This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The natural environment took an unprecedented pounding during the war in Gaza. And as the territory’s inhabitants have returned home since the ceasefire, the extent of the environmental devastation is becoming clear, raising crucial questions about how to reconstruct Gaza in the face of severe and potentially irreversible damage to the environment.

The war has knocked out water supplies and disabled sewage treatment facilities, causing raw effluent to flow across the land, polluting the Mediterranean and underground water reserves essential for irrigating crops. More than two-thirds of Gaza’s farmland, including wells and greenhouses, has been damaged or destroyed by bombardment and military earthworks.

Detailed satellite images taken since the ceasefire began on January 19 show 80 percent of Gaza’s trees lost. In addition, vital wetlands, sand dunes, coastal waters, and the only significant river, the Wadi Gaza, have all suffered extensively. The UN Environment Programme warns that the stripping of trees, shrubs, and crops has so badly damaged the soils of the once-fertile, biodiverse, and well-watered territory that it faces long-term desertification.

Nature is the “silent victim of Israel’s war on Gaza,” says Saeed Bagheri, a lecturer in international law at the University of Reading in the U.K.

Scientist Ahmed Hilles, head of the National Institute for Environment and Development, a leading Palestinian think tank, last week called for an international fact-finding committee “to assess the damage and lay the basis for environmental restoration and long-term recovery.” He said it should “prioritize the rehabilitation of water sources, soil remediation, and the restoration of agricultural lands.”

The Palestinian territory of Gaza extends for 24 miles along the shore of the eastern Mediterranean. Though small, it is a biodiversity hotspot where wildlife from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa meet. It has boasted more than 250 bird species and 100 mammal species, from wild cats and wolves to mongooses and mole rats, according to research conducted over the past two decades by the foremost expert on the territory’s fauna and flora, Abdel Fattah Abd Rabou of the Islamic University of Gaza in Gaza City.

Both wildlife and the human population have been sustained by its abundant underground water reserves. “The shallow sand wells provided an ample supply of the sweet life-giving water,” says Mark Zeitoun, director general of the Geneva Water Hub, which advocates for peace through diplomacy on water. This water, overlain by fertile soils, was why so many Palestinians fled to Gaza after being expelled from their homes by militias following the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

But Gaza’s population has since soared to more than 2 million inhabitants, making it one of the most densely populated places on Earth—it vies with Singapore, but without the high-rises. That has put immense pressure on the underground water. Extraction prior to the war was more than three times greater than recharge from rainfall and seepage from the Wadi Gaza, which had dwindled due to dams upstream in Israel.

As water tables fall, salty seawater has infiltrated the aquifer. By 2023, more than 97 percent of Gaza’s once-sweet underground water was unfit for drinking, according to the World Health Organization. Increasingly, well water has been restricted to irrigating crops. Public water supplies have come largely from seawater desalination plants built with international aid, augmented by water delivered from Israel through three cross-border pipelines.

The UN estimates the war has left more than 40 million tons of rubble that includes human remains, asbestos, and unexploded ordnance.

But since the start of the war on October 7, 2023, public supplies have dramatically diminished. Last October, the Palestine Water Authority reported that 85 percent of water facilities were at least partially out of action. Output from water-supply wells had fallen by more than a half, and desalination plants lacked power, while Israel had reduced deliveries down the pipelines.

A survey found that only 14 percent of households still relied on public supplies. Most were taking water from potentially contaminated open wells or unregulated private tankers. In September, Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, the UN special rapporteur on human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation, charged that limiting access to clean water “is clearly employed as a weapon in Gaza against [the] Palestinian civil population.”

Israel denies this. “The IDF does not aim to inflict excessive damage to civilian infrastructure,” an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson said, “and strikes exclusively on the grounds of military necessity and in strict accordance with international law.” It cites cases where it says Hamas has stored weapons and launched attacks from such water infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the fate of the once-abundant underground water—the lifeline for both human and natural life—hangs by a thread. With most wells currently out of use for irrigated agriculture, withdrawals from the aquifer may have been reduced. But the war has increased contamination of what water remains.

The threats are various. UNEP warns that Israeli efforts to use seawater to flood the estimated 300 miles of underground tunnels Hamas has dug beneath Gaza could be contaminating the groundwaters beneath. (The IDF has said on social media that it “takes into consideration the soil and water systems in the area” before flooding tunnels.) Meanwhile, sewage treatment has all but ceased, with facilities either destroyed by military action or disabled by lack of power. Even the solar panels installed at some treatment works have reportedly been destroyed.

Raw sewage and wastewater spills across the land and into water courses or the Mediterranean—up to 3.5 million cubic feet every day, according to UNEP. The porous soils in most of Gaza mean sewage discharged onto the land readily seeps into underground water reserves. “The crisis threatens long-term environmental damage as contaminants seep into groundwater,” says the UN Development Programme (UNDP).

The marine environment is also choking in sewage. In 2022 Israeli environmentalist Gidon Bromberg, who heads EcoPeace Middle East, a transnational NGO, persuaded Israeli security authorities to allow Gaza to import cement to build new three sewage treatment plants along the shoreline. The work was completed, and the following summer both Palestinians and Israelis could, for the first time in many years, swim safely from their respective Mediterranean beaches without encountering Gaza’s raw sewage. Fish returned and a Mediterranean monk seal was recorded for the first time ever off Gaza. But by the start of 2024, a few months after the war began, the plants were all out of action and satellite images showed plumes of sewage spewing into the sea.

The destruction of the built environment in Gaza is also a threat to the natural environment. UN agencies estimate the war has created more than 40 million tons of rubble, containing human remains, asbestos and other hazardous materials, and unexploded ordnance. Meanwhile, the collapse of waste collection services has resulted in a proliferation of makeshift dumps—141, according to a UNDP count in October—while open-air waste burning regularly sends black smoke and hazardous pollutants through densely populated areas.

Some international lawyers argue that Israel is guilty of war crimes against the natural environment in Gaza as much as against its people. The Geneva Convention prohibits warfare that may cause “widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment.” All three terms provoke debate about their precise meaning. The IDF said its actions are proportionate and are justified by military needs and within international law. But Bagheri said, “The destruction of the natural environment in Gaza is now very well documented. It is not collateral or incidental, but deliberate.”

Before the conflict, cultivation covered more than a third of Gaza. But by September, the UN Food and Agriculture Organizaton assessed that two-thirds of farmland had been badly damaged. Analyses of satellite imagery by Forensic Architecture, an interdisciplinary group of researchers at Goldsmiths’ College, part of the University of London, dedicated to exposing “state and corporate violence,” found that more than 2,000 farms, greenhouses, and other agricultural sites had been destroyed, “often to be replaced with Israeli military earthworks.”

The IDF said it “does not intentionally harm agricultural land and seeks to mitigate environmental impact,” but that “Hamas often operates from within orchards, fields, and agricultural land”. Yet there are growing concerns that the damage—in particular from the removal of trees—could prove permanent.

Tree loss has been examined in detail by He Yin, a geographer who heads the remote sensing and land science laboratory at Kent State University. He shared with Yale Environment 360 his latest assessment of satellite images.

Before the war, trees covered around a third of the cultivated area, he says. By late September, 67 percent of them had been damaged. But by January 21, two days after the ceasefire came into effect, that figure had risen to 80 percent, with losses exceeding 90 percent in northern Gaza. Prior to the conflict there were some natural trees, says Yin. “But I would say they are pretty much all gone now.”

There are two likely causes of tree loss: displaced residents cutting down trees for firewood, and the Israeli military bombarding and uprooting trees to eliminate cover for Hamas fighters and clear security buffer zones around the edge of Gaza.

With most farms covering less than two acres, “the loss of a single tree can be devastating” for farmers’ future fruit harvests, says Yin. But the environmental implications of tree loss could also prove permanent and devastating for future generations. UNEP says that uprooting by military equipment “has moved, mixed and thinned the topsoil cover over large areas.” This, it says, “will impact future cultivation [and] make the land vulnerable to desertification.”

All this is bad news not just for people, but for wildlife. The space for nature to flourish in Gaza is very limited. Still, long-term research by Abd Rabou found that, despite human population pressures, some species have revived in recent years. After the abandonment of a series of Israeli settlements in the territory in 2005, “dozens of Arabian wolf [sic] and other carnivores crept intermittently through gaps in the border to the east of the Gaza Strip.”

Yin’s images of the area reveal an almost total loss of trees since May, sometimes replaced by bombardment craters.

Animals dug burrows beneath Israel’s security fences to reach domestic livestock and poultry, as well as small prey living in waste dumps and sewage treatment plants.

But there are natural attractions for wildlife too. The Wadi Gaza, which bisects the territory, is an important stopover for migrating water birds, including herons, storks, flamingos, and raptors, as well as home to the Palestine sunbird, the territory’s national bird. The wadi’s attraction continues even though it has suffered badly in recent decades from both upstream water diversions and sewage discharged from refugee camps.

Still, in 2000, the Palestinian Authority made the wadi the territory’s only nature reserve, and in 2022, work began on a $50 million UN project to reduce pollution and restore its ecology.

The start of the war halted that work. And over the past 15 months, the wadi has again become a running sewer and dumping ground. “Top of my concerns for Wadi Gaza are pollution from debris, wastewater, corpses, ammunition, and explosives,” says Nada Majdalani, the Palestine director of EcoPeace Middle East.

Another ill-fated Gazan ecological treasure is Al-Mawasi, a narrow fertile strip of sand dunes near the border with Egypt. Once, Al-Mawasi was thinly populated and rich in wildlife attracted by miniature wetlands that form amid the dunes where the underground water surfaces. Abd Rabou has recorded 135 bird species there, including many Palestine sunbirds, as well as 14 species of mammals and 20 of reptiles.

But early in the war, the IDF designated Al-Mawasi a “safe zone” for people fleeing its bombardment of nearby towns. Hundreds of thousands sought shelter amid the dunes. Then, last July, the IDF began bombing the enclave, in pursuit of Hamas fighters. This redoubled the damage to the fragile ecosystem. Yin’s images of the area reveal an almost total loss of trees since May, sometimes replaced by bombardment craters.

Currently, most information about the state of Gaza’s natural environment comes from such remote sensing imagery. Detailed ground observations are rare. It has been unsafe, and even with a ceasefire, NGOs have other priorities. Meanwhile, academic life has been shattered by the war. Much of the Islamic University of Gaza, including Abd Rabou’s biology department, was destroyed in the first days of the conflict.

With or without a restored campus, it may be a while before peer-reviewed literature on the state of nature in Gaza resumes. When I contacted Abd Rabou by email in January to discuss his work, he sent a swift reply. “Now I am not able to communicate at all,” he wrote, “because five of my children were lost during the Israeli war on Gaza and my house was completely destroyed.”

This story was originally published by Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Flanked by Donald Trump in the Oval Office this week, Elon Musk claimed his much-vaunted, but ill-defined Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was providing “maximum transparency” on its blitz through the federal government. Its official website was empty, however—until Wednesday, when it added elements including data from a controversial rightwing think tank recently sued by a climate scientist.

New elements include DOGE’s feed from X, Musk’s social network, and a blank section for savings identified by the agency, promised to be updated “no later than” Valentine’s Day. At the top of the website’s regulations page, DOGE used data published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a libertarian think tank that claims to fight “climate alarmism.”

