Project 2025ers are determined to jeopardize people’s health care, people’s livelihoods, people’s educations, people’s freedoms and rights, people’s safety, and people’s futures. We all are (or know someone or are related to someone who is) negatively affected by what’s being shoved down our throats by the oligarchs in charge. So it’s understandable we tend to forget threats to species other than people. At a press conference this week ahead of Friday’s annual Endangered Species Day, Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse explained why we shouldn’t do that. (Any transcription errors are mine):
There is a bug that a wasp lays its little larval eggs in. And when those little wasp’s larvae grow, they take over the bug, and they steer the bug around to where they want the bug to go. That’s an analogy. Republican-controlled Congress is the bug. Fossil fuel industry is the wasp larvae that moved in and now steers the bug around wherever they want it to go.
We are also familiar with the analogy of the canary and the coal mine, which began with an actual practice of miners taking canaries down into the coal mine before there was protection for miners so that when the air got so poisonously bad in the coal mine, the canary would keel over first, and the miners would know to head for the exits as fast as they can. That’s an analogy too.
The remaining wild species of this planet are the canaries. They tell us how well we’re doing at protecting this beautiful planet Earth that Pope Francis liked to call “our common home.” We’re not doing so well.
If you look at all of the biomass of all the remaining wild mammals on the planet Earth, it’s 1/9th the biomass just of cattle. So we have really shrunk the wild population of the Earth’s species. Why would we not want to pay attention to and protect what remains? Well, the reason we would not want to pay attention to and protect what remains is that we’re being steered around by the fossil fuel industry, by the polluters who don’t care. And whose business model might be interrupted just a little bit for having to look out for the protection of God’s species on this planet.
So it really matters right now that we defend the endangered species of our world. Because, guess what? When the world is not livable for them, who’s next? We’re next This is our warning system. This is our monitoring system on how badly we’re doing on taking care of our planet. And the only people who want us to not pay attention to that anymore are the big polluters doing the damage. And we’re going to fight them tooth and nail because it’s the right thing ro, because that larvae should not be steering the bug around, and because so many kids care, and because we owe them better than we’re giving them right now.
With you fang and claw, Senator.
Ironically, one of our “canaries” happens to be a new estimate that 75% of the bird species of North America are in decline. It’s complicated because there are regional increases among less abundant birds. But, as with other species that are in decline, habitat loss is the leading culprit by far. A preponderance of the 1,300 species listed under U.S. law as endangered are there because they’re being squeezed out of where they live.
The Trump team has an Orwellian idea for how to worsen this situation. Just eliminate habitat destruction as a harm despite the plain language of the 1973 Endangered Species Act to the contrary. They want everyone to believe words don’t say what they say.
Steve Manlow, executive director for the Lower Columbia Fish Recovery Board, told a reporter, “If you were to put it in human terms, it’s just like saying it’s OK if they take your house, your clothing, your food, your shelter, as long as they’re not eliminating you. It’s kind of harder to survive without those basic things being met.”
Mariah Meek and Karrigan Börk explain in detail the damage this new interpretation would cause and how judges all the way to the Supreme Court have said the existing enforcement of the law that includes habitat loss is perfectly reasonable. They wrote:
A 2019 study examining the reasons species were listed as endangered between 1975 and 2017 found that only 17% were primarily threatened by direct killing, such as hunting or poaching. That 17% includes iconic species such as the red wolf, American crocodile, Florida panther and grizzly bear.
In contrast, a staggering 81% were listed because of habitat loss and degradation. The Chinook salmon, island fox, southwestern willow flycatcher, desert tortoise and likely extinct ivory-billed woodpecker are just a few examples. Globally, a 2022 study found that habitat loss threatened more species than all other causes combined.
The Supreme Court has already guaranteed a laxer regulatory regime with its gutting of the Chevron deference, undercutting pollution controls, and sabotaging other protections in rulings over the past few years. If the justices were to go along with the scientifically unsound interpretation of the ESA law, it would be a monument to corrupt and twisted jurisprudence given the stated purpose of what Congress passed in 1973. Lawmakers said it was “to provide a means whereby the ecosystems upon which endangered species and threatened species depend may be conserved [and] to provide a program for the conservation of such endangered species and threatened species.”
