeast Utah to a national rail network that runs next to the Colorado River and then to refineries on the Gulf Coast.“An agency may weigh environmental consequences as the agency reasonably sees fit,” Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote for five justices. The court’s three liberal members agreed with the decision’s bottom line but on narrower grounds. Justice Neil M. Gorsuch was recused.The Surface Transportation Board, a federal agency that regulates rail transportation, approved the Utah project in 2021 after conducting a review that yielded a 3,600-page report. Environmental groups and a Colorado county sued, saying the report had not taken account of some ways in which the railway could do harm to the environment.The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled for the challengers.The environmental impact statements required by a 1970 federal law, the National Environmental Policy Act, can be quite elaborate. Paul D. Clement, a lawyer representing seven Utah counties that support the project, told the justices when the case was argued in December that the law was “the single most litigated environmental statute.”He added that the board had acted responsibly.“It consulted with dozens of agencies, considered every proximate effect and ordered 91 mitigation measures,” he said, referring to measures intended to, among other things, dampen noise pollution and protect wildlife. “Eighty-eight miles of track should not require more than 3,600 pages of environmental analysis.”William M. Jay, a lawyer for the challengers, said at the argument that the report did not consider all the reasonably foreseeable results of the project, like oil spills and sparks that can cause wildfires, as required by the federal law.The case, Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colo., No. 23-975, was argued before an eight-member court after Justice Gorsuch recused himself, apparently over concerns that his ties to Philip F. Anschutz gave rise to a conflict of interest. Neither Mr. Anschutz, a billionaire and Republican donor, nor his companies are parties to the case, and the letter announcing Justice Gorsuch’s recusal gave no reasons.But the proposed railway could benefit companies in which Mr. Anschutz has an interest. Justice Gorsuch represented Mr. Anschutz and his companies as a lawyer, benefited from his support when he was being considered for a seat on an appeals court and once served as a keynote speaker at an annual party at his ranch. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump’s new ‘gold standard’ rule will destroy American science as we know it | Colette Delawalla

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      Science is under siege.On Friday evening, the White House released an executive order called Restoring Gold Standard Science. At face value, this order promises a commitment to federally funded research that is “transparent, rigorous, and impactful” and policy that is informed by “the most credible, reliable, and impartial scientific evidence available”. But hidden beneath the scientific rhetoric is a plan that would destroy scientific independence in the US by giving political appointees the latitude to dismiss entire bodies of research and punish researchers who fail to fall in line with the current administration’s objectives. In other words: this is Fool’s-Gold Standard Science.According to the order, “Gold Standard Science means science conducted in a manner that is:(i) reproducible;(ii) transparent;(iii) communicative of error and uncertainty;(iv) collaborative and interdisciplinary;(v) skeptical of its findings and assumptions;(vi) structured for falsifiability of hypotheses;(vii) subject to unbiased peer review;(viii) accepting of negative results as positive outcomes; and(ix) without conflicts of interest.”The order mimics the language of an active reform movement in science to increase rigor and transparency of research – a movement commonly called the open science movement, to which some of us are contributors. Science is, by nature, a continuous work in progress, constantly self-scrutinized and always looking for opportunities to improve. We should all be able to celebrate any administration’s investment in improving the openness, integrity and reproducibility of research.But, with this executive order, we cannot.Instead of being about open science, it grants administration-aligned political appointees the power to designate any research as scientific misconduct based on their own “judgment” and includes the power to punish the scientists involved accordingly; this would weaponize government counter to the public interest.The consequences of state-dictated science can be catastrophic. When Trofim Lysenko, a researcher who denied the reality of genetic inheritance and natural selection, won favor with Joseph Stalin and took control of agriculture in the Soviet Union, thousands of scientists who disagreed with him were fired, imprisoned or killed. His disastrous agricultural prescriptions ultimately led to famines that killed millions in the USSR and in China.Science does not proceed by sequentially establishing unassailable conclusions, but rather by steadily accumulating numerous lines of evidence, scrutinizing weaknesses, and pursuing additional evidence. Almost any study, any source of evidence, any conclusion, falls short of meeting every aspect of the White House’s list of best practices. This has nothing to do with laziness, let alone misconduct by individual scientists; it’s simply a consequence of the fact that science is difficult. Scientists constantly grapple with uncertainty, and nevertheless can ultimately arrive at robust, valid conclusions, such as the fact that vaccines do not cause autism, and that the burning of fossil fuels is warming the planet and wreaking havoc on our climate.Under the terms of the executive order, political appointees loyal to the president can willfully find justification to label any research finding as scientific misconduct, and then penalize the researchers involved accordingly. This administration has already appropriated the language of open science to assert control over and deal heavy blows to the scientific ecosystem of the United States – including cancelling thousands of active research grants in climate science, misinformation and disinformation, vaccines, mental health, women’s health, LGBTQ+ health and stem education. Calls to “revisit” decades of work that establish vaccine safety beyond a shadow of a doubt “because the only way you can get good science is through replication”, and demands for unethical vaccine clinical trial practices and additional data, further echo the bad-faith adoption of open science language.Trump has also advanced a congressional budget calling for massive cuts to federal spending on research and development and levied significant retaliation against universities that have not fallen in line with his demands. He has gone so far as to propose a rule change by the office of personnel management that would install policy police at all levels of federal agencies, converting thousands of employees into presidential appointees who can be summarily fired without due process for any arbitrary political reason. This new executive order raises the concern that many of our best scientists would be targeted in Lysenkoist purges. Meanwhile, the threat of such actions is already having a chilling effect on all scientists.Science is the most important long-term investment for humanity. Interference in the scientific process by political arbiters stifles scientists’ freedom of speech and thought. Science depends on unfettered speech – free and continuous discussion of data and ideas. We, like the rest of the scientific community, aspire to achieve greater openness, integrity and reproducibility of research to accelerate discovery, advance treatments and foster solutions to meet society’s greatest challenges. Meeting that objective will not occur by centralizing power over science and scientists according to the whims of any political administration. We see this executive order for what it is: an attempt to sell the US’s future for pyrite.