The CEI’s “unconstitutionality index,” which it started in 2003, compares regulations or rules introduced by government agencies with laws enacted by Congress.

The CEI claims to fight “climate alarmism,” and has long worked to block climate-focused policies, successfully lobbying against the ratification of the international climate treaty the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 as well as the enactment of the 2009 Waxman-Markey bill, which aimed to place a cap on greenhouse gas emissions.

The think tank ran ads to counter Al Gore’s 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, claiming in one ad: “The Antarctic ice sheet is getting thicker, not thinner…Why are they trying to scare us?” In a second ad, the CEI said carbon dioxide was “essential to life,” adding: “They call it pollution. We call it life.” The campaign incited pushback from a scientist who said his research was misrepresented in the ads.

During Trump’s first term, the organization also successfully pushed him to pull the United States from the 2015 Paris climate treaty. Today, it regularly publishes arguments against the mandatory disclosure of climate-related financial risks and increased efficiency regulations on appliances.

Last January, the CEI lost a lawsuit filed against it by the climate scientist Dr Michael Mann for $1 million in punitive damages.

The think tank has extensive ties to the far-right network formed by the fossil fuel billionaire Charles Koch and his late brother David. In 2020, the network provided some $900,000 to CEI, public records show—a number that is likely an underestimate, as it does not include “dark money” contributions which need not be disclosed. CEI also accepted more than $640,000 from the Koch network between 1997 and 2015.

CEI’s other donors have included the nation’s top oil and gas lobbying group, American Petroleum Institute, and the fossil fuel giant ExxonMobil. It is an associate member of ultraconservative State Policy Network, which has also received funding from Koch-linked groups and whose members have fought to pass punitive anti-pipeline protest laws.

The White House and CEI were contacted for comment.

This story was originally published by Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Flanked by Donald Trump in the Oval Office this week, Elon Musk claimed his much-vaunted, but ill-defined Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was providing “maximum transparency” on its blitz through the federal government. Its official website was empty, however—until Wednesday, when it added elements including data from a controversial rightwing think tank recently sued by a climate scientist.

New elements include DOGE’s feed from X, Musk’s social network, and a blank section for savings identified by the agency, promised to be updated “no later than” Valentine’s Day. At the top of the website’s regulations page, DOGE used data published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a libertarian think tank that claims to fight “climate alarmism.”

The CEI’s “unconstitutionality index,” which it started in 2003, compares regulations or rules introduced by government agencies with laws enacted by Congress.

The CEI claims to fight “climate alarmism,” and has long worked to block climate-focused policies, successfully lobbying against the ratification of the international climate treaty the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 as well as the enactment of the 2009 Waxman-Markey bill, which aimed to place a cap on greenhouse gas emissions.

The think tank ran ads to counter Al Gore’s 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, claiming in one ad: “The Antarctic ice sheet is getting thicker, not thinner…Why are they trying to scare us?” In a second ad, the CEI said carbon dioxide was “essential to life,” adding: “They call it pollution. We call it life.” The campaign incited pushback from a scientist who said his research was misrepresented in the ads.

During Trump’s first term, the organization also successfully pushed him to pull the United States from the 2015 Paris climate treaty. Today, it regularly publishes arguments against the mandatory disclosure of climate-related financial risks and increased efficiency regulations on appliances.

Last January, the CEI lost a lawsuit filed against it by the climate scientist Dr Michael Mann for $1 million in punitive damages.

The think tank has extensive ties to the far-right network formed by the fossil fuel billionaire Charles Koch and his late brother David. In 2020, the network provided some $900,000 to CEI, public records show—a number that is likely an underestimate, as it does not include “dark money” contributions which need not be disclosed. CEI also accepted more than $640,000 from the Koch network between 1997 and 2015.

CEI’s other donors have included the nation’s top oil and gas lobbying group, American Petroleum Institute, and the fossil fuel giant ExxonMobil. It is an associate member of ultraconservative State Policy Network, which has also received funding from Koch-linked groups and whose members have fought to pass punitive anti-pipeline protest laws.

The White House and CEI were contacted for comment.

Early medical care during pregnancy can prevent complications, and lead to healthier babies and parents-to-be. In 2022, Evangeline Warren, a sociology PhD student at Ohio State University, received a “diversity supplement” grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study medical mistrust among pregnant people. Over two years, she interviewed dozens of patients across Ohio who’d expressed discomfort about going to the doctor—gathering information which, she hopes, will improve medical visits, and ultimately, save lives.

Yet if she applied for this project in 2025, it’s unclear if it ever would happen. The NIH grant she’d received, which had been around since 1989, is typically given to hundreds of researchers every year to supplement ongoing NIH-funded research and support underrepresented groups’ participation in the sciences. (In her application, for instance, Warren flagged that she is multiracial and has a disability.)

“It is just common sense that in order to have the best science, we need the broadest, most inclusive environment for scientists.”

But within days of Donald Trump’s second stint as president, the NIH removed or altered webpages about the diversity supplement program and stopped accepting applications, marking the grant as “expired,” only to apparently reinstate them later—sparking concern about the future of the program. (NIH didn’t respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.)

Luckily for Warren and her colleagues, her grant concluded at the end of 2024. “I made it out under the wire,” she says. But as someone who benefited from one of these programs, she’s “heartbroken” to see it come under threat. “I’m really worried about what it means for junior colleagues,” she says, noting that the grants typically involve mentorship and professional development for early-career researchers. If we lose those scientists, she says, “we’re going to miss out on areas of discovery that aren’t even on our radar.”

The NIH supplements are just one potential casualty among the ongoing, government-wide war on DEI, or diversity, equity, and inclusion. Trump kicked it off with a January 21 executive order aimed at ending “immoral” “race- and sex-based preferences” at federal agencies. While it’s unclear what research or programs, specifically, fall under Trump’s definition of DEI, the order has already set off chaos and confusion throughout the science world, as agencies like the NIH, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the National Science Foundation (NSF) scramble to comply with it.

The NSF, for instance, which spends most of its $9.06 billion budget on funding academic research, has begun combing through grants for terms like “disability,” “diversity,” “equity,” “gender,” “historically,” “marginalized,” and “women,” among others, in an apparent attempt to weed out projects deemed non-compliant. (NSF initially froze funding too, including for ongoing awards, until a federal judge blocked the agency from doing so.) Researchers wanting to access NSF’s payment system, ACM$, were told at one point that funding would be unavailable while the agency conducted a “comprehensive review” of its portfolio, according to NSF memos reviewed by Mother Jones.

Meanwhile, workers at the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the NIH, the CDC, and the Food and Drug Administration, received a memo urging them to report colleagues who’ve used “coded or imprecise language” to “disguise” DEI efforts—or face “adverse consequences.” On top of that, Trump officials have reportedly removed more than 8,000 federal web pages, including pages devoted to workplace diversity at the CDC, health equity at the FDA, and some mentioning “broadening participation” in science at NSF. Research review panels at NIH and NSF, where experts convene to assess grant proposals, were also put on hold, grinding all new funding to a halt for more than a week. (Many panels have since restarted.)

“This kind of halt to the review of scientific proposals has never before happened,” an NSF employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity told Mother Jones.

If left unchecked, Trump’s unprecedented crackdown on anything considered DEI, scientists worry, will reshape who can participate in science for years to come, drain creativity and fresh ideas, limit the scope of projects, and by extension, lead to worse research. And that’s not just bad for scientists; it’s bad for the health and safety of the rest of us. “It is just common sense that in order to have the best science, we need the broadest, most inclusive environment for scientists,” says Jacob Hoover Vigly, a postdoctoral fellow at MIT. As Warren warns, “We are very much at risk of losing an entire generation of researchers, and that will negatively affect us for generations.”

Fostering diversity in science isn’t a new idea. In 1945, Vannevar Bush, the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, defended the need to expand opportunity in the field in a report titled, “Science: The Endless Frontier.” The prescient paper, which paved the way for the founding of NSF in 1950, argued that scientific advancement is “essential” to the United States’ national security, job creation, and health of its residents. And it stressed that one of the keys to advancement was widening the pool of scientists empowered to do research.

Research shows broadening the makeup of teams can enhance, creativity, innovation, and productivity.

Science, Bush felt, should be a field based on competitive merit and talent—but barriers often prevented all but the wealthiest from competing. “Higher education in this country is largely for those who have the means,” he wrote, adding, “there are talented individuals in every segment of the population” who often can’t access it. “Here is a tremendous waste of the greatest resource of a nation—the intelligence of its citizens.” Part of the solution for the most meritorious system, he asserted, is to “encourage and enable” a larger number of people to “take up science as a career” through scholarships and fellowships. In other words, greater opportunity would enhance a merit-based system.

In 1980, Congress passed the “NSF Authorization and Science and Technology Equal Opportunities Act,” aiming to support activities and programs that encourage people “of all ethnic, racial, and economic backgrounds” to have “equal opportunity in education, training, and employment in scientific and technical fields.” More than forty years later, in 2022, the CHIPS and Science Act called on NSF to invest further in minority-serving institutions and appoint a chief diversity officer.

Those reforms have led to some incremental progress. But there’s plenty more work to be done: As of 2023, the most recent year available, women made up about 48 percent of grad students in science, engineering, and health in the US, but are still underrepresented in science and technology careers. Hispanic, Black, American Indian, or Alaska Native people collectively account for 37 percent of the US population between the ages 18 to 34, according to a 2023 NSF report (which is now scrubbed from the agency’s website), but only 24 percent of master’s degrees in science and engineering, and just 16 percent of doctoral degrees. An estimated 72 percent of all full-time faculty at colleges and universities are white, even as 58 percent of the country’s population identifies that way.

The slow pace of diversifying science has likely come at a cost. Research shows broadening the makeup of teams can enhance, creativity, innovation, and productivity, NSF’s Committee on Equal Opportunities in Science and Engineering noted in 2023. Other research has shown that ethnic diversity among teams correlates with amplified scientific impact. These benefits are particularly clear, as a group of University of Massachusetts, Amherst-led researchers wrote in 2017, when women and people of color aren’t just on teams, but fully integrated in them. “If organizations and fields (and nations) cannot include all scientists, they will flounder,” the researchers concluded.

Now, programs that were supposed to help bridge the gap are under attack by officials who’ve labeled DEI as a form of radical wokeness. “DEI is just another word for racism,” Elon Musk, now at the helm of the unofficial “Department of Government Efficiency” or DOGE, posted on X last year.

Broad swaths of research have been lumped into the MAGA camp’s definition of “DEI”: In an October 2024 report from Sen. Ted Cruz, titled, “D.E.I.: Division. Extremism. Ideology. How the Biden-Harris NSF Politicized Science,” the Texas Republican claimed that NSF funded thousands of “questionable projects” under the Biden administration that promoted DEI “tenets” or pushed “neo-Marxist perspectives about enduring class struggle.” This week, Cruz released the full database of studies. (Notably, the review only analyzed grants awarded under Biden, not before, and many of the broad search terms used to identify them—including “minorities,” “increase diversity,” and “barrier”—were probably in use dating back to the 80s and 90s, the NSF employee says, the era of NSF’s 1980 equal opportunity law.)

