Grist

In 2009, the Environmental Protection Agency declared that the rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere threatened public health and welfare. This “endangerment finding,” as it’s known in legal jargon, may have sounded self-evident to those who had been following climate science for decades, but its consequences for U.S. policy were tremendous: It allowed the EPA to issue rules limiting emissions from U.S. vehicles, power plants, and other industrial sources. While those rules have not always survived court challenges and changing presidential administrations, the regulatory authority underpinning them has proven remarkably stable.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump’s EPA took a major step toward changing that. At a truck dealership in Indianapolis, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced a formal proposal to repeal the endangerment finding, which has been in the works since the beginning of Trump’s second presidency. At the same time, Zeldin announced a plan to repeal all federal greenhouse gas emissions regulations for motor vehicles. “If finalized, today’s announcement would amount to the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States,” he said at the press conference.

Zeldin accused his predecessors at the EPA of making “many, many, many mental leaps” in the 2009 declaration, and he argued that the “real threat” to people’s livelihoods is not carbon dioxide but instead the regulations themselves, which he claimed lead to higher prices and restrict people’s choices.

If the EPA succeeds in reversing the endangerment finding, it would “eviscerate the biggest regulatory tool the federal government has” to keep climate change in check, said Ann Carlson, an environmental law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Republicans in Congress have already repealed much of former President Joe Biden’s landmark climate law, which aimed to put the U.S. within reach of its Paris Agreement targets primarily by funneling money to renewable energy sources. Rescinding the endangerment finding targets the other main tool the U.S. government can use to address climate change: the executive branch’s power to limit emissions through regulatory action. In other words, Republicans have already eliminated many of the federal government’s proverbial climate carrots — now they’re going after the sticks. 

“We will not have a serious national climate policy if this goes through,” said Patrick Parenteau, an emeritus professor of climate policy and environmental law at Vermont Law School.

But that’s a big “if.” Experts say that the EPA’s plan is bound to be embroiled in years of lawsuits, perhaps one day making its way to the Supreme Court, which blessed the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases in 2007 and declined to hear a challenge to the endangerment finding as recently as December 2023. And even if the EPA does manage to overturn the endangerment finding after all court challenges have been exhausted, it would result in sweeping consequences — including some that the administration’s allies in the oil industry may not like. Indeed, the risk is serious enough that some fossil fuel industry groups have urged the Trump administration not to repeal the finding.

The tussle over the endangerment finding stems from differing interpretations of the Clean Air Act. When Congress expanded the law in 1970, it tasked the EPA with regulating air pollutants that threaten public health, but it kept the definition of “pollutant” broad. “They had the foresight to understand that they could not foresee every potential air pollutant that would endanger public health and welfare in the many decades to come,” said Zealan Hoover, who was a senior adviser to the EPA under Biden. That gave the EPA some leeway to determine exactly what it should be regulating — a question that presidents have approached very differently, with Democrats typically trying to expand the agency’s power and Republicans trying to limit it. With its 2009 endangerment finding, the Obama administration added carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases to the list.

Now that Zeldin has announced a plan to strike down the finding, the EPA will open a 45-day period for the public to weigh in on the proposal. The agency is supposed to take that feedback into account before moving to finalize the rule. At that point, states and environmental groups may sue the EPA in what’s expected to be a yearslong court battle.

“The lawyering that’s going to go on is going to make a lot of people rich,” Parenteau said. In the meantime, Zeldin would likely work to undo existing regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, unless the courts were convinced to pause the implementation of the new rule. 

Any lawsuit would probably end up in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears cases concerning federal policymaking. Law experts say the EPA’s argument may not fare well with those judges, as the circuit has upheld the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act in the past. On top of that, when Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, Democrats amended the Clean Air Act to explicitly declare carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases as air pollutants, bolstering the foundation for regulating them. Republicans did not repeal that language when they gutted much of the rest of the Biden-era law, and challengers are likely to invoke those amendments in court, Carlson said.

But that wouldn’t necessarily be the end of it, because such a case might go all the way to the Supreme Court. The court’s conservative majority could then choose to undermine Massachusetts v. EPA, the 2007 decision that gave the EPA authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and led to the endangerment finding. “That may be the ultimate aim here,” Carlson said, “to get the Supreme Court to revisit Massachusetts v. EPA to make it basically impossible to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.”

Read Next Trump’s EPA wants to demolish the bedrock of US climate regulation. It won’t be easy. Naveena Sadasivam

Undoing the finding wouldn’t just dismantle the foundation of U.S. climate regulation — it might also weaken oil companies’ best legal defense in the flood of climate lawsuits brought against them by cities and states. For years, oil companies have relied on a different Supreme Court ruling to argue that federal law shields them from state lawsuits over climate change. In the 2011 ruling American Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court found that because the EPA was already regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, states couldn’t separately sue polluters under federal “nuisance” law — a type of legal claim used when someone’s actions interfere with public rights, such as the right to a healthy environment.

The court’s reasoning was that Congress had delegated the task of regulating emissions to the EPA, leaving no room for federal courts to step in on making climate policy. But if the endangerment finding is revoked, and the EPA no longer regulates those emissions, that argument could fall apart, leaving fossil fuel companies vulnerable in courts across the country.

“There is great concern that reversing the finding would open the door to a lot more nuisance lawsuits against all types of energy companies,” Jeff Holmstead, a partner with energy law firm Bracewell, told E&E News earlier this year. The oil industry may then pursue a backup plan: Companies could ask Congress, which is currently controlled by a narrow Republican majority, to grant them legal protection from climate lawsuits, according to Parenteau.

Undoing the endangerment finding could leave fossil fuel companies navigating a patchwork of state laws instead of a single cohesive federal policy. If greenhouse gas emissions are no longer regulated under the Clean Air Act, states would presumably be free to make their own rules, Carlson added. Among other consequences, that could strengthen California’s case against the Trump administration over its right to place stricter-than-federal standards on vehicle emissions. “There’s potential for a lot of chaos,” she said. 

It’s possible that a more liberal presidential administration could one day reinstate the endangerment finding, even if Zeldin manages to revoke it. But it would be a while before that could translate to any meaningful action on climate change, according to Hoover.

“Unfortunately, for anyone who wants to see government solve a big problem, there’s very little you can achieve through regulations in four years,” he said.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump’s EPA is attacking its own power to fight climate change on Jul 30, 2025.

Over the last six months, Americans have been inundated with a near-constant stream of announcements from the federal government — programs shuttered, funding cut, jobs eliminated, and regulations gutted. President Donald Trump and his administration are executing a systematic dismantling of the environmental, economic, and scientific systems that underpin our society. The onslaught can feel overwhelming, opaque, or sometimes even distant, but these policies will have real effects on Americans’ daily lives.

In this new guide, Grist examines the impact these changes could have, and are already having, on the things you do every day. Flipping on your lights. Turning on your faucet. Paying household bills. Visiting a park. Checking the weather forecast. Feeding your family.

The decisions have left communities less safe from pollution, more vulnerable to climate disasters, and facing increasingly expensive energy bills, among other changes. Read on to see how.

— Katherine Bagley

 

 

Your Home Flip on your lights:

Pulling back from renewable energy could make your electricity bills go up.

When Trump began his second term, it was with a vow to “unleash American energy.” But over the last six months, it’s become clear that this call to arms was meant strictly for fossil fuels, not the country’s booming renewable energy industry. Trump has issued a series of executive orders to revive coal production, and he has opened up millions of acres of public land to oil and gas drilling and issued a moratorium on offshore wind leases.

This commitment was deepened with the Republican-led One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed into law on July 4. It bolsters investment in fossil fuels while sunsetting Biden-era credits for electric vehicles, energy efficiency, and wind, solar, and green hydrogen. Climate and clean energy advocates described the bill as “historically ruinous” for renewables and a massive handout to the oil and gas industry. The problem: Power demand is rising sharply, and recent growth in renewable energy has been reliably and affordably meeting that demand.

All of this could soon impact Americans’ electricity bills: According to one analysis by the nonpartisan think tank Energy Innovation, by 2035 the One Big Beautiful Bill Act could spike wholesale electricity prices 74 percent by stifling renewable energy at a time when new capacity is needed, and raise consumer rates by 9 percent to 18 percent, or $170 annually.

— Rebecca Egan McCarthy

 

Turn on your faucet:

Regulatory delays will continue to allow PFAS to contaminate drinking water.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are a class of manmade chemicals used to make everything from firefighting foam to nonstick cookware. Better known as “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down easily, the compounds have become ubiquitous in our lakes, soil, and even our own bodies. Roughly half the U.S. population consumes water tainted with PFAS. 

After years of mounting contamination and public outcry, the Environmental Protection Agency finally took steps to regulate the chemicals last year, establishing maximum levels for six PFAS types in drinking water. But in May, the Trump administration said it would rescind the existing rules and issue new ones for four of the chemicals, and delayed implementation of two others until 2031. 

Exposure to PFAS has been linked to decreased fertility, developmental delays in children, and reduced immune function.

— Naveena Sadasivam 

 

Check your weather forecast:

Funding and staff cuts are making it harder to track climate change and weather.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, provides critical scientific research on the Earth’s environment to U.S. communities and lawmakers. It houses the National Weather Service, which generates the data that makes weather forecasts possible, as well as the National Hurricane Center, which tracks tropical storms. 

In the first few months of Trump’s second term, his administration fired hundreds of NOAA employees, with plans to cut the agency’s workforce by a further 17 percent next year. NOAA has also taken steps to discontinue the collection of essential satellite data that forecasters use to track hurricanes once they form. 

Combined, these cuts could threaten lives: In June, John Morales, a longtime meteorologist in Miami, warned his viewers that “the quality of forecasts is becoming degraded” and that meteorologists may be “flying blind” with hurricane tracking this year due to the Trump administration’s “cuts, the gutting, the sledgehammer attack on science.”

— Matt Simon 

 

Run your appliances:

Disbanding energy-efficiency programs could increase your utility bills.

If you’re browsing for a new household appliance, like a dishwasher or washing machine, you might notice that some of them come equipped with a blue “Energy Star” label. The mark signifies that a machine meets a certain energy-efficiency standard, set by the federal government, and it allows consumers to choose appliances that can help keep utility bills low. Earlier this year, the EPA announced internally that it was planning to shut down the popular, voluntary program — though building and consumer advocates are now trying to save it.

If Energy Star is indeed over, it would mark the end of a program that saves American consumers some $40 billion annually in energy costs, or about $350 for every taxpayer dollar that goes into the program. 

The Department of Energy has also separately rolled back a slew of mandatory efficiency standards on appliances, ranging from microwaves to washers and dryers, dehumidifiers to ovens. Researchers estimate that the lower benchmarks could cost consumers $43 billion over 30 years of sales, due to increased electricity bills.

— Tik Root

 

Pay your bills:

Tariffs are disrupting supply chains and raising household costs.

Trump dubbed April 2 “Liberation Day” and imposed tariffs as high as 50 percent on nearly every country in the world, as well as several key commodities. Although he swiftly paused them for 90 days, the threat of reinstatement looms and some tariffs — on China, Canada, and aluminum — have already gone into effect, with higher prices on consumer goods like clothes, toys, and furniture. 

Companies generally pass the cost of tariffs on to their customers (even if Trump tells them not to). If Trump’s full, proposed tariffs ever do take effect, economists anticipate increased prices on everything from cars to electricity to building materials, the latter of which could also make natural disaster recovery and home insurance more expensive.

— Tik Root

 

Your Commute Fill your gas tank:

Fuel-efficiency rollbacks could cost you more at the pump and worsen air quality.

Gas-powered cars have become more fuel efficient and less polluting over the years largely due to federal regulations. After the 2008 financial crash, the Obama administration used the bailout of the auto industry as leverage to impose stricter fuel-efficiency requirements, ensuring cars drive farther on less gas, thereby saving consumers money at the pump and reducing air pollution. The Biden administration later strengthened those rules, requiring that automakers sell passenger cars averaging 65 miles per gallon by 2031 — a one-third increase from 2024 standards. The threshold, which applies across an automaker’s product lines, was designed to gradually shift the industry toward electric vehicles, which do not release exhaust fumes or other tailpipe pollutants. 

In June, the Trump administration began the process of formally rescinding those rules. According to an estimate last year from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Biden-era rule would have saved $23 billion in fuel costs while also reducing emissions and pollution.

— Naveena Sadasivam

 

Drive your EV:

Loss of tax credits and cuts to federal program will make it harder to buy and drive an electric vehicle.

Under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, federal tax credits for the purchase or lease of an EV — of up to $7,500 for new cars and $4,000 for used — would run through 2032. But the One Big Beautiful Bill Act repealed those measures and cut the runway to only a few months. The erasure will likely make electric vehicles more expensive, which would put the technology further out of reach for many low- to moderate-income Americans. 

For those who still can buy an EV, finding a place to plug in could be difficult. In February, the Federal Highway Administration said it was suspending the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure, or NEVI, program, which would have directed some $3 billion to states to expand the nation’s charging network. In June, a judge blocked that move and ordered the administration to unfreeze funds, but the court battle isn’t over.

— Tik Root

 

Take public transit:

A funding freeze is pausing certain train, bus, and bike lane projects.

For those who don’t exclusively rely on cars to get around, Trump’s second term has been none too kind on the buses, railways, and bike lanes that make up the country’s public transit system. Trump has relentlessly attacked New York City’s congestion pricing, designed to reduce traffic and raise funds for public transit, and threatened to cut public transit funding to major cities like New York and Chicago. 

In March, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy froze funds and ordered an investigation into any departmental grants that involve “equity analysis, green infrastructure, bicycle infrastructure, [and] EV and/or EV-charging infrastructure.” The directive also instructed employees to flag projects “that purposefully improve the condition for EJ [environmental justice] communities or actively reduce GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions.” The decision reverses Biden-era efforts to reduce the climate footprint of the transportation sector, which is America’s largest contributor to global warming, emitting over 1.8 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases per year. 

— Sophie Hurwitz

 

Your Food Buy groceries:

New tariffs could raise your grocery bill.

The Trump administration’s whiplash approach to a wide swath of exorbitant tariffs on other countries has sowed confusion among consumers, manufacturers, and agricultural growers. 

Although Mexico and the U.S. briefly appeared to reach an agreement, Trump is now threatening a 30 percent tariff on all Mexican imports, and a 17 percent rate on Mexican tomato imports has already gone into effect. Other tariffs could drive costs up even higher: Trump’s 50 percent steel and aluminum imports could hike up the price of canned foods, for example. And country-specific tariffs could increase the prices of imported goods like coffee and chocolate.

— Frida Garza

 

Get food assistance:

Funding cuts are leaving people hungry.

Local food systems and national food safety nets have been decimated by recent federal cuts. In March, after freezing nearly two dozen streams of funding, the Department of Agriculture cancelled future rounds of the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program and the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program. The two initiatives were slated to dole out roughly a billion dollars to states, tribes, and territories to reduce food insecurity. As a result, the USDA’s Emergency Food Assistance Program’s deliveries to food banks and soup kitchens have been reduced or cancelled entirely; kids in schools and lower-income families have less access to affordable meals; and agricultural producers across the country have been forced to lay off employees, delay projects, or shut down entirely.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act made unprecedented cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, a federal program that helps nearly 42 million Americans afford groceries. The cuts are further poised to increase food insecurity across the country at a time when persistently high food costs, fueled in part by worsening climate disasters, are among most Americans’ biggest economic concerns.

— Ayurella Horn-Muller 

 

Eat safe food:

Federal job cuts are disrupting food safety programs.

The Trump administration cut 20,000 jobs from the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention— two agencies that monitor and respond to foodborne illness outbreaks. Although some employees were later reinstated, the FDA has paused multiple initiatives due to staff shortages, including a quality control program that keeps the agency’s network of food-testing laboratories running efficiently. The FDA also paused its quality-testing program for milk and suspended a program to test milk and cheese for bird flu just before the program launched. Meanwhile, the USDA axed a proposed Biden-era rule to reduce salmonella risk in poultry.

The U.S. food supply is one of the safest in the world, but experts say these cuts threaten to disrupt that system and undercut its ability to keep consumers safe in the long term.

— Frida Garza

 

Support local farmers:

Funding cuts are leaving small farmers in the lurch, threatening locally sourced food supplies. 

Federal agricultural policy has centered on two major priorities during the early months of the second Trump administration: First is the slashing of federal food and agriculture funding, which has left small producers struggling to stay afloat. Second is giving farmers who grow traditional commodities such as corn, cotton, and soybeans multibillion-dollar bailouts. This strategy first became clear when the USDA began freezing and cutting billions of dollars to programs that supported the purchasing of goods from small and midsize farms. Then, the agency expedited disaster subsidies — funds meant to help agricultural producers recover from extreme weather — for commodity farmers. The decision funneled economic aid away from small producers into the pockets of industrial-scale operations. 

With the strain of an agricultural recession looming over regions like the Midwest, experts see these moves by the administration ultimately leading to the loss of many more small American farms, which would disrupt local economies and limit access to fresh food.

— Ayurella Horn-Muller

 

Your Community Take a breath:

Regulatory rollbacks could make air quality worse.

From rally stages to debate podiums, Trump repeatedly promised to deliver “clean air and clean water” if elected to a second term. He broke that promise almost from Day 1. Trump’s EPA is carrying out a massive deregulatory agenda, much of it focused on rolling back protections for the air we breathe. It rescinded billions of dollars in funding for a range of air quality initiatives, including clean energy projects and monitoring efforts in low-income and minority communities, though a judge ultimately ruled the latter unlawful. At the same time, the administration has also dramatically reduced the number of cases it brings against polluters. It even set up an email inbox soliciting requests from companies seeking exemptions from a range of clean air rules.

The agency has also taken steps to roll back limits on carbon dioxide and mercury emissions from power plants and methane emissions from oil and gas fields, which drive climate change and threaten human health. And in July, it repealed the “endangerment finding” — the landmark legal determination that classifies greenhouse gases as air pollutants and gives the EPA authority to regulate them.

— Naveena Sadasivam

 

Prepare for extreme weather:

Cancelled grant programs are making communities less resilient to natural disasters.

This spring, the Trump administration cancelled the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, or BRIC, program — an initiative that sends billions of dollars to communities, municipalities, and states proactively so that they can prepare for natural disasters before they hit. The program funds projects like burying power lines, building culverts, and upgrading power stations to make them more resilient to extreme weather. 

Trump canceled $750 million in new resilience funding and clawed back nearly $900 million in grant funding provided to BRIC by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, money that was already approved but not yet disbursed. The abrupt move ultimately led to the disruption of $3.6 billion in planned resilience spending across the U.S. — the kinds of projects that help protect people from flooding, wildfires, hurricanes, and more at a time when climate change is increasing their severity and frequency. Under Trump, FEMA also cancelled $600 million in flood-mitigation assistance funding to communities this year.

— Zoya Teirstein

 

Go outdoors:

A defunding campaign is threatening our shared spaces.

The future of public lands, parks, and forests in the U.S. is in the midst of a dramatic reshaping by Republicans, risking permanent changes to the environment and how we experience the outdoors. The Trump administration has fired a thousand National Park Service workers, hindering conservation efforts and leaving parks unable to accommodate the millions of visitors they typically welcome each summer. The administration also stripped protections for nearly 60 million acres of national forest and identified millions of acres eligible for potential oil and gas development. And a growing movement among Republican lawmakers and the administration would sell off millions of acres of public lands for housing and energy development — a policy opposed by 74 percent of Americans. 

In June, the Department of Justice granted the president the authority to revoke national monument designations, a status that marks land as permanently protected. The move threatens sites such as Bears Ears in Utah and the Sáttítla Highlands in California — two monuments that Trump has singled out in particular — which are significant to tribes and illustrate the complex history of U.S. public lands as stolen land.

— Miacel Spotted Elk

 

Wildlife watching:

New definitions are weakening species protections.

For decades, the Endangered Species Act recognized that in order to protect animals, it was vital to save the habitats they live in. The policy has led to the rebound of iconic species like the bald eagle, grizzly bears, grey wolves, and panthers, and it has protected millions of acres from development. But in April, the Trump administration proposed a new definition of the word “harm” that scientists, legal experts, and conservationists warn will hamstring the act’s effectiveness. 

Instead of the Endangered Species Act regulating activities that indirectly impact endangered or threatened species, like drilling in the spawning grounds of Atlantic sturgeon or logging forests that are home to a rare owl, the law will now only consider direct, intentional harm to the animal itself — killing, hurting, or capturing it. The rule change comes at a time when climate change and land use decisions increasingly threaten ecosystems and the animals that rely on them.