Extract habitat from that and what’s left? We once lived in a time when the specious arguments of ESA haters wouldn’t survive a court challenge. But with today’s Supreme Court, who knows?
—Meteor Blades
Related:
Cross-posted from The Journal of Uncharted Blue Places.
You can also find me @meteorblades.bsky.social
WEEKLY ECO-VIDEO
(Scroll to about 18:40 to view the press conference)
RESOURCES & ACTION
GREEN BRIEFS
The Internal Displacement Monitoring Center released its 10th Global Report on Internal Displacement this week. The 63-page analysis explains that natural disasters and conflicts sent a record-breaking 66 million people worldwide into internal displacement during 2024. The leader of these IDPs: the United States with 11 million, also a record.
Globally in 2024, across 114 countries, an estimated 45.8 million people were internally displaced by natural disasters, while 20.1 million fled domestically within 49 countries because of violent conflicts. The disaster tally for last year was far above the average annual count of 24 million over the past 15 years, the report stated.
IDMC director Alexandra Bilak said, “Internal displacement is where conflict, poverty and climate collide, hitting the most vulnerable the hardest. These latest numbers prove that internal displacement is not just a humanitarian crisis; it’s a clear development and political challenge that requires far more attention than it currently receives.”
As the researchers point out, displacing disasters can happen anywhere, including high-income nations. Hurricane Milton, for instance, displaced tens of thousands in Japan and millions in the United States in October. Huge floods last spring displaced people in central Europe. But, the IDMC report notes:
Low and middle-income countries continued to bear the brunt of disaster displacement impacts, however, and vulnerable communities were unevenly affected. Floods in Brazil’s Rio Grande do Sul state inundated an area the size of the United Kingdom, triggering around 775,000 displacements, mostly in the state capital of Porto Alegre where black and indigenous communities were forced to flee at higher rates than the general population. In Chad, floods triggered more displacements in 2024 than in the past 15 years combined. They destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes and left nearly 1.3 million people living in displacement at the end of the year.
Disaster displacement took place against the backdrop of ever-rising global temperatures in 2024. Human-induced climate change may be driving more severe and frequent hazards that force people from their homes, but other factors such as poverty, informal urban expansion and inadequate infrastructure also play a role. Assam is India’s most vulnerable state to climate change, and deforestation, riverbank erosion and the lack of maintenance of water infrastructure contributed to some of the highest flood displacement figures on record. In Kazakhstan, the worst floods in 80 years triggered more than 120,000 movements and led the government to revise its disaster risk and water resources management .
The increasing number of IDPs, according to the report, “results from a failure to reduce people’s vulnerabilities to displacement and support those displaced in resuming the lives they left behind. Doing so requires not only immediate interventions to sustain their livelihoods and ensure their protection, but also forward-looking investments and plans.” Unfortunately, lack of money is a problem. While billions of dollars international disaster aid are delivered to IDPs, such funding is meant to be temporary, a bridge, not a source for building more resilience against natural disasters. And even the aid there is has been declining, with the United States under Donald Trump having made a nasty splash with its recent dismantling of USAID.
—Meteor Blades
Orange Menace keeps wielding machete against environment
Trying to balance the positive with the negative environmental and climate news has always been one of my goals for each week’s edition of Earth Matters. Another has been to restrict content about Donald Trump to a minimum. I frequently don’t succeed. And this week has been particularly tough.
The list of links below isn’t exhaustive, though there is enough there to exhaust any sane person. But awful as it is, the courts are going to block or weaken some of the worst of what 47 is trying to accomplish. Some elected Republicans are resisting too, though it’s a paltry few so far. Without further ado, here’s a handful worth of the latest Trumpian environment-related attacks. Many readers no doubt have lists of their own:
—Meteor Blades
RESEARCH & STUDIES
Melting Ice Is Changing the Color of the Ocean – And Scientists Are Alarmed. Published at Nature Communications, a study noted that global warming is shifting the color of underwater light shifts that could significantly impact tiny vital organisms like ice algae and phytoplankton.