Kylea Garces is an NSF-funded postdoc whose grant was on the list. She studies plant fungi. She wonders if her work was flagged because in her grant application, she shared that she was a first-generation, multiracial woman. “Even if I had the opportunity to alter this work to be in compliance, whatever that may mean, I can’t remove my identity in my story,” she says. “And that being under attack hurts probably the most.” (So far, no action has been taken to remove her funding.)

“I can’t remove my identity in my story. And that being under attack hurts probably the most.”

But all sorts of research—on topics the administration may deem inappropriate, or conducted by scientists on “DEI” grants—appears to be on the chopping block. Isabel Low, for instance, a neuroscience postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia University, says her funding is set to dry up in about a year. In preparing for her next career step, she was looking to apply for three grants, two of which were open to researchers from underrepresented backgrounds, including women: NIH’s MOSAIC and BRAIN Initiative awards. Now, she’s not sure those awards will be available. After the inauguration, “the web pages for these grants were just disappearing in real time,” she says. (Applications for these grants appear to have been restored, for now.)

Low’s research, which focuses on how memories form in the brain, isn’t related to DEI as a subject area. “I’m just an underrepresented person in academia trying to do this work,” she says, adding, “This just hurts research broadly across the board.”

One professor at a Midwestern university, who also spoke anonymously, says he recently drew upon NIH’s supplement to enhance diversity to hire a postdoc at the end of January. But as of this week, the money hasn’t yet arrived. “If I had to bet,” the professor says, that money probably isn’t going to show up.” While he plans to continue supporting the postdoc, he says, at a public university, “There’s only so much moving around money one can do.”

Unfortunately, cuts to funding tend to hurt junior researchers first—grad students, postdocs, and early-career professors without the same safety net as established scientists. Which is a shame, the professor says, because “the junior people are always the most creative,” a trait he argues is critical to the advancement of science.

Research on topics like women’s health, health disparities, environmental justice, or historic inequities may be especially vulnerable, researchers worry. The Midwestern professor, for instance, has a grant proposal up for review at the NIH related to women’s health. Now he’s concerned the grant won’t get green-lit by the administration, at least in full. “I’m not sure studies of women’s health are going to fit broadly into what they want to fund,” he says.

Warren, at Ohio State, studies the effects of discrimination on health—an issue that she fears will become “a point of focus” for the administration. While most of her funding comes from her university, she worries about her field generally: “If we don’t study these things,” she says, “It becomes a lot harder to make coherent policy arguments for why we need to address societal problems.”

The tools and data researchers rely on are at risk too. Shortly after Trump took office, for instance, the administration cut access to the Council on Environmental Quality’s Climate & Economic Justice Screening Tool, which scientists used to track areas most vulnerable to pollution. This helps them address basic health questions about environmental hazards. “That’s not DEI,” says Sacoby Wilson, an environmental health scientist and professor at the University of Maryland. “That’s a science question.”

On a practical level, weeding out diversity and inclusion from science may be harder than it sounds. Because many grants have some sort of mandated diversity component, DEI is embedded in the DNA of scientific research. As an NSF-funded biologist who asked to remain anonymous explains, “Congress has required that the NSF work on broadening participation of people in science. That is required by law,” he notes, pointing to the 1980 NSF equal opportunity law.

On the downside, that means, “Everybody at the NSF has a certain level of insecurity from the DEIA standpoint,” he says. “Where does the terrible, awful, ideological purging line get drawn?”

Perhaps the most lasting threat of Trump’s DEI purge is an indirect one: good scientists quitting government-supported science—or steering clear of it in the first place.

Some of Warren’s peers, for instance, are considering private employment instead of a faculty or research job, she says. “That’s a great loss,” she says. “Those are folks who otherwise would be making discoveries that could benefit the public good.” Now, they’ll be “cordoned off in corporate land.”

Others are weighing leaving the country to pursue research on friendlier shores. “It feels less stable here now,” says Vigly. Some scientists worry that foreign researchers, who have long flocked to the US given its reputation for plentiful opportunities, will be dissuaded. “If we’re not putting our money where our mouth is in training world’s scientists, then all we’ve invested in the science in the US will not mean anything anymore,” the NSF-funded biologist notes. If scientists are limited in the scope of their work, he says, “the United States will no longer be the place where you go to do the best science.”

“Those are folks who otherwise would be making discoveries that could benefit the public good.” Now, they’ll be “cordoned off in corporate land.”

That’s not to say all young researchers are giving up hope. “There are thousands of postdocs and grad students across the country who are part of unions who are ready to fight on this,” Low, a steward for her postdoc union, UAW Local 4100, says. Even before the election, she’d started working with a coalition of researcher unions called Fair Research Careers Now to push for better working conditions for early-career scientists. After Trump paused federal funding for many researcher salaries, the group organized a virtual phone bank to call their representatives in Congress. Hundreds of people showed up—so many, that they had to increase their capacity on Zoom. “When we come together as unionized researchers,” Low says, “we can have a lot of power.” (Disclosure: UAW also represents Mother Jones and Reveal employees.)

Warren, for her part, is on track to graduate with her PhD in May. While she wasn’t planning to pursue a career in academia, she had considered applying for a postdoctoral fellowship, perhaps to study racism and health. Unfortunately, the grants she’d rely on are offered by NIH and NSF. “And with that amount of uncertainty,” she says, it wouldn’t make sense to apply for them. The first weeks of the Trump administration, she adds, “have really shown that what many consider to be a very stable career path is not, in fact, stable. At the whim of a single executive order, things can be thrown into chaos.”

Beyond the chaos in the near-term, a country with fewer scientists means less life-saving research, “a tremendous waste of the greatest resource of a nation—the intelligence of its citizens,” as Bush put it in 1945. And, at least for some researchers, it cuts against the very idea of what American science is—or was. As Warren says, “If we have suddenly decided that diversity is not a core value of our country, there is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the American project is.”

This story was originally published on the author’s substack, Field Notes with Alexander C Kaufman, to which you can subscribe here.

Artificial intelligence is driving up demand for electricity—the only question is how much, and what provides the power.

Over the next three years, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimates, AI’s thirst for power will double or triple. Last month, OpenAI unveiled its Stargate Project, a plan to invest $500 billion in the infrastructure for artificial intelligence over the next four years that includes adding 25 gigawatts of new electricity capacity.

Right now, the most likely source of electricity to power those data centers is gas. GE Vernova, the country’s leading manufacturer of gas turbines, has an order book roughly a decade long and recent deals to work with ExxonMobil and Chevron on generating plants to power the AI boom. While President Donald Trump retained the Biden administration’s executive order opening up federal lands to new data centers, he rescinded his predecessor’s other action directing agencies to consider the climate impacts of AI. Combined with Trump’s full-frontal assault on the fastest-growing sources of zero-carbon electricity, the US market for natural gas looks set to grow.

But new research from Duke University shows how we could do four Stargate Projects without building a single new power plant. The study, published Tuesday morning, found that scaling back power usage by just 0.5 percent per year could free up supply on the grid for nearly 100 gigawatts of additional power demand.

“This should be a tool in the toolbox to get new loads online more quickly, so we can win this economic race.”

The duration of power curtailment would be less than three hours on average at time—and it would be planned. That’s roughly within the bounds of what the Uptime Institute, an industry group that sets standards for data centers, considers high performance for unplanned outages.

The result comes just weeks after China’s Deepseek AI program went public with a major breakthrough in its computational approach, upending the debate over how much new power capacity is needed in the years to come.

The “clearest takeaway” from the Duke study is that we might not need as many new gas power power plants in the immediate future—or at all, according to the report’s lead author, who said the findings should help bring new data centers online even faster.

“If resources were no object and we had an infinite supply of electrical engineers, lineworkers, construction equipment, and transformers, that’d be one thing. But we don’t,” Tyler Norris, a fellow at Duke’s Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment and Sustainability, told me. “There’s a limited set of upgrades we can get done in a certain timeframe. This can buy us some time to figure that out.”

The findings show that, simply by dialing down power usage at certain data centers during specific times, US regulators can determine which places need the most urgent attention, and even give cleaner generating technologies like new nuclear reactors, which take far longer to build than new gas plants, the time needed to get started.

“We’re not trying to claim we’re not going to need more capacity. We absolutely are. But it’s going to be different from jurisdiction to jurisdiction,” Norris said. “But, at minimum, this should be a tool in the toolbox to get new loads online more quickly, so we can win this economic race.”

For months now, data center companies have been seeking to buy up power from nuclear plants. In September, Microsoft agreed to spend $16 billion bringing the Three Mile Island station back online to power its AI efforts. Amazon and Google, meanwhile, invested in new small modular reactor companies. But there are only so many defunct nuclear plants to try to revive—and new, as-yet untested SMR technologies are still years away.

The amount of existing electricity capacity that can be directed to new data centers that are prepared to curtail power usage, on the other hand, is greater than what “the entire US nuclear fleet of 94 can supply,” Varun Sivaram, a senior fellow for energy and climate at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me.

“The guy just proved you could have 100 gigawatts more data centers in the United States by doing absolutely nothing,” Sivaram, who is launching a new startup aimed at promoting demand-response technology that can reduce power usage at certain times at data centers, said of Norris. “That’s shocking.”

But the implications are much bigger. While data centers are attracting much of the hype, they are hardly the only thing spurring growth in electricity demand in the US for the first time in decades.

Electrification of automobiles, factories and buildings—not to mention the rapidly surging need for air conditioning to survive increasingly brutal heat—are all set to add more demand on the grid.

When public utility commissioners consider new power plants to supply that new demand, advocates “should be able to wave this study and say, ‘Have you done everything you can do to ensure flexibility in this region before you build more fossil fuel power plants?’

“This is not about data centers,” Costa Samaras, the director of the Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation at Carnegie Mellon University, told me. “This is about the electrification project and getting serious about flexibility…as a way to free up space for all the things we need to do for electrification.”

With all these new demands for electricity, the only way to ensure that shifting from internal combustion engine cars to battery-powered ones, or coal-fired factories to electric ones, is to make sure new power plants are well planned and clean, said Samaras, who previously served as a senior energy adviser to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Data centers, he said, “are going to set the table for how we respond” to new demand for electricity. “If the response is to do nothing,” he added, “we have to build a bunch of new fossil plants. There goes clean electrification.”

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A letter signed by mayors and local leaders across 39 states is calling on Congress to protect all clean energy tax credits made available to state and local governments, which had been responsible for creating thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in investments before President Donald Trump froze the funds.

Those tax credits and the bill that enabled them—the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s signature climate policy—helped launch 750 clean energy projects credited with creating 400,000 new jobs and more than $422 billion in investments. But it drew the ire of the Trump administration. One of Trump’s first acts was signing an executive order pausing further use of the tax credits. 

Republican-led states have benefited the most from the credits, and freezing them will hurt communities across the country, the letter sent to congressional leaders in the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means committees late Friday warns. 

Repealing the credits would raise Americans’ electric bills by about $489 a year, the letter stated.

