The Republican Party National Convention kicks off Monday to give its pro forma approval to Donald Trump as presidential nominee under the slogan of "Make America Wealthy Once Again." I guess that creates an opportunity for the Donvict to collect his personal slice of the take from selling a bunch of new hats labeled MAWOA. Woe is more like it. Presumably, there will also be tee-shirts touting Elon Musk’s tweet that Trump is the toughest candidate since Teddy Roosevelt. Uh-huh. Trump on safari with the 26th president, much less dismantling corporate monopolies, is an image even the most subservient AI would refuse to contrive.
Expect the theme for the whole Milwaukee convention to be that everything was hunky-dory in America under Trump, the best ever in the history of the universe, and Joe Biden screwed it all up. With help from Kamala Harris and the “radical Democrat agenda.” Uh-huh.
As usual, lies will underpin everything. Trump will surely display the stitches in his ear if he has any—“Can you zoom in here? Look everybody. Most terrible attempted assassination in history.” It’s hard to know exactly how they’ll play Project 2025 given the ludicrous attempt by Trump to deliver a version of his well-honed “never heard of those guys.” Thankfully, the traditional media has finally got the message and produced some good if belated coverage exposing just how much extremism is contained in its 922 pages. They need to keep it up right through Election Day. This manifesto is no joke and no idle threat. It is the culmination of an extended effort.
The ideologues behind the Project view the current operation of the U.S. system as a Gordian Knot incapable of being unraveled except with a sword. They are prepared to swing it. There is at least one or two things in their document that, if implemented, would negatively affect 9 out of 10 Americans in their social, economic, political, sexual, and/or religious lives. In other words, they propose a counter-revolution to dismantle the decades of hard-won gains in all those realms. How successful could they actually be? Their favored transformation would certainly be unlikely to happen under normal circumstances. Anybody seen those lying around anywhere?
Trump is the wild card. And he’s wounded legally now. Which makes him more dangerous than ever because he’s more vulnerable than ever. If NY Justice Juan Merchan orders him to prison in September with no stay while on appeal, how will that turn out? As Saturday showed, surprises happen. Their full impact is unpredictable. Meanwhile, the truly circus part of the campaign—the part Trump was once adept at manipulating but is now like a has-been comic telling his old jokes twice in the same set—begins in just a few hours.
The major focus on the first day is apparently going to be energy and environment. Oh boy! It’s tempting to call Trump’s relentless spray of energy, climate, and environmental views and vows stupid. And, of course, in the face of the climate and biodiversity crises, stupid is an accurate description. Continuing to push for greatly expanding oil, gas, and even coal production at a time when the former two are at their historical peaks while people are being cooked by climate-change-enhanced heat waves is madness, stupidity, and malignity combined.
But unlike his disastrous idea of running the federal government on tariffs instead of income tax revenue—which has only the fringiest of adherents—his stance on energy, climate, and environment policy is not an agenda he invented. This was in the works long before Trump was losing money owning casinos. He didn’t go to Big Oil this year with a billion dollars worth of ideas. He went with his hand out, saying, essentially, “I’m your man, what’s the plan?” And they’ve got one. In short: Talk green, practice green-washing, and keep fossil fuels alive far longer than scientists say we dare without catastrophic climate consequences.
Carbon Brief, a UK-based news service focusing on science and policy on climate change, brought it home in March with an estimate that a Trump victory could mean more than 4 billion tons of additional U.S. emissions by 2030. These extra emissions “would negate — twice over — all of the savings from deploying wind, solar and other clean technologies around the world over the past five years.” The group also stated:
In November 2023, the Financial Times reported that Trump was “planning to gut” the IRA [Inflation Reduction Act], increase investment in fossil fuels and roll back regulations to encourage electric vehicles. The newspaper added that Trump had called the IRA the “biggest tax hike in history”.
It quoted Carla Sands, an adviser to Trump, as saying:
“On the first day of a second Trump administration, the president has committed to rolling back every single one of Joe Biden’s job-killing, industry-killing regulations.”
Indeed, Republicans in the US House of Representatives have already made multiple attempts to repeal parts of the IRA. While some analysts think a full repeal of the act is unlikely, it is clear that a second-term Trump could – as Politico put it – ”hobble the climate law”.
A February 2024 commentary from investment firm Trium Capital argues that the impact on IRA will depend not only on whether Trump wins victory in November, but also on whether the Republicans retain control of the House and gain a Senate majority.