— Katherine Bagley 

 

Protect your health:

An attack on science is hindering research on public health.

The federal government has hemorrhaged more than 50,000 employees since Trump was reelected in January, including many who play crucial roles in keeping American waters and air safe from pollutants and disease-causing organisms. A quarter of the staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention alone were fired, leaving gaping holes across an agency tasked with keeping tabs on the movement of pathogens across the nation. The EPA is in the midst of a defunding and deregulation campaign, including the elimination of its research division, all of which limits its ability to oversee polluters. And the National Institutes of Health is rebranding its research on the intersection of climate change and public health, now focusing solely on extreme weather and excluding any mental health work.

— Zoya Teirstein

 

Illustrations by Lucas Burtin, with art direction by Mia Torres.

toolTips('.classtoolTips3','Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and other gases that prevent heat from escaping Earth’s atmosphere. Together, they act as a blanket to keep the planet at a liveable temperature in what is known as the “greenhouse effect.” Too many of these gases, however, can cause excessive warming, disrupting fragile climates and ecosystems.'); toolTips('.classtoolTips6','A powerful greenhouse gas that accounts for about 11% of global emissions, methane is the primary component of natural gas and is emitted into the atmosphere by landfills, oil and natural gas systems, agricultural activities, coal mining, and wastewater treatment, among other pathways. Over a 20-year period, it is roughly 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.'); toolTips('.classtoolTips12','An acronym for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, PFAS are a class of chemicals used in everyday items like nonstick cookware, cosmetics, and food packaging that have proven to be dangerous to human health. Also called “forever chemicals” for their inability to break down over time, PFAS can be found lingering nearly everywhere — in water, soil, air, and the blood of people and animals.
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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump’s environmental policies are reshaping everyday life. Here’s how. on Jul 30, 2025.

Eight years ago, when Debbie Wei Mullin founded her company Copper Cow, she wanted to bring Vietnamese coffee into the mainstream. 

Vietnam, the world’s second-largest exporter of coffee, is known for growing robusta beans. Earthier and more bitter than the arabica beans grown in Brazil, Colombia, and other coffee-growing regions near the Equator, robusta beans are often thought of as producing lower-quality coffee. 

In an effort to rebrand robusta, Mullin signed deals with coffee farming cooperatives in Vietnam and created smooth blends. Over the years, she helped a cohort of farmers convert their operations to organic. “We put in huge investments and were certified as the first organic specialty-grade coffee farms ever in Vietnam,” said the CEO and founder. In a few weeks, Copper Cow is planning to launch its first line of organic coffee at Whole Foods and Target.

But the second Trump administration has changed the calculus of her business. Mullin said she “was bullish” about her company’s prospects when President Donald Trump first took office, believing that Vietnam would likely be exempt from exorbitant tariffs since the president has many supporters in the coastal Southeast Asian country. Then, in April of this year, the White House announced a 46 percent tariff on goods from Vietnam. 

The shock left Mullin rethinking the very thesis she had set out to prove. “A big part of our mission is about how robusta beans, when treated better, can provide this really great cup of coffee at a lower price,” she said. “Once you put a 46 percent tariff on there, does this business model work anymore?”

Trump soon paused his country-specific tariffs for a few months, replacing them with a near-universal 10 percent tax. This month, Trump announced on social media that he would lower Vietnam’s eventual tariff from 46 to 20 percent — a sharp price hike that still worries Mullin. Meanwhile, Trump has threatened to impose an astounding 50 percent tariff on goods from Brazil, the nation’s largest importer of coffee, starting August 1. 

“I joke with my partner that I feel like I’m in a macroeconomics class,” said Mullin. In lieu of raising its prices, Copper Cow, which sells directly to consumers as well as to retailers, has scrambled to cut costs by reconsidering its quarterly team get-togethers and slowing down its timeline for helping more farmers go organic. The price of coffee hit an all-time high earlier this year, a dramatic rise due in part to ongoing climate-fueled droughts in the global coffee belt. As the U.S. considers fueling a trade war with coffee-producing countries, “it just feels like such an insult to an injury,” said Mullin. “It’s like, let’s have an earthquake hit a place that is in the middle of a hurricane.”

Coffee beans being roasted in a traditional coffee roasting store in India. Abhishek Chinnappa / Getty Images

Economists like to say that demand for coffee is relatively inelastic — drinkers are so attached to their daily caffeine fix that they keep buying it even when prices increase. As the Trump administration mounts its retaliatory trade agenda, that theory will be put to the test. Coffee growers, as well as the roasters and sellers that purchase them in the U.S., are now facing unforeseen geopolitical and economic challenges. “We have not seen tariffs of this magnitude before,” said David Ortega, a professor of food and economics policy at Michigan State University. “There’s no playbook for this.” 

Should Trump’s threatened tariffs go into effect next month, it will likely hurt consumers, as many businesses will pass on the costs by raising prices. But it could also have ripple effects on coffee farms, as companies may cut costs by pulling back on investments in environmentally-conscientious practices like organic or regenerative agriculture. “Our goal was always to slowly convert the rest of our products to certified organic,” said Mullin. “And we feel like that is not an option anymore because of the tariffs.”

Even if the tariffs do not go into effect in August, the ongoing economic uncertainty will likely impact coffee growers in Brazil, which provided 35 percent of America’s unroasted coffee supply as of 2023. As U.S. coffee companies navigate the Trump administration’s evolving trade policies, they are likely to seek out new, cheaper markets for coffee beans. “Suddenly, they become less attached to where they source their coffee from,” said João Brites, director of growth and innovation at HowGood, a data platform that helps food companies measure and reduce carbon emissions along their supply chain. 

The problem with that, according to Ortega, is that other countries in the coffee belt, such as Colombia, do not have the production capacity to match Brazil’s and meet U.S. demand for coffee. If the threat of punitive tariffs on Brazil kickstarts an increase in demand for coffee from other countries, that will likely raise prices. For coffee drinkers, “there are very few substitutes,” said Ortega.

These pressures on coffee farmers and buyers are coming after a period of worsening climate impacts. A majority of coffee grown in Brazil — about 60 percent — comes from smallholder farms, grown on about 25 or fewer acres of land. “The current reality they’re operating in is that they’re already very stretched,” particularly because of weather disruptions, said Brites. Coffee grows best in tropical climates, but in recent years unprecedented droughts in Brazil have stunted growers’ yields, forcing exporters to dip into and almost deplete their coffee reserves. Vietnam has been rocked by drought and heat waves — and though robusta beans need less water to grow than arabica beans, making them a relatively climate-resilient crop, growers have also seen their yields decline. (Mullin said she is seeing early signs of harvests rebounding this year.)

Brites speculated that U.S. companies buying from smallholder farms in Brazil may be able to pressure growers into selling their beans at lower prices, adding to the economic precarity that these growers face. “For a lot of these coffee growers, the U.S. is such a big market,” he said, adding that it would take time for them to find new buyers in other markets.

Charts showing President Donald Trump’s country-specific “reciprocal tariffs” on April 2 in Washington, DC.
Alex Wong / Getty Images

Growers themselves are worried. Mariana Veloso, a Brazilian coffee producer and exporter, said producers are facing logistical challenges — and anticipating more. “If we want to ship a coffee in the next month, we will probably not be able to,” said Veloso, remarking that sometimes cargo ships holding coffee sit at Brazilian ports for weeks before setting out. Shipping companies seem to be delaying shipments from Brazil, said Veloso, perhaps in anticipation of the looming tariffs.

In the U.S., not every coffee company sources from Brazil or Vietnam. But the Trump administration’s existing 10 percent across-the-board tariffs are still rattling the coffee business. “We source coffees from all around the world. So we’re not immune to anything,” said Kevin Hartley, founder and CEO of Cambio Roasters, an aluminum K-cup coffee brand. He added, “You know, 10 percent here and 30 percent there, that’s not trivial.”

Hartley added that one of the impacts of droughts on coffee growers is that younger farmers worried about the future are considering leaving the business. “In coffee farming families around the world, it’s a tough life and the current generation is showing reticence to take off where their parents began,” he said. 

Regardless of whether the U.S. imposes prohibitive tariffs on individual coffee-growing countries, climate change is already taking a toll on this workforce. “Everyone’s looking for a solution for this,” said Mullin, who believes robusta beans can offer a drought-resistant alternative to the ever-popular arabica beans. 

Copper Cow has even started experimenting with a lesser-known varietal of coffee beans called liberica, which requires even less water to grow than robusta beans. “And it’s delicious,” Mullin said. It’s an extremely labor-intensive crop because the coffee plant grows so tall, but one of the farmer cooperatives she works with is starting to plant them now, thinking the investment will be worth it as temperatures keep rising. 

This new era of environmental, economic, and geopolitical challenges has shaken coffee brands. “Everybody’s wondering, in 50 years, will there be much coffee anymore? People are trying to be really realistic about what that world is going to look like,” said Mullin. In the midst of that broader uncertainty, the impact of Trump’s tariffs is another question only time can answer.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate change has sent coffee prices soaring. Trump’s tariffs will send them higher. on Jul 29, 2025.

The Arctic island of Svalbard is so reliably frigid that humanity bet its future on the place. Since 2008, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault — set deep in frozen soil known as permafrost — has accepted nearly 1.4 million samples of more than 6,000 species of critical crops. But, the island is warming six to seven times faster than the rest of the planet, making even winters freakishly hot, at least by Arctic standards. Indeed, in 2017, an access tunnel to the vault flooded as permafrost melted, though the seeds weren’t impacted.

This February, a team of scientists was working on Svalbard when irony took hold. Drilling into the soil, they gathered samples of bacteria that proliferate when the ground thaws. These microbes munch on organic matter and burp methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas and significant driver of global warming. Those emissions are potentially fueling a feedback loop in the Arctic: As more soil thaws, more methane is released, leading to more thawing and more methane, and on and on. 

Read Next Ice roads are a lifeline for First Nations. As Canada warms, they’re disappearing. Hilary Beaumont

In some parts of Svalbard, though, the scientists didn’t need to drill. Air temperatures climbed above freezing for 14 of the 28 days of February, reaching 40 degrees Fahrenheit, when the average temperature at this time of year is 5 degrees. Snow vanished in places, leaving huge pools of water. “I brought my equipment to drill into frozen soil and then ended up sampling a lot of soil just with a spoon, like it was soft ice cream,” said Donato Giovannelli, a geomicrobiologist at the University of Naples Federico II and co-lead author of a paper describing the experience, published last week in the journal Nature Communications. “That was really pretty shocking.”

Scientists can now dig with silverware in the Svalbard winter because the Arctic has descended into a crisis of reflectivity. Until recently, the far north had a healthy amount of sea ice, which bounced much of the sun’s energy back into space, keeping the region cool. But as the planet has warmed, that ice has been disappearing, exposing darker water, which absorbs sunlight and raises temperatures. This is yet another Arctic feedback loop, in which more warming melts more sea ice, leading to more local warming, and on and on. 

Making matters worse, as temperatures rise in the far north, more moisture enters the atmosphere. For one, warmer seawater evaporates more readily, adding water vapor to the air. And two, a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture. This leads to the formation of more low-level clouds, which trap heat like blankets — especially in the dark Arctic winter — amplifying the warming. That, combined with the loss of sea ice, is why the Arctic is warming up to four times as fast as the rest of the planet, with Svalbard warming even faster than that. 

James Bradley

James Bradley

Researchers on Svalbard say rising Arctic temperatures have led to reduced sea ice cover and rapidly thawing permafrost. These conditions are part of a feedback loop that makes the region especially vulnerable to climate change. Courtesy of James Bradley

James Bradley

During the winter, Svalbard’s soils have historically frozen solid, and scientists assumed this made microbial activity grind to a halt. Reindeer could push through the snow to graze on vegetation. But February’s heat and rain melted the snow, forming vast pools of water that froze once temperatures dropped again. That created a layer of ice that reindeer couldn’t break through. “What we encountered was just so powerful, to be in the middle of this event,” said James Bradley, a geomicrobiologist at the Mediterranean Institute of Oceanography and Queen Mary University of London, co-lead author of the paper. “It really almost all melted over large, large, large areas of the ground. That ground remained frozen, so the water didn’t have too many places to drain away to, so what we also saw was huge pooling of liquid water over the tundra.”

This new climate regime could be profoundly altering the soil microbiome. Scientists assumed that methane-producing bacteria, known as methanogens, stopped proliferating when Svalbard’s soils froze in the winter, just like food in your freezer keeps for months because it’s in a hostile environment for microbes. But with warm spells like this, thawing could awaken methanogens, which could still produce that greenhouse gas even if it then rains and a layer of ice forms at the surface. In addition, that solid cap on the soil will stop the exchange of atmospheric gases into the ground, creating anaerobic, or oxygen-poor, conditions that methanogens love. “In some areas, deeper layers might never freeze completely, which means the methanogens and microbes at depth remain active,” Giovannelli said. “There’s no real winter period.”

If snow melts and the ground thaws, microbes eat organic material and release methane, a potent greenhouse gas that accelerates warming. Courtesy of James Bradley

Vegetation, too, is changing up there, a phenomenon known as Arctic greening. As temperatures rise, trees and shrubs are creeping north to conquer new territory. The good news is that those plants capture carbon as they grow, mitigating global warming to a certain extent. But the bad news is that dark-colored vegetation absorbs more of the sun’s energy and raises temperatures, just like the exposed ocean does. And shrubs trap a layer of snow against the landscape, preventing the chill of winter from penetrating the soil and keeping it frozen.

The speed of transformation in the Arctic is shocking, even for stoic scientists. And as nations keep spewing greenhouse gases, the feedback loops of the far north are threatening to load the atmosphere with still more methane. “We call this the new Arctic — this is not something that is a one-off,” Giovannelli said. “And on the other side, we’ve probably been a bit too cautious with our warnings regarding the climate. It’s not something for the next generation. It’s something for our generation.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Troubling scenes from an Arctic in full-tilt crisis on Jul 29, 2025.

In her latest rap song, Madhura Ghane, known by her stage name Mahi G, walks on a barren, drought-stricken hill where a large, leafless tree has fallen to the ground. In the following frames, with the background music slowly rising, the video shows close-ups of Indian laborers — men, women, and children — working at a brick factory in Maharashtra. As the background tempo reaches a crescendo, Mahi G fires the first few bars about brick kiln workers, sewage cleaners, and construction workers toiling under the scorching sun. “The one whose sweat builds your house himself wanders homeless,” she raps in Hindi. “But who cares about the one who died working for you in the sun?”

Mahi G’s song “Heatwave,” which was produced in collaboration with Greenpeace India, dropped in June, just as the country was reeling under soaring temperatures. Last year, more than 100 people died across India because of an extreme heat wave during the summer. Prolonged heat exposure can lead to heat strokes, a risk disproportionately borne by outdoor workers. 

In India, those workers typically occupy the lowest rungs of the social hierarchy. The country’s caste system divides people into four main groups based on birth. Those who are placed outside the system — referred to as Dalits — are often relegated to the most hazardous jobs. Members of tribes or Indigenous communities — referred to as Adivasis — also fall outside this structure and face systemic discrimination. Successive governments in India have evicted Adivasis from their ancestral lands to clear the way for exploiting mineral resources.

Mahi G’s music primarily speaks to the experiences of Dalits and Adivasis. She belongs to the Mahadev Koli tribe, a community found in the western state of Maharashtra, and lives in Mumbai. She has released 12 songs so far since she first began rapping in 2019.  Nearly half of them are about climate justice.

Growing up, the 28-year-old rapper witnessed her community struggle to access clean drinking water. “It always made me sad to see women walk long distances to fetch water,” she said. As an Adivasi woman, her drive to research and write about the environment comes from a deep, personal space, she said, and she chose to rap about sociopolitical issues because “you can talk about a big issue in a short, powerful, and aggressive way.”

India’s mainstream hip-hop scene has been mostly dominated by upper-caste male artists, primarily from Maharashtra and Punjab, a northwestern state. But in recent years, a handful of Dalit and Adivasi rappers have broken into the mainstream, using their music to challenge caste hierarchies, critique government policies, and spotlight social injustices.

Among them is Arivu, who shot to fame with his track “Anti-national,” a bold critique of the Indian government led by Narendra Modi, a right-wing Hindu nationalist, whose party and supporters routinely label dissenting voices as anti-national. In another song, Arivu lays bare feudalism and its contemporary manifestations while paying homage to his grandmother, a landless laborer in a tea plantation. The video has garnered more than half a billion views on YouTube.

Mahi G’s videos haven’t had that level of reach, but she draws support from activists and nongovernmental groups working on environmental and social justice causes. Her videos typically garner tens of thousands of views, and one song about Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, a social reformer and architect of the Indian constitution, has more than 300,000 views. But the music hasn’t made much money so far. She hasn’t monetized her YouTube channel and is instead funding her music through her salary as an engineer at a private company. 

“Heatwave” is not the first time Mahi G has used her music to talk about climate justice. In her first rap song, “Jungle Cha Raja” — King of the Jungle — Mahi G explored the relationship between tribal communities and the natural environment, highlighting how they have long worked to protect it. In another song, “Vikasacha Khul,” she raps about the cost of development — how the building of roads, skyscrapers, and shopping malls has come at the expense of forests, lakes, and clean air.

Rappers like Mahi G and Arivu are often making music that challenges the political establishment at great risk to themselves. In 2023, Umesh Khade and Raj Mungase, two rappers from Maharashtra, were jailed after the right-wing political party ruling the state alleged they had made defamatory statements about their politicians. Despite these concerns and looming threats, Mahi G said the response to her songs keeps her going. Her music has compelled people to think about the environment and has helped them realize that they don’t want industrialization that destroys forests, she said. Even though her community members, who are often new to rap, do not understand her music, she said they have appreciated her work to spotlight climate change, which has directly affected their lives. Shifting rainfall patterns and depleting water resources have taken a toll on the Mahadev Koli tribe’s ability to sustain themselves.

Asim Siddiqui, who teaches at Azim Premji University in southern India’s Bengaluru city and works on the educational and cultural politics of youth, said that rappers from lower-caste and Indigenous communities who have been historically marginalized grow up in contexts where they are intimately connected to their social and natural environment. Ecological destruction or social injustice has a personal impact on their emotions and identity. “It becomes obvious for them to bring out these themes in their musical expression,” he said.

Siddiqui said that singing was historically stigmatized in India as a degrading occupation and, therefore, confined to lower-caste communities. But once India gained independence from British rule and embarked on its nation-building project, “some of the music traditions got classicized and later commodified, which excluded singers and performers from Dalit and Adivasi communities,” Siddiqui said. Hip-hop provided access to marginalized communities across the world, he added, as it enabled young rappers like Mahi G to tell their stories through music.

For Mahi G, music is a platform for activism. “My rap focuses on protecting natural resources,” she said. “If you can’t plant a tree, at least don’t cut one down.” These basic principles form the core of her message.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This Indian rapper is spitting bars about climate justice, caste, and Indigenous rights on Jul 29, 2025.

As global inaction over the climate crisis has mounted and Pacific islands nations have watched in frustration as their calls for decisive action have gone unheeded, a growing number of them, led by Vanuatu, have turned to the courts. If policymakers won’t act, they hoped, perhaps the courts would. 

And so island nations in the South Pacific region of Melanesia, where Indigenous communities have had to flee their traditional lands due to landslides and rising seas, filed a case that was ultimately joined by more than 130 countries. Together, they urged the International Court of Justice to decide whether nation-states have a legal obligation to address climate change, and whether those harmed by a warming world have a right to reparations. 

Justices considered testimony in Indigenous Pacific languages, heard arguments from Indigenous attorneys, and learned how Indigenous traditions are being harmed by the typhoons, rising seas, and other extreme weather events worsened by the burning of fossil fuels.

Last week, the court issued a landmark ruling that climate harm violates international law. The seismic decision, although advisory, opens the door for countries like Vanuatu to seek reparations from some of the world’s biggest polluters, and it is widely expected to shape current — and future — climate lawsuits as early as this week.

“What the court has done has come in and made it crystal clear that affected frontline nations and communities that have been devastated by climate harm — harm that can be traced to the conduct of specific countries and corporations — those communities, those nations, they absolutely have the right to redress and reparations,” said Joie Chowdhury, a senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law. 

The court’s decision, handed down Wednesday, said that all nations have a legal obligation to limit greenhouse gas emissions and failing to do so, through the support of fossil fuel production, could violate international law. The justices didn’t disclose how much major polluters might owe, and said the level of reparations would be determined on a case-by-case basis. But Chowdhury said she expects the ruling to immediately influence ongoing climate litigation worldwide, and prompt new lawsuits. “There are litigators all over the world that are looking to this case and will absolutely bring it into the courtroom,” she said.