Nearly a Third of Antibiotics Used by Humans End Up in River Systems Globally Each Year. Published by PNAS Nexus, a study found some 8,500 tons of antibiotics — nearly a third of what humans consume annually — ends up in the world’s rivers, even after much have passed through wastewater systems. Researchers at McGill University said contamination levels globally were high enough to harm aquatic life and promote drug resistance.
HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ (OR LISTEN TO)
Senate Republicans Balk at House Plan to Gut Energy Tax Cuts by Ari Natter at Bloomberg Green. Key Senate Republicans are resisting the House’s plan to gut clean energy tax credits, vowing to soften the blow for emerging technologies and nuclear power. The pushback comes after House Republicans released a plan to help pay for an extension of President Donald Trump’s tax cuts by cutting more than $500 billion in energy tax credits from former President Joe Biden’s signature climate law. The comments from GOP lawmakers mean industries facing a sharp cutoff in federal help still have a chance to preserve their tax incentives for longer. The plan “needs refinement,” said Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, who serves on the Senate’s tax writing committee and was one of four Republicans to sign a letter to Senate leadership last month, vowing to defend Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act’s energy tax credits. “It needs more transitions. It’s not quite what we would author out here.”
Liberal Oregon and Washington Vowed to Pioneer Green Energy. Almost Every Other State Is Beating Them by Tony Schick and Monica Samayoa of Oregon Public Broadcasting in partnership with ProPublica. For all their progressive claims, Oregon and Washington trail nearly all other states in adding new sources of renewable energy. Iowa, a Republican-led state with roughly the same population and usable volume of wind as Oregon, has built enough wind farms to generate three times as much wind power. What’s held the Northwest back is a bottleneck Oregon and Washington leaders paid little attention to when they set out to go 100% green, an investigation by ProPublica and Oregon Public Broadcasting found: The region lacks the wiring to deliver new sources of renewable energy to people’s homes, and little has been done to change that. Northwest leaders left it to a federal agency known as the Bonneville Power Administration to arrange badly needed upgrades to an electrical grid that’s nearly a century old in places.
The 781.5 megawatt Roscoe Wind Farm in West Texas, which under optimal conditions can provide enough power for 250,000 average Texas households, was completed in 2009.
Survey: Texas GOP support growing for clean energy by Ben Santarris at PV Magazine USA. Some 64% of Republican survey respondents reported having “a favorable image of renewable energy,” up four percentage points from 2023, while 18% had an unfavorable image, according to the fourth set of results from the poll since 2020 by Conservative Texans for Energy Innovation (CTEI). Democrats were at 83% favorability and 6% unfavorability, while independents stood at, respectively, 72% and 12%. “With each passing year, more Texans are realizing that cleaner energy policies lead to greater customer choice, improved reliability, new technologies, and better pricing,” Matt Welch, CTEI state director, said in a statement accompanying the poll results. “With our booming economy, burgeoning population, and increased energy demands from technology including data centers and AI, Texas must prepare for the future using every tool in our energy arsenal,” Welch was quoted as saying. “This latest data underscores that residents understand what is at stake.”
‘Shock and awe’: Trump’s mining blitz ramps up public land fights by Hannah Northey and Michael Doyle at Greenwire (no paywall on this one). Donald Trump is driving a 21st Century gold rush that’s supercharging conservation battles on public lands across the West. While individual conflicts grab day-to-day attention, it’s the rapidly growing cumulative total that’s astonishing even longtime environmental activists concerned about the effect of mining coal and critical minerals on federal land and wildlife. The effort is focused on spurring new projects and, with the help of Republicans on Capitol Hill, opening up areas that the Biden administration made off-limits to mining. The Trump administration is also swiftly advancing mines that were already in the pipeline, in many cases envisioned by Biden as vital for a renewable energy future. Under Trump, the priority is no longer digging up minerals to feed construction of electric vehicle batteries and renewables, but instead to bolster supply chains for technology like artificial intelligence, as well as military applications.
The Crypto Racket. By Candice Bernd at The Texas Observer. Public officials at all levels are propping up a Texas Bitcoin mining boom that’s threatening water and energy systems while afflicting locals with noise pollution.