“Repeal, rollback, or adjustment of any clean energy incentives will upend countless energy projects and jobs across our country, endangering millions of American jobs, increasing costs for everyday Americans, costing billions in taxpayer dollars, and potentially forcing American jobs overseas,” reads the letter, signed by 133 local leaders representing 25 million Americans across jurisdictions led by both Democrats and Republicans.

The IRA is the nation’s largest single investment in addressing climate change, allocating billions of dollars via grants, loans, and tax incentives to promote the energy transition away from fossil fuels. The bill passed without a single Republican voting for it and has continued to face partisan attacks, though some Republican members of Congress have come to support it as money began flowing into their communities. According to the letter from local leaders, 85 percent of announced investments and 53 percent of new clean energy jobs stemming from the IRA are in districts represented by Republicans. 

The 13 tax credits the IRA created for state and local governments have led to the creation of charging stations for electric vehicles, solar installations on government buildings, and more. In just the first year of the tax credits being available, more than 500 local governments have taken advantage of them. 

Kate Gallego, Phoenix’s mayor, said the pause in tax credits has created uncertainty for local governments and businesses regarding the status of funding for various projects. In many cases, the credits come in the form of reimbursements for cities, she said. Phoenix has already placed orders for hybrid-electric buses thanks to the incentives and received a $15 million grant for expanding its EV charging network and addressing the city’s air quality problems. The city is trying to find out if that funding will still be available as city leaders work on the budget for the upcoming fiscal year, she said. 

Without certainty that the funding will be there, many of the projects can’t move forward. And if the IRA’s tax credits are repealed, it would raise electric bills for Americans across the country by roughly $489 a year as well as cutting jobs, the letter stated. 

“Whether you care about helping people manage their energy consumption, or American innovation or energy independence for the United States, the clean energy tax credits and direct pay have advanced those agendas,” said Gallego, who is also chair of Climate Mayors, a network of mayors focused on climate action. Many of the letter’s signees are members.

The tax credits’ uncertain future is one consequence of the Trump administration’s funding freeze across the government, touching off court battles and warnings from experts that the country is in a full-blown constitutional crisis. Federal judges have ruled that the Trump administration cannot pause congressionally approved funds to state and local governments, but agencies are still holding money back. 

That led a coalition of 22 Democratic state attorneys general to file a motion to enforce the judges’ rulings and a motion for a preliminary injunction in one of the court cases to stop the funding freeze. On Monday, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration must immediately restore all frozen federal funding, a win for the states. 

“This funding is owed by law to the people of Arizona,” said Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes in a statement announcing the legal filing. “Trump can try every trick he has up his sleeve to evade the Constitution but I will be there to stop him.” 

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A letter signed by mayors and local leaders across 39 states is calling on Congress to protect all clean energy tax credits made available to state and local governments, which had been responsible for creating thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in investments before President Donald Trump froze the funds.

Those tax credits and the bill that enabled them—the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s signature climate policy—helped launch 750 clean energy projects credited with creating 400,000 new jobs and more than $422 billion in investments. But it drew the ire of the Trump administration. One of Trump’s first acts was signing an executive order pausing further use of the tax credits. 

Republican-led states have benefited the most from the credits, and freezing them will hurt communities across the country, the letter sent to congressional leaders in the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means committees late Friday warns. 

Repealing the credits would raise Americans’ electric bills by about $489 a year, the letter stated.

“Repeal, rollback, or adjustment of any clean energy incentives will upend countless energy projects and jobs across our country, endangering millions of American jobs, increasing costs for everyday Americans, costing billions in taxpayer dollars, and potentially forcing American jobs overseas,” reads the letter, signed by 133 local leaders representing 25 million Americans across jurisdictions led by both Democrats and Republicans.

The IRA is the nation’s largest single investment in addressing climate change, allocating billions of dollars via grants, loans, and tax incentives to promote the energy transition away from fossil fuels. The bill passed without a single Republican voting for it and has continued to face partisan attacks, though some Republican members of Congress have come to support it as money began flowing into their communities. According to the letter from local leaders, 85 percent of announced investments and 53 percent of new clean energy jobs stemming from the IRA are in districts represented by Republicans. 

The 13 tax credits the IRA created for state and local governments have led to the creation of charging stations for electric vehicles, solar installations on government buildings, and more. In just the first year of the tax credits being available, more than 500 local governments have taken advantage of them. 

Kate Gallego, Phoenix’s mayor, said the pause in tax credits has created uncertainty for local governments and businesses regarding the status of funding for various projects. In many cases, the credits come in the form of reimbursements for cities, she said. Phoenix has already placed orders for hybrid-electric buses thanks to the incentives and received a $15 million grant for expanding its EV charging network and addressing the city’s air quality problems. The city is trying to find out if that funding will still be available as city leaders work on the budget for the upcoming fiscal year, she said. 

Without certainty that the funding will be there, many of the projects can’t move forward. And if the IRA’s tax credits are repealed, it would raise electric bills for Americans across the country by roughly $489 a year as well as cutting jobs, the letter stated. 

“Whether you care about helping people manage their energy consumption, or American innovation or energy independence for the United States, the clean energy tax credits and direct pay have advanced those agendas,” said Gallego, who is also chair of Climate Mayors, a network of mayors focused on climate action. Many of the letter’s signees are members.

The tax credits’ uncertain future is one consequence of the Trump administration’s funding freeze across the government, touching off court battles and warnings from experts that the country is in a full-blown constitutional crisis. Federal judges have ruled that the Trump administration cannot pause congressionally approved funds to state and local governments, but agencies are still holding money back. 

That led a coalition of 22 Democratic state attorneys general to file a motion to enforce the judges’ rulings and a motion for a preliminary injunction in one of the court cases to stop the funding freeze. On Monday, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration must immediately restore all frozen federal funding, a win for the states. 

“This funding is owed by law to the people of Arizona,” said Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes in a statement announcing the legal filing. “Trump can try every trick he has up his sleeve to evade the Constitution but I will be there to stop him.” 

This story was originally published by the Canada’s National Observer and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Canadian climate and fisheries experts are reeling after the Trump administration ordered researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—the US government agency in charge of weather forecasting, climate research, and fisheries—to temporarily stop communicating with “foreign nationals.” 

The move, which was first reported Wednesday by Wired, could devastate weather and oceanic forecasting, climate change research, and Canada’s ability to manage and study key fish stocks like Pacific salmon and halibut, experts and advocates say. 

“This is not a small blow for climate research—it is a body blow,” said Tzeporah Berman, a long-time Canadian climate advocate and expert. If implemented permanently, the move would hamstring some of the world’s most important climate monitoring data and modeling, making it hard to assess the scale of the crisis and craft effective responses. 

“Neither Trump nor Musk have the power to secure the US’s borders against climate change,” Berman said. “The fires and floods know no borders and it is absolutely critical that the world share data and solutions on shared global threats. Trump and Musk constraining NOAA from collaborating threatens us all, including us citizens. It’s a dangerous, closed minded, knee jerk ideological policy that could literally cost lives.” 

An internal email shared with Wired shows that employees at the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) were told to “PAUSE ALL INTERNATIONAL ENGAGEMENT” (sic), including international commissions and emails with “foreign national colleagues.” 

The ban extends to the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service, which works extensively with international partners to collect climate and weather data that is vital to protect air, shipping and railways from extreme weather, in addition to its value for climate research. Both organizations are contained within NOAA. 

The move could hide measurements from the Mauna Loa Observatory carbon dioxide monitoring program, widely considered the world’s benchmark measures. It could also eliminate a key global temperature record used by climate researchers worldwide, global monitoring for rising sea levels and ocean temperatures and lead to weaker climate modeling and forecasting. The move will also disrupt countries’ ability to meet their global climate commitments; and limit developing nations’ ability to prepare for climate disasters, Berman said. 

While other organizations in Europe, Japan and the UK could help fill the hole, the loss of NOAA data would be a “major setback” for global climate science, Berman warned. 

“Those data sets are not only of the US,” said Tianjia (Tina) Liu, a University of British Columbia geography professor who specializes in wildfire. “Having them is really beneficial for the entire region, and really helpful for managing natural disasters.” 

In a statement, Environment and Climate Change Canada confirmed it has a “longstanding relationship” with NOAA in weather, climate, satellite, and water monitoring. It has “not officially been informed of any changes to its collaboration with NOAA.” 

Villy Christensen, a professor at the University of British Columbia and founder of a decades-long approach to managing fisheries that focuses on ecosystem health long used by the NMFS emphasized that blocking collaborative efforts will harm research and management decisions in the US, Canada and other countries. 

American isolationism could curtail some of the decades-old committees that manage key species in both Canada and the US. Take Pacific salmon and Pacific Halibut: The fish species migrate between the countries and sustain important fisheries on either side of the border. For years, they’ve been managed through a collaborative US-Canada process that relies heavily on US data. 

“These are really important joint efforts between the US and Canada to manage, assess and manage and allocate fish stocks or catches,” said John Driscoll, a fisheries scientist and policy analyst with the David Suzuki Foundation. Even if the temporary pause is lifted, the disruption could have “disproportionate effects” on both countries’ ability to manage the fish. 

Still, Christensen said that ultimately, if necessary Canada and global researchers can make do without the US. Last year, the country joined most of Horizon Europe, the world’s largest research and innovation funding scheme, which allows Canadian researchers to access funding and collaborate more closely with Europe. 

But he was clear that’s not the goal of science. “[Scientists] depend on collaboration,” Christensen said. ” We stand on the shoulders of giants, they walk with us—and cooperation is absolutely a requirement.” 

This story was originally published by the Canada’s National Observer and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Canadian climate and fisheries experts are reeling after the Trump administration ordered researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—the US government agency in charge of weather forecasting, climate research, and fisheries—to temporarily stop communicating with “foreign nationals.” 

The move, which was first reported Wednesday by Wired, could devastate weather and oceanic forecasting, climate change research, and Canada’s ability to manage and study key fish stocks like Pacific salmon and halibut, experts and advocates say. 

“This is not a small blow for climate research—it is a body blow,” said Tzeporah Berman, a long-time Canadian climate advocate and expert. If implemented permanently, the move would hamstring some of the world’s most important climate monitoring data and modeling, making it hard to assess the scale of the crisis and craft effective responses. 

“Neither Trump nor Musk have the power to secure the US’s borders against climate change,” Berman said. “The fires and floods know no borders and it is absolutely critical that the world share data and solutions on shared global threats. Trump and Musk constraining NOAA from collaborating threatens us all, including us citizens. It’s a dangerous, closed minded, knee jerk ideological policy that could literally cost lives.” 

An internal email shared with Wired shows that employees at the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) were told to “PAUSE ALL INTERNATIONAL ENGAGEMENT” (sic), including international commissions and emails with “foreign national colleagues.” 

The ban extends to the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service, which works extensively with international partners to collect climate and weather data that is vital to protect air, shipping and railways from extreme weather, in addition to its value for climate research. Both organizations are contained within NOAA. 

The move could hide measurements from the Mauna Loa Observatory carbon dioxide monitoring program, widely considered the world’s benchmark measures. It could also eliminate a key global temperature record used by climate researchers worldwide, global monitoring for rising sea levels and ocean temperatures and lead to weaker climate modeling and forecasting. The move will also disrupt countries’ ability to meet their global climate commitments; and limit developing nations’ ability to prepare for climate disasters, Berman said. 

