climate change

Analysis: The Trump administration’s assault on climate action

clean air act, climate change, Earth science, EPA, global warming, misinformation, Policy, Science, Supreme Court / Tim Belzer / August 6, 2025

Official actions don’t challenge science, while unofficial docs muddy the waters.

Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency made lots of headlines by rejecting the document that establishes its ability to regulate the greenhouse gases that are warming our climate. While the legal assault on regulations grabbed most of the attention, it was paired with two other actions that targeted other aspects of climate change: the science underlying our current understanding of the dramatic warming the Earth is experiencing, and the renewable energy that represents our best chance of limiting this warming.

Collectively, these actions illuminate the administration’s strategy for dealing with a problem that it would prefer to believe doesn’t exist, despite our extensive documentation of its reality. They also show how the administration is tailoring its approach to different audiences, including the audience of one who is demanding inaction.

When in doubt, make something up

The simplest thing to understand is an action by the Department of the Interior, which handles permitting for energy projects on federal land—including wind and solar, both onshore and off. That has placed the Interior in an awkward position. Wind and solar are now generally the cheapest ways to generate electricity and are currently in the process of a spectacular boom, with solar now accounting for over 80 percent of the newly installed capacity in the US.

Yet, when Trump issued an executive order declaring an energy emergency, wind and solar were notably excluded as potential solutions. Language from Trump and other administration officials has also made it clear that renewable energy is viewed as an impediment to the administration’s pro-fossil fuel agenda.

But shutting down federal permitting for renewable energy with little more than “we don’t like it” as justification could run afoul of rules that forbid government decisions from being “arbitrary and capricious.” This may explain why the government gave up on its attempts to block the ongoing construction of an offshore wind farm in New York waters.

On Friday, the Interior announced that it had settled on a less arbitrary justification for blocking renewable energy on public land: energy density. Given a metric of land use per megawatt, wind and solar are less efficient than nuclear plants we can’t manage to build on time or budget, and therefore “environmentally damaging” and an inefficient use of federal land, according to the new logic. “The Department will now consider proposed energy project’s capacity density when assessing the project’s potential energy benefits to the nation and impacts to the environment and wildlife,” Interior declared.

This is only marginally more reasonable than Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s apparent inability to recognize that solar power can be stored in batteries. But it has three features that will be recurring themes. There’s at least a token attempt to provide a justification that might survive the inevitable lawsuits, while at the same time providing fodder for the culture war that many in the administration demand. And it avoids directly attacking the science that initially motivated the push toward renewables.

Energy vs. the climate

That’s not to say that climate change isn’t in for attack. It’s just that the attacks are being strategically separated from the decisions that might produce a lawsuit. Last week, the burden of taking on extremely well-understood and supported science fell to the Department of Energy, which released a report on climate “science” to coincide with the EPA’s decision to give up on attempts to regulate greenhouse gases.

For those who have followed public debates over climate change, looking at the author list—John Christy, Judith Curry, Steven Koonin, Ross McKitrick, and Roy Spencer—will give you a very clear picture of what to expect. Spencer is a creationist, raising questions about his ability to evaluate any science free from his personal biases. (He has also said, “My job has helped save our economy from the economic ravages of out-of-control environmental extremism,” so it’s not just biology where he’s got these issues.) McKitrick is an economist who engaged in a multi-year attempt to raise doubt about the prominent “hockey stick” reconstruction of past climates, even as scientists were replicating the results. Etc.

The report is a master class in arbitrary and capricious decision-making applied to science. Sometimes the authors rely on the peer-reviewed literature. Other times they perform their own analysis for this document, in some cases coming up with almost comically random metrics for data. (Example: “We examine occurrences of 5-day deluges as follows. Taking the Pacific coast as an example, a 130-year span contains 26 5-year intervals. At each location we computed the 5-day precipitation totals throughout the year and selected the 26 highest values across the sample.” Why five days? Five-year intervals? Who knows.)

This is especially striking in a few cases where the authors choose references that were published a few years ago, and thus neatly avoid the dramatic temperature records that have been set over the past couple of years. Similarly, they sometimes use regional measures and sometimes use global ones. They demand long-term data in some contexts, while getting excited about two years of coral growth in the Great Barrier Reef. The authors highlight the fact that US tide gauges don’t show any indication of an acceleration in the rate of sea level rise while ignoring the fact that global satellite measures clearly do.

That’s not to say that there aren’t other problems. There’s some blatant misinformation, like claims that urbanization could be distorting the warming, which has already been tested extensively. (Notably, warming is most intense in the sparsely populated Arctic.) There’s also some creative use of language, like referring to the ocean acidification caused by CO₂ as “neutralizing ocean alkalinity.”

But the biggest bit of misinformation comes in the introduction, where the secretary of energy, Chris Wright, said of the authors, “I chose them for their rigor, honesty, and willingness to elevate the debate.” There is no reason to choose this group of marginal contrarians except the knowledge that they’d produce a report like this, thus providing a justification for those in the administration who want to believe it’s all a scam.

No science needed

The critical feature of the Department of Energy report is that it contains no policy actions; it’s purely about trying to undercut well-understood climate science. This means the questionable analyses in the report shouldn’t ever end up being tested in court.

That’s in contrast to the decision to withdraw the EPA’s endangerment finding regarding greenhouse gases. There’s quite an extensive history to the endangerment finding, but briefly, it’s the product of a Supreme Court decision (Massachusetts v. EPA), which compelled the EPA to evaluate whether greenhouse gases posed a threat to the US population as defined in the Clean Air Act. Both the Bush and Obama EPAs did so, thus enabling the regulation of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide.

Despite the claims in the Department of Energy report, there is comprehensive evidence that greenhouse gases are causing problems in the US, ranging from extreme weather to sea level rise. So while the EPA mentions the Department of Energy’s work a number of times, the actual action being taken skips over the science and focuses on legal issues. In doing so, it creates a false history where the endangerment finding had no legal foundation.

To re-recap, the Supreme Court determined that this evaluation was required by the Clean Air Act. George W. Bush’s administration performed the analysis and reached the exact same conclusion as the Obama administration (though the former chose to ignore those conclusions). Yet Trump’s EPA is calling the endangerment finding “an unprecedented move” by the Obama administration that involved “mental leaps” and “ignored Congress’ clear intent.” And the EPA presents the findings as strategic, “the only way the Obama-Biden Administration could access EPA’s authority to regulate,” rather than compelled by scientific evidence.

Fundamentally, it’s an ahistorical presentation; the EPA is counting on nobody remembering what actually happened.

The announcement doesn’t get much better when it comes to the future. The only immediate change will be an end to any attempts to regulate carbon emissions from motor vehicles, since regulations for power plants had been on hold due to court challenges. Yet somehow, the EPA’s statement claims that this absence of regulation imposed costs on people. “The Endangerment Finding has also played a significant role in EPA’s justification of regulations of other sources beyond cars and trucks, resulting in additional costly burdens on American families and businesses,” it said.

We’re still endangered

Overall, the announcements made last week provide a clear picture of how the administration intends to avoid addressing climate change and cripple the responses started by previous administrations. Outside of the policy arena, it will question the science and use partisan misinformation to rally its supporters for the fight. But it recognizes that these approaches aren’t flying when it comes to the courts.

So it will separately pursue a legal approach that seeks to undercut the ability of anyone, including private businesses, to address climate change, crafting “reasons” for its decisions in a way that might survive legal challenge—because these actions are almost certain to be challenged in court. And that may be the ultimate goal. The current court has shown a near-complete disinterest in respecting precedent and has issued a string of decisions that severely limit the EPA. It’s quite possible that the court will simply throw out the prior decision that compelled the government to issue an endangerment finding in the first place.

If that’s left in place, then any ensuing administrations can simply issue a new endangerment finding. If anything, the effects of climate change on the US population have become more obvious, and the scientific understanding of human-driven warming has solidified since the Bush administration first acknowledged them.

John is Ars Technica’s science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots.

Analysis: The Trump administration’s assault on climate action Read More »

Southwestern drought likely to continue through 2100, research finds

climate change, drought, Science, southwestern united states, syndication / Paul Patrick / July 20, 2025

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

The drought in the Southwestern US is likely to last for the rest of the 21st century and potentially beyond as global warming shifts the distribution of heat in the Pacific Ocean, according to a study published last week led by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin.

Using sediment cores collected in the Rocky Mountains, paleoclimatology records and climate models, the researchers found warming driven by greenhouse gas emissions can alter patterns of atmospheric and marine heat in the North Pacific Ocean in a way resembling what’s known as the negative phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), fluctuations in sea surface temperatures that result in decreased winter precipitation in the American Southwest. But in this case, the phenomenon can last far longer than the usual 30-year cycle of the PDO.

“If the sea surface temperature patterns in the North Pacific were just the result of processes related to stochastic [random] variability in the past decade or two, we would have just been extremely unlucky, like a really bad roll of the dice,” said Victoria Todd, the lead author of the study and a PhD student in geosciences at University of Texas at Austin. “But if, as we hypothesize, this is a forced change in the sea surface temperatures in the North Pacific, this will be sustained into the future, and we need to start looking at this as a shift, instead of just the result of bad luck.”

Currently, the Southwestern US is experiencing a megadrought resulting in the aridification of the landscape, a decades-long drying of the region brought on by climate change and the overconsumption of the region’s water. That’s led to major rivers and their basins, such as the Colorado and Rio Grande rivers, seeing reduced flows and a decline of the water stored in underground aquifers, which is forcing states and communities to reckon with a sharply reduced water supply. Farmers have cut back on the amount of water they use. Cities are searching for new water supplies. And states, tribes, and federal agencies are engaging in tense negotiations over how to manage declining resources like the Colorado River going forward.

Southwestern drought likely to continue through 2100, research finds Read More »

Ocean acidification crosses “planetary boundaries”

climate, climate change, ocean acidification, Science, syndication / Mike M. / June 10, 2025

A critical measure of the ocean’s health suggests that the world’s marine systems are in greater peril than scientists had previously realized and that parts of the ocean have already reached dangerous tipping points.

A study, published Monday in the journal Global Change Biology, found that ocean acidification—the process in which the world’s oceans absorb excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, becoming more acidic—crossed a “planetary boundary” five years ago.

“A lot of people think it’s not so bad,” said Nina Bednaršek, one of the study’s authors and a senior researcher at Oregon State University. “But what we’re showing is that all of the changes that were projected, and even more so, are already happening—in all corners of the world, from the most pristine to the little corner you care about. We have not changed just one bay, we have changed the whole ocean on a global level.”

The new study, also authored by researchers at the UK’s Plymouth Marine Laboratory and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), finds that by 2020 the world’s oceans were already very close to the “danger zone” for ocean acidity, and in some regions had already crossed into it.

Scientists had determined that ocean acidification enters this danger zone or crosses this planetary boundary when the amount of calcium carbonate—which allows marine organisms to develop shells—is less than 20 percent compared to pre-industrial levels. The new report puts the figure at about 17 percent.

“Ocean acidification isn’t just an environmental crisis, it’s a ticking time bomb for marine ecosystems and coastal economies,” said Steve Widdicombe, director of science at the Plymouth lab, in a press release. “As our seas increase in acidity, we’re witnessing the loss of critical habitats that countless marine species depend on and this, in turn, has major societal and economic implications.”

Scientists have determined that there are nine planetary boundaries that, once breached, risk humans’ abilities to live and thrive. One of these is climate change itself, which scientists have said is already beyond humanity’s “safe operating space” because of the continued emissions of heat-trapping gases. Another is ocean acidification, also caused by burning fossil fuels.

Ocean acidification crosses “planetary boundaries” Read More »

Trump just made it much harder to track the nation’s worst weather disasters

climate change, climate disasters, doge, extreme weather, NOAA, Policy, Science, trump administration, Weather, wildfires / Kris Guyer / May 9, 2025

The Trump administration’s steep staff cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) triggered shutdowns of several climate-related programs Thursday.

Perhaps most notably, the NOAA announced it would be shuttering the “billion-dollar weather and climate disasters” database for vague reasons. Since 1980, the database made it possible to track the growing costs of the nation’s most devastating weather events, critically pooling various sources of private data that have long been less accessible to the public.

In that time, 403 weather and climate disasters in the US triggered more than $2.945 trillion in costs, and NOAA notes that’s a conservative estimate. Considering that CNN noted the average number of disasters in the past five years jumped from nine annually to 24, shutting down the database could leave communities in the dark on costs of emerging threats. All the NOAA can likely say is to continue looking at the historic data to keep up with trends.

“In alignment with evolving priorities, statutory mandates, and staffing changes, NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) will no longer be updating the Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters product,” NOAA announced. “All past reports, spanning 1980-2024, and their underlying data remain authoritative, archived, and available,” NOAA said, but no data would be gathered for 2025 or any year after.

According to NCEI’s FAQ, every state has experienced at least one billion-dollar disaster since 1980, while some states, like Texas, have been hit by more than 100. The Central, South, and Southeast regions of the US are most likely to be hurt most by the data loss, as those regions “typically experience a higher frequency of billion-dollar disasters,” the FAQ said.

Trump just made it much harder to track the nation’s worst weather disasters Read More »

Montana’s Republican legislators fight back after successful youth climate lawsuit

climate change, climate lawsuit, montana, Policy, syndication / Rejus Almole / April 30, 2025

Montana Environmental Policy Act

Republican backlash could lead to changes in Montana’s courts and environmental laws.

Supporters gather at a theater next to the court house to watch the court proceedings for the nation’s first youth climate change trial at Montana’s First Judicial District Court on June 12, 2023 in Helena, Montana. Credit: William Campbell via Getty Images

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

In the wake of a high-profile court decision that upended the state of Montana’s climate policy, Republican lawmakers in the state are pushing a suite of bills that could gut the state’s ability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The full-court legislative press targets the state’s environmental analysis, air quality regulation, and judicial system. It stems from the Held v. Montana case in which 16 young people sued the state over its contributions to climate change, claiming its fossil fuel-centric approach to energy violated the state constitution’s guarantee of a “clean and healthful environment.” The plaintiffs won, and in December 2024, the Montana Supreme Court upheld their victory.

The case “didn’t just make headlines,” Montana Republican Representative Greg Oblander, a sponsor of one of the bills that could hobble climate action in the state, said in a press conference. “It sent shockwaves through the Montana economy.”

He said the case “was an open invitation for activists to weaponize our environmental laws against the very industries that keep Montana running and Montanans employed.”

The fallout of the Held decision animated the breadth of the state’s 90-day legislative session, poised to end by early May, and bills weakening the state’s bedrock environmental policy are almost certain to be signed into law by the state’s Republican governor. Nonetheless, the battle is likely to continue in the courts.

A clean and healthful environment

The Held decision hinged on Montana’s constitutional protections of the environment. Framers in the state’s 1972 Constitutional Convention took the state’s environmental woes seriously. Extractive industries like mining and logging had left a lasting environmental toll on the air, water, and land in the state, and for decades, the Anaconda Copper Mining Company wielded enormous power at the state legislature, resulting in large-scale mining, logging, and other extractive industry. Today, Montana is home to the largest complex of Superfund sites, or government toxic waste cleanups, in the country.

In response to that environmental degradation, Montana ultimately enshrined some of the strongest environmental protections in the country in its constitution, culminating in the right to “a clean and healthful environment.”

That right played a central role in the Held case. During the trial in the summer of 2023, the state argued that Montana’s contribution to greenhouse gases is but a fraction of a fraction of the world’s pool of emissions.

“Montana’s emissions are simply too minuscule to make any difference,” the state’s attorney argued. “Climate change is a global issue that effectively relegates Montana’s role to that of the spectator.” Meanwhile, the attorney for the young plaintiffs argued that the state’s contributions were equivalent to that of entire countries like the Netherlands, Pakistan, or Argentina, and was actively degrading Montana’s environment.

When the plaintiffs won the case, the state appealed to the Montana Supreme Court. In December 2024, that court also ruled against the state. “Montana’s right to a clean and healthful environment and environmental life support system includes a stable climate system,” Judge Kathy Seeley wrote in the court’s decision.

That decision also hinged on what the state considers when it conducts environmental review.

In 2011, the Montana legislature barred analyses required by the Montana Environmental Policy Act, or MEPA, from considering impacts outside the state. In 2023 the legislature honed MEPA’s focus even more, passing a provision that said greenhouse gas emissions could not be considered in the state’s environmental analyses. That limitation, the Supreme Court ruled, was unconstitutional. MEPA analyses, according to the decision, would have to account for projects’ emissions. Less than a month after the Supreme Court’s decision, Republican legislators set to figuring out how to minimize its impact.

Legislation aims to undercut the Montana Environmental Policy Act

“The backlash [to Held] is profound,” said Anne Hedges, executive director of the Montana Environmental Information Center (MEIC), an organization dedicated to protecting the state’s land, air, and water, in an interview. The pushback, in particular, comes from Republicans in the state, who have strong majorities in both chambers of the state legislature. “Their goal is to prevent the state from being able to do anything to address climate change.”

Part of that backlash came in bills that aimed directly at MEPA. One bill, for example, limits the state to looking only at direct, proximate impacts of projects. This would make upstream or downstream impacts outside the scope of environmental analyses.

In, say, a project to expand a coal mine, the direct emissions associated with extracting the coal would be analyzed, according to the bill, but anything that happens next would be left out.

Montana produces about 5 percent of the country’s coal and contains the largest coal reserves in the US, according to the US Energy Information Administration. Colstrip, the largest coal plant in the state—and the dirtiest in the nation—has a footprint larger than the biggest city in Montana. In 2021 alone, the plant emitted about 11 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. But, under this particular bill, the emissions from burning that coal would not be considered as part of any required MEPA analysis of the plant or of mines that provide it with fuel.

“The Held decision was a gift-wrapped decision for radical environmental activists, an open door for endless lawsuits designed to shut down Montana’s fossil fuel industry,” the sponsor of that bill, Montana Republican Senator Wylie Galt, said in a press conference. “It had nothing to do with protecting our environment and everything to do with weaponizing the courts to strangle our economy.”

But, to opponents of the legislation, it is an intentional effort to ignore the reality of what’s driving climate change. “There’s never anything else to do with coal,” Hedges said. “You burn coal.”

Another bill strikes language that connects MEPA to Montana’s right to a clean and healthful environment and eliminates the ability of analyses to look at long-term impacts of projects. “Montana is a resource-rich state,” that bill’s sponsor, Republican Representative Brandon Ler, said in a press conference. “We have energy, we have agriculture, and we have timber. These industries aren’t just sectors on a spreadsheet. They fund our schools, support our businesses, and keep families together.” Neither Galt nor Ler responded to interview requests for this article.

A final piece of legislation attacking the state’s climate policy, sponsored by Republican Representative Greg Oblander, prevents Montana from implementing air quality standards stricter than those of the federal government. “It’s about making sure that when businesses want to invest in our state, they can do it without fear of being buried under layers of unnecessary regulations,” Oblander said. “Montana is open for business, but only if we keep it that way.”

Taken together, the bills effectively “wash [the legislature’s] hands of the whole problem and there is no way to enforce our right to a healthy climate,” Hedges said.

Proponents of the suite of bills, including mining and oil organizations, the state’s departments of environmental quality and natural resources, chambers of commerce, and other groups, said the bills offer stability, predictability, and certainty. Montana’s emissions, they argued, are but a drop in the global bucket.

“We all share the same air,” said John Iverson, with the Treasure State Resources Association, in a hearing on the air quality bill. “Making one table in a bar the non-smoking table doesn’t do much to improve the air quality. Making one corner of the pool the non-peeing section doesn’t improve your swimming experience.”

Some lawmakers and defendants also questioned the extent to which human-caused climate change is happening at all. “There is a strong sentiment of climate denial in the Capitol,” Hedges said. “They’ll complain about droughts, they’ll complain about wildfires, they will complain about all of the impacts either caused or exacerbated by climate change… but they won’t admit what the problem is and they refuse to do anything about it.”

Other testimony by lawmakers and lobbyists in House and Senate hearings also focused on the state’s constitutionally ordained rights. Along with a clean and healthful environment, the Montana Constitution also grants rights to pursuing life’s basic necessities, protecting liberties and protecting property. The MEPA bills, their supporters argued, help strike a balance between these rights when they butt heads.

In all the hearings, voices opposing the bills—including those of MEIC; conservation groups like Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, Montana Audubon, and Montana Conservation Voters; physicians organizations; citizens and more—have far outnumbered those in favor of the legislation. Testimony focused on the real-time health and environmental impacts of climate change, the importance of the MEPA process and the environmental protections in the Montana constitution.

One additional bill, put forth by a coalition of Democrats, would have revised MEPA to follow the court’s ruling in the Held decision, but it was killed in committee.

Politicizing the judiciary

While legislation directly reacting to Held focused on MEPA and other statutes, another legislative push from Republicans took aim at the branch of government responsible for the decision: the judiciary. Republican frustration with the court system had been building for years, fueled by the Held saga along with other court decisions that blocked laws passed by the legislature rolling back rights for transgender people and abortion access.

After the Held decision, Montana’s Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte put out a statement: “This Court continues to step outside of its lane to tread on the right of the Legislature, the elected representatives of the people, to make policy. This decision does nothing more than declare open season on Montana’s all-of-the-above approach to energy.”

An interim committee of Republican lawmakers put forth more than 27 bills to reform the judiciary ahead of this year’s legislative session. Two could have huge impacts on climate decisions in the courts by politicizing the judiciary. One bill would create a “court of chancery” specifically designed to tackle constitutional questions stemming from legislation. The three judges in that court would be appointed by the governor.

Another bill would politicize the state’s judicial races. Currently, judicial candidates—including state Supreme Court justices—are elected with no official party affiliation. The legislation would make the races partisan, meaning judges can run as Republicans or Democrats. Republican advocates of the legislation contend that through lobbying and campaign contributions, politics have entered the court system already, and this legislation would, as Gianforte argued in his “State of the State” address, “bring light into this darkness” by allowing voters to know the values of the judges for whom they’re voting.

Republican legislators have called the Held plaintiffs and the judges who decided in their favor radicals, activists, even, disparagingly, “little Greta Thunbergs.” Ler, sponsor of one of the MEPA bills, said in a press conference that the judges’ decision in the Held case was driven by an agenda beyond the desire to enforce the constitution’s requirement of a healthy environment. “This isn’t about climate,” he said. “It’s about control.”

Opponents of the judiciary bills—including Montana Supreme Court Chief Justice Cory Swanson—stressed the importance of an independent judicial system as part of the government’s checks and balances.

“You are considering a number of bills that well-respected attorneys are telling you violate the constitutional separation of powers,” Swanson warned lawmakers. “I urge you to listen to those arguments.”

Hedges with the MEIC sees the courts as a scapegoat for those pushing bills to politicize the judiciary. Republican lawmakers, she said, “bitch about the courts on the one hand, but then they give the courts nowhere to turn except to overturn their bills that are unconstitutional. It’s like this little round robin the legislature set up.”

What’s next

All three bills designed to mitigate the impact of Held by limiting the extent to which MEPA can analyze greenhouse gas emissions and the level at which the state can regulate them have passed both chambers of the legislature on party-line votes. Gianforte’s office declined to give an interview about the climate issues being addressed in the legislature, but the governor said in a press conference that he’s looking forward to getting the MEPA bills to his desk.

The bills targeting the judiciary, however, have died—despite being championed by the governor and other powerful Republicans in the legislature. However, things could change. The legislative session will wrap up by early May, and there’s a chance the bills could be revived in another form.

Hedges said the MEPA and air quality bills in particular continue to infringe on Montanans’ right to a clean and healthful environment, and they’re likely to end up in the courts.

“It’s depressing,” she said. “It’s going to take us years to unwind what they’re doing here. And they [Republican lawmakers] know it; to them, that’s a win.”

Montana’s Republican legislators fight back after successful youth climate lawsuit Read More »

Can the legal system catch up with climate science?

attribution, climate change, costs, liability, Science / Mike M. / April 24, 2025

Similarly, it’s possible to calculate the impact of emissions within a limited number of years. For example, Callahan and Mankin note that internal oil company research suggested that climate change would be a problem back around 1980, and calculated the impact of emissions that occurred after people knew they were an issue. So, the approach is extremely flexible.

From there, the researchers could use empirical information that links elevated temperatures to economic damage. “Recent peer-reviewed work has used econometrics to infer causal relationships between climate hazards and outcomes such as income loss, reduced agricultural yields, increased human mortality, and depressed economic growth,” Callahan and Mankin write. These metrics can be used to estimate the cost of things like flooding, crop losses, and other economic damages. Alternately, the researchers could analyze the impact on individual climate events where the financial costs have been calculated separately.

Massive damages

To implement their method, the researchers perform lots of individual models, collectively providing the most probable costs and the likely range around them. First, they translate each company’s emissions into the impact on the global mean surface temperature. That gets translated to an impact on extreme temperatures, producing an estimate of what the days with the five most extreme temperatures would look like. That, in turn, is translated to economic damages associated with extreme heat.

Callahan and Mankin use Chevron as an example. By 2020, Chevron’s emissions were responsible for 0.025° C of the warming that year. If you perform a similar analysis for the ears between 1991 and 2020, the researchers come up with a range of damages that runs from a low of about $800 billion all the way up to $3.6 trillion. Most of the damage affected nations in the tropics.

Carrying on through the five companies that have led to the most carbon emissions, they calculate that Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, Chevron, and Exxon Mobile have all produced damages of about $2 trillion. BP brings up the rear, with “just” $1.45 trillion in damage. For the full list of 111 carbon majors, Callahan and Mankin place the total damages at roughly $28 trillion.

Can the legal system catch up with climate science? Read More »

Drunk man walks into climate change, burns the bottoms of his feet off

asphalt, burns, climate change, health, Science / Kris Guyer / April 23, 2025

In the burn unit, doctors gave the man a pain reliever, cleaned the burns, treated them with a topical antibiotic, and gave them an antimicrobial foam dressing. At a follow-up appointment, the wounds appeared to be healing without complications.

While the man recovered from the injury, the author of the case study—Jeremy Hess, an expert in emergency medicine and global environmental health at the University of Washington—warned that the risk of such injuries will only grow as climate change continues.

“Extreme heat events increase the risk of contact burns from hot surfaces in the environment,” he wrote. “Young children, older adults, unhoused persons, and persons with substance use disorder are at elevated risk for these types of burns.”

Last year, The New York Times reported that burn centers in the southwest have already begun seeing larger numbers of burns from contact with sidewalks and asphalt during heat waves. In some cases, the burns can turn fatal if people lose consciousness on hot surfaces—for instance, from overdoses, heat stroke, intoxication, or other health conditions. “Your body just literally sits there and cooks,” Clifford Sheckter, surgeon and a burn prevention researcher at Stanford University, told the Times last year. “When somebody finally finds you, you’re already in multisystem organ failure.”

Drunk man walks into climate change, burns the bottoms of his feet off Read More »

USDA cuts could cause long-term damage, reverse hard-won progress

agriculture, climate change, Science, syndication, Trump, USDA / Kris Guyer / April 6, 2025

For decades, environmental and farm groups pushed Congress, the USDA and farmers to adopt new conservation programs, but progress came in incremental steps. With each Farm Bill, some lawmakers threaten to whittle down conservation programs, but they have essentially managed to survive and even expand.

The country’s largest farm lobby, the American Farm Bureau Federation, had long denied the realities of climate change, fighting against climate action and adopting official policy positions that question the scientific consensus that climate change is human-caused. Its members—the bulk of American farmers—largely adhered to the same mindset.

But as the realities of climate change have started to hit American farmers on the ground in the form of more extreme weather, and as funding opportunities have expanded through conservation and climate-focused programs, that mindset has started to shift.

“They were concerned about what climate policy meant for their operations,” Bonnie said. “They felt judged. But we said: Let’s partner up.”

The Trump administration’s rollbacks and freezes threaten to stall or undo that progress, advocacy groups and former USDA employees say.

“We created this enormous infrastructure. We’ve solved huge problems,” Bonnie added, “and they’re undermining all of it.”

“It took so long,” Stillerman said. “The idea that climate change was happening and that farmers could be part of the solution, and could build more resilient farming and food systems against that threat—the IRA really put dollars behind that. All of that is at risk now.”

Burk says he plans to continue with conservation and carbon-storing practices on his Michigan farm, even without conservation dollars from the USDA.

But, he says, many of his neighboring farmers likely will stop conservation measures without the certainty of government support.

“So many people are struggling, just trying to figure out how to pay their bills, to get the fuel to run their tractors, to plant,” he said. “The last thing they want to be doing is sitting down with someone from NRCS who says, ‘If I do these things, maybe I’ll get paid in a year.’ That’s not going to happen.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

USDA cuts could cause long-term damage, reverse hard-won progress Read More »

EPA accused of faking criminal investigation to claw back climate funds

attorney general, Citibank, climate change, Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, fbi, greenhouse gas reduction fund, Policy / Paul Patrick / March 13, 2025

Citibank has until March 15 to provide more information on orders to freeze funding. More details on that front were shared today, however, in a court filing in a lawsuit raised by Climate United—one of eight NCIF awardees whose funding was suddenly frozen.

In a motion opposing a request for a temporary restraining order forcing Citibank to unfreeze the funds, Citibank argued that it plays only an administrative role in managing accounts.

According to Citibank, it cannot be liable for freezing the funds because it’s legally required to follow instructions from the EPA and the Department of Treasury, and those agencies ordered Citibank “to pause all further disbursements from GGRF accounts, including those held by Climate United, until further notice.”

Citibank told the US district court that orders came to freeze the funding after “the government informed Citibank that the GGRF program was subject to an ongoing criminal investigation.”

Supposedly, the FBI received “credible information” that Climate United’s Citibank account was “involved in possible criminal violations,” allegedly including conspiracy to defraud the United States and wire fraud, Citibank’s filing said. In a footnote, Citibank said that it also “learned” that the EPA was “deeply” concerned about “matters of financial mismanagement, conflicts of interest, and oversight failures.”

So, freezing the funds was viewed as necessary, the filing alleged, to prevent “misuse of funds.” And Citibank claimed it had no authority to dispute “lawful” orders.

“Citibank is not vested with discretion to second-guess the government’s concerns regarding the ‘misconduct, waste, conflicts of interest, and potential fraud’ that the government has stated is occurring,” Citibank’s filing said.

Climate United, which describes itself as “a public-private investment fund that removes financial barriers to clean technologies,” said in a press release that freezing the funds had already harmed “hard-working Americans who are struggling to pay for groceries and keep the lights on.”

“Small businesses and developers are unable to draw committed funds for project expenses, critical programs are delayed or paused, and Climate United’s reputation as a lender is impacted,” Climate United said, rounding up stories from stakeholders already struggling through the freeze and urging, “this isn’t about politics; it’s about economics.”

EPA accused of faking criminal investigation to claw back climate funds Read More »

What the EPA’s “endangerment finding” is and why it’s being challenged

climate change, Earth science, EPA, greenhouse gasses, Policy, Science, trump administration / Kris Guyer / March 11, 2025

Getting rid of the justification for greenhouse gas regulations won’t be easy.

Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images

A document that was first issued in 2009 would seem an unlikely candidate for making news in 2025. Yet the past few weeks have seen a steady stream of articles about an analysis first issued by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the early years of Obama’s first term: the endangerment finding on greenhouse gasses.

The basics of the document are almost mundane: greenhouse gases are warming the climate, and this will have negative consequences for US citizens. But it took a Supreme Court decision to get written in the first place, and it has played a role in every attempt by the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions across multiple administrations. And, while the first Trump administration left it in place, the press reports we’re seeing suggest that an attempt will be made to eliminate it in the near future.

The only problem: The science in which the endangerment finding is based on is so solid that any ensuing court case will likely leave its opponents worse off in the long run, which is likely why the earlier Trump administration didn’t challenge it.

Get comfortable, because the story dates all the way back to the first Bush administration.

A bit of history

One of the goals of the US’s Clean Air Act, first passed in 1963, is to “address the public health and welfare risks posed by certain widespread air pollutants.” By the end of the last century, it was becoming increasingly clear that greenhouse gases fit that definition. While they weren’t necessarily directly harmful to the people inhaling them—our lungs are constantly being filled with carbon dioxide, after all—the downstream effects of the warming they caused could certainly impact human health and welfare. But, with the federal government taking no actions during George W. Bush’s time in office, a group of states and cities sued to force the EPA’s hand.

That suit eventually reached the Supreme Court in the form of Massachusetts v. EPA, which led to a ruling in 2007 determining that the Clean Air Act required the EPA perform an analysis of the dangers posed by greenhouse gasses. That analysis was done by late 2007, but the Bush administration simply ignored it for the remaining year it had in office. (It was eventually released after Bush left office.)

That left the Obama-era EPA to reach essentially the same conclusions that the Bush administration had: greenhouse gasses are warming the planet. And that will have various impacts—sea level rise, dangerous heat, damage to agriculture and forestry, and more.

That conclusion compelled the EPA to formulate regulations to limit the emission of greenhouse gasses from power plants. Obama’s EPA did just that, but came late enough to still be tied up in courts by the time his term ended. They were also formulated before the plunge in the cost of renewable power sources, which have since led to a drop in carbon emissions that have far outpaced what the EPA’s rules intended to accomplish.

The first Trump administration formulated alternative rules that also ended up in court for being an insufficient response to the conclusions of the endangerment finding. Which ultimately led the Biden administration to start formulating a new set of rules. And at that point, the Supreme Court decided to step in and rule on the Obama rules, even though everyone knew they would never go into effect.

The court indicated that the EPA needed to regulate each power plant individually, rather than regulating the wider grid, which sent the Biden administration back to the drawing board. Its attempts at crafting regulations were also in court when Trump returned to office.

There were a couple of notable aspects to that last case, West Virginia v. EPA, which hinged on the fact that Congress had never explicitly indicated that it wanted to see greenhouse gasses regulated. Congress responded by ensuring that the Inflation Reduction Act’s energy-focused components specifically mentioned that these were intended to limit carbon emissions, eliminating one potential roadblock. The other thing is that, in this and other court cases, the Supreme Court could have simply overturned Massachusetts v. EPA, the case that put greenhouse gasses within the regulatory framework of the Clean Air Act. Yet a court that has shown a great enthusiasm for overturning precedent didn’t do so.

Nothing dangerous?

So, in the 15 years since the EPA initially released its endangerment findings, they’ve resulted in no regulations whatsoever. But, as long as they existed, the EPA is required to at least attempt to regulate them. So, getting rid of the endangerment findings would seem like the obvious thing for an administration led by a president who repeatedly calls climate change a hoax. And there were figures within the first Trump administration who argued in favor of that.

So why didn’t it happen?

That was never clear, but I’d suggest at least some members of the first Trump administration were realistic about the likely results. The effort to contest the endangerment finding was pushed by people who largely reject the vast body of scientific evidence that indicates that greenhouse gases are warming the climate. And, if anything, the evidence had gotten more decisive in the years between the initial endangerment finding and Trump’s inauguration. I expect that their effort was blocked by people who knew that it would fail in the courts, and likely leave behind precedents that made future regulatory efforts easier.

This interpretation is supported by the fact that the Trump-era EPA received a number of formal petitions to revisit the endangerment finding. Having read a few (something you should not do), they are uniformly awful. References to supposed peer-reviewed “papers” turn out to be little more than PDFs hosted on a WordPress site. Other arguments are based on information contained in the proceedings of a conference organized by an anti-science think tank. The Trump administration rejected them all with minimal comment the day before Biden’s inauguration.

Biden’s EPA went back and made detailed criticisms of each of them if you want to see just how laughable the arguments against mainstream science were at the time. And, since then, we’ve experienced a few years of temperatures that are so high they’ve surprised many climate scientists.

Unrealistic

But the new head of the EPA is apparently anything but a realist, and multiple reports have indicated he’s asking to be given the opportunity to go ahead and redo the endangerment finding. A more recent report suggests two possibilities. One is to recruit scientists from the fringes to produce a misleading report and roll the dice on getting a sympathetic judge who will overlook the obvious flaws. The other would be to argue that any climate change that happens will have net benefits to the US.

That latter approach would run into the problem that we’ve gotten increasingly sophisticated at doing analyses that attribute the impact of climate change on the individual weather disasters that do harm the welfare of citizens of the US. While it might have been possible to make a case for uncertainty here a decade ago, that window has been largely closed by the scientific community.

Even if all of these efforts fail, it will be entirely possible for the EPA to construct greenhouse gas regulations that accomplish nothing and get tied up in court for the remainder of Trump’s term. But a court case could show just how laughably bad the positions staked out by climate contrarians are (and, by extension, the position of the president himself). There’s a small chance that the resulting court cases will result in a legal record that will make it that much harder to accept the sorts of minimalist regulations that Trump proposed in his first term.

Which is probably why this approach was rejected the first time around.

What the EPA’s “endangerment finding” is and why it’s being challenged Read More »

“Bouncing” winds damaged Houston skyscrapers in 2024

architecture, climate change, derecho, hurricanes, Science / Rejus Almole / February 21, 2025

“Bouncing” winds

Damage sustained by the Chevron Building Auditorium during the derecho: a) damaged side of the building, b) global damage view, c) & d) localized glass damage. Credit: Padgett et al., 2024

Elawady decided to investigate why the Houston derecho’s structural damage was so much more extensive than one might expect. He and his colleagues analyzed the impact of the derecho on five of the city’s most notable buildings: The Chevron Building Auditorium, the CenterPoint Energy Plaza, the El Paso Energy Building, the RRI Energy Plaza, and the Wedge International Tower.

The Chevron Building Auditorium, for instance, suffered significant damage to its cladding and shattered glass windows, mostly on the side facing another skyscraper: the Chevron Corporation Tower. The CenterPoint Energy Plaza’s damage to its double-skin facade was concentrated on one corner that had two tall buildings facing it, as was the damage to two corners of the El Paso Energy building. This suggested a wind-channeling effect might have played a role in that damage.

Next Elawady et al. conducted wind tunnel experiments at the FIU Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure’s “Wall of Wind” facility to determine how the winds may have specifically caused the observed damage. They placed a revolving miniature tall building in the tunnel and blasted it with wind speeds of up to 70 meters per second while placing an identical mini-model at increasing distances from the first to mimic possible interference from nearby buildings.

The results confirmed the team’s working hypothesis. “When strong winds move through a city, they can bounce due to interference between tall buildings. This increases pressure on walls and windows, making damage more severe than if the buildings were isolated,” said co-author Omar Metwally, a graduate student at FIU. For example, in the case of the Chevron Building Auditorium, the channeling effects intensified the damage, particularly at higher elevations.

“On top of this, downbursts create intense, localized forces which can exceed typical design values for hurricanes, especially on the lower floors of tall buildings,” Metwally added. The problem is only likely to worsen because of accelerating climate change. Glass facades seem to be particularly vulnerable to this kind of wind damage, and the authors suggest current design and construction guidelines for such elements should be re-evaluated as a result of their findings.

Frontiers in Built Environment, 2025. DOI: 10.3389/fbuil.2024.1514523 (About DOIs).

“Bouncing” winds damaged Houston skyscrapers in 2024 Read More »

Despite court orders, climate and energy programs stalled by Trump freeze

climate change, environmental justice, EPA, Policy, Science, syndication, trump administration / Tim Belzer / February 17, 2025

Chief of the EPA is also trying to claw back $20 billion, citing alleged wrongdoing.

President Donald Trump’s freeze on federal funding shows little sign of thawing for climate, energy and environmental justice programs.

Despite two federal court orders directing the administration to resume distributing federal grants and loans, at least $19 billion in Environmental Protection Agency funding to thousands of state and local governments and nonprofits remained on hold as of Feb. 14, said environmental and legal advocates who are tracking the issue.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has vowed to seek return of an additional $20 billion the agency invested last year in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund program, calling for a Department of Justice investigation into what he characterized as a “scheme… purposefully designed to obligate all of the money in a rush job with reduced oversight.”

Environmental advocates said Zeldin was unfairly smearing the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, or “green bank,” program, on which EPA worked for more than a year with the Treasury Department to design a standard financial agent arrangement—the kind the government has used many times before to collect and distribute funds.

Critics believe the Trump administration, thwarted last week in its effort to get an appeals court to reinstate its sweeping government-wide freeze on federal funding, is resorting to a new tactic—labeling individual programs as nefarious or fraudulent. Although that approach has met with some success—a federal judge last week allowed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to freeze $80 million in funding from a migrant shelter program in New York—legal experts said courts will be looking for specifics and evidence, not broad assertions that programs are improper.

“They cannot challenge an entire program based on charges of fraud and waste,” said Jillian Blanchard, a vice president of the nonprofit Lawyers for Good Government. “If they had actual concerns about fraud or waste, they would need to follow clear procedures and protocols in the regulations, going grant by grant to address this, but that’s not what’s happening here. They are challenging entire programs whole cloth without evidence.

“The executive does not have the authority to change policies simply because they don’t like them,” Blanchard said at a virtual briefing for reporters on Friday. “Congress makes the law, not the president and certainly not Elon Musk,” she said, referring to the billionaire donor whom Trump has deputized to cut government spending.

Feeling the freeze

Across the country, the spending freeze has thrown into chaos the environmental, resilience and community improvement programs that Congress authorized in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Among the efforts on hold: clean drinking water, air monitoring, hurricane recovery and electric school buses.

“Real people on the ground are being hurt by the stop-start situation,” said Blanchard, whose group is working with the Natural Resources Defense Council on the cases of 230 grantees in 44 states.

Grantees are in a state of confusion because they have not heard directly from EPA, she said.

Michelle Roos, executive director of the Environmental Protection Network, a coalition of former EPA employees that is also working with Lawyers for Good Government, said many grantees are not sure what is happening because the agency’s employees have been forbidden to talk to people outside of the agency.

Several grantees reached by Inside Climate News said that they were not talking to the press, or did not want to say whether or not they could access their funding.

MDC, a nonprofit in Durham, North Carolina, along with the Hispanic Federation, was supposed to receive a $3 million environmental justice community change grant for disaster recovery and resilience programs in Latino areas of eastern North Carolina.

“We were thrilled to receive federal support to do this work, but unfortunately, like many others, we have experienced an interruption in accessing this funding,” said Clarissa Goodlett, MDC’s director of communications.

Many neighborhoods, especially those that are home to low-income, Black and Latino residents, are still rebuilding from hurricanes that hit in 2016 and 2018.

During the storms, rural counties in eastern North Carolina did not provide real-time emergency alerts or evacuation orders in Spanish, according to Enlace Latino NC, a Spanish-language digital news outlet.

The MDC grant would help Latinos connect with local governments to ensure their communities are included in discussions and decisions about the impact of climate disasters.

“We are investigating and pursuing whatever options and channels are available to us to ensure we can follow through on our commitment to communities in eastern North Carolina,” Goodlett said.

Dorothy Darr, executive director of the Southwest Renewal Foundation in High Point, near Greensboro, North Carolina, said she doesn’t know if the group’s $18.4 million grant is frozen. Southwest Renewal is teaming up with eight partners to support not only environmental projects—tree planting, water testing and building an urban greenway—but also workforce training and infrastructure improvements. These include upgrades to old, leaking sewer lines and inefficient HVAC systems and a new energy-efficient “cool” roof at a Guilford County school.

The money would also pay for nine new public electric vehicle charging stations, anti-littering campaigns and other improvements in historically Black and low-income neighborhoods in the southwest part of the city.

Darr said the foundation only recently received an account number from the EPA, and she plans to try to access the funds Monday.

“The grant title”—Environmental and Climate Justice Community Change Grants—”has the words ‘environment’ and ‘justice’ in it,” Darr said. “If you’re just slashing programs based on words, then we’re a sitting duck.”

In Texas, the nonprofit group Downwiders at Risk received word in a Feb. 4 letter that it had received a $500,000 EPA environmental justice “collaborative problem-solving” grant it had applied for last year. The money was to be used to install community air monitors in neighborhoods near Dallas. But the notification didn’t provide instructions on how to access the money, and no followup ever came.

Executive Director Caleb Roberts called around his local EPA office, but no one could give answers.

“People are still unsure. Our project officer at the EPA has no idea. I’ve emailed people higher up,” Roberts said. “They have no idea if things are funded or not. They are just as in the dark as we are.”

Downwinders’ award letter said they had 21 days to pull their first block of funding. If no instructions to access the money arrive before then, Robert worries they may lose it.

The city of New Haven, Connecticut, only received word on Jan. 21—the day after Trump’s inauguration—that it and its local nonprofit partners had received a $20 million environmental justice community change grant, according to Steve Winter, who heads up the city’s Office of Climate and Sustainability. But he had never been able to access the funds; the online system originally said “unavailable for payment;” that changed on Feb. 10 to “suspended.”

The money was supposed to help fund whole-home energy efficiency retrofits in a city where one-quarter of the population lives in poverty and where energy costs have skyrocketed since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, Winter said. Connecticut, like much of New England, relies heavily on heating oil in winter—not only the most expensive home heating fuel, but the most polluting. The grants also would have helped with asbestos and mold remediation in the homes, which are necessary before energy efficiency upgrades can be done.

Winter said the city has warned its partners that they now may need to lay off staff that they’ve hired for outreach for energy efficiency programs, and the future of a community geothermal project is at risk. Also up in the air: a local food rescue organization’s plans to increase staff and food storage capacity.

“People might say, oh this environmental justice grant is some frivolous thing, but it’s about helping people with quality affordable housing, with lowering their energy bills, alleviating hunger in the community, providing affordable transportation options,” Winter said. “These are all trying to meet basic needs that also have an environmental impact.”

A “rush job” accusation

The Trump administration’s drive to root out “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or DEI programs, throughout the government has swept up environmental justice programs at EPA, even though the two are distinct policy initiatives similar only in that they often involve people of color. After taking office two weeks ago, the first employees that Zeldin announced he was eliminating from the agency were those in DEI and environmental justice programs.

“The previous Administration used DEI and Environmental Justice to advance ideological priorities, distributing billions of dollars to organizations in the name of climate equity,” Zeldin said in a statement. “This ends now. We will be good stewards of tax dollars and do everything in our power to deliver clean air, land, and water to every American, regardless of race, religion, background, and creed.”

Last week, as thousands more employees at EPA and other federal agencies were placed on administrative leave or accepted the deferred retirement offer, Zeldin escalated his critiques on environmental justice and climate programs.

In a video first posted on X, Musk’s social media platform, on Wednesday night,

Zeldin called out $20 billion for the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund that he said had been “parked at an outside financial institution,” suggesting that the money was given away in a “rush job” in the waning days of the Biden administration. In fact, the money in question was awarded to eight recipients in August, well before the election. The program’s defenders say it went through a rigorous selection process that began more than a year before the awards were announced.

The $20 billion falls under two programs within the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund and is intended to support nonprofits and financial institutions to serve as green banks. The eight recipients, which received between $400,000 and $7 billion, are supposed to use that money to finance projects by businesses and nonprofits around the country that would cut climate pollution. Much of the money is dedicated to low-income communities, where it is often harder for businesses to raise private financing.

The recipients have already begun using the funding to support businesses, including $250 million for an electric truck financing program beginning at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, $31.8 million in financing for a solar project for the University of Arkansas System and $10.8 million for solar projects on Tribal lands in Oregon and Idaho.

Unlike most of the grant recipients under the IRA, who draw down their money over time as work is completed, the green banks already received their money. Zealan Hoover, who administered IRA programs at EPA during the Biden administration, said the money was placed into bank accounts at Citibank under terms of financial agreements worked out with the Treasury Department.

Although EPA had never used such an outside financial agent before, the Treasury Department had made such agreements with outside institutions many times in the past to distribute or collect money. The system used for electronic federal tax payments, for expanding access to retirement savings and for getting money to assist businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic are just a few of the examples he cited.

“What is underway is not a good-faith effort to fight fraud,” Hoover said. “If it was, federal agencies would not be firing thousands of employees who are hired to conduct robust management and oversight of these programs.”

Zeldin said he was calling for termination of the financial agent agreement for the green bank program, and for the immediate return of the entire fund balance to the United States Treasury. He also said he was referring the issue to the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General and Congress and would “work with the U.S. Department of Justice.” In fact, EPA’s inspector general was dismissed in the early days of the Trump administration along with those at 16 other agencies. EPA’s press office said the agency currently has an acting inspector general but when asked, did not respond with that person’s name. EPA did not answer further questions on the financial agent program, referring only to Zeldin’s video post.

“The American public deserves a more transparent and accountable government than what transpired the past four years,” Zeldin said in the post. “We take our obligations under the law as seriously as it gets. I’ve directed my team to find your ‘gold bars’ and they found them. Now we will get them back inside of control of government as we pursue next steps.”

Citibank declined to comment. Each of the eight recipients of the green bank funds either declined to comment or did not reply to requests for comment.

“Hard for courts to catch up”

What happens next for the grant recipients is not entirely clear. Courts have issued temporary restraining orders to halt the funding freeze until the issue can be argued on its merits. In a five-page order issued Feb. 10, U.S. District Judge John McConnell Jr. of Rhode Island said that it was clear that the administration had in some instances continued “to improperly freeze federal funds.”

McConnell ordered the administration to “immediately end any funding pause,” but EPA and other agencies that are administering IRA climate programs, like the Department of Energy, are continuing to hold back funds.

“We’re talking about funding for families to make upgrades that help them save on their monthly energy bill, funding for people to buy energy efficient appliances and to retrofit their home so that cold air stays out in the winter and hot air stays out in the summer,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, in a briefing with reporters on Thursday. “Those programs aren’t just important to tackling the climate crisis. They are saving our families money.”

“What is painfully clear is that Trump’s illegal funding freeze is causing chaos and confusion,” Murray said.

But Murray and other Democrats, who helped shepherd the IRA to passage in 2022 with no Republican votes, now have little power to force a showdown in a Congress controlled by Republicans. And although multiple studies have shown that most of the $379 billion Congress devoted to funding the clean energy transition in that legislation has flowed to Republican districts, there has been little sign so far that GOP leaders are inclined to clash with the administration. In a few instances, Republicans have sought protection for individual programs that affect their own states.

Blanchard and other legal experts said the courts will have the final say on whether the Trump administration can continue to selectively freeze federal funds. But the decisions may not come soon enough for the programs that are relying on the money they were promised.

“The problem is, as a practical matter, it’s very hard for the courts to catch up,” said Richard Lazarus, an environmental law professor at Harvard Law School. “And the impact on these communities is immediate. The place is closed down, the services aren’t provided for these communities. So the impact can be immediate and devastating, and the practical remedy may be illusory.”

Lazarus was one of the legal scholars writing about environmental justice in the 1990s, before President Bill Clinton signed the first executive order to address communities that suffer a disproportionate burden of pollution. He said that although these communities now “have a fight on their hands,” it is not a new situation for them.

“It’s not as though the government turning against their hardship is something the EJ communities don’t know,” he said. “They don’t welcome it, but they know what this is. It’s how they’ve lived their lives for decades. They fought, and they’ll continue to fight. And that’ll be fighting in cases and lawsuits, and it’ll be fighting politically.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

Despite court orders, climate and energy programs stalled by Trump freeze Read More »