Trump calls program to help low-income Americans pay their energy bills “unnecessary” by Naveena Sadasivam at Grist. The federal Low Income Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, distributed nearly $4 billion to households struggling to pay their energy bills in 2024. It’s a lifeline for more than 6 million families and a target of the budget slashers of the Trump administration. Early last month, about dozen program employees were laid off. But the worry was that the $400 million allocated for LIHEAP but not yet distributed would be jeopardized. An intervention from Sen. Susan Collins directly the Health Secretary RFK Jr. got one person rehired to determine how much money states and other recipients receive. They were brought back on to release the remaining $400 million early this month. In a budget proposal released afterward, the White House proposed ending the program altogether and noting that LIHEAP is “unnecessary” and that the administration would “support low-income individuals through energy dominance, lower prices, and an America First economic platform.”
WEEKLY BLUESKY SKEET
x
Happy Tuesday! Who's ready to hear about
1. Flesh-eating maggots (mostly go after cattle)
2. They're native to the US
3. The USDA has kept them out of the US since the 1960s
4. But the flesh-eating maggots are making a 21st century comeback. And believe it or not it may be thanks to MAGA.
— Sarah Taber (@sarahtaber.bsky.social) 2025-05-13T17:00:28.206Z
ECOPINION
’I just returned from Antarctica: climate change isn’t some far-off problem – it’s here and hitting hard by Jennifer Verduin at The Guardian. Earlier this year, I joined more than 100 scientists on a journey to Antarctica. What we encountered was extraordinary: towering icebergs, playful penguins, breaching whales and seals resting on the ice. Yet beneath this natural wonder lies a sobering reality – Antarctica is changing, and fast. The experience left me both inspired and deeply saddened.This unique environment highlights the fragility of our planet. Its pristine landscapes and thriving wildlife represent what we stand to lose if we don’t take urgent action to reduce human impact. [...] As an oceanographer, I study how the ocean shapes our world – and Antarctica is central to that story. The surrounding waters link the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans through the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. This connectivity means that what happens in Antarctica affects us all. Pollution, warming seas and oil spills know no borders. These changes disrupt ocean currents, harm marine life and influence climate systems around the globe. The implications are clear: addressing environmental challenges requires international cooperation and decisive action.
Peter Glieck
Running blind: The silencing and censoring of environmental threats to US national security by Peter Glieck at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. U.S. intelligence agencies and the armed forces have analyzed threats to national security from a range of environmental angles, including dependence on fossil fuels, competition for scarce water resources and strategic minerals, and especially human-caused climate change. These reports have been produced under presidential administrations across the political spectrum. Hundreds of assessments have come from, among others, White House National Security Strategy reports, Department of Defense Quadrennial Defense reviews, and studies from every branch of the military, all the war colleges, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). Their consistent conclusions: Environmental factors pose direct, indirect, and accelerating threats to US forces, operations, bases, and national security interests. Immediately after Donald Trump took office in January 2025, his administration began purging these reports from the public record: removing environmental security studies from government websites or disabling those pages, cutting funding for environmental security studies, and requiring military and intelligence communities to suppress and censor references to climate change. Trump also rescinded Biden’s executive order 14008 that said, “climate considerations shall be an essential element of United States foreign policy and national security.” These actions will not reduce the actual risk that environmental problems pose for national security or the military—the physical reality of those threats will be unchanged. Instead, they will blind the country to environmental instability and real-world conflict risks that jeopardize our military and national security.
America Closed For Business: Bill Rolling Back IRA Provisions Will Slash Investment by Michael Barnard at Clean Technica. The new American uncertainty generated by the Trump administration’s assault on clean energy-related elements of the Inflation Reduction Act is especially advantageous to global competitors, primarily China and the European Union. China, already dominant in renewable energy supply chains, battery production, and electric vehicles, stands to gain significantly from U.S. flailing. The country continues to offer clear, consistent, and strategically aligned policies that attract long-term investment, reinforcing its supply-chain dominance. European policymakers, similarly, have responded to the IRA not by retreating but by solidifying their own incentives under the European Green Deal and various national strategies. Countries like Germany and France are aggressively courting clean technology investors through predictable regulatory frameworks, tax incentives, and public funding. As U.S. regulatory unpredictability grows, the EU emerges as a natural beneficiary, becoming an increasingly attractive destination for investment that might have otherwise flowed to the United States. Of course, this further eliminates any pretense that the United States is a leader or even a reliable partner on the most important file of the 21st Century, climate change. Europe and China will continue to lead on this crucial file as the United States further isolates itself.