While other organizations in Europe, Japan and the UK could help fill the hole, the loss of NOAA data would be a “major setback” for global climate science, Berman warned. 

“Those data sets are not only of the US,” said Tianjia (Tina) Liu, a University of British Columbia geography professor who specializes in wildfire. “Having them is really beneficial for the entire region, and really helpful for managing natural disasters.” 

In a statement, Environment and Climate Change Canada confirmed it has a “longstanding relationship” with NOAA in weather, climate, satellite, and water monitoring. It has “not officially been informed of any changes to its collaboration with NOAA.” 

Villy Christensen, a professor at the University of British Columbia and founder of a decades-long approach to managing fisheries that focuses on ecosystem health long used by the NMFS emphasized that blocking collaborative efforts will harm research and management decisions in the US, Canada and other countries. 

American isolationism could curtail some of the decades-old committees that manage key species in both Canada and the US. Take Pacific salmon and Pacific Halibut: The fish species migrate between the countries and sustain important fisheries on either side of the border. For years, they’ve been managed through a collaborative US-Canada process that relies heavily on US data. 

“These are really important joint efforts between the US and Canada to manage, assess and manage and allocate fish stocks or catches,” said John Driscoll, a fisheries scientist and policy analyst with the David Suzuki Foundation. Even if the temporary pause is lifted, the disruption could have “disproportionate effects” on both countries’ ability to manage the fish. 

Still, Christensen said that ultimately, if necessary Canada and global researchers can make do without the US. Last year, the country joined most of Horizon Europe, the world’s largest research and innovation funding scheme, which allows Canadian researchers to access funding and collaborate more closely with Europe. 

But he was clear that’s not the goal of science. “[Scientists] depend on collaboration,” Christensen said. ” We stand on the shoulders of giants, they walk with us—and cooperation is absolutely a requirement.” 

---

Under President Donald Trump, Republicans have promised to cut key components of the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature green legislation. The bill pledged $370 billion in funding for clean energy investments. About a third of that money has been invested in the last two years. A majority of it went to Republican districts—about 85 percent of project investments. Yet, Trump still has vowed to “rescind all unspent funds under the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.” 

Mother Jones spoke with Carl Weatherley-White, Head of Capital Markets for Greenbacker, in January, before the beginning of the second term, about the potential impacts of the next administration repealing the IRA. Greenbacker is a renewable energy investing company with over 450 projects around the US. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and condensed.

Do you think existing renewable energy projects will be hit by a new Trump administration repealing the IRA?

In the unlikely event that the IRA is repealed, then you have a lot of turmoil. A lot of projects that are under development will have to either renegotiate their power purchase agreements to get higher pricing. If they cannot do that, they would have to kill the projects.

How do you prepare for a full repeal?

We’ve accelerated some of our development so that we can grandfather projects. We have a pipeline of projects under development and under construction that work under the current tax law. I think if the change did happen, then we would revisit our development pipeline, and prioritize projects. We’d have to really rerun the numbers on all our projects and decide which ones still are still financeable and which ones aren’t.

How would the repeal trickle down to the public?

It basically gets at the cost of electricity. You have utilities that are delivering electricity, and they set rates at a level that create a return on their investment that is established by regulators. If a tax credit goes away, then they would have to increase rates to cover their costs. And so given the amount of electricity predicted to come from renewable energy, without a tax credit I think you’d likely see significant pressure to increase electricity prices.

And honestly, that would create another political problem for any administration.

Is there anticipation of some of these projects that have been funded by IRA facing increased scrutiny or auditing?

I don’t think so. The rules are very detailed. There’s already a lot of scrutiny, not only by the Internal Revenue Service, but also by all of the market participants: lawyers, accounts, bankers, investors. They’re all very careful to make sure that the products are well structured and they’re safe. It already is a pretty robust ecosystem. 

---

In 2022, President Biden and Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, securing over $370 billion for climate infrastructure. According to an oversight report from June 2024, only 12 percent—or $4.4 billion—of the funding had been spent. Biden rushed to “Trump-proof” another $96.7 billion in his last days of office by signing between the government and recipients. 

But that preparation may have not been successful.

On day one, Trump countered with an executive order that includes halting federal disbursements of IRA funds, even if the money had already been obligated. Investors fear that the $300 billion of the IRA loans are at risk, though tax credits are likely not going to be effective, and have already started withdrawing new energy projects.

On February 10th, Judge John J. McConnell, Jr. ordered the administration to immediately unfreeze IRA funds. It’s unclear what will happen next. Top members of the Trump administration have been questioning judges’ authority over Trump, which legal experts warn is a “constitutional crisis.”

What happens now? To see how Trump can, or cannot, halt green energy money I called Don Kettl, a professor emeritus and former dean at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. He has spent his entire career looking into public management and how the government functions. Below Kettl explains what limits hold Trump accountable in making sweeping changes and how he may sidestep them.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.

Can Trump stop funding?

It’s an interesting question that we’re going to see over and over and over again. Does the administration have the obligation to spend money that Congress has appropriated? 

We have had battles about the president’s rescission power since back during the Nixon administration, and its aftermath. 

It’s very clear also that the Trump administration coming in is intent on trying to find every conceivable way to test the boundaries of presidential power. There’s a lot of talk back and forth about how the Trump administration can act, but it’s an effort to try to push back the boundaries that constrain presidential action in every respect. 

The intent in congressional passage and appropriation is that the money that’s appropriated will be spent. It’s then a matter of trying to figure out how it is that state, local governments ought to do it. The question is, if we have our mind as president and we don’t think that the money ought to be spent, do we get to put hold on all the stuff? The basic question of empowerment is something that’s very much an open question. 

There are lots of ways the new administration can go stand in the gears, even if it proves unsuccessful in them expounding the money, and I expect they’re going to try.

What are the safeguards in the Inflation Reduction Act?

First, there is the reporting. There are contracts that have to be negotiated and all of them have provisions in them for performance. There always are audits that come along with that as well. And then, in addition, there are reporters who are out there keeping a close eye on the way in which the money is being spent. 

So, this is about to get incredibly contentious—because the Trump administration is going to come in and say that some of this money is being wasted just because of what it is, and how it is that state and local governments are proposing to spend it. But waste in the eye of the beholder here.

My guess is that two things will happen.

One is an effort to go through and cherry pick stories to say “can you believe that your federal government tax dollars are going for this?” We’ve seen that over and over and over again in the past, and then with the collection of some of these stories. 

The next piece is to try to cut the program out, to eliminate the funding.

Are there pathways for the money to be misappropriated? Or for a certain far-right electric vehicle CEO to get a lot of it?

There are guidelines for the way in which the money should be spent. But when it comes to clean energy in particular, there are huge numbers of background questions about who going to be favored. As you suggest, projects that benefit EVs may end up getting more money than would be the case otherwise.

When you start talking about where lots of money involved in lots of contracts might go, there are pressures that could come up in terms of who gets the money, and about the question of the trail of the funds and who’s connected to whom.

It can take quite a while to to sort out whether or not somebody with a financial interest connected to a major donor is getting some of the money. That’s a hard thing to try to sort out. So there are lots of ways on the inside that could create internal conflicts.

It’s not merely going to be a matter of a fundamental battle between potentially an administration not fond of clean energy to begin with. We’re talking about drill baby drill—and on the other hand someone like Elon Musk, who is head of a big company that produces lots of cars that are EVs. 

Those tech bros are looking at lots and lots of things that are very power-intensive. Who would have thought we would have had a restart at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania? The idea that we would have gone from a point where my parents literally had suitcases at the door ready to leave their home and perhaps never, ever be able to return because of the meltdown at the power plant there to the idea of starting it up all over again.

It is a whole lot more interesting than just the basic question of a new administration coming in intent on trying to reverse the Biden administration’s clean energy goals.

Will the use of IRA money in pro-Trump communities limit Trump’s hand in stopping the flow of money?

There is an inevitable tension that comes along with the new administration that wants to stand up and beat its chest on a new policy goal, whatever it may be. It will be pretty easy, on the one hand, for the Trump administration to say that they’re not going to force you to buy electric cars and do that through broad regulatory change at the Department of Transportation.

But at the same time to recognize the popularity of money flowing out to Republican areas with lots of opportunity to make lots of jobs. And it can at the same time fuel the kinds of things that maybe other parts of his coalition, like the tech bros, may be in favor of—like electric cars.

It’s pretty easy to try to resolve this paradox: You resolve the paradox by not resolving it. 

You allow a basic policy change at the top and at the same time you don’t try too hard to choke off the flow of funds. Once you’ve been able to establish some of the really big policy goals, rhetorically at least, and once you’ve decided that you don’t really care that much about the deficit, then it’s pretty easy to let the money slide and use it to try to continue to encourage support by encouraging the flow of funds into the places that already are likely to favor you politically to begin with. 

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

People across the US receiving rising utility bills aren’t just paying for the costs of gas and electricity: They could also be paying for corporate lobbying and advertising. 

Electric and gas utilities routinely charge ratepayers for costs related to political advocacy, ads to burnish their brand, and even luxury perks for executives and employees, according to a recent report by the utility watchdog group Energy and Policy Institute (EPI). Such expenses add up to millions of dollars paid by customers toward utilities’ efforts to raise prices and stall climate progress. While charging customers for lobbying is banned in federal and state laws, consumer advocates say that existing policies are nowhere near rigorous enough to hold utilities accountable.

In some states, that’s starting to change. In 2023, Colorado, Connecticut, and Maine passed the first comprehensive laws to prevent utilities from charging customers for lobbying, advertising, and other political influence activities. Customers in those states have already saved hundreds of thousands of dollars after regulators began enforcing the laws last year. 

Consumer advocates say that as the impacts of these policies become clearer—and as utility bills continue to hike—more laws will be on the way. Last year, eight states introduced bills to rein in utility cost recovery. Last month, five more states followed suit, according to EPI. “The momentum behind utility accountability legislation continues to grow,” said Karlee Weinmann, a researcher at EPI and co-author of the group’s latest report. “As we put numbers on the savings generated by these bills, we’re going to hear more and more ratepayers asking, ‘How do I get this done in my state?’”

DTE Energy’s attempt to charge ratepayers for private jet trips was “downright insulting to customers.”

The laws in Colorado, Connecticut, and Maine broadened and clarified the range of political activities utilities are banned from charging to ratepayers compared to existing federal and state rules. Costs that utilities are prohibited from passing on to customers in these states include membership dues to trade associations that engage in lobbying, donations to political advocacy groups, and public relations campaigns.

The three states’ laws also introduced limits or bans on invoicing customers for fees for consultants or lawyers hired to argue for rate increases, and required utilities to provide detailed annual reports on political spending to ensure that shareholders—rather than consumers—foot the bill. 

It’s still too early to assess the full impact of these laws since they apply primarily during rate cases, proceedings where utilities seek approval from regulators to adjust their prices. As part of the process, utilities tally up their investments and expenses, and state officials decide which costs can be reasonably passed on to the utility’s customers. Only a few rate cases have taken place since the laws took effect, and Maine just approved rules this week on how to implement its law. But judging from recent proceedings in Colorado and Connecticut, “we’re seeing very, very positive signs” in terms of what kinds of savings utility customers can expect from these laws, said Itai Vardi, co-author of the EPI report.

