Trump Is on the Wrong Side of the Water Wars

The president’s efforts to pin a sewage spill on Democrats point to a broader vulnerability.

Why is water so different from air? It sounds like the start of a joke. But it’s a fair thing to wonder after the Trump administration last week officially revoked the so-called endangerment finding, a 2009 scientific conclusion that climate change threatens human health and that greenhouse gases were therefore an appropriate subject for federal regulation under the Clean Air Act.

This move paves the way for the elimination of all federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. These rollbacks may kill a lot of people long before the associated climate effects kick in, though, because the emissions that the government has been regulating also reduce general pollution. The Environmental Defense Fund projects that the rollbacks could trigger an extra 37 million asthma attacks between now and 2055.

The Trump administration is not at all concerned about blowback, though, and in fact was making victory laps much of last week, with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum saying that all the extra carbon dioxide in the air would be good for plants.

Contrast that with how eagerly President Trump is trying to blame Democrats for a recent large sewage spill into the Potomac River.

“Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., who are responsible for the massive sewage spill in the Potomac River, must get to work, IMMEDIATELY,” the president posted Tuesday on Truth Social. “If they can’t do the job, they have to call me and ask, politely, to get it fixed. The Federal Government is not at all involved with what has taken place, but we can fix it,” he added. “This is a Radical Left caused Environmental Hazard.”

None of this is true, of course—as Maryland Governor Wes Moore pointed out, the federal government is actually responsible for overseeing the segment of sewer line that failed. And maybe that’s why Trump decided to weigh in.

But this is also an odd issue for Trump to highlight. Although the spill of over 200 million gallons of raw sewage is widely being referred to as the largest in the nation’s history, it hasn’t resulted in any boil-water advisories yet—and water quality is not exactly a signature Trump issue anyway. In his first administration, he scrapped the Clean Water Rule, significantly narrowing the scope of federal water protections. This time around, his administration is also attempting to roll back federal protections.

This isn’t the only story recently suggesting that clean water may have political significance that clean air doesn’t. Last week, Charlie Hope-D’Anieri wrote about the wild-card candidacy of a retired water scientist running for secretary of agriculture in Iowa. Chris Jones almost certainly will not win, Hope-D’Anieri acknowledged. But he’s upending long-standing, almost sacred conventions in Iowa politics by challenging the ethanol industry, and arguing “that farmers should be required to make basic, specific adjustments to their practices to prevent the ruination of the state’s water supply.” And, perhaps surprisingly, he’s getting some traction, including good turnout at campaign events.

On Tuesday, Inside Climate News reported a new poll that suggests Jones’s early success is not just a freak accident. “Eighty-five percent of voters in Iowa’s first and third U.S. House districts,” reports Anika Jane Beamer, “say they would be more likely to vote for an elected official who prioritizes protecting clean water, including cutting industrial agriculture pollution.” These are both “vulnerable, narrowly Republican districts,” Beamer notes. It’s not impossible that these will be some of the districts that determine whether Democrats flip the House in November.

“It’s very clear that Iowa’s water crisis has reached a boiling point,” Food & Water Action political director Sam Bernhardt reportedly said at a press conference announcing the poll results.

Now, you might be inclined to dismiss any single poll along these lines—and it’s worth noting that Food & Water Action did commission this one. But it’s also consistent with prior polling showing that water quality is a strikingly popular issue, which doesn’t seem as vulnerable to the partisan divides seen on other environmental topics. Pew polling from 2023 found that 63 percent of people thought the federal government was doing “too little” to “protect water quality of lakes, rivers and streams,” and only 7 percent said it was doing “too much”—making it the top issue when compared to air quality, climate change, protecting animals and their habitats, and protecting natural parks and nature preserves.

Regular polling from the Value of Water Campaign has also found that the number of voters calling “reliable water access” a “very” or “extremely important” issue has been rising for five years straight.

There are some caveats, of course, to how far political concern over water quality can go. The water crisis in Flint, Michigan, reached appalling levels for years, and it didn’t seem to make a huge political difference. A lot of people are comfortable ignoring quality issues with other people’s water.

Still, the political relevance of water availability and quality doesn’t seem likely to fade in the near future. It’s a key concern for the MAHA segment of Trump’s supporters. And the water crisis playing out in the American West, as the Colorado River dries up, is only getting worse, affecting both blue states and red. This past weekend, the seven states trying to negotiate a solution to this missed their deadline for a second time.

Water might not be a deciding factor in the midterms this November—there are a lot of issues that might take that prize. But as a political issue, it’s not going away.

Stat of the Week3 degrees Celsius

That’s the level of global warming a new report says governments need to prepare for—double the 1.5 degree Celsius (2.7 degree Fahrenheit) limit that leaders agreed to in 2015.

As Trump Obliterates Climate Efforts, States Try to Fill the Gap

As the Trump administration scraps the endangerment finding, Maxine Joselow has a timely report for The New York Times about how some states are trying to step up in the climate fight.

The end of federal greenhouse gas limits is an obstacle, but not a death knell, in the fight against climate change on the state level, experts said.Colorado helps explain why.In 2019, Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, set an ambitious goal of reducing the state’s greenhouse gas emissions 50 percent by 2030, from 2005 levels. Colorado is now on track to meet this goal by 2032, a two-year delay for which local leaders have largely blamed the Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks.

The end of federal greenhouse gas limits is an obstacle, but not a death knell, in the fight against climate change on the state level, experts said.

Colorado helps explain why.

In 2019, Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, set an ambitious goal of reducing the state’s greenhouse gas emissions 50 percent by 2030, from 2005 levels. Colorado is now on track to meet this goal by 2032, a two-year delay for which local leaders have largely blamed the Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks.

Read Maxine Joselow’s full report at 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.

Trump Wins Another Fake Award—but He Actually Deserves This One

Here are the policies the president is embracing as the “Undisputed Champion of Coal.”

Last month, Energy Secretary Chris Wright convened the National Coal Council for the first time since the organization was disbanded under President Biden. He extolled the administration’s work forcing aging coal plants to stay open, and hinted at further handouts to come. Now we’re starting to get a sense of what those handouts might look like.

This week, the Trump administration announced that it would, as promised last summer, revoke the so-called “endangerment finding”—a key scientific finding from 2009 on which almost all federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions is based. It will also order the Defense Department to purchase electricity from coal-fired power plants, and the industry will get a 33-month extension on cleaning up coal-ash dumps containing mercury, arsenic, and other toxins (all of which are expected to seep into groundwater in the meantime). Administration officials speaking to The Wall Street Journal ahead of the Wednesday announcement additionally said the administration would “award funding to five coal plants in West Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina and Kentucky to recommission and upgrade the facilities” and that “Trump will be awarded the inaugural ‘Undisputed Champion of Coal’ award by the Washington Coal Club.”

Trump famously covets fake awards that stroke his ego, but it’s hard to argue that he doesn’t deserve this one.

The revocation of the endangerment finding, which determined that greenhouse gases harm public health, is the biggest news. But propping up coal is societally consequential in its own right, and few think it’s a good idea. It’s economically unsustainable, and aside from warming the planet, coal combustion has been linked to respiratory problems, heart problems, cancer, cognitive impairment and decline, and death. In 2023, a study from George Mason University found that exposure to fine particulate pollution from coal combustion was associated with more than twice the mortality rates linked to fine particulate pollution from other sources.

In fact, pretty much everything that the Trump administration has proposed doing this week polls poorly—and not just with Democrats.

In 2023, Data for Progress found that 65 percent of all likely voters supported proposed Environmental Protection Agency regulations restricting coal- and gas-fired plant pollution—and half of Republicans did too. More recent polling conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the GMU Center for Climate Change Communication found that 66 percent of all registered voters, including a majority of moderate Republicans (57 percent), favor transitioning the economy to 100 percent clean energy by 2050. Shockingly, even 26 percent of conservative Republicans support this. And 74 percent of registered voters want to see carbon dioxide regulated “as a pollutant”—including 76 percent of moderate Republicans and 45 percent of conservative Republicans.

This is the data you should keep in mind when reading New York Times reporters Lisa Friedman and Maxeline Joselow’s meticulous story about the small, behind-the-scenes team that has been working for years to overturn the endangerment finding. While “conservative groups and businesses immediately fought to dismantle” the finding in 2009, they write, most corporations had given up by 2017 “as they lost legal challenges and public concern about global warming began to grow.” Officials in the first Trump administration actually rejected calls to revoke the finding, even during their wild dash to undo as many environmental regulations as possible on their way out the door in January 2021.

But a few key people—specifically Trump allies Russell Vought and Jeffrey Clark, as well as “lesser-known conservative attorneys” Mandy Gunasekara and Jonathan Brightbill—refused to give up, and during the Biden administration they began drafting “a comprehensive strategy for reversing the finding on ‘Day 1’ of the next Republican administration,” working “in secret ‘to prevent media and other conflicted sources from shaming participants and undercutting the work before it is done.’”

Businesses weren’t pressing for it anymore, most mainstream Republicans weren’t pressing for it anymore, and, to hear Joselow and Friedman recount the opinion of one former Trump transition adviser, “the years of work of conservative activists might have gone nowhere if a different Republican had won the presidency.”

Or, to put it another way, almost no one wanted this. Instead, both the polling data and the Times report show that a handful of extremely dedicated ideologues—not even fossil-fuel executives—toiled in secret and found, in Trump, a useful random-number generator who was willing to turn their incredibly unpopular position into policy. Cue the rejoicing from coal companies and the like, who weren’t even aware something this politically implausible was an option.

On the one hand, the fact that no one wants these handouts for coal means that the potential for backlash—as with almost everything else this administration seems to be pursuing—is significant. On the other hand, not all of this damage will be easy to undo.

Stat of the Week6.4 degrees Fahrenheit

That’s how much February temperatures have risen since the last time Cortina, Italy, hosted the Winter Olympic Games, in 1956. Unsurprisingly, climate change is creating challenges for this year’s games.

Why this country declared an ocean current collapse a national security risk

This detailed report on what the collapse of the Atlantic Ocean’s current system could mean for Iceland was published Tuesday, six days after reporter Chico Harlan was told he was being laid off after 17 years at the Post, as part of layoffs that cut almost half of staff at the storied newspaper.

Sometime over the next 100 years, human-driven warming could disrupt a vital ocean current that carries heat northward from the tropics. After this breach, most of the world would keep getting hotter—but northern Europe would cool substantially, with Iceland at the center of a deep freeze. Climate modeling shows Icelandic winter extremes plunging to an unprecedented minus-50 degrees Fahrenheit. Sea ice could surround the country for the first time since it was settled by Vikings. “At that point, Iceland would be one giant glacier,” said Hildigunnur Thorsteinsson, the director general of the Icelandic Meteorological Office.… In October, the government classified the AMOC collapse as a national security risk. It amounts to a reckoning with national survival, as the country begins to absorb the idea that climate change won’t necessarily unfold linearly or predictably, and could bring changes beyond the scope of what a nation can cope with.

Sometime over the next 100 years, human-driven warming could disrupt a vital ocean current that carries heat northward from the tropics. After this breach, most of the world would keep getting hotter—but northern Europe would cool substantially, with Iceland at the center of a deep freeze. Climate modeling shows Icelandic winter extremes plunging to an unprecedented minus-50 degrees Fahrenheit. Sea ice could surround the country for the first time since it was settled by Vikings.

“At that point, Iceland would be one giant glacier,” said Hildigunnur Thorsteinsson, the director general of the Icelandic Meteorological Office.…

In October, the government classified the AMOC collapse as a national security risk. It amounts to a reckoning with national survival, as the country begins to absorb the idea that climate change won’t necessarily unfold linearly or predictably, and could bring changes beyond the scope of what a nation can cope with.

Read Chico Harlan’s full report at The Washington Post.

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

What Offshore Wind and the Kennedy Center Have in Common

The Trump administration tends to respond to defeats by getting even more aggressive.

On Monday, the Trump administration suffered its fifth consecutive courtroom defeat in its war on offshore wind. All of these cases stem from an order in December in which the Interior Department claimed that a classified Defense Department report had deemed offshore wind a “national security threat” and Interior was therefore “pausing” the leases on five already-under-construction offshore wind projects on the East Coast, “effective immediately.”

How, you may wonder, did offshore wind pose a national security threat? That’s unclear. The Interior order mentioned previous findings of radar interference but seemed to be suggesting that the information in the “Department of War” reports contained something beyond that.

Judge Royce Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, apparently reviewed the new classified report and didn’t buy it. So Sunrise Wind in New York, like the other four wind projects (including Vineyard Wind in Massachusetts, which is already sending power to the grid and was particularly useful during the recent winter storm), is free to proceed as the appeals process continues. “The administration is now 0-5 in its effort to stop wind farms under construction along the East Coast,” The New York Times’ Maxine Joselow noted.

This is not the only embarrassing result of the administration’s odd flurry of late-December energy orders. The administration has long claimed that coal plants have been unfairly demonized by environmentalists, that the country urgently needs fossil fuels, while—in Trump’s words at the World Economic Forum recently—“windmills” are “losers.” But two utilities are now petitioning the administration to, pretty please, let them close their coal plants as planned.

Craig Generating Station’s Unit 1 is one of several coal plants targeted by the administration’s unusual “emergency orders” to remain open past their scheduled retirement. Obviously, environmental groups aren’t thrilled: Previous research has found that some 460,000 deaths in the United States were attributable to coal plant pollution between 1999 and 2020. But reviving coal was always a pretty foolish economic proposition, as well. “Reopening closed coal plants makes no economic sense,” two analysts at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis wrote last summer. The reason is simple: “As coal plants age, maintenance costs rise, pushing up their generation costs, making them uncompetitive.”

This is now precisely what two power utilities are saying in their petition. Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association and Platte River Power Authority, two co-operative utilities that run Craig Unit 1, along with three co-owners, weren’t just planning to close the plant to meet Colorado’s goal of phasing out coal by 2030. They were planning to close it because it’s extremely expensive to run, reports Canary Media’s Jeff St. John. One estimate suggests keeping the plant open merely 90 days could cost $20 million. The utilities are arguing, St. John writes, that “forcing them to operate it past December will require their members to bear unnecessary costs, which constitutes an ‘uncompensated taking’ of their property in violation of the Constitution.”

It’s one thing for environmentalists to point out that propping up fossil fuels makes no sense. It’s another thing for utilities themselves to say it.

Between this and being defeated five-nil on offshore wind, another administration might be feeling embarrassed right now (although not as embarrassed as it should have been for arguing that wind turbines pose a secret national security threat to begin with). And that’s typically the subtext when Bluesky liberals share these news stories—smugly or wryly noting further evidence of the administration’s consistent incompetence.

But this is a bit like Trump’s face-plant over the Kennedy Center—“an implicit admission of defeat,” in the words of The Atlantic’s David Graham. Trump now plans to close the storied D.C. arts institution for a complete reconstruction because, after a year with him at the helm promising to make the arts great again, droves of high-profile artists have canceled their performances and ticket sales have plummeted. It’s not working.

While it’s standard for political opponents to........

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