Kelly Matheson, deputy director of global strategy for Our Children’s Trust, a nonprofit law firm representing youth in climate litigation, said the organization is already incorporating the language of the advisory opinion into an amicus brief that it plans to file in a case in Latin America this fall. She also expects the ruling to feature heavily in La Rose v. His Majesty the King, a Canadian climate case youth plaintiffs brought against the Canadian government scheduled for trial next year, as well as a climate case pending before the African Court of Human and Peoples’ Rights. 

Government attorneys also are studying the decision to determine whether their countries can sue. Malik Amin Aslam Khan, former minister of the environment in Pakistan, said the ruling “opens up a legally grounded pathway for claiming climate damages and demanding reparations for countries like Pakistan, which has continuously been one of the world’s worst climate sufferers and has credibly recorded climate damage costs crossing $40 billion in the past decade alone.”

Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s minister of climate change, said Vanuatu plans to immediately push for a resolution at the United Nations General Assembly to implement the advisory opinion. The government also plans to use the ruling to advocate for better climate financing for the Pacific and better regional and domestic policies to address the climate crisis.

“For the first time in history, the ICJ has spoken directly about the biggest threat facing humanity, which is climate change,” Regenvanu said during a press conference at The Hague last week. ”It’s very important now, as the world goes forward, that we make sure our actions align with what was decided or what came out today from the court.”

The ruling builds upon a growing consensus in international law that states have a legal obligation to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Last year, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea ruled that the 169 countries that have signed the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea — a list that includes China and India, but not the U.S. — must reduce emissions. It was another victory led by Pacific island nations as well as island nations in the Caribbean and West Indies.

“For the first time in history, the ICJ has spoken directly about the biggest threat facing humanity,” Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s climate change minister, said of the ruling. He is seen here in court before the decision was handed down. John Thys / AFP via Getty Images

Earlier this month, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, a regional court for Latin and South America, ruled that a healthy climate is a human right and governments should limit emissions. The court also said they should prevent harm to marginalized communities such as Indigenous peoples and emphasized their role in combating climate change.

“Indigenous peoples play an essential role in the preservation and sustainable management of these ecosystems because their ancestral knowledge and their close relationship with nature proved essential for the conservation of biodiversity and the mitigation of climate change,” the court wrote. “Therefore, states should listen to them and facilitate their continuing participation in decision-making.”  

Matheson said that when Sheila Watt-Cloutier, an Indigenous Inuk woman who then chaired the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, brought a climate case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights wo decades ago, it dismissed her claims within two pages. Several years later, Palau brought a similar case before the ICJ to no avail. 

“For the law to be moving at this speed —  to go from dismissals and no consideration of the impact that climate change has on human rights 20 years ago, when the first case was filed, to now you have opinions from all but one of the highest courts in the world — is amazing,” she said, noting that an African court is expected to weigh in soon. 

While the ICJ ruling did not expound on the rights of Indigenous peoples and focused on the responsibilities of nation-states, it did clarify a question that has long troubled leaders of countries like Tuvalu and Kiribati that are losing land to rising seas: What happens to their borders if their islands disappear? On that note, the ICJ said any recognized borders should remain unchanged, which is important to ensure they continue to have a political voice on the international stage and control over their waters. “That presumption of statehood and sovereignty is a critical bit,” said Johanna Gusman, a senior attorney for the Center for International Environmental Law. 

The case was initiated six years ago by a group of law students in Vanuatu and led by the government of Vanuatu and the Melanesian Spearhead Group, which represents several nations in that region of the Pacific and the Indigenous people of New Caledonia.

“By affirming the science, the ICJ has mandated countries to urgently phase out fossil fuels because they are no longer tenable for small island state communities in the Pacific, and for young people and for future generations,” Vishal Prasad, director of Pacific Islands, Students Fighting Climate Change, said during a press conference at The Hague. “This opinion is a lifeline and an opportunity to protect all that we hold dear, and all that we love.”

The United Nations established the International Court of Justice in the wake of World War II to help the global community address conflicts and concerns peacefully and judicially. It has heard cases on issues ranging from nuclear testing to fishing rights to the status of entire territories, such as Western Sahara. While not binding, its decisions are significant because they interpret international law and clarify states’ legal responsibilities. In this case, the court reviewed several treaties, including the 2015 Paris Agreement climate accord, and concluded that under those treaties and under customary international law, all nations have a legal obligation to limit emissions and may owe compensation to countries that are harmed. 

Read Next Inside the Marshall Islands’ life-or-death plan to survive climate change Jake Bittle

There are limits to who can bring cases before the ICJ, which only hears cases brought by nation-states and not, for example, Indigenous political entities such as First Nations in Canada. Gusman said that Indigenous peoples may instead use the language of the cases in domestic disputes or through other U.N. venues. For example, “Indigenous nations and First Nations within Canada now have stronger legal backbones to take cases against Canada,” she said.

The court’s ruling will also be dulled somewhat in the United States, which has long rejected the ICJ’s authority and under President Donald J. Trump has been retreating even further from climate action. The U.S. and China are two major polluters whose rejection of the ICJ’s jurisdiction could prevent a country like Vanuatu from suing them directly over their emissions. 

Korey Silverman-Roati, a senior fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, said the ruling is a seminal moment for climate litigation but that the effects in the U.S. will be muted because U.S. courts don’t traditionally recognize the ICJ’s authority. “I don’t think we can expect that the direct language of the ruling will impact cases in the U.S.,” he said. He thinks the advisory opinion will likely instead influence other countries whose judicial systems give more weight to the ICJ, and influence the U.S. through the ruling’s use in international negotiations. 

Already, the ruling is expected to figure heavily at this year’s Conference of the Parties, or COP, in November in Brazil. Last year, negotiations fell apart in the waning minute to the disappointment of Pacific island nations and many climate advocates who criticized the amount of money pledged by U.N. member states as woefully insufficient. 

“The advisory opinion will be an essential tool that we in the Global South will use at the next meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, the U.N.’s climate change and biodiversity conferences, and everywhere to advocate for climate justice,” said Ilan Kiloe, acting director general of the Melanesian Spearhead Group. He said Pacific peoples have already suffered forced relocations due to climate change. “We have already lost much of what defines us as Pacific Islanders.”

Tik Root contributed reporting to this story. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How the world’s highest court bolstered the fight for climate reparations on Jul 28, 2025.

Native Americans are increasingly responsible for emergency management systems when a natural disaster hits a tribal community.

Tribes can issue emergency declarations requests to open up help from regional and federal partners, typically 24 hours after the event. When help is authorized to arrive, emergency management systems tend to move slowly and may be staffed with volunteers juggling multiple roles in a new command to get aid directly to people. To help you prepare and stay safe, Grist has put together a toolkit to outline what Native people and their tribal governments should do to receive aid when natural disasters hit.

Jump to:

↓ How to find accurate information
↓ Preparing for a disaster
↓ How disaster response works for tribes
↓ Finding shelter and staying safe

How to find accurate information

Many people find out about disasters in their area via social media. But it’s important to make sure the information you’re receiving is correct. Below is a list of reliable sources to check for emergency alerts, updates, and more.

Your local emergency manager: This year, New Mexico and Arizona joined three other states (California, Colorado, and Washington) to create laws that establish “Feather Alerts” — public safety operations that many consider Native versions of AMBER alerts. This requires multiple jurisdictions to work together with preparedness in mind for when large-scale emergencies need to alert every cell phone in a region. Call a local nonemergency line and ask if your tribe has an emergency management department that operates police, fire, or hospital services. A simple call or visit to any tribal administration office can also help confirm if this is the case. Many tribal nations apply for federal or state grants in collaboration with other local governments.

From there, ask if you can sign up for any text alerts, emails, or an automated phone call service. For example, Navajo Nation has a text service: Text “NavajoNation” to 888-777. (These alerts can also be useful to learn about road closures, ceremonial events, and weather outside of a disaster.) 

Some alerts go to specific ZIP codes, or to people who receive tribal benefits like housing or senior services. Schools opt-in parents for campus alerts at both tribally run schools and campuses run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (which can be another resource to get alerts).  Emergency managers are responsible for communicating with the public about disasters, managing rescue and response efforts, and coordinating among different agencies. They usually have an SMS-based emergency alert system, so sign up for those texts now. Many emergency management agencies are active on Facebook, so check there for updates, like livestreamed press conferences that give operational status updates and share resources for shelter and other aid.

If you’re having trouble finding your local department, you can search for your state or territory. We also suggest typing your city or county name followed by “emergency management” into Google. In larger cities, it’s often a separate agency; in smaller communities, fire chiefs or sheriff’s offices may manage emergency response and alerts.

National Weather Service: This agency, also called NWS, is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, and offers information and updates on everything from wildfires to hurricanes to air quality. You can enter your ZIP code on weather.gov and customize your homepage to get the most updated weather information and receive alerts for a variety of weather conditions. The NWS also has regional and local branches where you can sign up for SMS alerts. Local alerts in multiple languages are available in some areas.

If you’re in a rural area or somewhere that isn’t highlighted on the agency’s maps, keep an eye out for local alerts and evacuation orders. NWS may not have as much information ahead of time in these areas because there often aren’t as many weather-monitoring stations.

Read more: How to get reliable information before and during a disaster

Local news: The local television news and social media accounts from verified news sources will have live updates during and after a disaster. Meteorologists on your local news station use NWS weather data. Follow your local newspaper and television station on Facebook or other social media, or check their websites regularly. If you don’t have cable, these stations often livestream online for free during severe weather. 

Weather stations and apps: The Weather Channel, Accuweather, Apple Weather, and Google, which all rely on NWS weather data, will have information on major storms and other extreme weather events. That may not be the case for smaller-scale weather events, and you shouldn’t rely on these apps to tell you if you need to evacuate or move to higher ground. Instead, check your local news broadcast on television or radio.

Read more: What disasters are and how they’re officially declared

Tribes with police or fire agencies must have emergency management plans in place and are another resource for information on a tribe’s response plan. Disasters often bring first responders from elsewhere; checking in with the ones who serve the community are going to be the most useful on-the-ground resource for families with limited access to transportation or technology like the internet or cell phones.

Preparing for a disaster

As you prepare for a disaster, it’s important to have an emergency kit ready in case you lose power or need to leave your home. These can often be expensive to create, so contact your local disaster aid organizations, houses of worship, tribal leaders, or charities to see if there are free or affordable kits available — or buy one or two items every time you’re at the grocery store. 

Here are some of the most important things to have in your kit. You can read more details about how to prepare safely here. 

• Water (1 gallon per person per day for several days)
• Food (at least a several-day supply of nonperishable food) and a can opener
• Medicines and documentation of your medical needs
• Identification and proof of residency documents (see a more detailed list here)
• A flashlight 
• A battery-powered or hand-crank radio
• Backup batteries
• Blanket and sleeping bag
• Change of clothes and closed-toed shoes
• First-aid kit (the Red Cross has a list of what to include)
• N95 masks, hand sanitizer, and trash bags 
• If you have babies or children: diapers, wipes, and food or formula
• If you have pets: food, collar, leash, and any medicines needed

Read more: How to stay safe if you’re feeling exhausted or ill

How disaster response works for tribes

When a major disaster hits, your tribal government will communicate with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to apply for immediate aid as well as support for services that seek to mitigate future disasters. Here’s how that works:

There is a specific process cities, states, and tribal governments must navigate in order for residents to receive FEMA aid. FEMA has 10 regions that support tribes during disaster response. If your tribal nation’s lands cross multiple FEMA regions, identify which FEMA region the headquarters is located to determine whom to contact. Here is a map with a list of contacts.

FEMA updated its tribal policy in 2020, with the following guidance for its employees and contractors: Maintain tribal government relationships, consider unique community circumstances, and build tribal capacity through educational and technical assistance programs. It was updated again in December 2024 after FEMA held nine listening and consultation sessions with 118 tribal nations in all 10 regions the agency oversees. 

In 2025, FEMA changed that policy to empower “tribal nations’ sovereignty and access to federal assistance, thereby enhancing their response and recovery efforts and improving community and tribal community members’ outcomes.”

Here are other recent changes to the FEMA Tribal Policy:

• The policy gives power to tribes to define “tribal community member” when offering individual assistance to ensure “their full community is served.” This could reduce barriers for help to people not enrolled in the tribe to receive federal emergency funds for food, shelter, and reimbursements.
• Rebuilding tribal homes after a disaster also changed: When public assistance is approved, the federal government will automatically recommend that it takes on 98 percent of the cost when the total reaches $200,000. This means tribes could pay less for approved recovery and, as FEMA summarized from its tribal listening sessions, “provide more certainty for non-federal cost shares to tribal nations.”

Read more: How to navigate the FEMA aid process

State-recognized tribes

Tribes that are not federally recognized may encounter more red tape when trying to access government aid because they don’t have a direct relationship with FEMA. For example, the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw struggled to get aid after Hurricane Ida in 2021.

According to a June 2020 FEMA policy, state-recognized tribes should be treated as local governments, rather than tribal governments with a nation-to-nation relationship with the federal government. This way, they can access both individual assistance if there is a major disaster declaration in their state, as well as public assistance for infrastructure repair.

Tribal and state collaboration

Partnerships between local tribes and states or cities they border are essential for how Native nations and people move disaster aid and recovery. For example, a deadly Oklahoma wildfire in March gave some insight into how FEMA’s local partnerships work in a state with prominent tribal jurisdictional maps and people who live both in and outside the communities.

Last year, Oklahoma created rules for its State Assistance Dedicated for Disaster-Impacted Local Economies Revolving Fund, which takes federal disaster money, approves requests for aid, and pays Oklahomans directly with loans for long-term recovery projects.

There is a growing number of coalitions focused on relationships among tribes to promote a more collaborative approach. For example, Oklahoma has had the Inter-Tribal Emergency Management Coalition since 2004 and meets regularly to discuss emergency preparedness.

Read more: How to find housing and rebuild your home after a disaster

Finding shelter and staying safe

Emergency shelters can be set up in established tribal spaces, like school gymnasiums, powwow grounds, and hospitals. Tribal senior services and schools have the most up-to-date records of people and organizations in the community and are tapped by emergency management teams for welfare checks and transportation needs. Hospital services can also be key to prescriptions and other medical needs.

In the same way that cousins and relatives are expected to offer a home to rest, tribal citizens now have the expectation for their tribal government to give full immediate aid and help in recovery.

FEMA recovery centers

FEMA disaster recovery centers provide information about the agency’s programs as well as other state and local resources, and are opened in impacted areas in the days and weeks following a federally declared disaster. FEMA representatives can help navigate the aid application process or direct you to nonprofits, shelters, or state and local resources. Go to this website to locate one in your area, or text DRC and a ZIP code to 43362.

Community organizations and nonprofits

Here are some organizations focused on emergency management for Indigenous communities:

• Partnership with Native Americans has a disaster relief service and fund that helps displaced people, sets up supplies for shelters, and more. They coordinate with local groups as well as the Red Cross. 
• Northern Plains Reservation Aid, Southwest Reservation Aid, Native American Aid, Navajo Relief Fund, Sioux Nation Relief Fund, and Southwest Indian Relief Council are groups that offer direct aid to the regions they can serve. They can also be a direct resource for state-recognized tribes.

Read more: How to access food before, during, and after a disaster

More resources

Here are a few organizations that have newsletters, workshops, and other resources for tribal communities across the country.

• The Tribal Emergency Management Association, or iTEMA, is a “national association created for Indian Country, by Indian Country” that promotes a collaborative approach to disasters that impact tribal communities. They offer workshops and resources for tribal leaders, emergency managers, and other interested people. 
• Hazard Mitigation Planning through FEMA is essential. How to keep up with federal grant deadlines and policy directives can be navigated by the Pacific Northwest Tribal Climate Change Project: The online resource hosted by the University of Oregon is an example of tribal regional planning, with foundational support from the Nespelem Tribe in northern Washington. 
• The Regional Tribal Emergency Management Summit in May brought direct sources to South Dakota on what to expect in the next year. Access to presentations, other resources, and a list of other events is available on their site.
• The Red Guide to Recovery is another example of tribes networking with outside community groups in California. The National Tribal Emergency Management Council is listed as a partner.

 

Download a PDF of this article | Return to Disaster 101

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How tribes navigate emergency response aid to citizens and what you can do to prepare on Jul 28, 2025.

One sunny morning in May, four high school students stood on a flower-dappled prairie in southern Dallas holding shovels. Before them swayed a Texas blazing star, a tall and spindly stalk that erupts in a bottlebrush of purple florets. Max Yan, a senior, made two putts on either side of the imperiled member of the aster family and was beginning to wedge it out when a siren wailed in the distance. He froze, his foot on the blade. There were no fences, no signs warning them off. But the land is, like 97 percent of the state, private property, and they were, strictly speaking, breaking the law.

“Hopefully that’s not for us,” he said.

The siren faded, and the teens — who attend St. Mark’s School of Texas, an elite, all-boys prep academy on the other side of town — resumed work. They are among the most dedicated members of its prairie club, rising early on weekends to rescue rare plants from bulldozers and move them to restoration sites. Their guerrilla campaign rattles some professional conservationists, but in an era of mounting climate anxiety, it offers a tangible way to make a difference. Not to mention a dose of adrenaline. It is, one said, like “collecting my Pokémons.”

Laura Mallonee / Grist

Laura Mallonee / Grist

Max Yan (top, with shovel) and other members of the Blackland Prairie Restoration Crew at St. Mark’s School rescue plants at Coneflower Crest, a prairie in southern Dallas slated for demolition. Laura Mallonee / Grist

Laura Mallonee / Grist

Coneflower Crest, as the boys call this place, after the dusty pink flowers that bloom here, covers nearly 300 acres of undeveloped land believed by some to be the last large intact prairie in Dallas County. Heavy machinery is expected to crush most of it, making way for hundreds of homes and businesses promised to revitalize a neglected corner of Dallas. The developers tout their project’s walkability and eco-friendliness, with ample open space, water-smart landscaping, and native vegetation. But even the greenest projects come at a cost: The city is trading an ecosystem that naturally mitigates the effects of climate change for still more impervious growth that only exacerbates them. 

The trend is accelerating across Texas, where blackland prairie once stretched roughly 12 million acres from the Red River to San Antonio — an area nearly twice the size of Vermont. Eons ago, an ancient inland sea sculpted the state’s limestone geology and enriched its soil, sustaining more than 300 species of indigenous grasses and herbaceous flowering plants like big bluestem, lotus milkvetch, and rattlesnake master that fed bison and pronghorn antelopes.

Laura Mallonee / Grist

But since European colonization, agriculture and urban development have swallowed 99.9 percent of the prairie and continue taking their fill. No more than 5,000 acres are left statewide, and last year, a solar farm claimed most of the largest remnant near the Oklahoma border. In Dallas County, which covers some 908 square miles, more than 300 acres have been scraped away since 2014 to make way for everything from data centers and parking lots to high-rises and warehouses — and even a golf course.

All that concrete increases flooding and emissions, depletes aquifers, and compounds the urban heat island effect — the same problems prairies naturally alleviate, said Norma Fowler, a plant ecologist at the University of Texas at Austin. Long grasses and herbs help the ground soak up rain. Their roots reach a depth of 16 feet, producing humus-rich soil that holds water and releases it slowly. Prairies also cool cities, temper the impact of wildfires, and sequester up to one ton of carbon per acre each year. It’s why biodiversity loss and climate change are inherently linked. “Everything we do for conservation is also mitigating the bad effects of climate change,” Fowler said. “If we want to save the planet, it’s not either-or. It’s both-and.”

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Environmentalists have rallied to save the region’s grassland since at least the 1980s, when one particularly impassioned fellow patrolled Pioneer Prairie — a 127-acre field off Interstate 30 — with a shotgun. By the 1980s, development of the site loomed, prompting naturalist Ken Steigman to start surreptitiously digging up plants. He even used a sod cutter to roll up ribbons of earth — bugs and all. “It’s like Noah’s ark,” he said. “You are trying to protect everything.” 

Plans to replace the prairie with condos stalled amid an FBI investigation of its developers, who were later convicted of loan fraud. Activists rejoiced. Still, development came in bits and pieces, including the construction of a medical complex and a church. In 2019, a native nursery owner named Randy Johnson saw a drilling rig pulling cores for geotechnical analysis, a harbinger of construction. He rode his Honda minibike through its Indian grass as a kid, but by his 20s, reckless joy had given way to wonderment. Johnson worked with the city manager to map its most ecologically sensitive areas, thinking the landowner might build around them, but the bulldozers spared nothing. “It’s one of the most depressing things,” he said with a drawl. “[It’s] something you love and have devoted your life to, and every day you get in your car and see it being destroyed.” 