In Colorado, state regulators rejected more than $775,000 in lobbying fees, trade association dues, and investor relations costs sought by the utility Xcel Energy in a gas rate case last year, noting that those expenses are forbidden under the state’s utility accountability law. Total savings could end up even higher: Commissioners also ordered Xcel Energy to resubmit lobbying disclosures and remove all investor relations costs from its rates. 

In Connecticut, state officials nixed $555,000 in industry dues, travel and meal expenses, and investor relations costs that the utility Avangrid attempted to stick customers with during a gas rate case last year, according to EPI’s review of rate case filings. Regulators also cited the new utility accountability law for their reasoning.

Early enforcement in these states proves how effective these guardrails are. It’s also a troubling sign that utilities repeatedly attempt to recover lobbying and political costs even in states where it’s illegal, said Weinmann. “When we see these savings, we’re also seeing the degree to which expenses that are not associated with the provision of utility service and perhaps not beneficial to customers are included in rates.”

In every state in the US, the regulators who hear rate cases—known as public service commissions or public utility commissions—are supposed to keep inappropriate charges out of prices. Without rigorous legislation, they’re not always successful: The burden falls on commissioners and consumer advocacy groups to comb through thousands of pages submitted by utilities for rate proposals and pick out and dispute charges. But some utility requests are too egregious to make it past public utility commissions, even in the absence of comprehensive ratepayer protection laws.

In Virginia, state regulators have flagged and removed millions of dollars in lobbying charges by Dominion Energy in rate cases in 2021 and 2023. In California, an investigation by state regulators found that the utility SoCalGas improperly charged customers for lobbying to promote the use of natural gas. And in a particularly flagrant example, subsidiaries of the Ohio-based electric utility FirstEnergy agreed to refund tens of millions of dollars to customers across multiple states after charging them for lobbying costs and expenses related to FirstEnergy’s bribery of Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder between 2017 and 2020.

“If we don’t have transparency, we can’t know to what extent ratepayers are being ripped off.”

Utilities are also spending vast sums on advertising to boost their company image. According to the EPI report, 15 of the largest electric utilities in the US spent a combined $1.1 billion on brand advertising between 2014 and 2023. It’s unclear if any of those expenses were passed on to customers, but some utilities have made attempts to do so: Last year, Chesapeake Utilities in Maryland asked regulators for permission to charge ratepayers for its “Natural Gas Does More” campaign, which used puppies and other cuddly images to promote the fossil fuel. Maryland state officials deemed the request inappropriate and not in the public interest.

Utilities have even tried to pass on the costs of lavish corporate perks like private jets. In a rate case last year, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel called a request by Detroit-based utility DTE Energy to charge ratepayers for private jet trips “downright insulting to customers.” Michigan regulators later refused the request. In Indiana, Duke Energy Indiana admitted that it had charged consumers more than $5 million between 2021 and 2023 in private jet costs, according to testimony filed last year by the consumer advocacy group Citizens Action Coalition. Commissioners in Indiana recently denied another request from Duke Energy Indiana to pass on $1.9 million in private aircraft expenses to customers.

National utility trade associations strongly disputed the EPI report’s findings and emphasized their commitment to reducing emissions and providing affordable energy. “The natural gas industry has long committed to collaboration with policymakers and regulators to help achieve our nation’s ambitious climate and energy goals,” said Karen Harbert, president and CEO of the American Gas Association, which represents gas utilities. 

A spokesperson for Edison Electric Institute, a trade organization for investor-owned electric utilities, argued there’s no need for more state-level ratepayer protection laws. “Electric companies already are subject to strict federal and state laws that ensure lobbying activities are always funded by shareholders and not customers,” said spokesperson Brian Reil. “In instances of inadvertent expenses being approved, mechanisms already exist for state commissions to ensure that accounting changes are made, and, if needed, customer refunds granted.”

But in the absence of laws like the ones in Colorado, Connecticut, and Maine, it’s impossible to know exactly how much utilities are improperly charging customers, said Adria Tinnin, director of race equity and legislative policy at The Utility Reform Network, a consumer advocacy group in California. Under existing California rules, utilities can classify spending in even prohibited categories like promotional advertising or lobbying in vague or misleading ways, Tinnin said.

Meanwhile, during rate cases, utility regulators and advocates are often working with limited information, because “utilities do not provide any information that they’re not legally required to,” said Tinnin. “If we don’t have transparency, we can’t know to what extent ratepayers are being ripped off.”

More and more lawmakers are catching on to the issue. In January, legislators in Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Utah introduced bills to prevent utilities from recovering costs for lobbying and other political activities. In California, Tinnin’s group is partnering with other advocacy organizations to develop language for a similar bill to be introduced later this year. A previous utility accountability bill introduced last year in the state failed to move out of committee.

Consumer advocates say the laws could help address a growing energy affordability crisis as households struggle with mounting prices. Household utility bill debt has risen 8.4 percent since December 2023, according to one estimate, while power shutoffs for nonpayment have soared across the country. President Donald Trump’s threat to introduce tariffs on fossil fuels from Canada will likely raise energy prices even more while his other tariffs will make all kinds of products more expensive. 

“It all adds up,” said Weinmann. “At a time when we’re seeing folks across the country struggling with rising cost of living and higher utility bills, the impact of any bill savings is significant.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Donald Trump’s attempts to slash incentives for electric cars would cause sales of the vehicles to plummet, with this effort cheered on by a seemingly confounding supporter—Elon Musk, the billionaire chief executive of Tesla and erstwhile champion for action on the climate crisis.

Trump has said that he “will revoke the electric vehicle mandate, saving our auto industry and keeping my sacred pledge to our great American auto workers.”

The president, who previously suggested supporters of EVs “rot in hell” before somewhat tempering his rhetoric, has already ditched an aspirational goal for half of all car sales to be electric by the end of the decade, halted some funding for EV chargers, and began reversing vehicle pollution standards that prod auto companies to shift away from gasoline models.

A key tax credit for Americans buying an EV, worth up to $7,500, is also a major target for elimination, although to overturn this Trump will require Republicans in Congress. Should he succeed, though, the impact would be significant, with a recent study finding that electric car sales could fall by 27 percent without the incentive.

“It just shows he’s an opportunist, really.”

“Turning off the credits would affect a meaningful share of the EV market,” said Joseph Shapiro, a University of California, Berkeley, economist and co-author of the study, who added that while a growing number of people would still go electric, the total number of cars sold would shrink by more than 300,000 a year than if the incentives stayed in place.

“You could say that it would be a speed bump in the road but if the US goes all electric in 2090 rather than 2050, say, that matters a lot for the planet,” he said. “A lot of carbon would be emitted in that time.”

Trump’s agenda has been enthusiastically backed by Musk, despite the world’s richest person heading Tesla, the market-leading EV company that also relies upon some parts made in China that may be targeted by tariffs imposed by Trump.

Musk has said, though, that removal of EV subsidies will hurt rivals such as Ford and General Motors more than Tesla. “Take away the subsidies,” Musk wrote on X, another of his companies, in July. “It will only help Tesla.”

There is some logic to this, Shapiro said. Tesla is comfortably the largest EV brand in the US, accounting for nearly half of all sales, and makes more profit per car than its rivals, meaning the removal of incentives would be disproportionately felt by other manufacturers.

“If the tax credit is removed Tesla could survive and have less competition, they have more headroom to withstand a decrease in the market size,” Shapiro said. Stock in Tesla surged following Trump’s election win.

However, Tesla will still be affected. Weakening federal pollution rules, for example, could see a reduction in the amount of carbon credits Tesla sells to other car companies—amounting to $2.7 billion just last year—to offset their emissions and avoid fines. Tesla’s sales dipped slightly for the first time in 2024, amid concern among some of its traditionally liberal customer base about Musk’s rightward political turn.

“Tesla isn’t immune to sales being impacted, they have some brand loyalty although we don’t know what the impact Elon Musk has had on polarizing consumers yet, that’s still a bit of an unknown,” said Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of industry insights at Cox Automotive, which estimates EVs will have a 10 percent share of US car sales this year, up from 8 percent in 2024.

Regardless, Musk’s focus has now seemingly shifted away from EVs to other areas such as robotics, artificial intelligence and his SpaceX venture, Valdez Streaty said. He has also embraced rightwing fixations shared by Trump. In a speech after the president was inaugurated, Musk made no mention of cars but said that the “future of civilization is assured” with “safe cities, secure borders, sensible spending, basic stuff.”

He added: “We’re going to take DOGE to Mars,” in reference to the “department of government efficiency” he heads in an effort to curb spending. “Can you imagine how awesome it will be to have American astronauts plant the flag on another planet for the first time? Bam. Bam. Yeah. How inspiring would that be?”

Concern over the climate crisis is seemingly no longer one of Musk’s priorities, despite previously saying he is “super pro-climate” and in 2016 calling for a “popular uprising” against the fossil fuel industry because the world was “unavoidably headed toward some level of harm and the sooner we can take action, the less harm will result.”

“This desire for eternal glory for doing great deeds has motivated his primary accomplishments…But it also has a dark side.”

When Trump removed the US from the Paris climate agreement in 2017, Musk said he was quitting a presidential advisory body in protest. “Climate change is real,” he tweeted at the time. “Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.”

But Musk has had little to say after Trump, who memorably called climate change “a giant hoax,” once again pulled the US from the Paris deal and issued a flurry of orders to ramp up oil and gas drilling and stymie renewable energy production. In January, Musk said: “Climate change risk is real, just much slower than alarmists claim.”

Critics say it is unlikely Musk will reflect the growing alarm voiced by scientists, and the American public, over the impacts of dangerous global heating within the Trump administration.

“It just shows he’s an opportunist, really,” said Paul Bledsoe, who was a climate adviser to Bill Clinton’s White House. “He now downplays the dangers of climate change, but I think in the back of his mind he’s thinking about using government contracts for geoengineering as the costs of climate change become so undeniably expensive.”

Those who know Musk say that he soured on Democrats in part after not being invited to a major summit on electric cars held by the White House in 2021, after Joe Biden became president.

“That was an unforced error by Biden,” said Robert Zubrin, a leading advocate for human exploration of Mars who said he helped introduce Musk to the idea of Martian expansion. “And in the past two years, Elon Musk has redefined himself from the white knight of environmentalists to a Bond villain.”

Zubrin said that Musk’s “central motivation is the desire for eternal glory for doing great deeds. He wants to save civilization because he wants to be famous for saving civilization. “This desire for eternal glory for doing great deeds has motivated his primary accomplishments, Tesla and SpaceX,” he added. “But it also has a dark side to it, and this has been exploited.”

Tesla was contacted about its stance towards the EV tax credits but did not respond.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

When the White House took down a critical environmental justice tool just three days into President Trump’s administration, a team of data scientists and academics sprang into action. 

They had prepared for this exact moment, having created a list of 250 online resources widely expected to be taken down during Trump’s second term. The Climate & Economic Justice Screening Tool, a platform created to help federal agencies, states, and community organizations identify neighborhoods heavily burdened by pollution, topped the list. The team worked quickly to re-create the tool using previously archived data and host it on a new website. Two days later, the webpage was up and running.

