Last week, Trump appointed two veterans of his first administration, Nancy Beck and Lynn Dekleva, to lead chemical regulation at the Environmental Protection Agency. Beck is a chemical industry lobbyist. Dekleva is currently senior director at the American Chemistry Council, an organization whose positions include opposing the EPA’s recent, arguably belated ban on noncritical uses of methylene chloride—a chemical so toxic that it has been shown to poison even trained workers using protective gear. These appointments, while buried beneath the landslide of other headlines out of the White House over the past week, served as a critical indicator: Specifically, they dashed the (limited) hopes some advocates were nursing that right-wingers’ newish preoccupation with environmental health—embodied primarily in the chaotic figure of Trump’s Health and Human Services nominee, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—might make the second Trump administration marginally more environmentally friendly on chemical and plastics regulation than the first one.

The Washington Post, covering the appointments, highlighted the typical rationale for appointing industry insiders to such posts: that the EPA’s chemical approval process needs reform. “The EPA’s flawed decision-making process has consequently inhibited American innovation and our ability to compete in the global market,” according to Republican Representative Brett Guthrie of Kentucky. The Post also quoted lawyer Dimitri Karakitsos, who has represented chemical companies, arguing the approval process for new chemicals is actually impeding environmental progress: “A lot of these new chemicals tend to be greener and safer, and we want that innovation on the market,” he said.

Is that true? It’s a counterintuitive take, given that the EPA has come under heavy criticism in recent years for failing to ban even chemicals that dozens of other countries have chosen to ban over links to severe health damage. I called two experts to get their perspectives on the matter.

“I actually do think that there are tremendous innovations and discoveries of new chemicals happening today,” Yale School of the Environment professor and former director of the U.S. Green Chemistry Program Paul Anastas told me. “And yes … when you can demonstrate these things—that it’s safer, greener, performs better—there should be a more effective way of fast-tracking these innovations into the marketplace so that they can make their positive benefits.” At the same time, he said, “the role of science at EPA is fundamental, and everything that the EPA does must be science-based.”

A key part of the industry position, however, is that U.S. regulatory procedures are somehow exceptionally obstructive, particularly in an international context. Those with experience in this international context say that argument doesn’t hold up.

“The idea that U.S. chemical regulation is so advanced that it hinders and slows down U.S. competitivity is preposterous,” said David Azoulay, director of environmental health at the Center for International Environmental Law, or CIEL, over the phone from Geneva. The U.S. has “the least stringent, least efficient, and least protective legislation compared to any of the other major economies—and that includes economies like the EU of course, which is the most often mentioned, but also includes Korea, Japan, even China.” The EU, for example, “regulates or bans over 1,300 chemicals in cosmetics. The U.S. bans less than two dozen.”

The anti-regulatory argument also rests on the assumption that regulating to prevent environmental harm slows innovation. But when CIEL investigated this in 2013, Azoulay said, using patent applications as a proxy for innovation, “every time there was a new type of regulatory control measure being put in place around phthalates, we saw a spike in a number of patents being filed for new products or new substances or new applications that didn’t use phthalates.” He also pointed to a wealth of recent research showing that, contrary to the assumption that regulations hurt the economy, under-regulating harmful chemicals can cost billions of dollars.

These studies probably aren’t going to prevent people from arguing that EPA regulations harm American companies’ ability to compete. “An additional perspective that’s useful to consider,” Azoulay added, “is that, contrary to some simplified beliefs, the chemical industry is very much a global industry. All of those major chemical producers are multinationals that have production bases in the U.S., in Europe, in China, in the Gulf, in other places, that try to take advantage of being closest to the primary materials or the markets or whatever.” And the arguments everywhere seem to be the same: “Those rules in that particular jurisdiction are hindering competitivity. But because it’s the same companies making the same arguments, what they’re actually doing is trying to bring the floor down, and trying to lower the level of protection of health and the environment.”

If the track record of the first Trump administration is any indicator, those companies may be pleased by what happens next at the EPA. Then again, maybe they won’t. When the first Trump administration tried to weaken methylene chloride regulations, for example, they were quickly and repeatedly sued. Rushed, poorly evidenced environmental rollbacks in the first Trump administration were what allowed groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council to boast that “on average, we sued once every ten days for four years, and we won victories in nearly 90 percent of the resolved cases.” As these battles play out, however, many fear the toll—to insufficiently protected workers, to the people passively absorbing toxic chemicals in their environment, and to ecosystems—may mount.

A new study pushes back against earlier ones suggesting that the Atlantic Ocean’s system of currents is slowing down. This study finds no evidence of the system weakening at all—very good news, given that, as previously discussed in this newsletter, a lot of agriculture depends on the weather systems that depend, in turn, on these currents.

Maryland’s renewable energy program isn’t working, a new report suggests. Inside Climate News’s Aman Azhar explains the findings and talks to the report’s authors, who say this is a “well-known problem in the state that people don’t want to talk about.”

A previous edition of this newsletter noted that a so-called attribution study of climate change’s contribution to the L.A. fires might take time. Only two weeks later, a report from the World Weather Attribution group calculates that climate change made the hot, dry, windy conditions that helped the fires spread 35 percent more likely.

Kentucky’s Mountaintop Mines Are Turned Into Neighborhoods

Old coal mines that blew the tops off mountains have left lots of manmade plateaus in Kentucky. While these “ecological graveyards” may not be as lush as the landscape they’ve replaced, Austyn Gaffney writes, they may prove to be a lifeline in a state struggling to adapt to increasingly severe floods:

In 2022, apocalyptic flooding swept across eastern Kentucky, killing 45 people, destroying 542 homes and damaging thousands more. Now, instead of rebuilding in the floodplain, the state is permanently lifting residents onto safer land. Officials are more than two years into a nearly $800 million plan to reclaim these landscapes again, turning them from deserts into developments.… Seven communities across four counties, with aspirational names like Skyview and Olive Branch, have been designed for 665 brand-new properties, some of which will run on solar. Fourteen houses have been completed and about a dozen people have moved in to two communities called Thompson Branch and Wayland, according to the state.

Read Austyn Gaffney and Jon Cherry’s feature in The New York Times.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

In the first hours of his second term, President Trump signed executive orders re-withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate agreement, rolling back incentives for electric vehicles, pausing approvals for wind farms in federal waters, and declaring a “national energy emergency” to expedite drilling and open up more land and sea for drilling. He also withdrew the U.S. from the World Health Organization, signed an unconstitutional order trying to end birthright citizenship, attempted to set a national two-gender policy, ordered federal workers back to the office while making it easier to fire them, rescinded a Biden order lowering prescription drug costs, and pardoned those who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

You may remember this pattern from 2016—the “throw everything at them, plus a kitchen sink and ferret, ideally at 3 a.m. on Twitter” approach to politics. Trump’s first term was characterized by multiple news bombshells per day, a bewildering number of unrelated proclamations, crises, and scandals per week, and each Friday closing with politicians, media workers, and news readers struggling to remember what had happened just a few days prior. It’s no wonder a book urging digital detox and bird-watching as a form of radical political action became a breakout hit. This time around, people have announced they’re tuning out; essayists (including at TNR) have mused what ethical retreat and rest might look like during Trump 2.0; and leftists on Bluesky are urging fellow activists to “find your lane” and focus on that, rather than trying to track every last move the administration makes on the environment, reproductive autonomy, trans rights, immigration, etc.

The downside of choosing a lane, though, is that it makes it harder to see the themes emerging in Trump’s second presidency. And there are already some through lines on the climate front that aren’t perceptible in the catalog of his executive orders alone.

The three richest men in the world watched from prominent seats—in front of Cabinet nominees—as Trump was sworn in on Monday. As the president bragged about the country’s oil and gas reserves, promising to “export American energy all over the world,” applause broke out not just in the Capitol Rotunda, The New York Times reported, but “at the Hay-Adams hotel in downtown Washington, where some of the country’s leading oil and gas executives popped champagne and ate mini Pop-Tart pastries with Mr. Trump’s image,” hosted by fracking magnate Harold Hamm, who personally donated $4.3 million to pro-Trump PACs. Since April 2024, when Trump promised fossil fuel execs at Mar-a-Lago favorable policies in exchange for campaign donations, top fossil fuel billionaires’ wealth has grown by $40.2 billion, the Climate Accountability Research Project recently reported.

I remember a time when I didn’t really “get” the Green New Deal: A lot of the policies associated with it, like affordable housing and single-payer health care, seemed like good ideas but sort of orthogonal to the primary goal of lowering emissions. But it’s a political strategy as much as an ideological statement, and the political strategy rests on two core insights: first, that not only is it hard to disentangle inequality and the climate crisis, but the unchecked power of the wealthy is in fact driving rampant emissions and obstructing the progress of policies to curtail them. Second, climate policies and the politicians supporting them will not succeed without the ability to demonstrate material benefits in people’s everyday lives. In other words: For long-term success, climate policies can’t just be about lowering emissions. They need to show people that low-carbon life can be fun. They need to be defanging the culture war.

If the spectacle of ring-kissing billionaires at Trump’s second inauguration doesn’t show once and for all that Green New Deal supporters have a point, I’m not sure what will. Because these executive orders aren’t coming from the electorate: Outside the pro-petroleum Pop-Tart crowd at the Hay-Adams, these policies just aren’t that popular. Wind power is still backed by 72 percent of the population, per a Pew poll last year, while only a minority support further offshore drilling and even fewer back fracking. That’s hardly a ringing endorsement for the platform Trump announced at a Sunday rally—that “we’re going to drill, baby, drill and do all of the things that we wanted to” but “aren’t going to do the wind thing.”

The policies’ political currency comes instead from their culture-war status, i.e., their ability to motivate a core group of voters and a lot of money. Culture wars, as several writers at TNR have pointed out in recent years, are a deft bit of political theater that more often than not turn out to serve corporate interests. Per Green New Deal thinking, the way to combat that—aside from taxing billionaires out of a few of their zeros—is to enact policies that provide people with a more material benefit on a regular Tuesday than the fossil fuel industrial complex does.

Who knows whether this theory will ultimately be proven correct? (This week, Liza Featherstone wrote for TNR about one intriguing but vulnerable policy currently testing it: New York City’s congestion pricing.) But as Trump’s inaugural spectacle shows, we’re way past the point where his opponents can afford to ridicule this progressive strategy as “the green dream or whatever”—as Pelosi did during Trump’s first term. Socialists shouldn’t be the only ones noting the reactionary role “capital” has played in this election and inauguration. And there’s a message here for ordinary news consumers too: Whatever approach you take in processing the incoming onslaught, keep an eye on the oligarchy of it all. If you’re staying in your “lane,” remember that these lanes are often connected—and what connects them is often money.

Not all of Trump’s attempts to scrap pro-environment policies will hold up in court or have the effect he’s promised supporters that they will have. Meanwhile, America’s second withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement has so far mostly drawn criticism and pledges from other countries to stay the course.

Things aren’t looking good for the endangered right whale. After much hemming and hawing, the Biden administration in its final days ultimately dropped a proposal to tighten speed limits to prevent deadly ship strikes.

That’s the portion of the once-great carbon sink that, as the ground thaws, is now adding emissions to the atmosphere rather than subtracting them, according to a new study.

What happens when the California fires go out? More gentrification.

Climate disasters don’t level the playing field, this piece suggests: They just clear it for bigger buildings, mortgages, and rental bills. This could be what happens in Los Angeles in the wake of recent fires:

When a natural disaster strikes a community, housing prices almost always rise. In the short term, the reason is obvious: Apartments and houses have been damaged or destroyed, so there are fewer of them, and that decline in supply causes rents to spike.

But as rebuilding efforts drag on, many middle- and low-income people never return to their neighborhoods because they can’t afford to.

“One of the reasons gentrification happens is that everything just becomes more expensive,” said Jennifer Gray Thompson, founder and CEO of After the Fire, a nonprofit that helps communities prepare for and recover from wildfires. One reason is the high cost of building, but there are others, including landlords taking advantage of high demand to raise rents and real estate investors buying up properties to try to profit off of them later.

Read Abdallah Fayyad’s full report at Vox.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

In Kim Stanley Robinson’s widely acclaimed, Obama-praised climate novel, The Ministry for the Future, the climate crisis is already well underway when catastrophic rains drown Los Angeles in water. Recreational kayaks and motorboats become crucial rescue vehicles, thousands die in the floods, and early projections suggest some $30 trillion in damage.

“So now,” the main character muses, “one could imagine that the American people might support action on the climate change front. Better late than never! But no. Already it was becoming clear that LA was not popular in Texas, or on the east coast, or even in San Francisco for that matter.” Despite these public sentiments, “California’s government, one of the most progressive in the world, and the US federal government, one of the most reactionary in the world—both were making efforts to help.” And the devastation of a famed city shocked just enough elites to make a difference: “If it could happen to LA, rich as it was, dreamy as it was, it could happen anywhere. Some deep flip in the global unconscious was making people queasy.” Los Angeles’s disaster becomes one of the key turning points leading to a global carbon coin.

Right now, Los Angeles is burning. But so far, the incineration of over 40,000 acres in America’s second-largest city doesn’t seem poised to be any kind of turning point. The Wall Street Journal published an editorial ridiculing the idea that climate change could have driven both the exceptionally wet winters in 2023 and 2024 and the recent dry spell. (While a full so-called attribution study on climate change’s contribution to the fires will take time, there’s already a lot of research suggesting climate change can, in fact, increase both flooding and fire risks, and early analysis out of UCLA suggests climate change did play a role here.) Georgia congresswoman and renowned random-number-generator Marjorie Taylor Greene asked why “they” didn’t use geoengineering to dump rain on the fires. Donald Trump, days away from his second term as president, blamed the destruction on Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom and a tiny fish called the delta smelt, outlandishly claiming that policies to protect the endangered species had deliberately deprived Los Angeles of water. (This whopper was universally panned by fact-checkers.) And Trump’s pick for energy secretary has previously denied that climate change has anything to do with wildfires.

One line in Robinson’s novel rings particularly true: A lot of people seem to dislike L.A.—or at least a lot of right-wingers seem to dislike its image as haven for California liberals. The Journal also blamed the fires on Democrats: Newsom, the state legislature, and “the mayors of Los Angeles,” in that order, for spending money on climate policy that could have been spent directly on wildfire prevention (wildfire prevention also received funding). Republican Representative Warren Davidson, from Ohio, suggested on Fox Business last week that California should only get federal disaster aid “if they change their policies.” He was a little vague about which California policies needed to be changed. Elon Musk, right-wing actor James Woods, former Fox host Megyn Kelly, and conservative CNN commentator Scott Jennings all blamed the unchecked blazes on diversity hiring within the Los Angeles Fire Department. Another favorite target has been the environmental review process, which can delay risk-reduction practices like thinning or prescribed burns. (Libertarian Reason magazine—not a typical defender of regulation—was an unexpected voice debunking the notion that environmental review was to blame.)

The fires in L.A. have thankfully not yet reached the level of devastation Robinson portrayed in his novel. But the cascading effects of this type of disaster also make the scale of the destruction larger than it might seem from any one news story: Not only have at least 24 people been killed, but the smoke hazards threaten thousands or even millions more. The damage from smoke inhalation—not just in terms of immediate respiratory problems but in terms of increased cancer, respiratory disease, cardiovascular disease, and even dementia risk—may only be tallied years later.

Measuring destruction in terms of the number of homes burned can also be misleading, as if the fires’ effect on individual people and households can be reduced to “Did your home burn down or not?” and “Did you have insurance or not?” Being displaced is expensive, particularly if it means missing work as well. Those who have homes to return to but find their workplace has burned down, or their child’s school or daycare building has burned down, also face significant disruption and expense. Tap water could remain unusable for a while, multiple experts have emphasized. You can’t have destruction at this scale and not face a bottleneck of builders, repair workers, and materials afterward—affecting timelines not just for rebuilding but, most likely, unrelated repairs as well, both for renters and owners. Housing will get even more expensive than it already........

© New Republic