Laura Mallonee / Grist

He had nearly given up hope when a lanky freshman named Akash Munshi wandered into the St. Mark’s greenhouse, which Johnson tended, that same year. The young man was “hyper,” Johnson said, and extremely bright. Inspired by relatives in south India who cultivate rice, Munshi wanted to learn how to grow food and started a horticulture club. That interest gave way to native plants, and within a couple years, Munshi was as fluent in their Latin names as their common ones. 

His senior year, the club began restoring prairie to an acre of bermuda grass along a nearby bike path, a feat that consumed his time outside studies and soccer practice. To source the seeds, he visited local prairies, often after spotting their grassy texture and blinding limestone in satellite imagery. He counted six large sites fated for development, impressing on him a need to salvage as many plants as possible. Within two years, all but one — Coneflower Crest — were stripped bare. 

“It was pretty crushing. I didn’t realize how quickly I would lose them,” he said. “There were some sites where there was no sign of development, and I’d come back [the] next week, and the whole thing was scraped.” 

The destruction coincides with unprecedented biodiversity loss. Forty percent of all known plants worldwide, and 45 percent of flowering ones, could be at risk of extinction, and they are disappearing at a rate many magnitudes higher than normal due to human activity and climate change. Those recently discovered — like glandular blazing star, first described in 2001 and found only in Texas — are even more likely to vanish without anyone understanding their role or what benefits they might offer. As populations of at-risk flora shrink, their gene pools become less diverse, making them vulnerable to collapse. 

From left: Plants for sale at Native Plants and Prairies Day at White Rock Lake in Dallas. Monarch caterpillars crawl through a plastic container on display at the Texas Conservation Alliance’s booth during a native prairie event at White Rock Lake. The organization annually cultivates thousands of seedlings at its Native Plant Propagation Center at the Dallas Zoo. Laura Mallonee / Grist

“Each one of those that’s lost is threatening an already under-pressure system,” said Canaan Sutton, a botanist at the National Ecological Observatory Network. The organization collects ecological data to support research on how ecosystems are changing in response to climate change and other factors. Animals of all kinds lose food and habitat when prairies fall, particularly invertebrates with unique relationships to plants they’ve evolved with. There are fewer caterpillars to feed the birds, for example, and fewer bees to pollinate blooms and crops like east Texas’ famed blueberries. 

Rescuing doomed individuals can help prevent uncommon species from undergoing “a silent extinction,” Sutton said. Though conservationists focus on collecting seeds, they aren’t always ripe when developers permit harvesting. Some, like hall’s prairie clover, remain so poorly understood that few know how to germinate them. Others, including compass plants, take years to bloom from seed, delaying their availability to pollinators. Keeping a specimen alive helps bridge these gaps. But ultimately, the restoration sites where they live are faint echoes of the vast, complex ecosystem they once knew.

“What we’re in now is this perpetually shifting baseline of, ‘This is what we have, and this is as good as it gets,’” Sutton said. “Ultimately, people doing these rescues are trying to move that baseline back in the direction of the past and a more interconnected, natural world — even if that’s just [with] a handful of plants.”

The summer after his senior year, Munshi was leading a high school tour through another prairie destined to become a highrise. Stopping for a water break, he noticed a tiny yellow flower against a girl’s black shoe. “Oh shoot!” he said. “That’s dalea hallii!”

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Hall’s prairie clover — a globally imperiled plant listed as threatened by the state — grows on chalky, south-facing slopes of limestone prairies. These patches, an offshoot of the blackland prairie, form where bedrock breaks the surface, creating microhabitats that shelter species found nowhere else. They survived for centuries because the rocky terrain was too difficult to plow. But now, as developers search for more land to build on, that same rock offers an ideal foundation for sprawl.

At the time of Munshi’s discovery, just 59 populations were known to exist on Earth. He counted at least 100 plants and shared his find on Instagram and during a presentation at a meeting of the Native Prairies Association of Texas. It stunned Sutton — then president of the group’s Blackland chapter — and he worked with the Botanical Research Institute of Texas, or BRIT, which banks obscure seeds, to arrange a rescue operation that October.

The developer gave the crew three hours to dig up what it could. Wearing his customary conical straw hat, Johnson showed more than 40 volunteers how to excavate the plant’s 4-foot-long tap root using knives, pickaxes, sledgehammers, and pneumatic drills. Afterward, he hauled about 300 daleas to his nursery in Forney. Johnson, who is known locally as a plant wizard and, with his long gray hair and narrowed eyes, looks the part, repotted them in soil packed with microbes from bat guano and other things. A month later, he texted Sutton a picture of a flourishing dalea ready for its new home. “He was like, ‘Check it out, dude!’” Sutton said.

Laura Mallonee / Grist

To increase their odds of survival, the clover was spread across several sites, including a park, a preserve, and a ranch. More than one-third of those planted on public land survived, a high success rate for such delicate flora. But 180 minutes wasn’t sufficient to save the remaining plants dotting Penstemon Point. So, when Kay Hankins, a conservation botanist at BRIT, offered to contact the developer at Coneflower Crest, Munshi asked her not to, fearing they wouldn’t be given enough time. He and others have spent hundreds of hours relocating thousands of flowers from that site and others to a bike path 30 minutes north — casting any worries about trespassing aside like the rocks they pried loose with their shovels 

Despite the questionable legality of their efforts, Munshi said no one has ever confronted them or even asked them to leave. Once, at another location, a passerby suspected him of burying a body and called the police. When the officers saw the plants, they left. “They don’t care,” Munshi said. “They’re literally about to scrape the entire site.” 

Johnson fears seeking permission could backfire. A raft of federal protections shields endangered species. Texas offers few for those it lists on its own, and landowners who don’t want the hassle or liability of having them on their property may target them. “This is a war between us and the developers, and nobody’s calling uncle or throwing up white flags,” he said. “You can get out of jail, you can post bail, but once the [plant] genetics are gone, they’re gone, and I’m not going to let that happen if I can help it.”

But some in Texas’ native plant community are uneasy with this approach, arguing that permission is essential for “ethical” digs that promote trust and collaboration with landowners and developers. “If all the experience developers have [with conservationists] is negative, we’ll always be initiating the dialogue from a disadvantaged position,” Hankins said.

Laura Mallonee / Grist

Developer involvement could ensure that activists don’t inadvertently disturb land that isn’t slated for construction, and more volunteers might help out if it doesn’t involve breaking the law. It also enhances the flora’s value for research and conservation, Hankins said, since reputable institutions, seed banks, and herbaria don’t accept specimens collected without paperwork. As Ashley Landry, who founded the Native Plant Rescue Project near Austin, put it, “We can’t give rare plants to conservation organizations if they’re stolen.”

Landry plays “a long PR game” to gain access. She monitors municipal websites and follows the news to spot new development, then sends emails and snail mail to start a conversation with landowners. She also drives by their property to try catching them in person. In February, her team of 30 volunteers relocated 900 square feet of MoKan, the 30-acre “crown jewel” of central Texas prairies. Tractors carved out 56 sections, each as thick as a mattress, and stitched them together like quilts at two nearby sites. If the transplants take, the method could be replicated elsewhere.

“I just always feel so thankful to have seen these places before they’re gone,” said Landry. “It helps frame your understanding of what the landscape is supposed to look like.”

Relatively few people can enjoy that experience today—and even fewer are likely to know it in the future. In Dallas, swaths of historic prairie survive in parks, preserves, and the unwanted stretches along utility lines and railroads. Most are tucked away on private land, off-limits to trespassers. These slivers of the past are all that remain there of the grasslands that once waved across the state. The prep school boys now fighting to save what’s left were raised in neighborhoods garnished with greenery from other continents. Some say they grew up without the strong sense of place that environmentalist Wendell Berry has called essential for living in a locale without destroying it. 

Like Landry, those who have truly seen Coneflower Crest — not just looked at it, but knelt in its grasses, attuned to its miniscule delights and dramas — have felt changed by the experience. Munshi, now a plant science major at Cornell University, vividly remembers the first time he glimpsed what became his favorite prairie. White rosinweed and Cobea penstemon speckled the grasses, and butterflies flitted amid more echinacea than he had ever seen, suggesting the ground had never been scarred by a plow. “This is, like, a 10!” he exclaimed, filming the scenery. “Imagine what else is in here!”

Laura Mallonee / Grist

Leadership of the club he founded, the Blackland Prairie Restoration Crew, passed to Yan, who graduated this spring. He has since handed it off to two boys who joined him in digging up the Texas blazing star and a handful of other beleaguered species. Just two days after their surreptitious dig, a dozen men and women in business suits smiled for the cameras as they scooped shovelfuls of what might be the county’s last expanse or tallgrass. Homes may rise on the pockets that held the greatest biodiversity. Yan and his friends knew this was coming and they understand the need for more housing, but it still saddened them. He dreams of a movement that would push developers to preserve prairies, though such a movement may come too late. “I just don’t know if the prairie will be able to recover at that point,” he said. “There are parts of Coneflower Crest that will never be recovered.”

Stacked against this tremendous loss, their efforts felt almost trivial. But long after the bulldozers at Coneflower Crest move on to the next job, hundreds of its priceless plants will persist, quivering in the breeze along the bike path. Before Yan and his classmates even transplanted the last of the flora they’d rescued, a few uprooted daleas bloomed in their buckets, rising from the soil toward the sun just as they have always done.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The guerrilla campaign to save a Texas prairie from ‘silent extinction’ on Jul 28, 2025.

Last summer, the United States took a crucial step towards protecting millions of workers across the country from the impacts of extreme heat on the job. In July 2024, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, published its first-ever draft rule to prevent heat illness in the U.S. workforce. Among other things, the proposed regulation would require employers to provide access to water, shade, and paid breaks during heat waves — which are becoming increasingly common due to human-caused climate change. A senior White House official at the time called the provisions “common sense.”

Before the Biden administration could finalize the rule, Donald Trump was reelected president, ushering in another era of deregulation. Earlier this month, the Trump administration announced plans to revise or repeal 63 workplace regulations that Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said “stifle growth and limit opportunity.” 

OSHA’s heat stress rule wasn’t among them. And though the new administration has the power to withdraw the draft regulation, it hasn’t. Instead, OSHA has continued to move it forward: The agency is currently in the middle of soliciting input from the general public about the proposed policy. Some labor experts say this process, typically bureaucratic and onerous even in the absence of political interference, is moving along faster than expected — perhaps a sign that civil servants at OSHA feel a true sense of urgency to protect vulnerable workers from heat stress as yearly temperatures set record after record. 

But labor advocacy groups focused on workers along the food supply chain — many of whom work outside, like farmworkers, or in poorly ventilated spaces, like warehouse and meat processing facilities — say workers have waited too long for basic live-saving protections. Earlier this month, Senator Alex Padilla and Congresswoman Judy Chu, both from California, reintroduced a bill to Congress that, if passed, would direct OSHA to enact a federal heat standard for workers swiftly.

It’s a largely symbolic move, as the rulemaking process is already underway, and the legislation is unlikely to advance in a Republican-controlled Congress. But the bill signals Democratic lawmakers are watching closely and urgently expect a final rule four years after OSHA first began drafting its proposed rule. The message is clear: However fast OSHA is moving, it hasn’t been enough to protect workers from the worst impacts of climate change. 

“Since OSHA started its heat-stress rulemaking in 2021, over 144 lives have been lost to heat-related hazards,” said Padilla in a statement emailed to Grist. “We know how to prevent heat-related illnesses to ensure that these family members are able to come home at the end of their shift.” 

The lawmaker added that the issue is “a matter of life or death.” 

Farmworkers in southern California take a water break in the middle of a heat wave.
ETIENNE LAURENT / AFP via Getty Images

Heat is the deadliest form of extreme weather, according to the World Health Organization. In the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 986 workers died from heat exposure on the job from 1992 to 2022, or about 34 per year. 

This is very likely an undercount. Prolonged heat exposure can exacerbate underlying health problems like cardiovascular issues, making it difficult for medical professionals to discern when illness and death is attributable to extreme heat. As heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions continue to push global temperatures higher, experts expect heat-related illnesses and deaths to follow.

The life-threatening impacts of exposure to extreme heat in the workplace have been on the federal government’s radar for more than 50 years. Labor unions and farmworkers have long pushed for federal and local heat standards. In 2006, California became the first state to enact its own heat protections for outdoor workers, after an investigation by the state’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health found 46 cases of heat-related illnesses the year prior. Legislative efforts to protect workers or nudge OSHA along often follow or name farmworkers who died from heat stress. Padilla and Chu’s bill from this year is named after Asunción Valdivia, a 53-year-old who died in California in 2004 after picking grapes for 10 hours straight in 105-degree Fahrenheit heat. 

OSHA’s proposed heat standard would require employers to establish plans to avoid and monitor for signs of heat illness and to help new hires acclimate to working in high heat. “That should be implemented yesterday,” said Nichelle Harriott, policy director of HEAL Food Alliance, a national coalition of food and farmworkers. “There really is no cause for this to be taking as long as it has.”

In late June and early July, OSHA held virtual hearings in which it heard testimony from people both for and against a federal heat standard. According to Anastasia Christman, a senior policy analyst from the National Employment Law Project who attended the hearings, employees from the agency seemed engaged and asked substantive questions. “It was very informative,” she said. OSHA didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment.

As written, OSHA’s proposed heat rule would apply to about 36 million workers in the U.S. Christman noted that sedentary workers — those who sit for most of the work day — are currently excluded from the federal standard. Ironically, at one point during the agency’s hearings, participants had to take an unscheduled break after the air conditioning stopped working in the Department of Labor building where OSHA staff were sitting. “They had to be evacuated because it was too hot to sit there and be on a Zoom call,” said Christman. She estimated that if sedentary workers were non-exempt, the number of U.S. workers covered by the rule would nearly double to 66 million.

From her point of view, OSHA is moving “very fast on this — for OSHA.” But Christman acknowledged that, even in a best-case scenario, regulations would not be on the books for another 12 to 14 months. At that point, OSHA would publish guidance for employers on how to comply with the regulation, as well as respond to any legal challenges to the final rule. That process, “in an optimistic world,” she said, could take between two and four years. 

A farmer loads plants on a truck at an ornamental plant nursery in Homestead, Florida, some 40 miles north of Miami.
CHANDAN KHANNA / AFP via Getty Images

For many farmworkers, as well as other workers along the food supply chain, that’s too long to wait. 

“For decades, millions of workers have been waiting for federal heat standards that never came,” said Oscar Londoño, co-executive director of WeCount, a member-led immigrant rights organization based in South Florida. 

The group has spearheaded multiple campaigns to draw public attention to how sweltering temperatures impact outdoor workers in the region, including plant nursery workers. Londoño said some agricultural workers have told WeCount it already feels like the hottest summer of their lifetime.

In response to the news of Padilla and Chu’s bill, Londoño said, “We appreciate any step by a lawmaker trying to protect workers, especially as we’re seeing, once again, a record-breaking summer.” But he cast doubt on OSHA’s ability to enforce regulations around heat stress, particularly in the agricultural sector.

“We know that there are employers across the country who are routinely violating the laws that already exist,” said Londoño. “And so adding on new laws and regulations that we do need doesn’t automatically mean that workers will be protected.”

WeCount’s organizing is hampered by Florida’s Republican governor and state legislature, which passed a law last year prohibiting local governments from enacting their own heat standards. In the absence of politicians who will stand for workers, WeCount members are trying to publicize the risks that agricultural workers take on. Their latest campaign, Planting Justice, centers on local plant nursery workers, who grow indoor houseplants. 

The goal is to try and educate consumers about the labor that goes into providing their monsteras, pothos, snake plants, and other indoor houseplants. “If you buy indoor houseplants, it’s very possible that that plant came from workers in Florida,” said Londoño, “workers who are being denied water, shade, and rest breaks by working in record-breaking heat, including 90- or 100-degree heat temperatures.”

Down the line, the nursery workers hope to solidify a set of demands and bring those concerns to companies like Home Depot and Lowe’s that sit at the top of the indoor plant supply chain. Similar tactics have worked for agricultural workers in other sectors; the Fair Food Program, first established by tomato pickers in 2011 in Florida, has won stringent heat protections for farmworkers in part by building strong support for laborers’ demands among consumers.

“Right now we are looking at every possible solution or strategy that can help workers reach these protections,” said Londoño. “What workers actually need is a guarantee that every single day they’ll be able to go to work and return home alive.” This kind of worker-led organizing will continue, he said, whether or not OSHA delivers its own heat standard.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A long-awaited rule to protect workers from heat stress moves forward, even under Trump on Jul 28, 2025.

Americans are paying more for electricity, and those prices are set to rise even further.

In almost all parts of the country, the amount people pay for electricity on their power bills — the retail price — has risen faster than the rate of inflation since 2022, and that will likely continue through 2026, according to the Energy Information Administration, or EIA.

Just about everything costs more these days, but electricity prices are especially concerning because they’re an input for so much of the economy — powering factories, data centers, and a growing fleet of electric vehicles. It’s not just the big industries; we all feel the pinch firsthand when we pay our utility bills. According to PowerLines, a nonprofit working to reduce electricity prices, about 80 million Americans have to sacrifice other basic expenses like food or medicine to afford to keep the lights on. And it’s about to get even worse: Utilities in markets across the country have asked regulators for almost $29 billion in electricity rate increases for consumers for the first half of the year.

Why are prices rising so much all of a sudden? Right now, there are the usual factors driving the rise in electricity rates: high demand, not enough supply, and inflation. But there are problems that have been building up for decades as well, and now the bills are due: Aging and inadequate infrastructure needs replacement, while outdated business models and regulations are slowing the deployment of urgently needed upgrades.

On the campaign trail, President Donald Trump promised to bring energy prices down by increasing fossil fuel extraction. “My goal will be to cut your energy costs in half within 12 months after taking office,” Trump said last August in a speech in Michigan.

But electricity prices are still going up, and Trump’s signature legislative accomplishment, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, is likely to raise prices further. Without better management and investment, the result will be more expensive and less reliable power for most Americans.

The variables baked into your power bill, explained

There are several key factors that shape how much you pay for electricity.

There’s the cost of building, operating, and maintaining power plants. Higher interest rates, inflation, tariffs, and longer interconnection queues — power generators waiting for approval to connect to the grid — are making the process of building a new electricity generator slower and more expensive. PJM, the largest power market in the U.S., said this week that soaring demand for electricity and delays in building new generators will raise power bills 1 percent to 5 percent for customers in its service area across 13 states and the District of Columbia.

Then there’s the fuel itself, whether that’s coal, oil, natural gas, or uranium. For renewables, the cost of wind, water, and sunlight are close to zero, but intermittent generators need conventional power plants or energy storage systems to back them up. Still, wind and solar power have been some of the cheapest sources of electricity in recent years, forming the dominant share of new power generation connecting to the grid.

That electricity then has to be routed from power plants over transmission lines that can span hundreds of miles and into distribution networks that send electrons into homes, offices, stores, and factories.

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Then you have to think about demand, over the course of hours, days, months, and years. Some utilities offer time-of-use billing that raises rates during peak demand periods like hot summer afternoons and lowers them in evenings. Cooling needs are a big reason why overall electricity use tends to be higher in summer months than in the winter. And for the first time in a decade, the U.S. is experiencing a sustained increase in electricity use driven in part by a rapid build-out of power-hungry data centers, more EVs, more electric appliances, and more air conditioning to stay cool in hotter summers.

More users for the same amount of electricity means higher prices. The Trump administration’s rollback of key incentives for renewables and slowdown of approvals for new projects is likely to slow the rate of new generation coming online.

And the process of bridging electricity supplies with demand is becoming a bottleneck, thus comprising a larger share of the overall bill. “If you actually look at the cost breakdowns of what’s significantly increasing, it’s really the grid,” said Charles Hua, founder and executive director of PowerLines. “It is the poles and wires that make up our electric infrastructure that’s increasing in cost particularly rapidly.”

According to the EIA, just under two-thirds of the average price of electricity is due to generation costs, with the remainder coming from transmission and distribution. However, energy utilities are now putting more than half of their expenditures into transmission and distribution through the end of the decade. “It used to be the case maybe a decade ago where generation was the largest share of utility investments, and therefore customer bills,” Hua said. “But it has now been inverted where really it’s the grid expense that is rising and doesn’t show any signs of relief.”