In the two weeks since Trump’s inauguration, his administration moved swiftly to scrub government websites of information it objects to. Federal agencies have taken down critical environmental and public health datasets. The US Global Change Research Program ended the National Nature Assessment, a sweeping review of the nation’s flora and fauna and its benefits to humanity. Departments throughout the executive branch have altered websites to eliminate any reference to the inequities women, people of color, and other marginalized communities face. 

“Policymakers and the public and communities need good information to make the best policy decision, whatever that is.”

Researchers and advocates whose work revolves around addressing these inequities and mitigating the impacts of climate change told Grist they find these changes troubling. 

“One of the things that’s worrisome is when you start to take down resources like this, you start to construct a knowledge sphere that doesn’t acknowledge that environmental or climate injustices exist,” said Eric Nost, a geographer and assistant professor at the University of Guelph. Nost, who studies the role of data technology in environmental policymaking, is part of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, one of several organizations tracking the Trump administration’s changes to federal websites and resources.

Many of these changes are a direct response to executive orders the president issued within hours of taking office to end “Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing” and defend “Women From Gender Ideology Extremism.” Many of them dovetail with his rescinding a Clinton-era executive order requiring federal agencies to consider the impact of their policies on areas with high poverty rates and large minority populations.

Trump also revoked Justice40, President Biden’s policy of ensuring so-called “disadvantaged” communities receive 40 percent of the benefits of climate and energy spending. Some of the resources dismantled in the past two weeks, including the Climate & Economic Justice Screening Tool, were created to help achieve these goals.

The Environmental Protection Agency deleted pages showcasing the work of African American employees. It also removed an equity action plan, the “Diversity and Inclusion” section on its careers page, and scrubbed “Environmental Justice” and “Climate Change” from its homepage menu.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took down data and resources related to trans people, HIV, and environmental justice. The Department of Energy eliminated online resources for anyone struggling with energy bills. The webpage previously listed government assistance programs like the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps low-income households pay for electricity. The agency also killed its own version of the environmental justice screening tool.

Beyond making it harder for taxpayers to access information that could reduce their bills and navigate some of the effects of climate change, these steps make it harder to govern effectively. “Policymakers and the public and communities need good information to make the best policy decision, whatever that is,” said Carrie Jenks, the executive director of the Environmental & Energy Law Program at Harvard University. “To the extent that any administration is not using data or not giving access to data, that will always be of concern to us.”

The law program has been tracking the Trump administration’s rollback of environmental rules and environmental justice policies since his first term. A handful of other groups consisting of academics, archivists, students, and environmental organizations are pursuing similar efforts and have launched an initiative called the Public Environmental Data Project. The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative is part of the effort, as is the Internet Archive, a nonprofit that has since 1996 been archiving webpages, and End of Term, a group that has since 2008 archived federal websites at the end of each presidential administration. 

“I almost see a resurgence in pride in this work and willingness to get it done.”

Other environmental groups are archiving taxpayer-funded datasets at a smaller scale. For instance, the Urban Ocean Lab, a think tank that helps coastal communities design climate and ocean policy, began collating research and data on climate change in a dedicated section of its website last summer. The group started a “Resource Hub” to help cities easily identify the best available climate science. When Trump won the election in November, it realized that dozens of datasets and research hosted on government websites could disappear and began archiving additional policy papers and data. Those resources were especially relevant because the lab found many cities use outdated information to make planning decisions. 

“We remember what had happened during the last Trump administration, where a huge amount of relevant environmental information was taken down or altered, and we wanted to make sure that the resources that we had posted to our own website would continue to live on,” said Alex Miller, an analyst there. 

What’s happening now is in many ways a repetition of the efforts the Trump administration made during his first term, when as much as 20 percent of the EPA’s website became inaccessible to the public. The use of the term “climate change” decreased by more than a third. The first Trump administration also tried to derail work on the National Climate Assessment, an important synthesis of the state of climate science that shapes federal policy. 

This time around, Trump officials are attempting to more tightly control how the assessment is compiled and want to lower the scientific standards it employs, according to reporting by E&E News. While the document is likely to be published in some form within two years, the administration did axe another environmental review. 

Last year, the Biden administration announced the National Nature Assessment, a comprehensive literature review of the state of nature in the United States. It was modeled after the climate assessment and enlisted dozens of researchers to calculate all the ways nature is valuable. Last week, the administration told researchers who had spent nearly a year working on the report that it was shutting down the effort.

Alessandro Rigolon, an architect and planner who teaches at the University of Utah and studies the benefits of green spaces, was working with other researchers to outline the effects of nature on physical and mental well-being. Rigolon said he was informed about the administration’s decision just a few days after a meeting in Vermont with those colleagues. 

Because those working on the report were volunteers, Rigolon said they trying to find a way to continue their work.  “We are committed to writing this one way or another,” said Rigolon. “I almost see a resurgence in pride in this work and willingness to get it done after the work was terminated without explanation.” 

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Jeff Bezos’s $10 billion climate and biodiversity fund has halted its funding of one of the world’s most important climate certification organizations, amid broader concerns US billionaires are “bowing down to Trump” and his anti-climate action rhetoric.

The Bezos Earth Fund has stopped its support for the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), an international body that assesses if companies are decarbonizing in line with the Paris agreement. Earth Fund had been one of two core funders of the SBTi, with the Ikea Foundation: The two accounted for 61 percent of its total funding last year. Earth Fund’s decision was first reported by the Financial Times.

Spokespeople for Earth Fund and SBTi said the $18 million grant had been a three-year commitment that expired as previously agreed, and Earth Fund had not made a final decision on future support. But researchers familiar with the SBTi, as well as advisers at the organization, raised concerns that the vanishing support was part of a broader trend of wealthy individuals moving away from funding causes that the US president—who has previously called climate change a hoax—did not agree with.

“We’re seeing a huge retreat from a lot of these climate pledges.”

Professor Doreen Stabinsky, who is on the technical council of SBTi, said: “You look at Bezos and the folks he’s hanging out with in the billionaires club, and you realize this is about more than SBTi,” she said. “Bezos is bowing down to Trump in a way a bunch of billionaires are bowing down to Trump.”

Stabinsky said Bezos’s decision was “not surprising at all” given he previously stopped the editorial board of the Washington Post—which he owns—taking an endorsement position on presidential candidates.

It came as scientists described their “stress and fear” at Donald Trump’s executive orders to cut federal grant money. Mentions of the climate crisis have also been removed or downgraded across US government websites. Stabinsky said: “Climate for Trump is just one of those things that is very visible, very on his radar, very part of his messaging—anti-climate action, anti any corporate that is doing something that is visibly about climate change.”

Before Trump’s inauguration last month, the US’s six biggest banks quit the global banking industry’s net zero target-setting group. Kelly Stone, a senior policy analyst at ActionAid USA, said the move to no longer fund SBTi was “really disappointing, but not especially surprising at this point,” describing it as “part of a corporate wave” of abandoning green ambitions. She said: “We’re seeing a huge retreat from a lot of these climate pledges from the biggest corporate and financial actors.”

Peter Riggs, executive director of US nonprofit Pivot Point, said he was concerned “about how this will impact green investment generally, and investments in energy transitions, because obviously the signal from Washington right now is very strong that renewable energies and other kinds of zero-carbon or low-carbon approaches are actively discouraged. It’s not even that they’re being sidelined, they’re being eviscerated.”

In April last year, SBTi announced plans to allow companies to use carbon offsets from the voluntary carbon market for indirect emissions, in a move some believed was influenced by the Bezos Earth Fund. It provoked internal fury from staff, who said they had not been consulted, and warned that it opened the door to greenwashing.

Riggs said: “I think there are two things at play. One is that Bezos, or the Bezos Earth Fund, ultimately decided that they weren’t in the position, or weren’t willing to endorse, the science-based standard because of the challenges in it. And second, the political climate in Washington having changed—they didn’t want to draw a lot of attention to those kinds of commitments.”

An SBTi spokesperson said: “The three-year incubation grant made to the SBTi in 2021 by Bezos Earth Fund was designed to help us scale at the pace needed to meet extraordinary demand for our services. The grant expired in 2024 as originally agreed.”

A spokesperson from Bezos Earth Fund said: “In 2021, the Bezos Earth Fund made a three-year grant to SBTi for capacity building, which ended in December 2024 as originally agreed. There has been no change in the relationship between the Earth Fund and SBTi. SBTi has not requested additional funding from the Earth Fund. As a result, the Earth Fund has made no decision with regard to further funding.”

Remember “Sharpiegate”? Back in September 2019, then-President Trump appeared to alter the path of Hurricane Dorian—at least on paper, with a marker. Craig McLean, who had been at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for nearly 40 years, was the acting chief scientist and head of NOAA Research. Objecting to the controversy led to serious professional repercussions.

This week, Donald Trump nominated Neil Jacobs, the former NOAA head involved in “Sharpiegate,” to lead the agency. Below, McLean explains what he anticipates for what’s next in Trump’s second term.

His story has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dorian was a nasty hurricane. It took lives in the Caribbean and the Bahamas and was making a move toward the Florida Panhandle. Days out, there was a small chance of tropical storm–force winds in Alabama. The National Weather Service forecasted, correctly, that the storm was going to make a hard right turn and certainly not impact the people of Alabama. But Trump tweets something like, Look out people in Alabama, here comes the storm. It’s going to be bad.

The communities of Alabama, from the governor’s office to local mayors and citizens, were asking our Weather Service forecasters, What’s happening here? And they replied, You have no risk. The storm is going up the coast, it’s going to miss you. They didn’t realize what the president had tweeted. It became national news. The president doesn’t have the dignity to either leave it alone or say, “Hey, sorry. I was relying on misinformation.”  

I’m up on Cape Cod, and I get a message from one of my staff saying, “You don’t want to see this, but you better read it.” It’s a press release from “NOAA”—no person associated with the remarks—chastising Weather Service forecasters, saying they were incorrect, and the president was correct as a technical matter. I really had to contain myself.

Project 2025 plans to break up and reduce the components of NOAA. But the services NOAA provides, every citizen uses every day.

I wrote a one-page memorandum that called this out as political. Later, after an independent investigation, I asked political appointees at NOAA to sign an affirmation that they read and fully understood their obligations under the agency’s scientific integrity policy. That was probably just too much. 

Soon after, I had a response back from the acting NOAA chief of staff asking about my authority to ask for this affirmation. I said I was the acting chief scientist, the assistant administrator for research, and a NOAA employee. The acting NOAA chief of staff says something like, Thank you very much for your response. You’re no longer the acting chief scientist. You’re being replaced. Thank you for your service.

Political manipulation wasn’t unique to the Trump administration, but the collapsed ethics were profound. That the law may say what one must do, and—Don’t worry about the law. This is what I want you to do instead.

Early on, I was told I should find people from different communities of the science world to speak for climate. They wouldn’t say, “People who don’t believe your current climate conclusions.” But it was pretty clear.

When you have lunacy in the control tower, you have to fly the airplane yourself. And the best way to fly that airplane yourself is to go back to the rules of the road—the law. When crazy people give you instructions to do unlawful, damaging things, you go to the first level of defense. The law requires NOAA to produce, analyze, verify, present, and explain what data means. And so we did.