      Colette Delawalla is a PhD candidate at Emory University and executive director of Stand Up for Science. Victor Ambros is a 2024 Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine at the Chan Medical School, University of Massachusetts. Carl Bergstrom is professor of biology at the University of Washington. Carol Greider is a 2009 Nobel laureate in medicine and distinguished professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Michael Mann is the presidential distinguished professor of earth and environmental science and director of the Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania. Brian Nosek is executive director of the Center for Open Science and professor of psychology at the University of Virginia More

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      ‘Flooding could end southern Appalachia’: the scientists on an urgent mission to save lives

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      The abandoned homes and razed lots along the meandering Troublesome Creek in rural eastern Kentucky is a constant reminder of the 2022 catastrophic floods that killed dozens of people and displaced thousands more.Among the hardest hit was Fisty, a tiny community where eight homes, two shops and nine people including a woman who uses a wheelchair, her husband and two children, were swept away by the rising creek. Some residents dismissed cellphone alerts of potential flooding due to mistrust and warning fatigue, while for others it was already too late to escape. Landslides trapped the survivors and the deceased for several days.In response, geologists from the University of Kentucky secured a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and raced around collecting perishable data in hope of better understanding the worst flooding event to hit the region in a generation.View image in fullscreenOn a recent morning in Fisty, Harold Baker sat smoking tobacco outside a new prefabricated home while his brother James worked on a car in a makeshift workshop. With no place else to go, the Baker family rebuilt the workshop on the same spot on Troublesome Creek with financial assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema).“I feel depressed, everyone else is gone now. The days are long. It feels very lonely when the storms come in,” said Baker, 55, whose four dogs also drowned in 2022. With so few people left, the car repair business is way down, the road eerily quiet.Since the flood that took everything, Harold and James patrol the river every time it rains. The vigilance helped avert another catastrophe on Valentine’s Day after another so-called generational storm. No one died but the trauma, like the river, came roaring back.“I thought we were going to lose everything again, it was scary,” said Baker.At this spot in July 2022, geologist Ryan Thigpen found flood debris on top of two-storey buildings – 118in (3 metres) off the ground. The water mark on Harold’s new trailer shows the February flood hit 23in.Troublesome creek is a 40-mile narrow tributary of the north fork of the Kentucky River, which, like many waterways across southern Appalachia, does not have a single gauge. Yet these rural mountain hollers are getting slammed over and over by catastrophic flooding – and landslides – as the climate crisis increases rainfall across the region and warmer waters in the Gulf of Mexico turbocharge storms.Two years after 45 people died in the 2022 floods, the scale of disaster grew with Hurricane Helene, which killed more than 230 people with almost half the deaths in Appalachia, after days of relentless rain turned calm streams into unstoppable torrents.Another 23 people died during the February 2025 rains, then 24 more in April during a four-day storm that climate scientists found was made significantly more likely and more severe by the warming planet.View image in fullscreenThe extreme weather is making life unbearable and economically unviable for a chronically underserved region where coal was once king, and climate skepticism remains high. Yet little is known about flooding in the Appalachian region. It’s why the geologists – also called earth scientists – got involved.“This is where most people are going to die unless we create reliable warning systems and model future flood risks for mitigation and to help mountain communities plan for long-term resilience. Otherwise, these extreme flooding events could be the end of southern Appalachia,” said Thigpen.Amid accelerating climate breakdown the urgency of the mission is clear. Yet this type of applied science could be derailed – or at least curtailed – by the unprecedented assault on science, scientists and federal agencies by Donald Trump and his billionaire donors.Danielle Baker, Harold’s sister-in-law (James’s wife), had her bags packed a week in advance of the February flood and was glued to local television weather reports, which, like the geologists, rely on meteorological forecasting by the taxpayer-funded National Weather Service (NWS).She was “scared to death” watching the creek rise so high again. But this time the entire family, including 11 dogs and several cats, evacuated to the church on the hill where they waited 26 hours for the water to subside.View image in fullscreen“The people in this community are the best you could meet, but it’s a ghost town now. I didn’t want to rebuild so close to the creek, but we had nowhere else to go. Every time it rains, I can’t sleep,” she said, wiping away tears with her shirt.Danielle was unaware of Trump’s plans to dismantle Fema and slash funding from the NWS and NSF. “A lot of people here would not know what to do without Fema’s help. We need more information about the weather, better warnings, because the rains are getting worse,” she said.A day after the Guardian’s visit in mid-May, a NWS office in eastern Kentucky scrambled to cover the overnight forecast as severe storms moved through the region, triggering multiple tornadoes that eventually killed 28 people. Hundreds of staff have left the NWS in recent months, through a combination of layoffs and buyouts at the behest of Trump mega-donor Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge).Yet statewide, two-thirds of Kentuckians voted for Trump last year, with his vote share closer to 80% in rural communities hit hard by extreme weather, where many still blame Barack Obama for coal mine closures.