It’s typically been Trump’s most outlandish statements on every subject that catch mainstream media and social media attention. However, whether he’s spouting nonsense about wind turbines, forehead-slapping ignorance about electric boats, or outright disinformation about sea rise—“It basically means you’ll have a little more beachfront property”—it’s his wrecking of sound environmental policy that truly matters.
There’s a long list of that wreckage which could be made of existing good policy in a Project 2025-enhanced Trump presidency. The list of interests being served is short but powerful, and the list of victims being many and likely hampered from obtaining adequate redress.
Here’s just one example of the intentions of the Project’s creators from the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Policy Director Rachel Cletus’s analysis:
Attacks on the process of advancing climate science to inform policymaking
In a blatant effort to politicize climate science, Project 2025 states that ‘The President should also issue an executive order to reshape the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) and related climate change research programs… The next President should critically analyze and, if required, refuse to accept any USGCRP assessment prepared under the Biden Administration. Downsize the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research…’ And then it goes on to spread disinformation: ‘OAR is, however, the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism. The preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded.’
Here are the facts: The USGCRP is tasked by Congress (under the 1990 Global Change Research Act, passed under the Bush administration) to produce regular updates on the state of climate science via the National Climate Assessment (NCA), with the Fifth NCA being released last year. As my colleague Rachel Licker and former UCS-er Andrew Rosenberg point out in this blogpost, the NCA provides exactly the kind of information policymakers need, without being policy-prescriptive. The NCA is produced through the work of hundreds of scientists, relying on research done by thousands more. It is not a political document. Suggesting that a new President “critically analyze” the work of scientists or reject their work just because it was done under a different administration is a blatant attempt to politicize science and would leave us all worse off.
NOAA scientists are doing essential work to keep us safe, including generating the science we need to understand and prepare for the rapidly worsening impacts of climate change. Good governance and leadership require facing hard facts—like the reality of climate change—head-on and taking decisive action to address problems rather than pretending they don’t exist.
That’s just a taste. And the Republican National Platform is even worse. It doesn’t mention “climate” once, just like a lot of government documents in Gov. Ron DeSantis’s Florida. Which is important to remember. It’s not just Donald Trump. Without him, the bulk of the elected Republican Party is aligned with the extremism in Project 2025 and the party platform. Without him, we still have a Supreme Court majority conceived in deception and shenanigans that is turning precedence into pulp. Without him, we still have the plague of dark money, which has turbocharged extremists in Congress. But with Trump actually at the helm, we face even deeper peril and a quicker pace on the trajectory to Republican Gleichshaltung.
Against this we have the Biden-Harris administration’s record of achievements, a long list of them environmental in nature. Not perfect by any means. But tweakable, expandable, and adjustable with a Climate 2.0 agenda. As nobody needs me to explain, the only way that agenda happens is with Democrats in the White House and Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. Donald Trump and his entourage of toadies will spend this coming week providing fodder for our winning all of that.
—MB
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HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ (OR LISTEN TO)
Biden Gets Climate Boost From Key Policy Group by Emma Janssen at The American Prospect.The Biden-Harris administration has made progress on 85 percent of climate change policies proposed by Evergreen Action in 2020, the climate nonprofit says in a report released Thursday. According to the study, the administration has completed 155 proposals and made some progress on 125 out of the 329 policies proposed by Evergreen Action in the group’s 2020 plan. That’s nearly half of the group’s proposals that have been completely accomplished. Evergreen, founded by former staffers on Washington Gov. Jay Inslee’s 2020 presidential campaign, has been an influential player in the crafting of the White House’s environmental policies. The group noted: “To be sure, success has many mothers—this agenda reflected demands from across the movement, and amplified ideas that environmental justice and labor activists have been calling for for decades. But what’s clear is that when the climate movement made clear demands with an actionable plan, the Biden administration took note and delivered.”
The sperm whale 'phonetic alphabet' revealed by AI by Katherine Latham & Anna Bressanin at the BBC. Researchers studying sperm whale communication say they've uncovered sophisticated structures similar to those found in human language. Sperm whales are not easy to study. They spend much of their lives foraging or hunting at depths beyond the reach of sunlight. They are capable of diving over 3km (10,000ft) and can hold their breath for two hours. Now, from elephants to dogs, modern technology is helping researchers to sift through enormous datasets, and uncover previously unknown diversity and complexity in animal communication. And the Cetacean Translation Initiative’s researchers say they have used AI to decode a "sperm whale phonetic alphabet." In 2005, Shane Gero, biology lead for Ceti, founded The Dominica Sperm Whale Project to study the social and vocal behaviour of around 400 sperm whales that live in the Eastern Caribbean. Almost 20 years—and thousands of hours of observation—later, the researchers have discovered intricacies in whale vocalisations never before observed.
Sperm whale communication may have similarities to human language
Q&A: Joseph Lee on ‘Indigenous knowledge’ and covering adaptation to extreme weather by Kevin Lind at the Columbia Journalism Review. Joseph Lee, an author and freelance journalist, is a member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe from Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. He’s been part of Changing with Our Climate,” a five-part series for Vox exploring “Indigenous solutions to extreme weather rooted in history—and the future.” Here’s an excerpt from Lind’s interview with him:
Joseph Lee
KL: Tell me more about “Changing with Our Climate.”
JL: Vox had this vision for doing something on extreme weather for this rough summer period. I had an idea to look at Indigenous people and climate change through different types of extreme weather—whether that’s heat, storms, or fire—and at how they are responding, as well as what’s standing in the way of them being able to do what they’re trying to do, and how they are figuring some of those things out, whether that’s historical inequities and issues or current policies.
KL: Often, when climate change solutions are offered, the conversation devolves into a debate about policy or the significance of the effects. Would you say that, for the series, you were seeking to highlight the straightforward solutions that Indigenous people are using to survive on our changing planet?
The point of this series isn’t to say that there aren’t those big structural issues. There are big policy conversations that need to be had and big-picture solutions that are out there. One of the places I’m coming from with this is that in climate journalism now, we hear a lot about how Indigenous people are on the front lines of the climate crisis. We’re hearing that Indigenous land stewardship is a good thing; we’re hearing about “Indigenous knowledge” or “traditional ecological knowledge.” Those terms are out there now, but there’s not a ton of specificity about what they actually mean. What I’m hoping to do with this series is to answer, What do those things actually mean? What do they look like? What I’ve found is that a lot of those answers are in smaller places than national policy conversations. But small is relative: that could be one person, a tribe, a collaboration between tribes having an initiative. For most people, they’re not living those big-picture policies in a day-to-day way. Especially for Indigenous people, a lot of the stuff that is starting to creep into national awareness is things that they’ve been doing or trying to do for a long time.
Climate litigation is booming worldwide — report
The annual report from the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics says that lawsuits taking on governments and corporations are still rising, but at seemingly slower pace than previously. The researchers found at least 230 new climate cases were filed in 2023. However, report authors Joana Setzer and Catherine Higham said the number of climate lawsuits expanded less rapidly than in previous years. Among its findings:
- Just 5% of climate cases have been brought before international courts, but many of these cases have significant potential to influence domestic proceedings.
- There were significant successes in “government framework” cases in 2023. These challenge the ambition or implementation of a government’s overall climate policy response.
- The number of cases concerning “climate-washing” has grown in recent years, 47 having been filed in 2023, bringing the recorded total to more than 140. These cases have met with significant success, with more than 70% of completed cases decided in favor of the claimants.
- “Polluter pays” cases numbered more than 30 worldwide. These lawsuits seek to hold companies accountable for climate-related harm allegedly caused by their contributions to greenhouse gas emissions.
- Usually on human rights grounds, “just transition” cases challenge the distributional impacts of climate policy or the processes by which policies were developed,
- Green vs. green cases delve into potential trade-offs between climate and biodiversity or other environmental aims.
The Sad Future of Grocery Shopping by Yasmin Tayag at The Atlantic. What makes climate change so troubling is that it affects so many aspects of the food system. Cargo ships stuck in massive seaside traffic jams—some due to low water levels caused by climate change—are holding up food deliveries. Events such as the war in Ukraine—which has curtailed production of wheat, the country’s major export—“may not have any obvious connection to the climate, but they’re happening on top of a baseline,” said David Lobell, a professor and the director of Stanford University’s Center on Food Security and the Environment. All of this means higher prices and patchy supply. It’s already happening, but you might not have noticed. Inflation has masked some of the price hikes. In some cases, climate-related shortages can be remedied by importing food from places that aren’t affected. For basic commodity crops such as cocoa, wheat, and coffee, price increases may seem minor compared with what’s happening on farms themselves; these goods are typically stockpiled, which means there’s usually a backup supply to draw from if there’s a shortage, softening any upticks in price. The sheer range of products available allows most shortages to be sidestepped painlessly: Shoppers can swap olive oil for canola; juice makers can substitute mandarins for oranges. Food companies also have tricks so that you don’t notice food shortages. In March, Cadbury confirmed that it had downsized one of its chocolate bars because cocoa has become more expensive thanks to poor harvests.
The GOP Has Found A New Reason To Pawn Off America’s Public Lands by Chris D’Angelo at Huffpost. The new Republican Party platform, adopted last week in advance of this week’s nominating convention in Milwaukee, mentions federal lands only once — and rather than a vague call to protect them, it proposes pawning some of them off to address housing affordability. Republicans will “open limited portions of Federal Lands to allow for new home construction” in order to “help new home buyers,” the platform states. Former President Donald Trump has endorsed the 16-page document. The effort appears to be part of a broader shift within the Republican Party. As HuffPost previously reported, GOP lawmakers have largely abandoned brazen calls for the outright sale and transfer of federal lands, instead working to gut environmental protections and find savvier ways to give states more of a say in how public lands are managed. “They realized a wholesale sell-off was a political third rail, so now they’re trying to frame it as a housing solution, but what they’re actually proposing is just more sprawl and McMansions,” said Aaron Weiss, deputy director at the Colorado-based conservation group Center for Western Priorities.
ECO-QUOTE
Writer Barbara Kingsolver wrote the oath below for the first 9,000 young people who signed up last month with the American Climate Corps to fight the impacts of climate change today while gaining skills for speeding the green transition:
I pledge to bring my skills, respect, and compassion to work every day, supporting environmental justice in all our communities.
I will honor nature’s beauty and abundance, on which we all depend, and commit to its protection from the climate crisis.
I will build a more resilient future, where every person can thrive.
I will take my place in history, working with shared purpose in the American Climate Corps on behalf of our nation and planet, its people, and all its species, for the better future we hold within our sight.
ECOPINION
Accelerating the clean energy revolution by working with China David G. Victor and Michael R. Davidson at Brookings. It has become axiomatic in Washington that America must get tough on China. This is evident in clean energy, an industry that is critical to the future, where Chinese suppliers are treated as existential threats rather than vital to America’s success. This approach will backfire. America is already lagging behind China in important ways. Collaboration and competition, not hostility, are how we can catch up to the world’s largest supplier of clean technology products. Big tariffs and barriers to Chinese firms doing business in the United States will undermine that strategy. These anti-Chinese policies are already making it harder for American firms to stay abreast of the world’s best innovations and redefine the technological frontier with their own ideas. In the end, isolating ourselves from China won’t just fail—it will also harm American companies, workers, and innovators. Moreover, it will drive up the cost of green technology, making it even harder to clean up the world’s energy system. U.S. strategy should help American companies compete at the frontier while avoiding excess dependence on China. Success requires understanding how China became so dominant in so many clean technologies and how trade and investment can help American industry, workers, and communities thrive as well.
Nuclear energy could power the AI boom—but only if proliferation risks are minimized by Miles A. Pomper & Yanliang Pan. Oklo Inc., a nuclear energy startup chaired by Sam Altman, the CEO of the artificial intelligence leader, OpenAI. The language, image, and video processing capabilities of ChatGPT and similar chatbots depend on large language models (LLMs) trained through computations of data at unprecedented scale. Computational power has thus become, in Sam Altman’s words, “the currency of the future” and “the most precious commodity in the world.” The training and use of LLMs require huge amounts of electrical power and cascades of advanced microchips. Altman’s nuclear investment reflects his belief that Oklo’s microreactors can satisfy the future power requirements of AI models. But the intuitive compatibility between AI and nuclear power does not exempt the latter from traditional concerns about economics and safety, despite efforts by Oklo and other vendors of “advanced” reactors to downplay those concerns. The microreactor’s sodium-cooled fast-neutron configuration is ideal for the breeding of plutonium 239, which could be employed directly in nuclear weapons once separated from spent fuel. Indeed, the CFR-600 reactor that the US government claims China is using to produce plutonium for an expanded nuclear arsenal is of the same sodium-cooled fast breeder design.
In a Devolving Legal and Political Landscape, Cities are the Federal Government’s Secret Weapon on Climate by Amy Turner at the Sabin Center Climate Law blog. Around two-thirds of global greenhouse gas emissions are generated within or come from powering urban areas, and local officials are well-positioned to craft climate policy that is responsive to the needs of residents. Moreover, prior to passage of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, U.S. federal policy was largely characterized by a failure to meaningfully address the climate crisis, leaving cities and other local jurisdictions to step in. This gap-filling function was particularly apparent when cities across the country adopted as their own the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement, from which the U.S. withdrew during the Trump administration, but local governments have been pushing forward on climate in the absence of meaningful federal legislation for a long time. If in 2025 Democrats hold the presidency and a majority in Congress, we may see an Inflation Reduction Act 2.0; if Trump wins, the regulatory vacuum will surely grow. Either way, the legal and political hurdles that stymie more tangible federal action will remain, and it is cities that will have to carry the torch on climate. In some places, their states will be essential partners while in others they’ll go it alone, but in neither scenario are they superfluous. Cities’ autonomy and ambition propel them to legislate when Congress is logjammed, regulate when the EPA is legally constrained, and implement when the federal government is too unwieldy to make a real difference in communities on the ground. It is time to move on from the outdated notion that they play only a limited role in the federalist system; on climate, they are the leaders.
California Victory Against Big Oil Shows What's Possible When We Fight by Nalleli Cobo at Common Dreams. The win against fossil fuel giants in California last month—a modern-day David and Goliath fight—marks a profound victory in our ongoing battle for a cleaner, healthier world. In the face of overwhelming opposition, California oil and gas drillers withdrew a challenge at the ballot box to a landmark state law that banned new oil drilling within 3,200 feet of a community and requires tighter health and safety standards for existing wells. The ban is now in effect. This triumph resonates far beyond the immediate victory; it reaffirms the enduring power of community and the relentless pursuit of justice. In California, we have shattered the illusion that profit should outweigh the health and safety of our people. Our collective voice has risen above that of the oil industry, proclaiming that our lives are not negotiable commodities.
Nalleli Cobo
The Real Reason Some People Are Angry About the Stonehenge Protest by Kate Aronoff at The New Republic. Last month, to protest new oil and gas licensing, two members of the group Just Stop Oil sprayed Stonehenge orange. People got mad, demanding lengthy prison sentences for the activists, and, as has happened with previous protests, denouncing the tactics as ineffective and counterproductive. The irony is that Stonehenge faces a much greater threat than the temporary, cornstarch-based paint: The now-ousted Conservative government—top brass of which have called the protest “disgraceful”—proposed to build a road tunnel that could “compromise the integrity of this prehistoric landscape,” according to Unesco World Heritage Site officials. But the discourse in the United States has been particularly frustrating. Tweeters and journalists alike have not only sidelined the tunnel threat to focus on whether Just Stop Oil’s actions are effective but have also suggested that these protests somehow discredit the climate movement as a whole. Asking whether certain protest tactics are optimal misses the forest for the trees. Climate change is like any other issue in that it’s virtually impossible to entirely prevent suboptimal protests from happening. The nature of living through a chaotic, man-made transition to a new geological epoch is that people will, for good reason, freak out about it. (Given how dire the situation is, it’s remarkable that more people haven’t engaged in actual sabotage.) Address the reasons for people’s panic, and there will be less panic; fail to, and there will be more.
OTHER GREEN STUFF
Around the halls: After Chevron, what’s next? ¶Supreme Court ruling threatens clean energy tax credits and much more ¶Minnesota creates new ombudsperson role to help connect solar faster ¶Showdown in Colorado: Whether to Drill Under Homes, Schools and the Water Supply ¶A simmering conflict over one of Latin America’s biggest wind hubs confronts Mexico’s next president ¶AI supercharges data center energy use—straining the grid and slowing sustainability efforts ¶Gassy cows and pigs will face a carbon tax in Denmark, a world first ¶Only 4% of TV news correctly connected Hurricane Beryl to climate change ¶Minnesota solar rebate extension gives installers longer runway to reach lower-income customers ¶Data centers offer energy peril and promise, with the Midwest increasingly in the crosshairs ¶As Ohio clamps down on clean energy, recent changes make it easier to force landowners to allow oil and gas drilling ¶Electric vehicle batteries adding to toxic PFAS pollution, study finds