In elections, you elect policy. You don’t elect science.

Coming into government, the first Trump administration was not planned out. They didn’t have a real transition team in place, as many other elected administrations do. But this time around, they’re hitting the ground running. But what are they going to run into? Are they going to run into federal senior executives who tell them, “No, you can’t do that, because the law won’t allow you”?

This Trump administration is going farther than I thought it would. They’re not even going at the substance. They’re looking at the long game, going after the size of the staff. Just by cutting the number of people, they’ll defeat the mission of the agency.

Project 2025 plans to break up and reduce the components of NOAA. But the services NOAA provides, every citizen uses every day. They just don’t realize what and how.

NOAA answers four God-level questions: How many fish are in the sea? NOAA has to answer that every year, in order to manage the fisheries and so we have food security. What will the weather be like tomorrow? The Weather Service exists in law as the provider of weather forecasts for the nation. What’s the weather going to be 50, 100, or 10 years from now? That’s climate. And lastly, can we make the coasts resilient to the increased ferocity of storms? That’s what NOAA is delivering.

Fifty to 100 years from now, we’ll be living on a Mad Max movie set. And that really bothers me because my grandkids will be on that movie set. Without NOAA, you’re not going to be able to tell how bad it’s happening, or how fast.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Jeff Bezos’s $10 billion climate and biodiversity fund has halted its funding of one of the world’s most important climate certification organizations, amid broader concerns US billionaires are “bowing down to Trump” and his anti-climate action rhetoric.

The Bezos Earth Fund has stopped its support for the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), an international body that assesses if companies are decarbonizing in line with the Paris agreement. Earth Fund had been one of two core funders of the SBTi, with the Ikea Foundation: The two accounted for 61 percent of its total funding last year. Earth Fund’s decision was first reported by the Financial Times.

Spokespeople for Earth Fund and SBTi said the $18 million grant had been a three-year commitment that expired as previously agreed, and Earth Fund had not made a final decision on future support. But researchers familiar with the SBTi, as well as advisers at the organization, raised concerns that the vanishing support was part of a broader trend of wealthy individuals moving away from funding causes that the US president—who has previously called climate change a hoax—did not agree with.

“We’re seeing a huge retreat from a lot of these climate pledges.”

Professor Doreen Stabinsky, who is on the technical council of SBTi, said: “You look at Bezos and the folks he’s hanging out with in the billionaires club, and you realize this is about more than SBTi,” she said. “Bezos is bowing down to Trump in a way a bunch of billionaires are bowing down to Trump.”

Stabinsky said Bezos’s decision was “not surprising at all” given he previously stopped the editorial board of the Washington Post—which he owns—taking an endorsement position on presidential candidates.

It came as scientists described their “stress and fear” at Donald Trump’s executive orders to cut federal grant money. Mentions of the climate crisis have also been removed or downgraded across US government websites. Stabinsky said: “Climate for Trump is just one of those things that is very visible, very on his radar, very part of his messaging—anti-climate action, anti any corporate that is doing something that is visibly about climate change.”

Before Trump’s inauguration last month, the US’s six biggest banks quit the global banking industry’s net zero target-setting group. Kelly Stone, a senior policy analyst at ActionAid USA, said the move to no longer fund SBTi was “really disappointing, but not especially surprising at this point,” describing it as “part of a corporate wave” of abandoning green ambitions. She said: “We’re seeing a huge retreat from a lot of these climate pledges from the biggest corporate and financial actors.”

Peter Riggs, executive director of US nonprofit Pivot Point, said he was concerned “about how this will impact green investment generally, and investments in energy transitions, because obviously the signal from Washington right now is very strong that renewable energies and other kinds of zero-carbon or low-carbon approaches are actively discouraged. It’s not even that they’re being sidelined, they’re being eviscerated.”

In April last year, SBTi announced plans to allow companies to use carbon offsets from the voluntary carbon market for indirect emissions, in a move some believed was influenced by the Bezos Earth Fund. It provoked internal fury from staff, who said they had not been consulted, and warned that it opened the door to greenwashing.

Riggs said: “I think there are two things at play. One is that Bezos, or the Bezos Earth Fund, ultimately decided that they weren’t in the position, or weren’t willing to endorse, the science-based standard because of the challenges in it. And second, the political climate in Washington having changed—they didn’t want to draw a lot of attention to those kinds of commitments.”

An SBTi spokesperson said: “The three-year incubation grant made to the SBTi in 2021 by Bezos Earth Fund was designed to help us scale at the pace needed to meet extraordinary demand for our services. The grant expired in 2024 as originally agreed.”

A spokesperson from Bezos Earth Fund said: “In 2021, the Bezos Earth Fund made a three-year grant to SBTi for capacity building, which ended in December 2024 as originally agreed. There has been no change in the relationship between the Earth Fund and SBTi. SBTi has not requested additional funding from the Earth Fund. As a result, the Earth Fund has made no decision with regard to further funding.”

On January 25, the State Department office that funds the clearance of unexploded bombs, land mines, and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) sent an email to its staff announcing that funding would be on hold, effective immediately. The freeze on federal funding would last for “90 days” as a review took place. 

But there is a problem with suddenly defunding landmine and bomb clearance programs: It means more people could step on unexploded weapons and die. 

Most years, the United States spends millions of dollars cleaning up explosives left behind by previous wars. A large portion of those explosives are manufactured in the United States. A recent State Department report claims that this country spends more than any other on cleaning up the explosive remnants of war. But under Trump, that money is now on hold. And it is not clear when, or if, it will be back. 

In Gaza, United Nations experts estimate that if the current ceasefire holds it will take 14 years to clear the 140-square-mile strip of explosives. 

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said soon after the initial freeze that “lifesaving humanitarian aid” would be exempt. But what “lifesaving humanitarian aid” means is unclear. While preventing people from being killed by bombs might seem definitionally lifesaving to the average person, groups that perform the dangerous work of “demining” say their funding has not been restored. 

Unexploded ordnances (UXO) exists all over the world, said Iain Overton, director of the data-collection and advocacy group Action on Armed Violence. “If there is [an] UXO [somewhere]…every single day that [means] there’s something in a field that a child could go pick up [and], there’s a higher likelihood that child could be blown up,” he said. Overton’s organization has counted hundreds of instances of exactly that in the past decade.

Though governments are often loath to give firm numbers on how often their bombs fail to explode, a Government Accountability Office report issued after the Gulf War found that one in 60 American mines failed to self-destruct.

“Often, these weapon systems have ribbons attached to them, or bright colors, because you generally paint your ordnance bright colors if you’re in a military, so people know it’s something you shouldn’t drop,” Overton said. “But children are inherently curious…they see this as a toy.” 

Since US bombs fell on Laos 50 years ago, more than 20,000 Laotians have been killed by unexploded ordinances.

The effects of UXOs reverberate for decades.

Roughly one-third of Ukraine’s land is contaminated after only two years of war. At least 170 Ukrainian farmers who have taken ad hoc demining into their own hands have been killed, according to the Ukrainian defense ministry. And even if these explosives left behind don’t immediately kill anyone, lead and cadmium contamination from munition casings moving into the soil may continue to harm people. In Gaza, United Nations experts estimate that if the current ceasefire holds it will take at least 14 years to clear the 140-square-mile strip of explosives. 

“It is a way of contaminating the land to such a degree that if you don’t have the money to rebuild, then the land just remains barren,” Overton said. 

Sera Koulabdara, executive director of the demining advocacy group Legacies of War, says the effects of the US funding freeze in her family’s homeland of Laos will be heavy. Since US bombs fell on Laos 50 years ago, more than 20,000 Laotians have been killed by unexploded ordnances. Only 10 percent of the bombed land in Laos has been decontaminated, Koulabdara said. 

“Laos averages around 30-60 [UXO] accidents per year—the stop work order could mean higher rates of accidents and should one occur, assistance cannot be provided,” Koulabdara said. This month, one 36-year-old Laotian man was reported killed by a 50-year-old explosive. A partner organization of Legacies of War, which provides medical help to people injured in UXO explosions, is already reporting that it’s unable to assist the injured. 

And, as Overton explained, even a 90-day freeze means that “smaller projects may end up getting shut down permanently.” At least one Norwegian demining NGO and one Cambodian group have reportedly paused their operations entirely. Such small organizations, Koulabdara said, “run out of money to pay their staff and risk having to re-hire and re-train in the hopeful event that the freeze is lifted.” 

In fiscal year 2024, the State Department announced it would fund its Conventional Weapons Destruction Program—through which much of this work is performed—to the tune of $258 million. The State Department’s overall budget this year, by comparison, was around $50 billion; the Department of Defense’s was about 16 times that. Foreign aid makes up far less than 1 percent of the United States’ total budget. 

The refusal to fund peacemaking work is “driven by a sort of Second Amendment logic infiltrating American foreign policy when it comes to disarmament,” Overton said. “Why would you care about the legacies of war when it’s all about armament and arms trade and bombing?”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Staffers with Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (DOGE) reportedly entered the headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Silver Spring, Maryland, and the Department of Commerce in Washington, DC, today, inciting concerns of downsizing at the agency.

“They apparently just sort of walked past security and said: ‘Get out of my way,’ and they’re looking for access for the IT systems, as they have in other agencies,” said Andrew Rosenberg, a former NOAA official who is now a fellow at the University of New Hampshire. “They will have access to the entire computer system, a lot of which is confidential information.”

Cutting NOAA “will have a ripple effect that sacrifices the communities, jobs, and coastal economies that rely on healthy oceans.”

Project 2025, written by numerous former Trump staffers, has called for the agency to be “broken up and downsized,” claiming the agency is “harmful to US prosperity” for its role in climate science.

Rosenberg noted it had been a longtime goal of corporations that rely on NOAA data to prevent the agency from making the data public, instead of giving it directly to private corporations that create products based on it, such as weather forecasting services.

He also argued there was no legal authority to abolish NOAA or reduce its budget, outside of reducing it through Congress. “There’s no real transparency. They just show up wherever they want, do whatever they want. They’re following through on major budget cuts and major staffing cuts,” Rosenberg added. “I think the strategy here is: ‘Well, we’re just going to do it and dare somebody to stop us, and by the time they stop us, we’ll have destroyed it.’”

In response to the prospect of potential cuts of personnel, budget, or mission at NOAA, Beth Lowell, US vice-president of the ocean conservation nonprofit Oceana, said doing so “will have a ripple effect that sacrifices the communities, jobs, and coastal economies that rely on healthy oceans. And the National Weather Service, part of NOAA, provides daily weather forecasts and lifesaving storm alerts that protect our communities across the country and mariners at sea.”

The organization cited impacts of cuts could include overfishing, increased imports of illegal or unethically sourced seafood, threats to endangered wildlife, and threats to life and property without its weather forecasting and data resources.

“Millions of Americans depend on thriving oceans and productive fisheries for their jobs, businesses, and seafood dinners, and our oceans depend on NOAA,” she said in a statement. “President Trump, his administration, and Congress must safeguard our waters for all who depend on well-managed oceans, and that requires full support of NOAA.”

NOAA deferred comment to the Department of Commerce, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment.