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    A coal-fired plant in Michigan was to close. But Trump forced it to keep running at $1m a day

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    Donald Trump has made several unusual moves to elongate the era of coal, such as giving the industry exemptions from pollution rules. But the gambit to keep one Michigan coal-fired power station running has been extraordinary – by forcing it to remain open even against the wishes of its operator.The hulking JH Campbell power plant, which since 1962 has sat a few hundred yards from the sand dunes at the edge of Lake Michigan, was just eight days away from a long-planned closure in May when Trump’s Department of Energy issued an emergency order that it remain open for a further 90 days.On Wednesday, the administration intervened again to extend this order even further, prolonging the lifetime of the coal plant another 90 days, meaning it will keep running until November – six months after it was due to close.The move, taken under emergency powers more normally used during wartime or in the wake of disaster, has stunned local residents and the plant’s operator, Consumers Energy. “My family had a countdown for it closing, we couldn’t wait,” said Mark Oppenhuizen, who has lived in the shadow of the plant for 30 years and suspects its pollution worsened his wife’s lung disease.“I was flabbergasted when the administration said they had stopped it shutting down,” he said. “Why are they inserting themselves into a decision a company has made? Just because politically you don’t like it? It’s all so dumb.”The 23 May order and the latest edict, by the US energy secretary, Chris Wright, both warn that the regional grid would be strained by the closure of JH Campbell with local homes and businesses at risk of “curtailments or outages, presenting a risk to public health and safety” without it.“This order will help ensure millions of Americans can continue to access affordable, reliable, and secure baseload power regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining,” Wright said in a statement on Thursday.But Miso, the grid operator for Michigan and 14 other states, has stressed it has had “adequate resources to meet peak demand this summer” without JH Campbell and Consumers Energy had already set about making plans for life after its last remaining coal plant.“What’s remarkable is that this is the first time the energy secretary has used these powers without being asked to do so by the market operator or power plant operator,” said Timothy Fox, an energy analyst at ClearView. “It shows the Trump administration is prepared to take muscular actions to keep its preferred power sources online.”View image in fullscreenWright – whose department has bizarrely taken to tweeting pictures of lumps of coal with the words “She’s an icon. She’s a legend” – has said the US “has got to stop closing coal plants” to help boost electricity generation to meet demand that is escalating due to the growth of artificial intelligence.The administration has also issued a separate emergency declaration to keep open a gas plant in Pennsylvania, although it has sought to kill off wind and solar projects, which Trump has called “ugly” and “disgusting”.The president, who solicited and received major donations from coal, oil and gas interests during his election campaign, has signed an executive order aimed at reviving what he calls “beautiful, clean coal” and took the remarkable step of asking fossil fuel companies to email requests to be exempt from pollution laws, again under emergency powers.So far, 71 coal plants, along with dozens of other chemical, copper smelting and other polluting facilities, have received “pollution passes” from the Trump administration according to a tally by the Environmental Defense Fund, allowing greater emissions of airborne toxins linked to an array of health problems. Coal is, despite Trump’s claims, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels and the leading source of planet-heating pollution.Trump has launched a “political takeover of the electricity grid” to favor fossil fuels, according to Caroline Reiser, an attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The result of this will be higher electricity bills, more pollution in our communities and a worsening climate crisis,” she added.In Michigan, the cost of keeping JH Campbell open is set to be steep. Consumers Energy initially estimated its closure would save ratepayers $600m by 2040 as it shifts to cheaper, cleaner energy sources such as solar and wind.Reversing this decision costs $1m a day in operating costs, an imposition that midwest residents will have to meet through their bills. It is understood the company privately told outside groups it fears the administration could keep adding 90-day emergency orders for the entire remainder of Trump’s term.“Consumers Energy continues to comply with the [Department of Energy] order and will do so as long as it is in effect,” a company spokesperson said. “We are pursuing recovery of the costs of running the Campbell plant in a proceeding currently before [the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission]. Timely cost recovery is essential.”Should the Trump administration go further and force all of the US fossil fuel plants set to retire by 2028 to continue operating, it will cost American ratepayers as much as $6bn a year in extra bills, a new report by a coalition of green groups has found.This would almost certainly be met by legal action – Dana Nessel, Michigan’s attorney general, has already filed a lawsuit arguing the “arbitrary and illegal order” to extend JH Campbell’s lifespan will unfairly heap costs upon households in the state.Trump’s efforts may bear some fruit, with US coal production expected to tick up slightly this year, although the longer-term trend for coal is one of decline amid cheaper gas and renewables. “The administration may slow the retirement trend although they are unlikely to stop it,” said ClearView’s Fox. “The economics don’t change but the administration could be a savior for these plants at least while Donald Trump is in office.”For those living next to and downwind of coal plants, there is a cost to be paid that isn’t just monetary. Tiny soot particles from burned coal can bury themselves deep into the lungs, causing potentially deadly respiratory and heart problems.The closure of such plants can lift this burden dramatically – a recent study found that in the month after a coal facility was closed near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 2016, the number of childhood asthma visits to local hospitals declined by 41% and then continued to fall by about 4% each month.The study shows “the closure of a major industrial pollution source can lead to immediate and lasting improvements in the lung health of the those who live nearby”, said Wuyue Yu, research co-author and postdoctoral fellow at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine.For those living in the township of Port Sheldon, a mostly bucolic setting on the shore of the vast Lake Michigan, a pollution-free future beckoned once JH Campbell had been scheduled to close, with lofty plans for new parkland, housing and a battery plant touted for the site.View image in fullscreenNow there is uncertainty. Last week, a few dozen residents and activists held a protest event next to the sprawling plant, which hummed and whirred in the summer heat, one 650ft chimney puncturing the horizon, another, smaller flue striped red and white, like a candy cane.Dozens of train cars full of coal, hastily procured after the plant’s supply was used up ahead of a closure that has been scheduled for four years, backed up in the sunshine. When burned in the huge 1.5GW plant, this coal emits about 7.7m tons of carbon dioxide a year.“Trump is just trying to keep the money coming into coal companies as long as he can, I suppose,” said David Hoekema, who has lived a couple of miles from the plant since 2006 and has had to clean coal dust from his windows. Trump easily won this county, called Ottawa, in last year’s election, but Hoekema said even his staunchest conservative neighbors don’t want the coal plant.“I’ve not met anyone along the lake shore who says, ‘Oh yeah, let’s keep this open’ – even the conservative Republicans are concerned about their health,” he said. “Republican ideology says local control is best but the Trump administration is saying, ‘We don’t care what the hell states do, we will impose our order on them.’ I know there’s a lot of competition, but this would have to be one of their craziest decisions.”The Department of Energy did not respond to questions about its plan for JH Campbell once its latest extension expires. The battle over the coal plant’s future has taken place to a backdrop of a scorching summer in Michigan, one of its hottest on record, with algal blooms sprouting in its lakes, both symptoms of an unfolding climate crisis.“The talk in neighborhoods has been how hot it’s been this summer – my kid was prepared to be outside every day and it’s been so hot so often it’s been irresponsible to do that,” said Stephen Wooden, a Democratic state lawmaker who added that Michigan residents are also “pissed off” about increasing power bills.“We’re seeing the impacts of climate change daily, it is impacting our state,” Wooden said. “And this is being caused by the continuation of outdated, expensive fossil fuels that Donald Trump wants to prop up.” More

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      Scientists rush to bolster climate finding Trump administration aims to undo

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

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      The Trump administration has decided coal is female – here’s why | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Have you ever tossed and turned at night wondering what the correct pronouns are for a lump of coal? No, me neither. However, it seems someone at the US Department of Energy has devoted a few spare brain cells to this matter and decided that coal is a she/her.Co-opting a phrase adopted by the LGBTQ+ community, the official energy department X account tweeted on 31 July: “She’s an icon. She’s a legend. And she is the moment,” alongside a sparkling picture of coal. This comes as the Trump administration devotes considerable energy to making fossil fuels great again. The president has signed numerous executive orders aimed at “Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry” and reversed Biden-era pollution regulations on coal-fired power plants. These plants, according to a 2023 report, killed at least 460,000 Americans over the past two decades. Deaths declined when the environmental regulations that Donald Trump is so scornful of were put in place.Why is the Trump administration, which seems to think women are objects, so keen on personifying coal? Is it for poetic effect? Or are they trying to sanitise the deadly impact of coal pollution and associate it with mother nature? I suspect the second motive. Ships, for example, have traditionally been referred to as “she”, possibly because sailors saw them as a maternal protector. Countries can also be classified as female – particularly when a man thinks their violent actions need to be defended. In 2023, shortly after the 7 October attacks, at a time when Gaza was being bombed and blockaded by Israel, Keir Starmer said Israel had “the right to defend herself”.Then again, sometimes the short answer to why things are unnecessarily gendered is simply “lazy sexism”. For a long time, Atlantic hurricanes were given only female names. When feminists started to challenge this in the 1980s, some people argued that storms would be taken seriously only if they evoked female fury. Years after meteorologists finally changed the policy, a 1986 Washington Post editorial lamented: “Somehow many of the male names don’t convey either the romance or the urgency that circumstances might warrant.” This has been much debated and it’s not clear whether gendering a storm makes any difference to public safety. As for the weird social media post gendering coal? It feels like a smokescreen to get people chattering online as the world burns. Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist 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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      ‘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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      Democrats and climate groups ‘too polite’ in fight against ‘malevolent’ fossil fuel giants, says key senator

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      The Democratic party and the climate movement have been “too cautious and polite” and should instead be denouncing the fossil fuel industry’s “huge denial operation”, the US senator Sheldon Whitehouse said.“The fossil fuel industry has run the biggest and most malevolent propaganda operation the country has ever seen,” the Rhode Island Democrat said in an interview Monday with the global media collaboration Covering Climate Now. “It is defending a $700-plus billion [annual] subsidy” of not being charged for the health and environmental damages caused by burning fossil fuels. “I think the more people understand that, the more they’ll be irate [that] they’ve been lied to.” But, he added, “Democrats have not done a good job of calling that out.”Whitehouse is among the most outspoken climate champions on Capitol Hill, and on Wednesday evening, he delivered his 300th Time to Wake Up climate speech on the floor of the Senate.He began giving these speeches in 2012, when Barack Obama was in his first term, and has consistently criticized both political parties for their lackluster response to the climate emergency. The Obama White House, he complained, for years would not even “use the word ‘climate’ and ‘change’ in the same paragraph”.While Whitehouse slams his fellow Democrats for timidity, he blasts Republicans for being in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry, an entity whose behavior “has been downright evil”, he said. “To deliberately ignore [the laws of physics] for short-term profits that set up people for huge, really bad impacts – if that’s not a good definition of evil, I don’t know what is.”The American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s trade association, says on its website that “API and its members commit to delivering solutions that reduce the risks of climate change while meeting society’s growing energy needs”.Long before Donald Trump reportedly told oil company CEOs he would repeal Joe Biden’s climate policies if they contributed $1bn to his 2024 presidential campaign, Republicans went silent on climate change in return for oil industry money, Whitehouse asserted. The key shift came after the supreme court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which struck down limits on campaign spending. Before that, some GOP senators had sponsored climate bills, and John McCain urged climate action during his 2008 presidential campaign.But Citizens United, Whitehouse said, “told the fossil fuel industry: ‘The door’s wide open – spend any money you want in our elections’”. The industry, he said, promised the Republican party “unlimited amounts of money” in return for stepping away from bipartisan climate action: “And since 2010, there has not been a single serious bipartisan measure in the Senate.”Whitehouse said that after delivering 300 climate speeches on the Senate floor, he has learned to shift from talking about the “facts of climate science and the effects on human beings to calling out the fossil fuels’ massive climate denial operation”.He said: “Turns out, none of [the science] really matters while the operation is controlling things in Congress. I could take facts from colleagues’ home states right to them, and it would make no difference because of this enormous, multibillion-dollar political club that can [punish] anyone who crosses them.”Most Republicans even stay silent despite climate change’s threat to property values and other traditional GOP priorities, Whitehouse said. He noted that even the Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell – who is not known for climate bona fides, he said – testified before the Senate in February that in 10-15 years there will be whole regions of the country where nobody can get a mortgage because extreme weather will make it impossible to afford or even obtain insurance.Democrats can turn all this to their advantage if they get “more vocal and aggressive”, Whitehouse argued. “The good news is that the American people hate dark money with a passion, and they hate it just as much, if not more, in districts that went for Trump as in districts that went for Biden.”Democrats also need to recognize “how much [public] support there is for climate action”, he said. “How do you have an issue that you win 74 [percent] to 12 [percent] and you don’t ride that horse as hard as you can?”Whitehouse said he was only estimating that 74% figure, but that’s exactly the percentage of Americans who want their government to take stronger climate action, according to the scientific studies informing the 89 Percent Project, the Guardian and other Covering Climate Now partner news outlets began reporting in April. Globally, the percentage ranges from 80% to 89%. Yet this overwhelming climate majority does not realize it is the majority, partly because that fact has been absent from most news coverage, social media and politicians’ statements.Democrats keep “getting caught in this stupid doom loop in which our pollsters say: ‘Well, climate’s not one of the top issues that voters care about, so then we don’t talk about it’,” said Whitehouse. “So it never becomes one of the top issues that voters care about. [But] if you actually go ask [voters] and engage on the issue, it explodes in enthusiasm. It has huge numbers when you bother to engage, and we just haven’t.”Nevertheless, Whitehouse is optimistic that climate denial won’t prevail forever. “Once this comes home to roost in people’s homes, in their family finances, in really harmful ways, that [will be] motivating in a way that we haven’t seen before around this issue,” he said. “And if we’re effective at communicating what a massive fraud has been pulled on the American public by the fossil fuel industry denial groups, then I think that’s a powerful combination.”This story is part of the 89% Project, an initiative of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now More

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      Trump’s EPA announces major rollbacks to power plant pollution limits

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      US power plants will be allowed to pollute nearby communities and the wider world with more unhealthy air toxins and an unlimited amount of planet-heating gases under new regulatory rollbacks proposed by Donald Trump’s administration, experts warned.The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) unveiled a plan on Wednesday that would repeal a landmark climate rule that aims to mostly eliminate greenhouse gases from power plants by the 2030s and would, separately, weaken another regulation that restricts power plants’ release of hazardous air pollutants such as mercury.“We choose to both protect the environment and grow the economy,” said Lee Zeldin, administrator of the EPA, at an event to announce the plans. He said the rollbacks will save households money while also defying what he called “the climate change cult”.The climate rule has “saddled our critical power sector with expensive, unreasonable and burdensome regulations”, Zeldin said. “American energy suffered and Americans who rely on reliable, affordable energy suffered. The good news is those days are over.”The EPA’s proposals will go out for public comment and are likely to face legal challenges.They target a rule crafted last year by the Biden administration to phase out emissions from electricity-producing fossil fuel plants, which are responsible for around a quarter of US greenhouse gases, and a regulation called the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, which Biden toughened in 2023 to slash harmful pollution suffered by communities.These rollbacks come despite overwhelming scientific evidence of the dire consequences of the worsening climate crisis and the harm caused by pollutants such as mercury, which can seep into water, soils and the air and has been linked to neurological damage in young children as well as heart, lung and immune system ailments in adults. Coal-fired power plants cause nearly half of all mercury emissions in the US, according to the EPA.More than 200 health experts wrote to the EPA on Wednesday warning the moves “would lead to the biggest pollution increases in decades and is a blatant give-away to polluters”. The experts added the reversals are “a direct contradiction to the Environmental Protection Agency’s mission of protecting public health and the environment”.Trump, however, has vowed to boost fossil fuel production at all costs, having reaped record donations from the oil and gas industry during his election campaign. At Wednesday’s EPA event, Zeldin was joined by eight lawmakers, all Republicans – Kevin Cramer, Troy Balderson, Brett Guthrie, Carol Miller, Dan Meuser, Rob Bresnahan, Michael Rulli and Riley Moore – who have collectively received more than $3m from fossil fuel donors in their own election campaigns, a Guardian analysis of the OpenSecrets database shows.Bresnahan, a Pennsylvania representative, holds personal financial interests in more than 20 fossil fuel companies.In justifying the deletion of the Biden climate plan, which the EPA previously estimated would deliver $370bn in net benefits, Zeldin has claimed that US power plants only produce a small and declining fraction of the world’s emissions. This is despite the fact that if these power plants were a country, it would be the sixth-largest emitter on the planet.Gina McCarthy, who was EPA administrator under Barack Obama, said that Zeldin’s “dismantling of our nation’s protections from power plant pollution is absolutely illogical and indefensible. It’s a purely political play that goes against decades of science and policy review.”“By giving a green light to more pollution, his legacy will forever be someone who does the bidding of the fossil fuel industry at the expense of our health,” she added. “Everyone will be affected by his actions, but the most vulnerable among us, our kids and grandkids, will suffer the most.”The EPA has embarked upon a wide-ranging blitz upon environmental regulations since Trump became president, setting about removing or loosening clean air and water rules that, collectively, were on track to save 200,000 American lives in the decades ahead.Trump, who has adopted the mantra of “drill, baby, drill”, has claimed unhindered fossil fuel production will bring down energy costs, although he has sought to hobble clean energy such as solar and wind, which are typically the cheapest sources of new electricity generation.The rollbacks follow the second-hottest May on record globally, and a record-hot 2024 that unleashed a stunning number of climate-driven disasters and six weeks of extra-dangerously hot days. Experts have warned that sea level rise is on track to cause “catastrophic inland migration”, including to millions of Americans, with climate shocks set to wipe 50% from global GDP by the end of this century.“It’s completely reprehensible that Donald Trump would seek to roll back these lifesaving standards and do more harm to the American people and our planet just to earn some brownie points with the fossil fuel industry,” said Patrick Drupp, climate policy director at the Sierra Club.“This administration is transparently trading American lives for campaign dollars and the support of fossil fuel companies, and Americans ought to be disgusted and outraged that their government has launched an assault on our health and our future.” More

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      ‘A ruthless agenda’: charting 100 days of Trump’s onslaught on the environment

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      Donald Trump has never been mistaken for an environmentalist, having long called the climate crisis a “giant hoax” and repeatedly lauding the supposed virtues of fossil fuels.But the US president’s onslaught upon the natural world in this administration’s first 100 days has surprised even those who closely charted his first term, in which he rolled back environmental rules and tore the US from the Paris climate agreement.This time, the mantra “drill, baby, drill” has been used to justify a hyperactive series of actions to reverse rules designed to protect clean air and water, open up vast tracts of land, ocean and even the seabed to mining, fire federal scientists en masse and downgrade the federal response to the disasters that stem from a warming world.Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is attempting to roll back toxic regulations that were calculated to save an estimated 200,000 Americans’ lives in the years ahead, his Department of the Interior is looking to shrink national monuments and his scientific agencies are degrading the basic data collection required for climate assessments and even weather forecasts.This burst of activity faces a barrage of legal action, with the courts already taking a dim view of the administration’s attempts to skirt usual practice in its haste to deregulate. Even with a rightwing-dominated supreme court, many of these executive orders are expected to founder.However, the US must accelerate efforts to cut emissions if climate goals are to be met, half of Americans still have to endure unsafe air and endangered species and public lands face pressure from a changing climate. The next few years will see little remedy to these growing problems from the White House.“The pace of announcements may slow at some point but the pressure on our regulatory system and our democracy will not only continue, but ramp up,” said Michael Burger, a climate law expert at Columbia University.“The result will be fewer environmental protections and more people suffering the public health consequences of more pollution. It’s that straightforward.” Oliver MilmanHistoric rollbacks of environmental regulations What has the administration done:

      Taken more than 140 actions to roll back environmental rules and push for greater use of fossil fuels.

      Set about rewriting regulations that limit pollution from cars, trucks and power plants.

      Officially reconsidering whether greenhouse gases actually cause harm to public health.

      Legally targeted states that have their own laws on tackling the climate crisis.

      Speeded up environmental reviews of drilling projects, from years to just a few weeks.

      Winding back water efficiency standards for showers and toilets and halting a phase-out of plastic straws
      View image in fullscreenAnalysis and reaction: When campaigning for president, Donald Trump promised to torch environmental regulations if fossil fuel companies were able to donate enough money to propel him to the White House. He has set about fulfilling this pledge in dizzying fashion.By the Guardian’s count, Trump’s administration has taken more than 140 actions to weaken or rescind environmental rules and to escalate the use of fossil fuels in his first 100 days – more than all of the rollbacks of his entire first term.The drumbeat of this effort, largely via a blizzard of executive orders and agency memos, to eviscerate rules designed to protect Americans’ air, water and a livable climate, has been relentless. “What we’ve seen in this first 100 days is unprecedented – the deregulatory ambition of this administration is mind-blowing,” said Burger of Columbia University.In a single day in March, Trump’s EPA launched 31 different actions to refashion pollution laws for cars, trucks and power plants and even re-evaluate whether greenhouse gases harm public health – a key finding that underpins US climate laws. It was a “dagger to the heart of the climate religion”, according to Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator.Zeldin has repeatedly touted the EPA’s record during the first 100 days, with the agency publishing a list of 100 environmental actions, including the cleanup of toxic waste and the testing of chemicals.But the administration has also sought to ease restrictions upon coal plants dumping their toxic ash and mercury and to scale back a plan to prevent states from wafting their pollution to their neighbors. Consideration of the climate crisis has been removed from federal spending decisions and disaster recovery, pipeline safety standards are to be relaxed and environmental permit approvals speeded up from years to just weeks.Places of refuge for nature and carbon storage, such as oceans and national forests, will be opened up for the extraction of fish and timber while endangered species laws are set to be upended and, if the administration gets its way, essentially neutered.Not content with the reorientation of the federal government’s response to the climate crisis, Trump has ordered his Department of Justice to target states that have their own climate laws. He has also ordered the expiration of environment and energy regulations across 25 different laws, usually a responsibility of Congress.Trump has even used the power of his office to attend to his own fixations around shower water pressure, which he considers too weak, and paper straws, which he dislikes compared with the plastic alternative. “There doesn’t seem to be any strategy to this but I feel like I have policy whiplash,” said Gina McCarthy, who was Joe Biden’s top climate adviser.“We see an administration that doesn’t care about these things and is all about the whims of President Trump. Executive orders are not laws, though, and we spend a great deal of time focusing on them when most of them are highly illegal and won’t go anywhere.” Oliver MilmanTrump’s ‘drill, baby, drill’ agendaWhat the administration has done:

      Trump signed executive orders to ease restrictions on fossil fuel extraction and exports, pledging to “unleash American energy”.

      He tapped fossil fuel-supporting appointees to head up crucial federal agencies, including Chris Wright, a former fracking CEO, for energy secretary; Doug Burgum, former Republican governor of North Dakota – the third largest oil and natural gas producer in the country – to lead the interior department (DOI); and Lee Zeldin, a former Republican congressperson to head the EPA.

      Trump offered the fossil fuel industry – which lavished record levels of donations on him and Congress – an exemption from the tariffs he presented in April (and which he placed on pause shortly thereafter).
      Analysis and reaction: Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the youth-led environmental justice group Sunrise Movement said: “Donald Trump’s actions on climate are part of a ruthless agenda to prop up big oil and reward the billionaires bankrolling his campaigns. Big oil’s bribe paid off.”Trump’s loyalty to the fossil fuel industry has not, however, shielded fossil fuel companies from the fallout of his erratic policymaking. The domestic oil industry is currently facing the some of the lowest prices for crude it has seen in years. The Dow Jones’s US Oil and Gas Index, which tracks 42 fossil fuel companies, plummeted by more than 15% since Trump announced the tariffs on 2 April, sinking to its lowest level since 2022, before a slow, partial rebound.View image in fullscreenMeanwhile, Trump’s tariffs have already begun driving up the costs of oil production, with new taxes on steel and aluminum inflating the costs of building fossil fuel infrastructure. And his calls to “drill, baby, drill” have raised concerns about oil demand, since an increase in supply could push down prices, thereby limiting profit.Though the oil industry has publicly praised Trump, they have quietly showed they are anxious about the economic implications of his policies. In a recent anonymized survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, for instance, fossil fuel executives brazenly criticized Trump. “The administration’s chaos is a disaster for the commodity markets,” one oil boss said. “‘Drill, baby, drill’ is nothing short of a myth and populist rallying cry. Tariff policy is impossible for us to predict and doesn’t have a clear goal. We want more stability.”At a major Texas oil and gas conference in May, fossil fuel top brass echoed these criticisms.Though the Trump administration has not ended the chaos created by its policies, it has given big oil other gifts. In recent weeks, for instance, Trump signed an executive order instructing the Department of Justice to “stop the enforcement” of state climate laws forcing polluting companies to pay for climate damages, and also targeting dozens of lawsuits that accuse big oil of intentionally covering up the climate risks of their products. Dharna NoorHollowing out agencies including Noaa, Fema and DOIWhat has the administration done

      Sweeping cuts to federal agencies on the forefront of the climate crisis, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), the DOI and the Department of Agriculture (USDA), and widespread firings of climate scientists and regulation experts.

      Withdrawal from contracts and canceled grant funding; datasets pulled from public-facing websites; funding for regional climate centers suspended.

      National Climate Assessment contract canceled; hundreds of experts dismissed.

      Executive order to expedite deep-sea mining for minerals.

      Plans to dismantle a key Fema disaster preparedness program.

      Weather balloon launches stopped due to staff shortages.

      Censorship of climate-related words, flagged in studies, contracts and agency documents/websites.

      Plans to drain funding for climate, weather and ocean laboratories.
      Analysis and reaction: Trump wasted no time before he unleashed an all-out assault on environmental science, gutting the federal agencies positioned on the frontlines of the climate crisis, firing hundreds of researchers, staffers and forecasters and pulling public access to critical resources and data.Vital work to understand, prepare and respond to changes caused by global heating has slowed or stopped as teams try to navigate the chaos, while the threat of more severe budget cuts and political crackdowns lingers. The moves largely bypassed input or oversight from Congress as Trump used executive orders and actions undertaken by the billionaire Elon Musk-led “department of government efficiency”, even on budget issues typically governed by the legislative branch.View image in fullscreenThousands of federal workers were culled from the ranks across the country’s premier scientific agencies – including at Noaa and Nasa – and in roles across the government that typically facilitate regulatory process or research. Many of those fired were probationary employees, a classification applied to the first year, or sometimes two, in a position.The widespread firings were challenged in court, forcing the administration to rehire workers and put them on administrative leave, only to fire them again when legally in the clear. In the end, at least 121,000 federal workers were fired, leaving significant holes in their wake.Thousands more workers have opted to take offers of early retirement or voluntary separations. At Noaa alone, roughly 27,000 years of collective experience was lost, according to Craig McLean, the former director of Noaa research.“We lost our promising new talent in the probationary firings and now we’ve lost our institutional knowledge,” a Noaa employee said of the resignations, asking for anonymity out of fear of retribution.While the losses are expected to have a profound effect on the American public, the impact will be felt globally too.Among the hundreds of positions lost were workers who track El Niño-La Niña weather patterns around the world, people who model severe storm risks, and scientists contributing to global understanding of what could happen as the world warms.“I want to emphasize that this blunt smashing of federal agencies is limiting the ability of our nation to respond not only now, but in the future,” said Dr Gretchen Goldman, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s dismantling the very infrastructure by which we collect data, foster expertise and collaboration, and have the people and processes in place to take action.”Already, the staff shortages have hampered data collection and field offices have had to stop deploying tools that gather essential intel.“The effects may not be obvious until there is a major tornado outbreak, or a hurricane landfall downwind, that doesn’t go so well,” said climate scientist Daniel Swain, who spoke about the gravity of this issue during a recent broadcast on YouTube. But, he said, the actions taken in the first 100 days were just the beginning.“What we have seen so far is just the tip of the iceberg,” he said, noting recently leaked budget documents that outline the president’s plans to continue gutting climate science-focused federal work. If the administration has its way, he said, “it would probably spell the end of most publicly funded climate research in the United States”. Gabrielle CanonPublic lands targetedWhat has the administration done

      Rescinded protections for hundreds of millions of acres of federal waters.

      Initiated major changes to National Environmental Policy Act (Nepa) regulations that require federal projects consider environmental impacts and enable public oversight/comment, severely reducing the often years-long environmental impact process to 28 days.

      Ordered the end of American Climate Corps jobs that create climate and public lands-supporting positions.

      Plans to fast-track controversial deep-sea mining and accelerating approvals for mining, drilling, and fossil fuels extraction on public lands..

      Proposed rolling back protections in the Endangered Species Act.

      Plans to rescind Bureau of Land Management rules that protect millions of acres in Alaska and across the US west; planned repeal of BLM Public Lands Rule.

      Emergency situation determination issued by the USDA to open logging on more than 100m acres of national forests and an executive orders to increase and accelerate logging on federal lands. And revoked a Biden order that protected old-growth forests.

      Joint taskforce between DOI and the Department of Housing and Urban Development to examine federal lands for housing development as the administration pushes for the sell-off of public lands.
      Analysis and reaction: Trump may be one of the very few Americans who doesn’t cherish the country’s public lands. Voter support for these roughly 640m acres – forests and deserts, parks and monuments among them – is stalwart and one of the few issues bridged by an otherwise vast political divide.But even with broad popularity and a rapidly escalating interest in outdoor recreation that’s fueled both local economies and international tourism, the administration has made it a priority to shrink land management agencies, reduce protections once governed by them and possibly even diminish the holdings of lands under federal jurisdiction.View image in fullscreenThousands of employees were fired or took deals to leave, and agencies are struggling to hire seasonal employees who typically run operations during the busiest seasons. Still, more cuts are being planned as Trump seeks to reshape the federal government. Reports found the Department of Interior has plans to cull roughly 25% of its workforce, and employees at the US Forest Service are bracing for a broad reduction in force that has yet to be detailed. The National Park Service alone has suffered a 13% reduction in staff already.Sweeping firings left behind gaping holes in an already short-staffed workforce at parks and forests, leaving some departments with workforce levels typically seen during government shutdowns according to some experts.Toilets, trash and overgrown trails may become a common feature in highly trafficked areas, along with increasing risks of trampled conservation areas, a lack of capacity for the study of threatened plants and animals, and lost support that ensures safety measures are followed. Visitation has surged in recent years, adding new strains on ageing infrastructure and more opportunities for injuries and wildlife conflicts, as dangers from extreme conditions fueled by the climate crisis continue to mount.“Scientists who should be doing their job tracking the wildlife and the ecosystems in these parks, are being told they have to take restroom cleaning shifts,” said Aaron Weiss, the deputy director for the Center for Western Priorities. “That’s incredibly important in parks,” he added, “but we shouldn’t be assigning those jobs to scientists because Doge has fired all the custodial staff.”It’s not just about recreation, though. The administration has also made moves to open the country’s holdings of conservation areas, protected habitats and wilderness to extraction and development. There have been a series of orders from the administration that call for increased logging, fossil fuels leases, and mining as Trump pushes for expanding industry access.Ben Vizzachero, a federal worker who initially lost his job during the federal firing spree but who was later brought into his position said the outlook still remained bleak for US public lands. “The Trump administration is waging a campaign of bullying and harassment, trying to shrink the federal workforce by any means,” he said, noting that removing regulators and regulations will “open lands for mining, logging, drilling, and other destruction”.These sweeping changes and the threats to public lands come as they continue to be widely supported and cherished by the American people. “The fight to protect our public lands is embedded within the fight for our democracy itself.” Gabrielle CanonCancelling environmental justice schemes, and hitting US farmers What has the administration done

      Trump immediately rescinded a slew of executive orders that directed federal agencies to prioritize tackling environmental racism and other injustices – including one dating back more than 30 years.

      A separate executive order focused on ending government-sponsored diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and so-called “illegal DEI” efforts in the private sector also targeted environmental justice by wrongly conflating the two. This called for the closures of all environmental justice offices and positions in the federal government – including the office of environmental justice and external civil rights which was created to support EPA efforts to help improve access to clean water, air and land in communities disproportionately affected by environmental pollution, as well as enforce federal civil rights laws.

      Mass layoffs in the EPA, USDA and health and human services department which will disproportionately hit access to adequate, clean and affordable food, water, air and energy for low-income and rural communities.

      Freezing the Biden-era Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund – more than $20bn of competitive grants available to states, cities, tribes and other eligible groups to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution, particularly in areas most affected by climate crisis and excluded from mainstream finance.

      Terminating climate and conservation grants to US farmers including the Biden-era five-year $3.2bn real-life study into the effectiveness of conservation practices such as cover cropping for commodity farms.
      View image in fullscreenAnalysis and reaction: From day one of Trump 2.0, the president has revealed his intention to willfully conflate environmental justice – efforts to acknowledge and correct decades of harm caused by placing polluting factories, landfills, fossil fuel infrastructure and highways in low-income and Indigenous people and communities of color – with what he and his allies believe to be woke, anti-white DEI policies that proliferated in response to the BLM movement.Citing Trump’s crusade against DEI, the justice department terminated a two-year investigation into a petrochemical plant in LePlace, Louisiana, accused of emitting extraordinarily high levels of the cancer-causing chemical chloroprene into the majority Black community. Then, in an unprecedented move, his justice department terminated a 2023 landmark settlement with the state of Alabama requiring health authorities to provide the majority-Black Lowndes county with basic sewage and sanitation services – which an earlier investigation found had been denied for decades due to environmental racism. Several other consent decrees involving egregious polluters are feared to be under threat.Not to be outdone, Robert F Kennedy Jr, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), dismantled the office and fired the entire staff at the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (Liheap). States were still waiting for about $380m to be disbursed this year, when the bipartisan program that helps low-income Americans struggling to pay energy bills so they don’t die from the extreme heat or cold was disbanded. In a leaked HHS budget for 2026 seen by the Guardian, Liheap was terminated – which unless revived will increase heat and cold deaths in the richest country in the world.The $20bn Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, and the portal, has been frozen on and off since February, causing chaos and uncertainty for recipients as this makes its way through the courts. The money was appropriated by Congress through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and finalized before the election, and it is widely agreed (outside Trump world) that the fund cannot legally be cancelled without legislation. The fear is that the Republican-majority Congress will succeed in pushing this through in the continuing resolution for the 2025 budget, which should be passed in May.“The administration is trying to make it so difficult that people will give up, but our quest for environmental justice [has been waged] for 40 years and we will not stop now,” said one veteran environmental justice leader who asked not to be named in fear that his organization, a recipient of the fund, would be targeted. “The climate crisis is real; environmental racism is real. Those are the facts.” Nina LakhaniTearing up US global climate pledgesWhat has the administration done

      Pulled out of the 2015 Paris accords, which the Biden administration rejoined in 2021 – four years after Trump first withdrew the US from the global climate mitigation pact.

      Withdrew the US from the loss and damage fund – a global agreement under which the developed countries most responsible for the climate crisis pledged to partly compensate developing countries for irreversible harms caused by global heating.

      The EPA missed the annual 15 April deadline to submit data on US greenhouse gas emissions to the United Nations – the first time in 30 years.
      Analysis and reaction: The US is currently the second biggest greenhouse gas emitter, so withdrawing from the Paris agreement and its legally binding commitment to reduce emissions will further weaken global efforts to slow global heating – with catastrophic consequences for communities vulnerable to climate shocks in the US and globally. It takes a year for the withdrawal to go into effect, but missing the 15 April emissions reporting deadline, which never happened even during Trump’s first term, has raised suspicion that this administration is willing to violate international rules and could be preparing to exit from the entire UNFCCC.View image in fullscreenAnother major concern is climate finance. As the world’s biggest economy (and worst historical polluter), the US has been a major, albeit inadequate, contributor to global climate funds to help developing countries that are not responsible for global heating in their climate mitigation and adaptation efforts. It has already pulled out of the loss and damage fund, adopted at the Cop28 UN summit in 2023 after years of diplomatic and grassroots advocacy – and despite US efforts to block it. The US has long obstructed progress on global climate action and had pledged a measly $17.5m (£13.5m) to the fund; the cynical move to withdraw from loss and damage efforts – while bolstering fossil fuel production – was widely condemned by the global south.Harjeet Singh, a climate activist and founding director of the India-based Satat Sampada Climate Foundation, said: “As the largest historical emitter, the United States bears a significant share of the blame for the climate adversities affecting vulnerable populations worldwide. The decision by the Trump administration exemplifies a longstanding pattern of obstruction by the US government in securing necessary finance for addressing climate impacts, [and] undermines global efforts to deliver climate justice.” Nina Lakhani More

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      Fifteen years after Deepwater Horizon, Trump is setting the stage for disaster | Terry Garcia

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      Last month, I joined nearly 500 former and current employees of National Geographic, where I was executive vice-president and chief science and exploration officer for 17 years, urging the institution to take a public stance against the Trump administration’s reckless attacks on science. Our letter pointed out that the programs being dismantled are “imperative for the success of our country’s economy and are the foundation of our progress and wellbeing. They make us safer, stronger and more prosperous.” We warned that gutting them is a recipe for disaster.In the face of this danger, none of us can remain silent.I say this from the unique perspective of having been closely involved in the two most significant environmental disasters in US history: the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon oil spills. Fifteen years ago this Sunday, an enormous explosion tore through the BP Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and unleashed an environmental catastrophe that devastated the Gulf of Mexico. The explosion triggered the release of more than 3m barrels of oil that polluted 1,300 miles of coastline from Louisiana to Florida. Eleven lives were lost, ecosystems were ravaged and the economic toll soared into the billions.I served on the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, which investigated the root causes of the disaster, and before that I led the federal government’s implementation of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Restoration Plan. I have witnessed first-hand the human and economic toll exacted by these events. Men and women who, for generations, had made a living from the sea were suddenly confronted with the possibility that an entire way of life would be lost.Despite such painful lessons of the past, we find ourselves once again hurtling toward disaster. The Trump administration’s personnel and programmatic cuts at science, environmental and safety agencies, and the wholesale rollback of environmental regulations, threaten to unravel decades of progress in safeguarding our country. These actions aren’t just misguided – they’re a dangerous rejection of the hard-won knowledge gained from former crises and a gamble we cannot afford to take.Among the many alarming moves by the Trump administration are plans to weaken offshore drilling safety measures implemented in response to the Deepwater Horizon calamity, such as the reversal of the Biden administration’s ban on drilling in sensitive coastal areas, including the Arctic, and the closure of regional offices responsible for oil spill response. Eliminating these measures demonstrates a callous disregard for lessons learned at a staggering human and economic cost.Disturbingly, these actions are but a small part of a larger effort to weaken environmental regulation and oversight under the guise of restoring government efficiency. Take the recent rollback of dozens of Environmental Protection Agency health and safety regulations and the reported plan to eliminate the agency’s scientific research office. The administration claims these moves will unleash US energy and lower the cost of living, when in fact the only thing they’re guaranteed to achieve is undermining fundamental protections that keep our air and water clean. The mass layoffs and plans to dismember the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), where I was deputy administrator from 1997 to the end of 1999 and prior to that its general counsel, have nothing to do with cost savings – they’re an outright assault on science. Targeting programs that monitor ocean health, track ecosystem changes and study climate impacts – essential to understanding and mitigating looming threats – will leave us blind to and defenseless against the dangers ahead.Cuts to science funding amplify the harms, jeopardizing our ability to innovate solutions, assess risks and respond effectively to crises. In 2010, we lacked even basic data about ocean conditions in areas around the ruptured Deepwater Horizon well. This absence of critical knowledge hindered response and recovery efforts, including understanding the impacts of using oil dispersants in the deep ocean. After the spill, robust government support for science enabled researchers to develop new response and cleanup technologies, better understand long-term ecological impacts, and provide critical insights that helped shape environmental and safety policy. Without government support, these advances would have been impossible – and they will be impossible in the future as funding is slashed.The Trump administration’s insistence that its actions will reduce bureaucratic burdens or spur economic growth is false and deliberately misleading. It’s gaslighting on a national scale. The only sure result is that the burden of risk will be shifted on to communities, small businesses and ordinary Americans. The destruction of habitats and livelihoods is not an abstract consequence of environmental disasters. They devastate families, cripple economies, poison food supplies and leave communities struggling for decades. Businesses are boarded up, and community members suffer life-altering health consequences. After the Deepwater Horizon spill, losses in commercial and recreational fishing, tourism and property values amounted to tens of billions of dollars; cleanup and restoration costs exceeded $60bn – far surpassing what preventive measures would have required.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump and his industry allies will paint such an event as an unforeseeable tragedy, a terrible mishap, a sad accident. Don’t buy it.As we mark this somber anniversary, we cannot allow the cautionary tales of Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon to fade into history, only to be repeated when the next horror strikes. Science and environmental protections are our first line of defense against catastrophe. Now is the time to demand that our government stop the madness and commit to strong environmental and safety regulations, rigorous scientific research, and adequate funding for the agencies tasked with protecting our health and shared resources. The price of ignoring science and dismantling regulations is far too high.

      Terry Garcia was National Geographic’s executive vice-president and chief science and exploration officer for 17 years. He also served as the assistant secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and deputy administrator of Noaa, as well as its general counsel More