Will U.S. Push on Seabed Mining End Global Consensus on Oceans? Trump’s recent order to expedite permits to begin deep-sea mining bypasses international agreements that protect oceans. By moving unilaterally, says the Ocean Conservancy’s Jeff Watters, the U.S. could endanger fragile marine ecosystems and set a troubling precedent. Richard Schiffman interviewed him for Yale Environment 360. A brief excerpt:
Yale Environment 360: How do you view President Trump’s recent executive order on deep-sea mining?
Jeff Watters: It’s deeply concerning, particularly in a moment when the administration is proposing massive cuts to NOAA. The agency is tasked with not only understanding the ocean and understanding the world around us, but also with being a steward of the marine environment. And so there’s a certain irony to the administration issuing an executive order directing NOAA to expedite and facilitate what would be a massive new extractive industry on the high seas.
e360: The U.S. is not the only player here. The International Seabed Authority has been discussing whether or not to allow deep-sea mining for many years now. They have not yet sanctioned it.
Watters: There’s a very robust years-long dialogue that’s been happening at the ISA about whether or not deep-sea mining should happen in international waters and at a global scale. Quite a few countries are opposed to pursuing [it].
Active Management’ Harms Forests — And It’s About to Get a Whole Lot Worse by by Dominick A. DellaSala, David Lindenmayer and Diana Six at The Revelator. Active management impacts depend on the intensity of removals, frequency and duration of impacts, and scale (site, landscape, ecoregion, biome) that often combine with the natural disturbance background in exceeding disturbance thresholds that degrade ecological integrity. Such practices have been widely accepted on at least three continents — North America, Australia, and Europe — where our research has been exposing severe impacts. What Are the Ecological Costs of Active Management? As we’ve shown in our recent studies, scaling up these types of activities comes with severe costs to natural ecosystems. The impacts of active management can even approach the effects of deforestation as they ramp up in application and intensity. In the United States, this is especially apparent in relation to the recent executive orders that President Donald Trump announced under the rubric of a national timber emergency, cloaked in wildfire prevention. Even some progressive states, like California, have taken drastic measures to log vast areas with minimal environmental reviews in response to wildfires. Canada and European nations also have been driving up the active management rhetoric.
America Closed For Business: Bill Rolling Back IRA Provisions Will Slash Investment by Michael Barnard at Clean Technica. The new American uncertainty generated by the Trump administration’s assault on clean energy-related elements of the Inflation Reduction Act is especially advantageous to global competitors, primarily China and the European Union. China, already dominant in renewable energy supply chains, battery production, and electric vehicles, stands to gain significantly from U.S. flailing. The country continues to offer clear, consistent, and strategically aligned policies that attract long-term investment, reinforcing its supply-chain dominance. European policymakers, similarly, have responded to the IRA not by retreating but by solidifying their own incentives under the European Green Deal and various national strategies. Countries like Germany and France are aggressively courting clean technology investors through predictable regulatory frameworks, tax incentives, and public funding. As U.S. regulatory unpredictability grows, the EU emerges as a natural beneficiary, becoming an increasingly attractive destination for investment that might have otherwise flowed to the United States. Of course, this further eliminates any pretense that the United States is a leader or even a reliable partner on the most important file of the 21st Century, climate change. Europe and China will continue to lead on this crucial file as the United States further isolates itself.
OTHER GREEN STUFF
Swamp Coolers’ Ability to Beat the Heat is Evaporating in Record Southwestern Temperatures • Why the mighty Himalayas are getting harder and harder to see • The Vietnam War ended 50 years ago, but the battle with Agent Orange continues • Joe Rogan and Other Top Podcasts Spread Climate Disinfo, Research Finds • New Hampshire’s Community Solar Program • A watershed moment for Texas solar • China’s energy investing is getting greener • How to make electric vehicles that don’t trash forests through mining • Industry groups are not happy about the imminent demise of Energy Star