“It doesn’t matter if people don’t believe in climate change. It’s going to wallop them anyway. We need to think about watersheds differently. This is a new world of extremes and cascading hazards,” said Thigpen, the geologist.The rapidly changing climate is rendering the concept of once-in-a-generation floods, which is mostly based on research by hydrologists going back a hundred years or so, increasingly obsolete. Geologists, on the other hand, look back 10,000 years, which could help better understand flooding patterns when the planet was warmer.Thigpen is spearheading this close-knit group of earth scientists from the university’s hazards team based in Lexington. On a recent field trip, nerdy jokes and constant teasing helped keep the mood light, but the scientists are clearly affected by the devastation they have witnessed since 2022. The team has so far documented more than 3,000 landslides triggered by that single extreme rain event, and are still counting.View image in fullscreenThis work is part of a broader statewide push to increase climate resiliency and bolster economic growth using Kentucky-specific scientific research. Last year, the initiative got a major boost when the state secured $24m from the NSF for a five-year research project involving eight Kentucky institutions that has created dozens of science jobs and hundreds of new student opportunities.The grant helped pay for high-tech equipment – drones, radars, sensors and computers – the team needs to collect data and build models to improve hazard prediction and create real-time warning systems.View image in fullscreenAfter major storms, the team measures water levels and analyzes the sediment deposits left behind to calculate the scale and velocity of the flooding, which in turn helps calibrate the model.The models help better understand the impact of the topography and each community’s built and natural environment – important for future mitigation. In these parts, coal was extracted using mountaintop mine removal, which drastically altered the landscape. Mining – and redirected waterways – can affect the height of a flood, according to a recent study by PhD student Meredith Swallom.A paleo-flood project is also under way, and another PhD student, Luciano Cardone, will soon begin digging into a section of the Kentucky riverbank to collect layers of sediment that holds physical clues on the date, size and velocity of ancient floods. Cardone, who found one local missionary’s journal describing flooding in 1795, will provide a historical or geological perspective to catastrophic flooding in the region, which the team believe will help better predict future hazards under changing climatic conditions.View image in fullscreenAll this data is analyzed at the new lab located in the Kentucky Geological Survey (KGS) department where super-powerful computers are positioned around a ceiling-to-floor black board, with a groovy lamp and artwork to get the creative mathematical juices flowing.So far the team has developed one working flood risk model for a single section of the Kentucky River. This will serve as a template, as each watershed requires its own model so that the data is manageable, precise and useful.This sort of applied science has the capacity to directly improve the lives of local people, including many Trump voters, as well as benefiting other mountainous flood-prone areas across the US and globally. But a flood warning system can only work if there is reliable meteorological forecasting going forward.Reports suggest NWS weather balloons, which assess storm risk by measuring wind speed, humidity, temperature and other conditions that satellites may not detect, have been canceled in recent weeks from Nebraska to Florida due to staff shortages. At the busiest time for storm predictions, deadly heatwaves and wildfires, weather service staffing is down by more than 10% and, for the first time in almost half a century, some forecasting offices no longer have 24/7 cover.Trump’s team is also threatening to slash $1.52bn from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), the weather service’s parent agency, which also monitors climate trends, manages coastal ecosystems and supports international shipping, among other things.“To build an effective and trusted warning system we need hyper-local data, including accurate weather forecasts and a more robust network of gauges,” said Summer Brown, a senior lecturer at the University of Kentucky’s earth and environmental sciences department. “The thought of weakening our basic weather data is mind-boggling.”View image in fullscreenIt’s impossible not to worry about the cuts, especially as the grand plan is to create a southern Appalachian flood and hazard centre to better understand and prepare the entire region’s mountain communities for extreme weather and related hazards, including flash floods, landslides and tornadoes.For this, the team is currently awaiting a multimillion-dollar grant decision from the NSF, in what until recently was a merit-based, peer-reviewed process at the federal agency. The NSF director resigned in April after orders from the White House to accept a 55% cut to the $9bn budget and fire half of its 1,700-person staff. Then in an unprecedented move, a member of the governing body stepped down, lambasting Musk’s unqualified Doge team for interfering in grant decisions.The NSF is the principal federal investor in basic science and engineering, and the proposed cut will be devastating in the US and globally.“Rivers are different all over Appalachia, and if our research continues we can build accurate flood and landslide models that help communities plan for storms in a changing climate,” said Jason Dortch, who set up the flood lab. “We’ve submitted lots of great grant proposals, and while that is out of our hands, we will continue to push forwarded however we can.”Fleming-Neon is a former mining community in Letcher county with around 500 residents – a decline of almost 40% in the past two decades. The town was gutted by the 2022 storm, and only two businesses, a car repair shop and a florist, reopened. The launderette, pharmacy, dentist, clothing store and thrift shop were all abandoned.View image in fullscreenRandall and Bonnie Kincer, a local couple who have been married for 53 years, run the flower shop from an old movie theater on main street, which doubles up as a dance studio for elementary school children. The place was rammed with 120in of muddy water in 2022. In February it was 52in, and everything still reeks of mould.The couple have been convinced by disinformation spread by conspiracy theorists that the recent catastrophic floods across the region, including Helene, were down to inadequate river dredging and cloud seeding. The town’s sorry plight, according to the Kincers, is down to deliberate manipulation of the weather system paid for by mining companies to flood out the community in order to gain access to lithium. (There are no significant lithium deposits in the area.)Bonnie, 74, is on the brink of giving up on the dance classes that she has taught since sophomore year, but not on Trump. “I have total confidence in President Trump. The [federal] cuts will be tough for a little while but there’s a lot of waste, so it will level out,” said Bonnie, who is angry about not qualifying for Fema assistance.View image in fullscreen“We used all our life savings fixing the studio. But I cannot shovel any more mud, not even for the kids. I am done. I have PTSD, we are scared to death,” she said breaking down in tears several times.The fear is understandable. On the slope facing the studio, a tiered retainer wall has been anchored into the hill to stabilize the earth and prevent an avalanche from destroying the town below.And at the edge of town, next to the power station on an old mine site, is a towering pile of black sludgy earth littered with lumps of shiny coal – the remnants of a massive landslide that happened as residents cleaned up after the February storm.Thomas Hutton’s house was swamped with muddy water after the landslide blocked the creek, forcing it to temporarily change course towards a residential street. “The floods have made this a ghost town. I doubt it will survive another one. If you mess with Mother Nature, you lose,” said Hutton, 74, a retired miner.View image in fullscreenThe geologists fly drones fitted with Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) – a remote sensing technology that uses pulsed lasers to create high-res, 3D, color models of the Earth’s surface, and can shoot through trees and man-made structures to detect and monitor changes in terrain including landslides. The affordability and precision of the China-made Lidar has been a “game-changer” for landslides, but prices have recently rocketed thanks to Trump’s tariff war.The Lidar picked up fairly recent deforestation above the Fleming-Neon power plant, which likely further destabilized the earth. The team agrees that the landslide could keep moving, but without good soil data it’s impossible to know when.Last year’s NSF grant funded new soil and moisture sensors, and mini weather stations, which the landslide team is in the process of installing on 14 steep slopes in eastern Kentucky – the first time this has been done – including one opposite Hutton’s house.Back at the lab, the geologists will use the data the sensors send back every 15 minutes to create models – and eventually a website where residents and local emergency managers can see how the soil moisture is changing in real time. The end goal is to warn communities when there is a high landslide risk based on the soil saturation – and rain forecast.“We have taken so many resources from these slopes, we need to understand them better,” said Sarah Johnson, a landslide expert. “We’re not sitting in an ivory tower making money from research. The work we do is about making communities safer.” More

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

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

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      in Elections

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

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

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      in US Politics

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

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

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      in US Politics

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

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

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

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

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