Good morning. Here’s the latest:
We have more on these stories below. But first, a look at the Trump administration’s record on climate change.
Trump’s climate agenda
There is stronger evidence than ever that greenhouse gases are bad for us, the nation’s leading scientific advisory body said yesterday. Yet President Trump has proposed to cancel the government’s 16-year-old finding that carbon dioxide emissions endanger public health. Doing so would mean the Environmental Protection Agency could no longer limit emissions from cars or power plants. The Trump administration once merely downplayed the threat of global warming. Now it “flatly denies the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change,” reports my colleague Lisa Friedman, who covers climate policy. For today’s newsletter, I spoke with Lisa about all the things that are shifting. Can you list for us the most important climate decisions from Trump’s second term? Ending climate protections. The most significant is the proposed repeal of the “endangerment finding,” which you mentioned above. Dismantling climate science. The administration cut funding and took down the website of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, a 35-year effort to track climate change and its impacts. It fired hundreds of scientists at work on the next version of the National Climate Assessment, a congressionally mandated report used to prepare for extreme weather events. And it created a new official analysis written by climate skeptics. War on wind and solar. Trump is stopping renewable energy projects, and his domestic policy law phases out tax credits for new wind and solar development. I get that fossil fuel industries are part of the Republican coalition. But I don’t understand the opposition to solar and wind projects. Last month, Trump ordered construction to halt on a $6 billion wind farm that was almost completed. What is your best explanation for why Trump wants to block green technologies? Most experts I’ve spoken with see it as ideological — and, in the case of wind, personal — for the president. Trump hasn’t liked wind since he unsuccessfully tried to stop an offshore wind farm near one of his Scottish golf courses. Broadly speaking, renewable energy has become more partisan over the years, with Republican support for wind, solar and electric cars declining.
Can’t the next Democratic president just undo all of this? Yes, a new president could create new analyses, new climate protections and new incentives for renewable energy. But it would be a long and difficult process. Some things require Congress. And there’s one legal possibility that climate activists fear the most. In reviewing lawsuits about the climate endangerment finding, it’s possible that the Supreme Court will reverse the 2007 precedent that lets the government regulate greenhouse gases. If it does, the next president may not be able to restore any of these regulations. The administration fired many people who study climate change, and then hired five others to put out a report saying that concern about climate change is overblown. What is their argument? They don’t dispute that human activity is heating the planet, but they claim that some warming attributed to fossil fuels is actually driven by natural cycles or variability in the sun. They also argue that sea levels are not rising more rapidly, that extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can boost crop yields, and that the risks from extreme weather events are overstated. All of these fly in the face of established research.
Trump’s energy secretary told European leaders last week that climate “ideology” hurts prosperity — and that they should drop their environmental rules and buy more gas. How do policymakers abroad see what’s happening here? They’re used to seeing Washington pivot between Democratic and Republican control. So far, no other country has withdrawn from the Paris agreement or abandoned its climate and clean-energy goals. But they are doing as they’re asked and promising to buy more gas, which won’t help them meet their targets. They acknowledge that fighting climate change has costs, but there is also a cost to inaction. Extreme weather, deadly heat waves, species extinction, the decline of crop yields and other problems tied to rising global temperatures exact a price, too. The administration has stopped gathering certain climate data, as our colleague Maxine Joselow reports this morning. What are we no longer collecting? And what happens if we don’t know these things? Here are some of the biggies: The Trump administration retired an extreme-weather database that had tracked the costs of natural disasters since 1980. And it says power plants, oil refineries and other large industrial facilities needn’t report their greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, Trump’s proposed budget would eliminate funding for the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, which has tracked climate data every day for nearly 70 years. Scientists say wiping out scientific data will make it only more difficult to understand what is happening to the planet. More climate coverage
ABC announced last night that it was suspending “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” indefinitely over comments Kimmel made about Tyler Robinson, the man charged with shooting Charlie Kirk. Americans were searching for news about Kimmel online. Here’s what happened: Kimmel said during Monday’s show, “We hit some new lows over the weekend, with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.” Prosecutors said on Tuesday that Robinson had, in private messages, objected to Kirk’s “hatred.” And they said Robinson’s mother believed her son had recently become “more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented.” Brendan Carr, head of the F.C.C., said on a podcast Wednesday that Kimmel’s remarks were part of a “concerted effort to lie to the American people” and threatened to take action against ABC, adding, “Frankly, when you see stuff like this — I mean, we can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Disney, which owns ABC, pulled Kimmel’s show hours after Carr’s comments.
Federal Reserve
Vaccines
Trump’s British Visit
Politics
Russia
Other Big Stories
Democrats are torn between focusing on protecting democracy and highlighting Trump’s poor economic leadership. E. J. Dionne Jr. asks: Why not both? Here’s a column by Jamelle Bouie on the deportation of South Korean workers. New: The Times family subscription is here. One rate. Four individual logins. Savings for all. Now you and three others can enjoy unlimited access to The Times, while personalizing your own experience. Learn more.
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