There are several reasons for this. One is that the existing power grid is old, and many components like conductors and switchgear are reaching the ends of their service lives. Replacing 1960s hardware at 2025 prices raises operating costs even for the same level of service. But the grid now needs to provide higher levels of service as populations grow and as technologies like intermittent renewables and energy storage proliferate.

Power outages driven by extreme weather are becoming more frequent and longer, but hardening the grid against disasters like floods and fires is expensive too. Putting a power line underground can add up to double or more the price of stringing conductors along utility poles, which is why power companies have been slow to make the change, even in disaster-prone regions.

While utilities are pouring money into distribution networks, they are having a harder time building new long-distance transmission lines as they run into permitting and regulatory delays. The U.S. used to build an average of 2,000 miles of high-voltage transmission per year between 2012 and 2016. The construction rate dropped to 700 miles per year between 2017 and 2021, and dipped to just 55 miles in 2023. There were 125 miles of new high-voltage transmission installed in the first half of 2024, but it was all for one project. The Department of Energy this week canceled a loan guarantee for the Grain Belt Express, a transmission project that would stretch 800 miles across four states.

There are also shortages of critical parts of the grid like transformers, while tariffs on materials like aluminum and steel are pushing up construction expenses.

One underrated driver of higher prices is the lack of coordination between utilities, grid operators, and states on how to spend their money. In utility jargon, this process is called Integrated Distribution System Planning, where everyone with a stake in the energy network puts together a comprehensive plan of what to buy, where to build it, and who should pay — but only a few states like Illinois, Maine, and New Hampshire have such a system set up.

“That’s sort of a no-brainer,” Hua said. “Anybody should understand the need to plan ahead, especially if you’re talking about something that has such high economic implications, but that’s not what we’re doing.”

So while prices are rising, there’s no easy way around the fact that the grid is overdue for a lot of necessary, expensive upgrades. For millions of Americans, that means it’s going to get more expensive to stay cool, charged up, and connected.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why your energy bill is suddenly so much more expensive on Jul 27, 2025.

President Donald Trump is temporarily exempting medical sterilization facilities that use the colorless gas ethylene oxide from tighter emissions standards, including plants in Georgia that have generated health concerns for residents living nearby.

Last year, then President Joe Biden’s administration finalized new emissions limits for plants that use ethylene oxide, also known as EtO.

The rules require facilities install new controls to limit releases of the gas, monitor continuously for leaks, and meet other requirements. The standards were set to phase in starting in 2026, with the largest EtO users given an extra year to comply. Under Biden, the Environmental Protection Agency said the stiffer regulations would reduce emissions from EtO facilities by 90 percent and protect residents living near them.

But in a Thursday proclamation, Trump said he would extend the deadline for a slew of facilities across the country to meet the requirements, claiming the technology is not “commercially viable” to meet the timelines. Now, sterilizers will have two more years to make upgrades.

Trump argued the current rules would “likely force existing sterilization facilities to close down, seriously disrupting the supply of medical equipment.”

“In short, the current compliance timeline would undermine our national security,” Trump’s proclamation says.

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The extension applies to several Georgia facilities, including: Becton Dickinson, or BD, facilities in Covington and Madison; the Sterigenics plant in Cobb County; Kendall Patient Recovery, or KPR, near Augusta; and Sterilization Services of Georgia’s facility 15 miles from downtown Atlanta.

EtO plays a critical role maintaining safety in medical and dental settings by killing dangerous bacteria that can’t be eliminated by other methods, like steam or radiation. About half the medical devices used in the United States — approximately 20 billion devices each year — are sterilized with EtO, according to the EPA. It is also used to kill potentially harmful microbes lurking in spices, dried vegetables, walnuts and other food products.

But the gas has been known for years to be dangerous to humans.

In 2016, the EPA reclassified ethylene oxide as a human carcinogen and the gas has been linked to breast, lymphoid, leukemia and other types of cancers. That same year, the EPA determined ethylene oxide is dangerous at much lower levels than previously thought.

Based on its new threshold, EPA air modeling flagged several census tracts in Georgia for potential elevated cancer risks from exposure to ethylene oxide in 2018. But neither the agency nor the state Environmental Protection Division alerted the public. A year later, media reports revealed the potential for increased cancer risk based on the modeling faced by residents in neighborhoods surrounding Sterigenics’ Cobb County plant.

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The situation spawned a slew of lawsuits and in 2023, Sterigenics agreed to pay $35 million to settle dozens of claims by people who alleged their exposure to EtO from the plant caused cancer and other injuries. Sterigenics did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump’s proclamation.

Hundreds of lawsuits are still pending in Georgia against BD, Sterigenics, and KPR. In May, the first of those to reach trial resulted in a $20 million verdict for a retired Covington-area truck driver, Gary Walker, who claimed decades of exposure to EtO from BD and its predecessor, C.R. Bard, was to blame for his non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Michael Geoffroy, an attorney who’s part of Walker’s legal team and involved in many other EtO cases, said the Trump administration’s move “is only going to make things worse.”

“Loosening rules or delaying implementation of safety standards that are there to keep communities safe and make it to where fewer people get sick with cancer is just a step in the wrong direction,” Geoffroy said.

In a statement, BD spokeswoman Fallon McLoughlin said the company is “committed to the safe and responsible operation of our medical sterilization facilities and has a long history of compliance with local, state and federal regulations related to EtO emissions.”

She added BD has already installed new emissions controls at many facilities and is committed to meeting the new standards. But she said doing so could require new equipment that may not be available in time to meet the deadline.

“The recently announced exemption will ensure there is a more realistic time frame to comply with the new requirements,” McLoughlin said.

A representative for Sterilization Services declined to comment. KPR did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Mindy Goldstein, director of the Turner Environmental Law Clinic at Emory University, said the federal Clean Air Act allows presidents to exempt certain facilities from compliance for up to two years. But to do so, they must prove that the technology to meet the requirement is not available and the extension serves a national security interest.

Trump used both rationales in his proclamation. But Goldstein said he included little evidence to support the claims, which could give opponents an opening to challenge the move.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, has already said it’s reevaluating the Biden-era EtO rules, but it’s unclear whether they’ll seek to change the standard. Trump’s EPA has already unwound much of his predecessors’ environmental legacy, announcing plans to reconsider drinking water standards for certain toxic “forever chemicals,” roll back limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and much more.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Georgia sterilization plants using toxic gas among those exempt from new rules on Jul 26, 2025.

The motley crew of scientists, conservationists, and agricultural producers set out to begin in earnest. Spring was well underway in Hood Canal, Washington, when the team assembled on the shores of Baywater Shellfish Farm, armed with buckets. Before them, floating mats of seaweed were strewn about, bright green clumps suffocating clams, geoducks, and other intertidal creatures while swallowing the gear laid out to harvest them. 

Excess seaweed is a seasonal nuisance along the bays and inlets that twine throughout Puget Sound. But the issue has magnified as excess nutrient runoff has fueled sprawling blooms. It has become a bona fide threat to the business of Washington shellfish farmers like Joth Davis.

In the past, Davis has attempted to harvest the seaweed by hand to reduce the surging number of macroalgae menacing his catch. Alas, there is the “age-old problem of scale,” he said. “It is difficult work, and time available during low tides to tackle the problem is limited, with everything else we need to accomplish when the tide is out.” 

A couple years before the team got to work last May, researchers at the University of Washington, or UW, approached Davis to see if he’d be interested in partnering with them to develop a new supply chain. The plan was simple: Harvest the seaweed from Davis’s farm, give it to small and mid-sized crop farmers in the area as a soil-building replacement for chemical fertilizer, and along the way study the effects — reduced emissions from a shortened supply chain, steady yields from shellfish and terrestrial farms, changes in soil chemistry, and possibly a way to sequester the carbon stored in the seaweed itself. They were also aiming to investigate the impacts of seaweed removal on shellfish survival and growth. 

A Department of Agriculture program established by the Biden administration, and funded by the Inflation Reduction Act, offered exactly the federal support they needed to make the vision happen. In February 2022, the USDA launched the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative, or PCSC, which former Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said at the time would “provide targeted funding to meet national and global demand and expand market opportunities for climate-smart commodities to increase the competitive advantage of American producers.”

Davis, who has a background in marine science, seized the chance. 

The aptly named “Blue Carbon, Green Fields” project was selected by the USDA in 2023 to receive roughly $5 million of the climate-smart commodities money in a five-year agreement. In addition to Davis’s team at Baywater and the scientists from UW, the partnership consisted of researchers from Washington State University and Washington Sea Grant, conservationists from the nonprofit Puget Sound Restoration Fund, and the local farm incubator Viva Farms. In their first year in the field, the team harvested a little over 15,000 pounds of wet seaweed, which was stockpiled and distributed to four crop farms throughout the region. By laying the groundwork for the agricultural supply chain, the team was on track for the unthinkable — a quadruple win of sorts, where everyone involved benefited, including the planet. 

Instead, not even halfway through a federal contract, their drying racks and other seaweed harvesting equipment are at risk of just gathering cobwebs on Davis’s farm; each unused tool a daily reminder of the progress they lost at the behest of President Donald Trump’s cultural politics. The supply chain, fragile in its novelty, is splintering apart.

Excess seaweed overtaking shellfish gear on Baywater Shellfish Farm in Hood Canal, Washington. Sarah Collier

Almost a year after the team began their field work harvesting seaweed in Puget Sound, the USDA announced that it would cancel the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative. In a press release issued on April 14, the agency called the $3.1 billion funding pot a “climate slush fund” and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins decried it as “largely built to advance the green new scam at the benefit of NGOs, not American farmers.” The USDA said that it axed the initiative due to the “sky-high administration fees which in many instances provided less than half of the federal funding directly to farmers.” 

Robert Bonnie, the former under secretary for farm production and conservation at the USDA under the Biden administration, rejects this claim. He contends that the reason some projects reported higher administrative fees than others is because roughly half the awards were intended to boost markets for smaller projects. “You would expect those projects to have higher administrative costs because those farmers are harder to reach,” he argued. “Take the Iowa Soybean Association, or Archer Daniels Midland, where they’ve got established relationships with farmers, where they’ve got high demand amongst many of their farmers, you’re going to expect those projects to have lower administrative costs as a percentage because they’ve already got an extensive network. So we wanted to provide flexibility across projects to make sure that the door was open to everyone,” added Bonnie. 

In any case, USDA’s use of the term “cancel” was something of a misnomer. In the same announcement, the agency shared its plan to review existing projects under a new set of scoring criteria, to ensure that they align with the new administration’s priorities. The release noted that the program would be “reformed and overhauled” into a Trump-era effort to redistribute the pool of IRA money. So as the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program sunsetted, the Advancing Markets for Producers initiative was born. 

The Trump program’s criteria required grant awardees to ensure that a minimum of 65 percent of their funds go directly to farmers, that they enrolled at least one farmer in their program by December 31, 2024, and that they have made a payment to at least one farmer by that same date. According to a former senior USDA official, who spoke to Grist on the condition of anonymity, the USDA grouped the 135 PCSC grantees into three buckets: Fifteen projects were told they could keep going, as they met the new thresholds; five recipients were told they could continue on the condition that they modified their projects to meet the new priorities; and 115 were informed that their projects were terminated as they did not meet the new policy priorities and were invited to resubmit. A few weeks later, the official said that projects that initially received cancellation letters were told something different – that the termination would be rescinded and they could just modify their proposals to meet administration priorities.

The group behind Blue Carbon, Green Fields was among the 115. 

In the USDA’s official termination notice to the University of Washington, shared with Grist, the team was told that their project “failed to meet the first of three Farmer First policy priorities identified by USDA” — that at least 65 percent of the funds must go to producers. A second notice stated that because of that, “the award is inconsistent with, and no longer effectuates, department priorities.”

Sarah Collier, the UW assistant professor leading the initiative, remembers how the news of the termination hit her. When she got the letter, “everything had to come to a screeching halt.” She jumped into crisis mode, notifying the 25 or so people working on the project, including students whom Collier said saw their “dissertation research derailed.” She then reached out to notify the farmers who had been receiving the seaweed fertilizer. The timing couldn’t have been worse: The team had just completed a round of farmer recruitment, and were in the middle of signing contracts with five more small and mid-sized farmers.  

“I have days where I am like, I can’t,” said Collier. “I can’t handle one more conversation where all I can say is, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do about this, because this isn’t the way that things are supposed to go. This isn’t the way that federal grants are supposed to work.’” 

In May, the USDA sent a letter to grantees who had received cancellation notices informing them of how to submit revised applications. According to the letter, which was also shared with Grist, grantees would need to arrange one-on-one meetings with Natural Resources Conservation Service representatives and submit a new budget narrative and statement of work incorporating Trump’s policy priorities. They had until June 20. 

When they first learned that their funding had been culled, Collier’s UW team, as the main grantee, wasn’t sure they were going to resubmit — or whether they even could. At the time, nothing further had been disclosed about what it would entail, so Collier decided to wait to talk with the NRCS to find out more. After that meeting, they moved forward with resubmission, in a bid to salvage what funding they were able to. That required Collier to create “a very revised” narrative and restructure the budget, in addition to regular meetings with the NRCS. 

The former USDA official noted that specific details of the resubmission process have since largely been kept quiet, since the vast majority of former PCSC grantees are fearful of speaking out about their experiences in case of retaliation by the administration. The closed-door nature of it all, with a lack of clear communication from the Trump administration and changes in guidance leading up to the submission deadline, the official said, has sown confusion and distress among former grantees. 

Although no official verdict timeline has been communicated — Collier has heard everything from 60 days to sometime in September — she expects to be waiting on the final funding decision for at least two more months. Hannah Smith-Brubaker, executive director at the nonprofit Pasa Sustainable Agriculture, or Pasa, has been told something similar about her pending resubmission. Another PCSC grantee, Pasa also reapplied to the new USDA program after being informed they didn’t meet one of the Trump administration’s priorities. Doing so required a total revamp of what their old project had been structured to do. 

“In the end, we decided to completely rewrite our proposal rather than just alter our original proposal. We had already said goodbye to the old program and knew it wouldn’t be able to fit the new reality,” said Smith-Brubaker. She says she “lies awake at night” concerned over the outcome, including whether the USDA may choose to deny their resubmission because of Pasa’s involvement in a federal lawsuit filed earlier this year challenging the Trump administration’s funding freeze. 

“It’s hard to say right now which decisions and actions might unintentionally result in things going awry,” said Smith-Brubaker. “Even though we still feel it was not in farmer’s best interest to have this degree of disruption, and fear for what a new reality could mean where every change in administration could involve a complete dismantling of stability and promises, we are extremely grateful for the opportunity to still leverage these funds for what our farmers need most.”

In a series of separate recent actions, the USDA provided a peek into how leaders at the nation’s highest food and farming agency have taken strides to comply with the president’s executive orders targeting climate action, environmental justice, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. In mid-June, the agency announced the termination of more than 145 awards totaling $148.6 million of “woke DEI funding.” Then, on July 10, the USDA posted a final rule in the Federal Register revoking a longstanding provision that ensured “disadvantaged” producers have equitable access to federal support, by allowing for carve-outs designed specifically for groups, such as Black and Indigenous farmers, that have historically faced discrimination. Shortly thereafter, the agency also revoked guidelines implemented during the Biden administration that mandated schools administering federal meal programs to ban discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. 

Some observers say that in the USDA’s rushed campaign to gut federal funding while erasing footprints of the Biden administration, the termination of the climate-smart project happened much too fast, and much too soon. For one, Bonnie, who helped design and implement the PCSC initiative, believes that the USDA’s invitation for grantees to resubmit their applications signals the administration’s initial lack of understanding about the bipartisan backlash to the decision. 

“The Trump administration was surprised at the amount of support for not only this program, but for climate-smart agriculture more broadly,” said Bonnie. Leadership at USDA were, he added, “under pressure to satisfy the far right, to be anti-climate and anti-woke.”

“They try to paint with a broad brush about this being the Green New Deal,” Bonnie continued. “Most people that knew this program knew that they were blowing smoke.” 

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While the Blue Carbon, Green Fields team is hopeful that, in time, an iteration of the project may continue, work on the ground has stalled. If they do receive a new round of funding from the USDA, Collier said, one change to their budget proposal will have considerable impacts on how the project will be carried out. To satisfy the requirements for resubmission, nearly two-thirds of the funds for the award will have to go directly to participating producers — rather than to the partners like the UW team, which is how it was originally structured.

“That does mean that, pending what we learn as we engage with USDA on this, that if we’re able to go forward, participants will have to seek out their own services to support the practices that they’re implementing, rather than having those services provided by the project partners, as part of the grant,” said Collier. “Instead, they will receive funds to seek out the services that they need, like technical assistance, or like harvesting and transporting seaweed.”

That modification, though seemingly minor, is rather significant, particularly for small farmers who already struggle with limited time and resources to allocate to anything beyond their day-to-day operations, some of whom say it presents an unjust burden. According to fellow PCSC grantee Smith-Brubaker, such a structural change will make things harder for them. “It’s really too bad to have to make it even more complicated for farmers to get the services they want and need,” she said.

Ellen Scheffer, who co-operates a 20-acre organic vegetable and grain farm in Fall City, Washington, is a small farmer involved with the Blue Carbon, Green Fields project. The funds “being yanked away” makes Scheffer “feel really defeated about the future.” A downside of USDA’s resubmission process, she noted, is that “any positive benefit that might help the future of our environment is going to have to be a side benefit, rather than the direct goal of the research. It feels very, very frustrating, especially as someone who is living every day trying to grow food in a way that is good for our planet.” 

Others, like project partner Viva Farms, the nonprofit farm incubator that connected producers in their network with the seaweed researchers, feels as if the group’s chapter together has already come to a close. “It did feel like the momentum was really a sheer drop-off,” said Viva Farms’ Elma Burnham. “We were about to prepare to onboard all sorts of new farms, to have seaweed drying here, to sort of get them more action of the program, instead of more of this, like, planning. And, yeah, it was challenging to see it sort of come to a halt,” she said. 

The likelihood of revival, according to Burnham, feels low. “Of course, we would love to see more organic, small-scale farmers pursue this research, we would love to see more innovation and collaboration happening in the Puget Sound region. But it feels over,” said Burnham. “This particular project feels over.” 

Davis, the shellfish grower, says he struggled to come to terms with the time and workload that would be demanded of him in the revised program — and what the restructuring of the proposal to align with the Trump administration’s policy priorities altogether represents. “I just thought it was kind of backwards, to be honest. It just didn’t seem like the right way to do it,” he said. For instance, directing most of the grant money to the farmers rather than project leads, he added, “didn’t make sense.”   

Instead, he’s going his own way. Davis has begun planning out an even shorter seaweed supply chain in tandem with his daughter, Hannah, and Emily Buckner, one of her colleagues at the Puget Sound Restoration Fund, just two of the six original partners. They’ve been busy identifying producers in the Chimacum Valley to collaborate with, all within a 20-mile radius of his farm. By narrowing the geographic range and foregoing much of the soil chemistry research, the scope of Davis’s new venture is limited compared to Blue Carbon, Green Fields, but, he said, “At the end of the day, I was, and I am, too invested in the parts that [the USDA] didn’t want.”

Still, not all the equipment that the USDA funds bought is laying idle around the farm, at risk of catching cobwebs: Davis is currently testing out a raft-based suction system to vacuum up the excess seaweed clustered around sensitive geoducks.

“We’ve got the equipment, and we’re going to harvest it and dry some and see where this can go,” he said. “We want to move forward with that, just to see if it works.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Seaweed brought fishers, farmers, and scientists together. Trump tore them apart. on Jul 25, 2025.

It’s less than an hour before the Dave Matthews Band takes the stage on a sunny Thursday evening on the coast of Long Island — but the biggest crowds at the Northwell at Jones Beach Theater aren’t at the tequila bar. They’re in the “eco-village” operated by Reverb, a nonprofit focused on greening live music by inspiring fans to take action around climate change. 

As I wander through tents emblazoned with the logos of organizations like the Nature Conservancy and Generation180, volunteers explain how fans can reduce their carbon footprints and join the clean energy transition. The longest line emanates from Reverb’s flagship tent, where batches of limited-edition blue-and-yellow Nalgene bottles hang from tent poles like so many coconuts from a grove of palm trees. 

Fans acquire the bottles by making a $20 donation, which enters them into a raffle to win a guitar signed by Matthews; they can fill their bottles at a nearby filtered water station. It’s all part of “RockNRefill,” a partnership between Reverb and Nalgene. The program has raised $5 million for climate and conservation nonprofits and eliminated an estimated 4 million single-use plastic bottles. 

“It’s cutting down on single-use plastics, so we hope everybody takes a bottle home or brings it back to another show,” says Dan Hutnik, Reverb’s onsite coordinator. “We’re trying to help save the planet — I like to say, one water bottle at a time.” (I bought one of the Nalgenes, but didn’t win a signed guitar.)

Concertgoers wander around the Reverb eco-village at Dave Matthews’ show at the Northwell at Jones Beach Theater. Zack O’Malley Greenburg

With this year’s summer touring season in full swing, the Dave Matthews Band’s efforts are just one example of the increased focus on sustainability in live music over the past several years. Decades after trailblazers like Bonnie Raitt began to prioritize climate, more and more artists are embracing sustainability and pushing for change — both inside and outside the industry — with the help of organizations like Reverb. 

Founded in 2004 by environmentalist Lauren Sullivan and her husband Adam Gardner, a guitarist and vocalist of the alt-rock group Guster, Reverb has become a leading force in greening live music. The nonprofit sends staffers like Hutnik out on the road with acts from Matthews to Billie Eilish, setting up eco-villages and organizing volunteers. Reverb staffers serve as the bands’ de facto sustainability coordinators, allowing initiatives like RockNRefill to be scaled up, rather than every artist having to build something similar from scratch.

Reverb also coordinates with concert promoters and venues, which have their own sustainability teams and programs. As part of the recent renovation of Jones Beach, for example, Live Nation added a sorting facility out back where employees handpick recyclables and compostables out of the garbage. The company’s Road To Zero campaign, a partnership with Matthews, diverted 90 percent of landfill-bound waste at the majority of the band’s shows last summer.

Live music has grown immensely since the pandemic — the top 100 tours grossed roughly $10 billion last year, nearly double what they reached in 2019. (For various reasons unrelated to climate, the 2025 number will likely be lower.) 

If abandoning climate projects is the new normal in our current political moment, the music business hasn’t gotten the memo. According to a recent Reverb study, 9 out of 10 concertgoers are concerned about climate change and are prepared to take action — and artists are ready to lead the way.

“As more and more artists are asking for the same things, it makes sense for these venues to make it a permanent change and not something where they just say, ‘OK, put away all the Styrofoam and all that crap, we’ll save it for the next band,’” said Gardner. “And that’s where the power really starts coming into play.”

Five days after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Coldplay played the biggest — and almost certainly the most overtly eco-friendly — stadium show of the 21st Century. A crowd of 111,000 streamed into Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad, India, to see the latest stop on the band’s Music of the Spheres Tour. Coldplay has grossed nearly $1.3 billion in the first three years of the tour, making it the second-most lucrative of all time behind Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. 

Coldplay has notched quite a few firsts on the climate front. After the group’s 2016-2017 tour, front man Chris Martin and his bandmates were so concerned about their carbon footprint that they took a break from the road until they could forge a more sustainable path. They eventually began planning the Music of the Spheres Tour with a pledge to reduce CO2 emissions by 50 percent compared to their last tour, and to hold themselves accountable with transparent reporting.

Coldplay committed to offsetting unavoidable emissions as responsibly as possible, drawing on the Oxford Principles for Net-Zero Aligned Carbon Offsetting, a guide that aims to ensure the integrity of carbon credits. The group has also used a portion of its tour proceeds to support new green technologies and environmental causes. Above all, the band wanted to push the envelope industry-wide with a sustainability rider — a set of requests that artists make as a condition for performing — covering everything from venues’ power connections to free water for fans.

Coldplay performs at a Music of the Spheres tour stop in Las Vegas in June. The tour and album name references planets and outer space.
Ethan Miller / Getty Images

Concert promoters are accustomed to accommodating all manner of demands on big acts’ riders (ranging from peppermint soap to actual kittens) and have proven open to doing the same for climate initiatives.

“Any artist could add sustainability considerations to their rider and try to influence promoters and venues to do things in a lower-impact way,” said Luke Howell, the band’s head of sustainability. “While not all artists can change how a venue operates at the macro scale, they can all ask for no single-use plastics, more veggie options on menus, or make sure the kit they are using is efficient and specced correctly to minimize energy use. And they can all engage their fans.”

To that end, while operating at a scale that few other acts can approach, Coldplay has introduced a bevy of novel green touring concepts. The band partnered with BMW to develop the first mobile show battery, which can power 100 percent of a concert with renewable energy. These clean sources include solar panels that come along for the ride, as well as power-generating bicycles and kinetic floors that quite literally draw energy from dancing fans.

Coldplay, of course, isn’t the first group to care about its impact on the planet, or try to reduce it. Environmental activism in the modern pop music world dates back more than half a century to conservation-focused songs like Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” and Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology).” 

Similarly, early benefit concerts — many organized by late folk singer Tom Campbell — focused on causes like protecting forests in the Pacific Northwest. After Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne played one such show in Oregon, their crews needed a police escort out of town to stave off a convoy of chainsaw-wielding loggers.

As the science around global warming went mainstream at the turn of the millennium, artists turned their focus toward climate change. Raitt’s 2002 summer tour launched Green Highway, a traveling eco-village where fans could learn about environmental issues and check out the newest hybrid vehicles from Honda. She and her manager, Kathy Kane, convinced tour bus companies to let them power their vehicles with biodiesel, booking the tour well in advance so as to route buses efficiently instead of wasting fuel hopscotching the country. 

At every venue, Raitt’s rider called for replacing disposable silverware with real cutlery, and she began bringing her own water bottle refill stations to reduce backstage plastic use. If there wasn’t a proper recycling system on-site, the crew would bring paper scraps on the bus and dispose of them properly in the next town. And Raitt inspired a new generation of artists who were concerned about live music’s environmental footprint.

“All I had to do was look at the ground when the lights came up at the end of the show to see all the plastic,” said Guster’s Gardner. “I just didn’t feel good about it.”

His wife, Lauren Sullivan, was working for the Rainforest Action Network when a venue refused to let them set up a table at a Dave Matthews show. Apparently, the nonprofit had been rallying against old growth woodcutting practices of one of the venue’s major sponsors. When Matthews threatened to skip the gig, the venue relented. 

The episode inspired Sullivan to team up with her husband to channel the power of live music into climate action. Sullivan reached out to Raitt, who was on the Rainforest Action Network’s board, and learned that the touring gear from Green Highway was in storage. Raitt offered it up — and pledged to incubate Sullivan’s project via her own nonprofit, until Reverb was officially launched in 2004.

Sullivan and Gardner wanted their new nonprofit to be an organization that all acts could use to make their tours greener. In their vision, fans walking into any venue would be greeted by a Reverb volunteer wearing a band-branded T-shirt, ready to engage on environmental issues. Concertgoers would be incentivized to take action — like reducing their own carbon footprint or pushing elected officials to enact eco-friendly legislation — with chances to win goodies like ticket upgrades and signed instruments. 

On the artists’ side, Reverb helped institutionalize practices that not only reduced waste, but saved dollars — like replacing single-use batteries with rechargeable battery packs for performers’ in-ear monitors. Over time, due to artist demand, these rechargeable packs became the norm.

It turned out that, when big acts demanded a certain standard of sustainability, the live music industry was willing to make meaningful changes. Adam Met, from the alt-pop band AJR, remembers realizing this while planning a tour five years ago and asking venues to eliminate single-use plastics.

“Every place we went, the venue [employees] said, ‘Oh, like Jack Johnson,’” recalled Met, who now serves on Reverb’s advisory board. “That was the artist bringing the requests to the table, and an organization like Reverb.”

As the nonprofit grew, one challenge was broadening its reach beyond alt-rock, whose artists and audiences skew heavily white, male, and middle-aged. To that end, Reverb worked increasingly with emerging artists to help them weave sustainability into their touring process from day one.  

Perhaps the best example is Billie Eilish, who started teaming up with Reverb six years ago when she rose to stardom with her 2019 album “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” On her 2022 Happier Than Ever Tour, Reverb helped her eliminate 117,000 single-use plastic bottles, save 8.8 million gallons of water, and push venues to offer plant-based meals — for the same prices as meat-based meals. She also introduced the pricier Changemaker Ticket, with proceeds supporting climate projects. Eilish even fueled her 2023 Lollapalooza set with solar-backed batteries.

Billie Eilish performs onstage at Lollapalooza in 2023 in Chicago.
Michael Hickey / Getty Images for ABA

Other young artists have also joined the movement. Last year, for the first time, solar panels fueled the batteries behind festivals in the world of country music (Tyler Childers’ Healing Appalachia) and hip-hop (Tyler, the Creator’s Camp Flog Gnaw). And concert promoters continue to step up to meet artist and fan demand. In 2022, Live Nation invested in Turn Systems, purveyor of a leading reusable cup setup; earlier this month, AEG hosted its first solar-backed battery-powered festival.

“As touring infrastructure becomes normalized where we don’t have to go out of our way to bring along our reusables and compostables, it’s just part of what’s happening at those venues,” said Gardner. “If that becomes the new normal, then there’s massive savings there, both with carbon and with dollars.”

On a bright Monday morning, I was walking through Central Park with AJR’s Met — discussing the future of green touring — when, appropriately, we happened upon the seasonal amphitheater at Rumsey Playfield. Perched on a hill overlooking Bethesda Fountain, it has hosted acts ranging from Pitbull to the Barenaked Ladies. The venue is largely constructed with repurposed shipping containers.

“So the infrastructure itself is already reused, which is great,” said Met, who then wondered aloud how this sort of space could be used during the venue’s downtime — perhaps as a seasonal solar farm. “There are all of these different ways to think about how to use the venue itself as a producer for sustainability initiatives.”

For Met, though, what’s even more powerful is the collective ability of fans to mobilize around the causes championed by their favorite artists. That’s the focus of his new book, Amplify: How to Use the Power of Connectivity to Engage, Take Action, and Build a Better World. 

He believes that, with a little encouragement, audiences can be particularly potent around local causes. For example, during last summer’s AJR tour stop in Phoenix — where temperatures reached 109 degrees — thousands of fans signed petitions to FEMA asking the agency to designate extreme heat as a type of emergency, thereby unlocking additional funds for response. In Salt Lake City, concertgoers phone-banked around increasing the Great Salt Lake’s water levels because of the economic benefits it provides to seven different states; Met noted that each state later voted for progressive climate policies, even the ones that went for Trump.

This sort of activity might strike some as preachy, but it turns out most fans don’t mind. According to a survey of 350,000 concertgoers organized by Met’s nonprofit, Planet Reimagined, most fans encourage it. A full 70 percent of respondents said they had no problem with musicians publicly addressing climate change; 53 percent believed artists had an obligation to do so.

Perhaps the most important thing an artist can do on the climate front is spotlight the collective carbon footprint of concertgoers — a facet that has more to do with advocating for a greener society than a greener music industry. As part of its Music Decarbonization Project, Reverb recently released its Concert Travel Study, which found the average amount of CO2 emissions generated by the thousands of fans getting to a given show is 38 times larger than that of the typical act — including artist and crew travel, hotel stays, and gear transportation. 

That makes sense: 80 percent of fans at the average show arrive in a personal vehicle, usually gasoline-powered. Yet the study also found that fans are hungry for greener ways to attend concerts — 33 percent would prefer to use public transit, but only 9 percent say they can and do.

Rock stars can’t make cities build more subways. But they can work with municipalities to run more routes on show nights, and keep trains and buses open later than usual. They can also team up with businesses like Rally and Uber that can offer deals on group shuttles. That’s something Raitt and her peers never had back in the day.

“I mean, what were you going to do, send postcards to people in the ’90s: ‘Let’s meet up at 8 o’clock and catch a ride to the show?’” said Raitt’s manager, Kane. “The development of technology has been able to allow fans to connect into a community, and artists to connect to their fans, in more real time.”

Music — and the special energy and sense of community that forms around a concert — has a unique power, whether that’s starting fashion trends or catalyzing social change. It shouldn’t be a stretch for acts to inspire fans to choose more sustainable options, especially if artists and venues do the work to make those options more accessible. 

At its best, live music can be a launching pad for all sorts of climate-friendly ideas — from the plant-based concessions championed by Eilish to the kinetic dance floors pushed by Coldplay — making them not only available, but desirable to the broader public.

In the meantime, back at Jones Beach, as Dave Matthews winds down his set, thousands of cars sit in the parking lot beyond the grandstand, dimly illuminated by a strawberry moon rising over the ocean. While many fans will be leaving with new reusable water bottles, they’ll still have to burn dinosaur bones to get home. But the singer offers a message of hope.

“The world is a little bit crazy at the moment,” Matthews tells the crowd. “We should take care of each other a little bit more.”

One Nalgene at a time.

Correction: This story originally misstated the partners involved in the RockNRefill program.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How musicians and concert venues are upping the tempo on climate action on Jul 25, 2025.

The massive budget bill that President Trump signed into law earlier this month took aim at a robust system of tax credits that have aided the explosion of U.S. wind and solar energy in recent years. While the move was primarily intended to help enable the law’s extension of tax breaks for high-earning Americans, some Republicans felt the law did not go far enough in discouraging the growth of wind and solar power. Those holdouts, however, voted for the bill after saying they’d received assurances from President Trump that he’d use his executive authority to further stymie the energy sources. 

“We believe we’re going to get 90-plus percent of all future projects terminated,” U.S. Representative Chip Roy of Texas told Politico after the bill passed. “And we talked to lawyers in the administration.”

Last week, Trump’s Department of the Interior announced what appeared to be a fulfillment of the president’s promise to his party’s right wing. The department’s new guidelines for wind and solar developers now require all federal approvals for clean energy projects to undergo “elevated review” by Interior Secretary Doug Bergum, who was appointed by President Trump in January.

The new guidelines include a granular outline of steps that will now require personal approval from Bergum’s office, rather than being delegated to department bureaucrats as had previously been customary. Experts who spoke to Grist say that this could create an unmanageable slowdown for developers and allow the administration to quietly kill wind and solar projects on public land. Some are even worried that the effect of the updated regulations will spill over into private projects, which sometimes have to consult with the Interior Department when their work bleeds into federal lands or a habitat for endangered species.

Since only 4 percent of existing renewable energy projects are on public land, clean industry insiders who have interpreted the new policy narrowly are not yet panicking. But those with a broader interpretation of the text — or those who suspect that the administration will take a broad interpretation — wonder if the new rules will amount to a de facto gag order on the industry. For now, only time will tell just how many of their fears come to pass.  

Much of the memo’s power to wreak havoc for renewables depends on how strictly it’s enforced. The Interior Department maintains a website called Information for Planning and Consultation, or IPaC, which developers often use to plan large-scale projects. You type in the name of a locale, draw a border around the general area of your proposed project, and IPaC will tell you what kind of federal permitting you might need to move forward. (For example, it would flag if there are any protected wetlands or endangered species that would be affected by your development.) As of last week, the website now displays a pop-up warning users that “solar and wind projects are currently not eligible to utilize the Information for Planning and Consultation website.” This kind of opacity could make it especially hard for developers to plan for an endless bureaucratic battle with Interior. 

“It’s one thing to take away our [tax] credits, but it’s another to basically just put impediments so projects can’t get built,” a source who works for a renewables developer told E&E News. (He was granted anonymity due to his ongoing professional engagement with the federal government.) “The level of review here is so ridiculous.”

Others say that, while the outlook for wind and solar has become much dimmer, the new Interior rules aren’t necessarily a kill shot. “I was personally very worried when I saw it come out,” said Jason Kaminsky, CEO of kWh Analytics, a solar risk management firm. “But after doing more reading, it does seem like it affects, hopefully, a minority of assets.” 

An internal report from the investment bank and research firm Roth Capital Partners, which was obtained by Grist, estimated that only 5 percent of projects on private land — specifically, those that require an easement or need to cross public land to connect a transmission line to the main electrical grid — would be affected by the new regulations. 

“If [projects are on] a private piece of land, that’s a totally different story that would not be impacted by this,” said Doug Vine, director of energy analysis at the nonprofit Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. “There’s plenty of projects that are going to go ahead.” 

Others warn that it will be hard to know anything for certain until the dust clears and the permitting process begins to play out. “Just how broad and wide-scoped the activities listed in the memo were, points towards an attempt to quash [private] projects, not just the ones on federal land,” said Dan O’Brien, a senior modeling analyst at the clean energy think tank Energy Innovations, noting that developers often end up consulting the Interior Department on issues like wildlife protection.

Regardless of the scope of the memo, any move with the potential to slow the deployment of renewables is almost certainly bad news for American energy, since most other sources of new electricity simply aren’t being built: 93 percent of new energy that came online in 2024 was renewable. But upon taking office, President Trump warned that the United States was reliant on a “precariously inadequate and intermittent energy supply” and immediately set about revoking previously approved federal funding from green energy projects, trying to cancel offshore wind leases, and rescinding clean energy tax credits that had been expanded by his predecessor. How this will lead the nation toward the current administration’s promise of “energy dominance” is unclear. 

“You don’t have enough [electricity] supply to meet new demand,” said O’Brien. “Instead of new capacity coming online — cheap renewables — you have existing gas plants running longer, and so gas demand goes up and prices go up, both for power plants and for household consumers. … All signs point toward this being a bad, bad scenario.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Will new Interior Department rules shackle wind and solar? Insiders are divided. on Jul 25, 2025.

In the first six months of the second Trump administration, some 60,000 federal workers have been targeted for layoffs, even more have taken buyouts, and up to trillions of dollars in funding has been frozen or halted. Many more people could still be facing cuts under additional planned reductions.

President Donald Trump has explicitly targeted climate- and justice-related programs and funding, but the resulting cuts have gone deep into services communities rely on to survive, like food aid in rural areas or improvements to failing wastewater infrastructure. Farmers have lost grants and support that help keep them going through increasingly volatile weather. Even your favorite YouTube creators may be affected.

We asked those who have lost their federal jobs or funding to tell us about what’s being lost: What was their work providing to communities, and what happens now?

Their stories, reflecting just a small sample of the many people who’ve been affected, illuminate  how deep these cuts go, not only into programs explicitly working to reduce emissions, but also into those keeping us safe, healthy, fed, and informed.

Have you been impacted, or know someone who has? We want to hear about it. Message us on Signal at 206-876-3147 or share your story using this form. (Learn more about how to reach us and how we will use your information.)

Sort by topic All Disaster recovery Health and safety Food access Historical preservation Public information Education Data and research Waste and recycling Energy costs

• Disaster recovery

  “It offered housing, your food was paid for. I didn’t really have to worry about how I would survive.”

  Rachel Suber, former FEMA Corps member | Pennsylvania

  Read more

  Since January, Rachel Suber had been a member of FEMA Corps, a specialized program of AmeriCorps, the federal national service program, which deploys volunteers to disaster zones to aid in recovery. She’d been assigned to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to help those affected by Hurricane Debby, a tropical cyclone that flooded parts of the Northeast last summer.

  As a corps volunteer with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Suber would go into the field to survey damage and help people access federal assistance funding. Back at the office, she would log data about what had been done at site inspections, where the worst damage was, and who had yet to receive assistance.

  In April, Suber got the news that her program — and all of AmeriCorps — was being terminated. “We will be demobilized immediately,” she remembers her boss saying. “I’m going to miss you all.” One hundred and thirty FEMA Corps members and some 32,000 AmeriCorps volunteers were out of work.

  Suber and her cohort were aware of the changes Trump was making to FEMA and other federal agencies, but the funding for her program was allocated for the year. No one had thought the new administration could take it away.

  So far, FEMA’s work in the region continues. But without help from the corps members, Suber said, more work will be put on program managers, slowing the process of getting aid to those who need it.

  For Suber, it’s also the end of her path to a career and a way out of rural Pennsylvania, where jobs are scarce. “It offered housing, your food was paid for. I didn’t really have to worry about how I would survive.” With the cancellation of the program, less than four months into what should have been a 10-month assignment, Suber’s dreams of working for FEMA have faded.

  — Zoya Teirstein

• Health and safety

  “People felt like their concerns were real and that they deserved better.”

  Caroline Frischmon, graduate research assistant | Mississippi

  Read more

  Caroline Frischmon had been selected to receive a $1.25 million grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to study air pollution in two Louisiana towns and Cherokee Forest, a subdivision in Pascagoula, Mississippi. The neighborhood, which is near a Chevron refinery, a Superfund site, and a liquefied natural gas terminal, has more than three times the amount of cancer risk the EPA deems acceptable.

  The funding was part of EPA’s Science to Achieve Results, or STAR, an initiative that has awarded more than 4,100 grants nationwide since 1995 to support high-quality environmental and public health research. In April, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin ordered the termination of STAR and other research grants, including some $124 million in funds that had already been promised. Frischmon’s funding evaporated overnight.

  As a graduate student at the University of Colorado, Frischmon had set up low-cost air monitors in Cherokee Forest and identified a recurring pattern of short-lived, intense pollution episodes that correlated with resident complaints of burning eyes, sore throats, vomiting, and nausea. The state air quality monitors were capturing average pollution levels but missed short-term spikes that were just as consequential to human health.

  “The validation has really led to an activation in the community,” said Frischmon. “People felt like their concerns were real and that they deserved better.”

  The $1.25 million EPA grant would have funded a multiyear air quality study and Frischmon’s postdoctoral position at the university. She is now job hunting and searching for smaller grants, but she isn’t optimistic she will find funding on the scale of the EPA grant. For the community, she said, it feels like an abrupt end to tangible progress toward solving their health crisis. “So there’s a lot of sadness over losing that momentum.”

  — Naveena Sadasivam

• Food access

  “Agricultural producers are already living on the fringes of income.”

  Matthew O’Malley, agricultural engineer with the Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service | Colorado

  Read more

  As an agricultural engineer with the Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, or NRCS, Matthew O’Malley’s job was helping farmers and ranchers in northeastern Colorado implement more efficient infrastructure to deal with growing water scarcity. On any given day, that could involve anything from building an irrigation system that cuts down on the amount of water released to feed thirsty crops to designing a retention basin to store excess water produced during rainy periods for use during drier ones.

  In February, O’Malley was abruptly fired from his position in a wave of mass layoffs by the Trump administration. By the end of the following month, he’d be invited back to work, temporarily, after a federal court ruled the thousands of laid-off government workers must be reinstated. O’Malley instead elected to take the deferred resignation he was subsequently offered, wary of the volatility. Until September 30, he will remain a federal employee on paper.

  Before the mass government firings hit the NRCS offices in northeast Colorado, there were a total of four staffers, O’Malley included, serving as agricultural engineers in the region. Half took the deferred resignation.

  “The planning stopped for the projects I was designing overnight,” said O’Malley. “I’m more concerned for the smaller agricultural producers, rather than myself, for the agency. They’re the ones that rely on USDA programs to help them make it through years when there’s crop failure.”

  Because of the economic landscape, escalating extreme weather risk, and intensifying water scarcity, farmers’ need for support in the region is at a level O’Malley has never before seen. “Agricultural producers are already living on the fringes of income,” he said. “Helping these producers protect the resources that they have, and allowing them to better utilize them, ultimately helps everyone. We all need to eat.”

  — Ayurella Horn-Muller

  Photo credit: Courtesy Matthew O’Malley

• Health and safety

  “The funding just stopped. I’m stuck with this valuable data that not a lot of people have.”

  Edgar Villaseñor, advocacy campaign manager for the Rio Grande International Study Center | Texas

  Read more

  Residents of Laredo, Texas, like people in cities all over the world, endure a phenomenon known as the urban heat island effect, whereby roads, sidewalks, and buildings trap heat. For Laredo, this phenomenon only exacerbates already ferocious heat, particularly in lower-income neighborhoods that tend to have fewer trees and green spaces.

  Last summer, to better understand how heat affects Laredo’s 260,000 residents, the nonprofit Rio Grande International Study Center partnered with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and enlisted more than 100 volunteers to drive around the city taking temperature readings. Edgar Villaseñor, the center’s advocacy campaign manager, then worked with a company called CAPA Strategies to create a map of heat throughout the city.

  Villaseñor wanted more detailed data and an enhanced, interactive map that would not only be easier for residents to navigate, but also help the city council plan interventions, like installing more shade for people waiting at bus stops. He applied for a $10,000 grant through NOAA’s Center for Heat Resilient Communities, which was funded through the Inflation Reduction Act.

  The center had planned to work with a range of communities for a year to craft targeted heat action plans, and then to create guides that would help cities around the U.S. build their own heat strategies.

  The research center was ready to announce in May that Villaseñor’s nonprofit, along with 14 city governments, had been selected. But the day before the announcement, NOAA instead sent notices that it was defunding the center. “The funding just stopped,” Villaseñor said. “I’m stuck with this valuable data that not a lot of people have.”

  Villaseñor said his work won’t stop, even though that $10,000 grant would have gone a long way. “I’m still trying to see what I can do without funding.”

  Read more: Funding to protect American cities from extreme heat just evaporated

  — Matt Simon

• Historical preservation

  “You have to make sure you’re not destroying any wetlands, not affecting air pollution … not harming any historical or cultural material.”

  Name withheld, National Park Service archaeologist | East Coast

  Read more

  Archaeology might not be the first profession that comes to mind when you think of the National Park Service. But the federal agency, housed under the Interior Department, needs a whole lot of them — to examine historical artifacts, to oversee excavations, to ensure that on-site construction projects comply with preservation laws.

  One federal archaeologist, who asked that their name be withheld for security, worked at a historic East Coast park, combing through a “very long backlog” of 19th-century farm equipment and deciding which samples should be preserved. Storage space is a “very serious problem in archaeology,” they said, and the park service generally lacks the funding to make more room.

  The other part of their job was about compliance, ensuring that proposed developments — whether a new water line or a building renovation — adhered to federal laws on environmental and historical impacts. “You have to make sure you’re not destroying any wetlands, not affecting air pollution … not harming any historical or cultural material,” they said.

  This worker had been at their post, which was supported by funding via the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, for national parks, just over a year when Trump froze IRA spending. They found out in February that their funding was no longer available, but held on a few more weeks, thanks to extra funds cobbled together by their supervisor. By the time a federal judge ordered the IRA money unfrozen, they had already accepted another archaeology job. With all the funding uncertainty — compounded by layoffs and buyouts that have reduced park service staff by 24 percent since the beginning of the year — they said the vacancy they left is unlikely to be filled.

  Without archaeologists, the worker said, simple maintenance projects could be stalled or improperly managed. “They will either not be able to do that or they will do the projects without compliance and destroy very important sites to our shared history.”

  — Joseph Winters

• Public information

  “The team was part of a nationwide push to build trust with communities so that we could better understand what they needed so that the government could serve communities better.”

  Amelia Hertzberg, environmental protection specialist at the EPA | Virginia

  Read more

  When EPA employees engage with communities affected by an environmental disaster, they often face angry and distrustful crowds. These communities are often the ones that have been historically neglected by the federal government, and residents may be dealing with serious health problems. Amelia Hertzberg was training staff to stay calm and engage productively in those situations.

  Hertzberg began working at the EPA in 2022, first as a research fellow and then as a full-time employee in the community engagement department within the environmental justice office. She initially helped communicate the risk that ethylene oxide, a toxic chemical used in sterilization, poses to communities. Then, as the EPA ramped up its efforts to work with historically disadvantaged communities during the Biden administration, she began conducting trainings to help staff understand how to work directly with communities facing trauma.

  “Again and again, I heard, ‘I don’t know how to deal with people’s emotions,’” recalled Hertzberg. “‘There’s things that I can’t help them with that make me upset, and I don’t know what to do with my feelings of stress or theirs.’ And so I was trying to meet that need.”

  In April, the Trump administration announced that it would lay off 280 employees from the EPA’s environmental justice office and reassign an additional 175 people, effectively ending the office altogether. The announcement came after a February notice that placed 170 staff members, including Hertzberg, on administrative leave. Just two of the 11 people on Hertzberg’s community engagement team stayed on, and most of their programs have been canceled. Hertzberg is still on administrative leave.

  “The environmental justice office is the EPA’s triage unit,” Hertzberg said. “The team was part of a nationwide push to build trust with communities so that we could better understand what they needed so that the government could serve communities better.”

  — Naveena Sadasivam

• Disaster recovery

  “We were in constant contact with survivors who were very upset.”

  Julian Nava-Cortez, former California Emergency Response Corps member | California

  Read more

  After devastating fires tore through Los Angeles in January, Julian Nava-Cortez traveled from northern California to assist survivors at a disaster recovery center near Altadena, where the Eaton Fire had nearly destroyed the entire neighborhood. People arrived in tears, overwhelmed and angry, he said.

  “We were the first faces that they’d see,” said Nava-Cortez, at the time a member of the California Emergency Response Corps, one of two AmeriCorps programs that sent workers to assist in fire recovery. He guided people to the resources they needed to secure emergency housing, navigate insurance claims, and go through the process of debris removal. He sometimes worked 11-hour, emotionally draining shifts, listening to stories of what survivors had lost. “We were in constant contact with survivors who were very upset,” he said. What kept him going, he said, was how grateful people were for his help.

  Volunteers like Nava-Cortez have helped 47,000 households affected by the fires, according to California Volunteers, the state service commission under the governor’s office. But in late April, Nava-Cortez and his team at the California Emergency Response Corps were suddenly placed on leave. Another program helping with the recovery in L.A., the California AmeriCorps Disaster Team, also abruptly shut down as a result of cuts to AmeriCorps.

  At the end of April, two dozen states, including California, sued the Trump administration over the cuts to AmeriCorps, alleging that DOGE illegally gutted an agency that Congress created and funded. In June, a federal judge temporarily blocked the cuts in those jurisdictions.

  The nonprofit that sponsored Nava-Cortez and his fellow AmeriCorps members offered them temporary jobs 30 days after they were put on leave, though many had already found other work. Nava-Cortez took the offer and worked for another month before the money ran out, but was unable to finish his term, which was supposed to go through the end of July. Since then, he’s been on unemployment, unable to find work ahead of moving to San Jose for school this fall.

  Read more: After disasters, AmeriCorps was everywhere. What happens when it’s gone?

  – Kate Yoder

• Public information

  “There might just be one day you log onto YouTube and none of your favorite creators are there anymore.”

  Emily Graslie, creator of The Brain Scoop YouTube channel | Illinois

  Read more

  Emily Graslie creates YouTube videos explaining all kinds of scientific research in fun, easy-to-understand ways. On her channel, The Brain Scoop, she’s covered topics ranging from fossils to rats, often partnering with libraries or museums to tell the story of their work.

  Her next project was going to be with the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, creating videos for The Brain Scoop explaining some of the organization’s groundbreaking medical research. She’d spent a year developing the series with her NIH partners and was supposed to be on campus at the NIH in January of this year to begin shooting. Instead, she received an email telling her that the project was on hold until further notice.

  The acting Health and Human Services secretary had issued a memo within the first days of the Trump administration halting nearly all external communications. “Because I’m considered a member of the media, I was unable to communicate with these people I had been partnering with for over a year,” she said.

  Through an informal meeting with one of her collaborators, she learned that the project was effectively canceled — and with it, money Graslie had been counting on for her livelihood, a slate of planned videos, and what she saw as important work educating viewers about lifesaving science.

  Many people may not realize, Graslie said, that the federal funding that supports scientific research and programming at museums also often covered contracts with independent creators like herself, to help communicate the work to the public.

  “One of the most significant things that The Brain Scoop did is just share the different kinds of work that happens at nature centers and museums across the country,” she said. The loss is “just a limiting of people’s understandings of what they’re capable of, who they want to be when they grow up, how they see the world around them.”

  Read more: Even your favorite YouTube creators are feeling the effects of federal cuts

  — Claire Elise Thompson

  Photo credit: Julie Florio

• Education

  “It’s a huge loss for the 1,000 students that we work with.”

  Sky Hawk Bressette, former restoration educator for the city of Bellingham’s Parks and Recreation Department | Washington

  Read more

  For three years, Sky Hawk Bressette served as a restoration educator in the parks department in Bellingham, Washington. With a fellow member of the Washington Service Corps, he worked with the school district to teach nearly every fifth grader in the city about native plants.

  Their free lessons — aligned with state science standards — showed kids how to identify plants, spot invasive species, and understand the role of native flora in the local ecosystem. They also hosted “mini-work parties,” where students got their hands dirty pulling weeds and planting native trees and shrubs, learning how to care for the land around them. “All of our teachers that we work with absolutely love what we do,” Bressette said.

  But that work is now on hold — possibly for good — after federal cuts to AmeriCorps funding. In late April, Bressette received notice that he was being put on unpaid leave, effective immediately. “It’s weird, it’s sad, it’s scary,” he said. “I really do love what I do.” After a judge struck down the cuts in June, he briefly returned to work until his term ended in July. By then, he had already missed the end of the school year, the busiest time for working with students.

  Outside the classroom, Bressette helped organize volunteer work parties that planted thousands of trees and hauled dump trucks’ worth of invasive species out of local parks in Bellingham. But with no guarantee for future funding, the city is eliminating Bressette and his colleague’s positions. That means that the environmental education lessons are likely shut down for at least the next year, Bressette said, while the city weighs whether to bring them back.

  “It’s a huge loss for the 1,000 students that we work with in our city alone,” he said.

  — Kate Yoder

  Photo credit: Allison Greener Grant

• Disaster recovery

  “I lost my job from the fire and here again from this political climate.”

  Ryanda Sarraude, former office administrator at Roots Reborn | Hawai‘i

  Read more

  In the summer of 2023, Ryanda Sarraude was working as an account manager at a human resources company serving local businesses in West Maui. When massive wildfires shut down tourism and contaminated the water in her neighborhood, Sarraude was forced to move out of her house and her company laid her off because so many local businesses had shut down.

  Months later, a job opened up at Roots Reborn, a nonprofit organization serving recent immigrants on Maui, and Sarraude was hired as an office administrator. The role was funded by a federal program aimed at helping disaster survivors get back on their feet.

  Lāhainā is home to many immigrant communities from the Philippines, Latin America, and the Pacific islands. Many families who didn’t have bank accounts had hidden cash in their homes that burned down, so the nonprofit launched a financial education workshop. Health issues like depression and asthma shot up in the wake of the fires, so Roots Reborn partnered with Kaiser to help people enroll in health insurance by providing guidance and Spanish interpreters.

  “I wanted to help people,” Sarraude said. “It was very rewarding.” Then in February, Sarraude found out the federal funding for her position had evaporated amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on government spending. Sarraude was among 131 Maui workers who lost their jobs almost overnight across 27 different organizations, even though the nonprofit overseeing their program had expected the federal funding to be renewed for several more months. Around 5 p.m. on a Sunday, Sarraude was told not to show up to work the next day.

  “I lost my job from the fire and here again from this political climate,” Sarraude said. She scrambled to apply to other gigs and a few weeks later landed a lower-paying role as a web administrator for a local business. She likes her new job, but is relying on Medicaid and food stamps and is nervous about what Republicans’ decision to cut funding for those programs will mean for her access to food and health care.

  — Anita Hofschneider

• Food access

  “We want kids to understand where their food comes from. We want them to be able to have that experience of growing their own food.”

  Erica Krug, farm-to-school director at Rooted | Wisconsin

  Read more

  First established some 25 years ago in a historically underserved neighborhood in Madison, Wisconsin, that has long struggled with access to healthy food, Mendota Elementary’s garden is now a part of the school’s curriculum — students plant produce, which is shared with local food pantries. Come summer, the garden opens to the surrounding community to harvest crops like garlic, tomatoes, zucchini, collards, and squash.

  “They’re mending the soil one week, and then the next week they’re going to start to see these little seedlings pop through the soil,” said Erica Krug, farm-to-school director at Rooted, a nonprofit that helps oversee the garden.

  In January, the Rooted team applied for a $100,000 two-year grant through the USDA’s Patrick Leahy Farm to School program, intended to provide public schools with locally produced fresh vegetables as well as food and agricultural education, a grant they’d received in past cycles. The program was created in 2010, and Congress allocated $10 million for it this fiscal year.

  In March, Rooted received an email announcing the cancellation of this year’s grant program “in alignment with President Donald Trump’s executive order Ending Radical and Wasteful Government and DEI Programs and Preferencing.”

  The loss of the funds is “so upsetting,” said Krug, and the reasoning provided, she continued, is “ridiculous.” In prior years, Krug said, “we were being asked ‘What are you doing to address equity? To address diversity? How are you making sure your project is for everyone?’ And now we’re going to be penalized for talking about that.”

  The team at Rooted is now working overtime to find other funding sources to continue the work. “We’re not ready to say, without this funding, that we’re going to abandon this program, because we believe so strongly in it,” she said.

  Read more: Trump’s latest USDA cuts undermine his plan to ‘Make America Healthy Again’

  — Ayurella Horn-Muller

• Public information

  “It’s our duty to help protect people and have them understand the risks and understand the tools they can use.”

  Tom Di Liberto, former public affairs specialist at NOAA | Washington, D.C.

  Read more

  For Tom Di Liberto, a climate scientist-turned communications specialist, working at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fulfilled a dream he had held since elementary school. It was also, he believed, fulfilling an essential function for the American people.

  “I was incredibly proud of being able to work with different communities to help them understand the resources that NOAA has, so they can properly use them in the decisions that they make,” he said. That included working with doctors to help them make better use of the agency’s climate and weather data to understand the shifting probabilities of various medical diagnoses, and reaching out to faith communities to discuss how they could use their gathering spaces to help residents weather extreme heat and other impacts.

  “Those sorts of activities are all done now,” Di Liberto said.

  He lost his job at NOAA on February 27, along with hundreds of his colleagues targeted by the Department of Government Efficiency. By court order, he was rehired in March, but then fired once again in April, he said, when the judge let that order expire. Di Liberto is now working as a media director for the nonprofit Climate Central.

  These workforce reductions have hampered the agency’s research capacity, as well as its ability to share that critical research with the public, Di Liberto said.

  “I think people don’t know that NOAA is beyond just your weather forecast — that NOAA works directly with communities to help build resilience plans for extremes,” he said, adding that, under the new Trump administration, the bulk of that community work “is either threatened or come to a screeching halt.”

  One of the communication projects he was proudest of was launching NOAA’s first animated series — a creative tool to teach climate and weather science to kids. “I have all the episodes downloaded personally on my computer — so if they ever take it down, they’ll go right back up,” he said.

  — Claire Elise Thompson

• Food access

  “This was for important work, representing small- and medium-sized farms, and also trying to leverage the food economy to go faster and further.”

  Anthony Myint, cofounder of Zero Foodprint | Oregon

  Read more

  Anthony Myint’s nonprofit, Zero Foodprint, works across the public and private sectors, sourcing and awarding grants that incentivize the adoption of better farming practices. His goal is to support farmers who are working to build healthier soil, which increases the food system’s resilience to supply chain shocks, improves water quality, and stores carbon.

  A chef-turned-entrepeneur, Myint founded the nonprofit after seeing firsthand how important farming practices are to ensuring a more sustainable planet.

  In April, Myint learned that a $35 million USDA grant his team was a subawardee on had been suddenly canceled. The nonprofit had been awarded roughly $7 million in 2023 as part of a five-year program to help hundreds of farmers and agricultural projects across the country implement production techniques to improve soil quality and crop resilience.

  Myint’s team had been helping award and distribute the funding to roughly 400 projects, like a group of almond producers in California’s Central Valley working to establish composting and nutrient management practices. By the time the project was terminated, only about $800,000 had been awarded to around 50 projects. “We were ramping up to the bulk of work this spring,” said Myint.

  The loss of the funding left “a really big gap.” “We’re using reserves and philanthropy and other things to maintain and sort of shift our growth onto that new available capacity instead of hiring,” said Myint. “We’re essentially frozen.”

  Myint saw the USDA funds as a vital — and successful — incentive to move farms and companies to more sustainable practices. “This was for important work, representing small- and medium-sized farms, and also trying to leverage the food economy to go faster and further … and every single project was negatively impacted.”

  — Ayurella Horn-Muller

• Data and research

  “It’s just about having the info that policymakers need to make decisions. Without it, we’re flying blind.”

  Shane Coffield, former science and technology policy fellow at AAAS | Washington, D.C.

  Read more

  Every year, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS, places roughly 150 fellows at various federal agencies. Established in 1973, the Science and Technology Policy Fellowships program provides a pipeline for scientists to enter public service.

  Shane Coffield was one of six fellows placed at the EPA last September. As a researcher with a doctorate in Earth system science, Coffield specializes in various remote sensing techniques and was tasked with working on the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory, an annual accounting of the country’s emissions, which provides a baseline for climate policy and has been published since the early 1990s. The U.S. is also obligated to provide the emissions data every year to a United Nations body that oversees international climate negotiations.

  In April, the agency missed a deadline to release the data, even though Coffield and others at the EPA had finished the report. That month, the agency also terminated its agreement with AAAS that allowed Coffield and five other fellows to work there, four months before their positions were due to end. This year’s report was never officially released, although the information was made public through a FOIA request. It’s unclear if the agency will produce the inventory in 2026.

  The greenhouse gas inventory is “policy agnostic,” said Coffield. “It’s just about having the info that policymakers need to make decisions. Without it, we’re flying blind.”

  During his time at the agency, Coffield also helped other countries such as El Salvador and South Africa build their own greenhouse gas inventories. When the Trump administration instructed staff to drop all foreign aid work in late January, Coffield could not engage with his international counterparts anymore.

  — Naveena Sadasivam

  Photo credit: Courtesy Shane Coffield

• Education

  “There’s a huge need to increase climate literacy, even here in NYC, and now there will be fewer opportunities for it.”

  Rafi Santo, principal researcher at Telos Learning | New York

  Read more

  Last year, Rafi Santo helped launch an education project that aimed to connect young people from climate-impacted communities with scientists and artists to co-create interactive public exhibits. The program — a collaboration between Pratt Institute, Beam Center, and Santo’s organization, Telos Learning — was funded by a National Science Foundation grant focused on bringing STEM learning to new settings and audiences.

  “We have an incredible need to both have the general public understand the mechanisms behind climate change, but also understand what they can do about it,” Santo said. The pop-up exhibits would aim to build climate literacy and awareness of local adaptation efforts in New York.

  Santo, who studies educational frameworks, also wanted to research the significance of giving young people a seat at the table — “helping to better understand how those most affected by the crisis can be meaningfully contributing to its response.”

  The group received around 400 applications. But on April 25, the day they planned to send acceptance letters, they instead found out that their grant had been terminated. The National Science Foundation had announced that it was terminating awards “that are not aligned with program goals or agency priorities.” Hundreds of research grants were canceled.

  Santo’s program was specifically focused on young people in communities of color, which “probably made an easy keyword search for them,” he said.

  It was devastating to see so much passion and so many stories that now won’t get to be shared, Santo said, as well as the loss to the public of the opportunity to engage with climate topics in new ways. For him personally, this would also have been his first climate research initiative — something he had wanted to pursue professionally ever since he experienced a devastating heat wave in 2021. “It feels especially heartbreaking,” he said. “I now don’t know how I might contribute or what kind of projects I might do that can contribute to this work.”

  — Claire Elise Thompson

• Waste and recycling

  “Composting, for me, is a lot about community.”

  Ella Kilpatrick Kotner, compost program director at Groundwork RI | Rhode Island

  Read more

  “Composting, for me, is a lot about community,” said Ella Kilpatrick Kotner, who leads a composting program at Groundwork RI, a nonprofit in Providence, Rhode Island, “and treating this thing that many people think of as a waste as a resource to be cherished and handled with care and turned into something beautiful that we can then reuse to grow more food.”

  Every day, her team of three bikes through the city, collecting food scraps from hundreds of households. Back at a community garden, they mix it all with dry leaves and wood shavings, while sifting out pieces of plastic and even the occasional fork, transforming the waste into a nitrogen-rich conditioner for the soil. That compost is available to those enrolled in Groundwork RI’s subscription service to use in home gardens, yards, or urban farms.

  In December, Groundwork RI was one of nine organizations included in an $18.7 million grant awarded to the Rhode Island Food Policy Council through the Community Change Grants Program, a congressionally authorized program to support community-based organizations addressing environmental justice challenges.

  A portion of the three-year funding was intended to help Groundwork RI expand its collection service to neighboring cities, build a bigger compost hub, renovate its greenhouse and pay-what-you-can farm stand, and add composting bin systems to more local community gardens. It also would have made it possible for Kilpatrick Kotner’s team to launch a free food-scrap collection pilot with the city.

  During Trump’s first term, his administration committed to ambitious food waste reduction goals. This time, after months of uncertainty, the partners involved in the Rhode Island food-waste project learned in May that their grant was terminated. The EPA’s official notice, shared with Grist, informed the grantees that their project was “no longer consistent” with the federal agency’s funding priorities and therefore nullified “effective immediately.”

  Read more: An $18M grant would have drastically reduced food waste. Then the EPA cut it.

  – Ayurella Horn-Muller

  Photo credit: Charlotte Canner / Groundwork RI

• Health and safety

  “We have wastewater infrastructure that is old. It’s critical that we do the work to replace this.”

  Sheryl Sealy, assistant city manager for Thomasville | Georgia

  Read more

  Thomasville, Georgia, has a water problem. Its treatment system is far out of date, posing serious health and environmental risks — not just the risk of sewage overflowing into homes and waterways, but resulting respiratory issues as well.

  “We have wastewater infrastructure that is old,” said Sheryl Sealy, the assistant city manager for this city of 18,881 near the Florida border. “It’s critical that we do the work to replace this.”

  Earlier this year, Thomasville and its partners were awarded a nearly $20 million Community Change grant from the EPA to make the long-overdue wastewater improvements, build a resilience hub and health clinic, and upgrade homes in several historic neighborhoods.

  “The grant itself was really a godsend for us,” Sealy said.

  Thomasville has a history of heavy industry that has led to high risks from toxic air pollution, and the city qualified for the Biden administration’s Justice40 initiative, which prioritized funding for disadvantaged communities.

  In early April, as the EPA canceled grants for similar projects across the country, federal officials assured Thomasville that its funding was on track. Then, on May 1, the city received a termination notice. “We felt, you know, a little taken off guard when the bottom did let out for us,” said Sealy.

  Under the Trump administration, the EPA has canceled or interrupted hundreds of grants aimed at improving health and severe weather preparedness because the agency “determined that the grant applications no longer support administration priorities,” according to an emailed statement to Grist.

  Thomasville, along with other cities that have had grants terminated, is appealing the decision.

  Read more: Trump cuts hundreds of EPA grants, leaving cities on the hook for climate resiliency

  — Emily Jones

• Disaster recovery

  “I come home and I’m exhausted and I’ve got cat poop all over me, but it was just such a rewarding feeling.”

  Susan “Lala” Caballero, former humanitarian at the Maui Humane Society | Hawai‘i

  Read more

  Susan Caballero wasn’t living in Lāhainā the day that the West Maui town burned down on August 8, 2023. But the devastating wildfire brought the island’s tourism industry to a screeching halt. A day later, Caballero was laid off from her job as a salesperson at a boutique handicrafts store 45 minutes away.

  Within months, federal funding to help wildfire survivors poured in and the Biden administration released a federal grant specifically to help displaced workers. It was through that funding that Caballero got hired at the Maui Humane Society. Her job was caring for cats: feeding them, giving them medicine, persuading families to adopt them.

  There are 40,000 stray cats on Maui that need homes, about one cat for every four people living on the island. Residents often abandon their cats because there’s so little pet-friendly housing. It’s a massive challenge with terrible environmental consequences: Parasites in feral cat poop contaminate the ocean, killing endangered monk seals. Caballero felt proud using her sales skills to persuade families to take the creatures home, once successfully adopting out a 20-year-old feline.

  “It’s just an amazing feeling, I come home and I’m exhausted and I’ve got cat poop all over me, but it was just such a rewarding feeling,” Caballero said.

  In February, Caballero was hospitalized after a moped accident. She was lying in her hospital bed when she learned that she was out of a job. The state of Hawaiʻi had expected the federal grant supporting her position and 130 others to be renewed at least through September, but in February the state learned that, at best, the new administration would only offer half of what had been requested. Confronted with uncertain funding, the state shut down the program.

  “I was only making $23 an hour. I’m 58 years old,” she said. “I have to laugh because that’s all I can do and that hurts.”

  Five months later, she’s still physically recovering and isn’t sure what’s next. Her rent just went up to $1,582 per month, and her disability check will no longer cover it.

  — Anita Hofschneider

• Food access

  “This is a blow to our entire food system.”

  Robbi Mixon, executive director of the Alaska Food Policy Council | Alaska

  Read more

  Three years ago, the Alaska Food Policy Council, or AFPC, partnered with a handful of other food and farming groups to apply for the Regional Food Business Center program — a new initiative launched by the Biden administration to expand and build localized food supply chains. In May 2023, it was selected by the USDA as a sub-awardee to help create one of 12 national centers established through the initiative, leading the Alaska arm of the Islands and Remote Areas Regional Food Business Center.

  Ever since, Robbi Mixon, the AFPC’s executive director, and her team have devoted countless hours to developing the center, an online hub to help farm and food ventures connect with local and regional markets. Her team had planned to give out $1.6 million in grant awards — representing a direct investment in over 50 businesses over the next three years — and use another $1.4 million for training over 1,000 individuals statewide.

  In January, their funding was frozen by the new administration, and for the last six months, their funding pot has continued to remain inaccessible. On July 15, the USDA finally announced it was shuttering the program.

  “This is a blow to our entire food system,” said Mixon. The center “was a catalytic opportunity” to build capacity for small businesses across the state, she said. “Its loss disrupts food security planning, economic development, and supply chain resilience.”

  Mixon’s team had been planning to use their funding to support the creation of fresh produce markets in rural Alaska, training to help remote communities learn how to start home-based food businesses, and grant-sourcing for those in fishing and aquaculture industries, among other initiatives.

  “Food security is national security,” she said. “Just because this funding goes away, the need certainly does not.”
  
  — Ayurella Horn-Muller

• Energy costs

  “I’ll find the money, if I have to. I’ll win the lottery and spend the money on cheaper power.”

  John Christensen, Port Heiden tribal president | Alaska

  Read more

  In Port Heiden, Alaska, home to a small fishing community of Alutiiq peoples, the diesel fuel they need to power their lifestyle costs almost four times the national average.

  “Electricity goes up, diesel goes up, every year. And wages don’t,” said John Christensen, Port Heiden’s tribal president. “We live on the edge of the world. And it’s just tough.” Christensen and his son are among those who will spend the summer hauling in thousands of pounds of fish each day to sell to seafood processing companies.

  In 2015, the community built its own fish processing plant, a way to keep more fishing income in the village. But the building has never been operational — they simply can’t afford to power it.

  The tribe planned to use a $300,000 grant to pay for studies to design two hydropower plants, which Christensen sees as a path to cheaper and cleaner energy. In theory, the plants could power the entirety of Port Heiden.

  The money was coming from Climate United, a national investment fund selected to participate in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a project of the Inflation Reduction Act. Now, the fund has become a particular target in the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate climate programs. The EPA froze all grants, calling the fund “criminal” and leaving $20 billion in limbo.

  As it awaits the outcome of its lawsuit filed against the EPA and Trump, Climate United is exploring other options, including issuing the money as a loan rather than a grant. For his part, Christensen said he has lost what little faith he had in federal funding and has begun brainstorming other ways to get his community off diesel.

  “We’ll figure it out,” he said. “I’ll find the money, if I have to. I’ll win the lottery, and spend the money on cheaper power.”

  Read more: This Alaska Native fishing village was trying to power their town. Then came Trump’s funding cuts.

  — Ayurella Horn-Muller

  Photo credit: Courtesy John Christensen

• Food access

  “Our people are hurting, and our people are hungry.”

  Sylvia Crum, director of development at Appalachian Sustainable Development | Virginia

  Read more

  In March, Appalachian Sustainable Development, a nonprofit food hub, was forced to shutter its food-box program. The program provided fresh produce to Appalachia residents in need, and income to 40 farmers who supplied that produce.

  A $1.5 million USDA grant that was supporting the program was being delayed, and the team learned they may end up being reimbursed only a portion of the money. Then, another of the local food system programs they were counting on for future funding was suddenly terminated by the USDA.

  For director of development Sylvia Crum, the situation was “heartbreaking.” But there was no other choice. “We don’t have the money,” said Crum. It costs roughly $30,000 to fill the 2,000 or so boxes that, up until March 7, the organization distributed every week.

  For decades, the USDA has funded several programs that are meant to address the country’s rising food-insecurity crisis. A network of nonprofit food banks, pantries, and hubs around the country, like Appalachian Sustainable Development, rely extensively on government funding, particularly through the USDA. Most of these programs continue to face funding freezes or have been cut altogether.

  Food insecurity has long been a widespread problem across Appalachia. Residents in parts of Kentucky, for example, grapple with rates of food insecurity that are more than double the national average. In the last year alone, a barrage of devastating disasters has magnified the issue, said Crum, causing local demand for the nonprofit’s donation program to reach new highs. Just in February, the region was hit hard by torrential rain and flash floods.

  “[This region] has really dealt with so much, with the recent hurricanes and mudslides and tornadoes. And our farmers are hurting, and our people are hurting, and our people are hungry,” Crum said. “It’s an emotional roller coaster for everybody.”

  Read more: ‘Our people are hungry’: What federal food aid cuts mean in a warming world

  — Ayurella Horn-Muller and Naveena Sadasivam

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline They lost their jobs and funding under Trump. What did communities lose? on Jul 24, 2025.

Zoe Jonick didn’t think she was asking for much when she went before the Oakland City Council with what she considered a simple request: Urge the California state legislature to vote yes on a bill requiring the state to study the feasibility of ditching Pacific Gas & Electric and embracing public power.

It didn’t seem unreasonable, given that the nearby cities of San Francisco, Berkeley, and Richmond had done exactly that in recent months. What Jonick, an organizer with the climate organization 350 Bay Area, and others backing the move wanted the city to do was push state lawmakers to support SB 332. The legislation would explore alternatives to investor-owned utilities and introduce safety and equity measures to improve service. “We’re not being prescriptive and saying what exactly a not-for-profit system would look like,” she said. 

Yet this proved to be too much for the City Council, even if dozens of residents spoke out against the utility — which employs more than 8,000 people in Oakland — during a tense council meeting last week. The legislation, which also would have urged regulators to link utility executive compensation to power reliability and grid safety, was pulled from the agenda by a procedural maneuver. “It seems like a number of the council members have not had an opportunity to meet with both sides,” said Kevin Jenkins, the council president.

It was the latest setback in a nationwide campaign to replace investor-owned utilities with publicly owned operations. Advocates argue such a move would lead to cheaper, more reliable power and greater say for residents in how electricity is generated. Despite some victories here and there — Winter Park, Florida, and Jefferson County, Washington, have flipped the switch, and some nonprofit utilities, like California’s Sacramento Municipal Utility District, are many decades old — they’re fighting an uphill battle. Voters in Maine rejected switching to public power in 2023, an effort to do so in San Diego stalled amid skepticism from city leaders, and the city council in Ann Arbor, Michigan voted down a feasibility study proposal five months ago.

Those hoping to see Oakland join the fight come from the climate and environmental justice world. People of color comprise about 70 percent of the population, and almost 14 percent of the city’s 438,000 people live at or below the federal poverty line, leaving them burdened by utility debt. Critics of the utility, known locally at PG&E, also say the for-profit model disincentivizes maintenance and upgrades. That lack of upkeep contributed to faulty equipment sparking at least 31 fires, which killed 113 people, between 2017 and 2022.

Oakland council member Carroll Fife sponsored the measure in support of Senate Bill 332, the Investor-Owned Utilities Accountability Act. Beyond calling for a feasibility study, the bill ties executive bonuses to affordability metrics and requires all utilities to publish disconnection data on their websites. California’s utility bills are the second-priciest in the nation, and Fife said people in her district have experienced six rate hikes and frequent cutoffs in the past year — even as PG&E’s CEO earned $17 million.

“When I’m hearing that one ZIP code in my district in West Oakland has double-digit shutoffs for energy costs, I get concerned,” Fife said. “There are several neighborhoods in Oakland where at least 10 percent of the population has had their power cut off and remains without access to power.”

Critics say public power doesn’t necessarily mean cleaner power: Nebraska, the only state served entirely by a public utility, gets most of its electricity from coal. They also argue that the process of transforming a large utility system into a nonprofit would be time-intensive and expensive, and that they could cost electrical workers their jobs. But those weren’t the primary concerns constituents brought to Fife in voicing their reservations: She said Oaklanders were afraid that PG&E grant funding to local nonprofits would be cut off. 

Read Next Utilities are shutting off power to a growing number of households Akielly Hu

The company, which provides power to about 16 million people throughout California, is Oakland’s second-largest employer, and it recently spent $900 million relocating to Oakland. The utility also is a big philanthropic player — it provided nearly 1,000 grants throughout the state totaling $36 million last year, and spent $3.5 million on Oakland nonprofits in particular.  Fife said nonprofit leaders she’s known for “two, three decades” said they supported her resolution but feared losing funding over it. (None of them spoke at the July 15 council meeting.) 

“The lobbyists for PG&E were telling people that I specifically was trying to push PG&E out of Oakland, that I would be responsible for a lack of charitable giving to nonprofits in my district and in the city,” she said. 

A PG&E representative, in an emailed statement, said the company “did not, and would not, suggest that we would pull our charitable support.” 

“We stand ready to continue to listen to the concerns of City Council members and citizens, and we look forward to continuing to work with city officials on tangible efforts to advance energy equity, climate resilience, and public safety.” 

The company representative did not comment on SB 332, but the company made the its thoughts clear during a Senate hearing in May: “SB 332 proposes sweeping changes without fully accounting for existing regulatory safeguards or the operational complexities of transforming the state’s energy infrastructure,” a PG&E lobbyist told lawmakers. 

PG&E’s response speaks to the vehemence with which investor-owned utilities fight to maintain their hold over energy. When advocates of public power in Maine managed to get a referendum on the ballot, the state’s two dominant utilities spent more than $40 million to oppose it, outspending its advocates 34 to 1 and handily defeating the measure.

Even if Oakland’s resolution is out of play for now, the city’s public-power advocates aren’t done. As SB 332 continues moving through the legislature, “We’re also building this movement from the ground up,” Jonick said. That might look like more community workshops, or more city council resolutions. Above all, it’ll look like neighbors talking to each other. “No matter what, we’re going to be pushing to build community understanding that another way is possible, and we can fight the utility monopolies’ hold on us.”

Correction: This story originally misspelled Carroll Fife’s first name, and has been updated to reflect the latest version of SB 332.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The national fight for public power comes to Oakland on Jul 24, 2025.

Like so much of an iceberg is hidden underwater, much of a tree is hidden underground. While the trunk and branches and leaves sequester planet-warming carbon dioxide, trees and other plants have long formed subterranean alliances with mycorrhizal fungi, which intertwine with their roots to establish a mutually beneficial trade network. In exchange for helping everything from oaks to redwoods find water and essential nutrients like nitrogen, the fungi get energy, in the form of carbon that their partners have pulled from the atmosphere. 

A whole lot of carbon, in fact: Worldwide, some 13 billion tons of CO2 flows from plants to mycorrhizal fungi every year — about a third of humanity’s emissions from fossil fuels — not to mention the CO2 they help trees capture by growing big and strong. Yet when you hear about campaigns to conserve and plant more trees to slow climate change, you don’t hear about the mycorrhizal fungi. Humanity may be missing the forest for the trees, in other words, in part because without going somewhere and digging, it’s hard to tell what mycorrhizal species are associating with what plants in a given ecosystem.

Mycorrhizal fungi in Italy’s Apennine Mountains Seth Carnill

A new research project is trying to change that. The Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, or SPUN, has launched the Underground Atlas, an interactive tool that maps mycorrhizal fungi diversity around the world. It’s a resource for scientists and conservationists to better understand where to focus on protecting these species so they can keep sequestering carbon and provide other critical services in ecosystems. “We’ve known for a long time that these mycorrhizal fungi are very important in ecosystems, and that they exist all over the planet and partner with lots of different plants,” said fungal ecologist Michael Van Nuland, lead data scientist at SPUN and lead author of a new paper describing the work in the journal Nature. “But it’s been hard to match that sense of scale with large datasets or large-scale, high-resolution maps.”

To build this atlas, Van Nuland and his colleagues didn’t visit every square foot of vegetation on Earth and take soil samples, because they didn’t have to. Instead, they analyzed the DNA of mycorrhizal fungi samples from 130 countries. Because they knew the conditions where the samples were taken — local temperatures, precipitation, vegetation type, even the pH of the soil — they could teach a computer model to associate those characteristics with different species of fungi. 

SPUN

Now the system could predict what mycorrhizal species should live in a given place, even if scientists haven’t been at that exact spot to collect a sample. In the map above, brighter colors indicate a greater diversity of a group known as ectomycorrhizal fungi, which grow as sheaths around roots. Notice the glowing areas in the far north, which include boreal forests. “It is nice to see that their model recapitulates the patterns that we mostly know to expect of high diversity in those temperate boreal regions,” said fungal ecologist Laura M. Bogar, who studies ectomycorrhizal fungi at the University of California, Davis, but wasn’t involved in the research.

SPUN

The map above inverts that dynamic. It shows the predicted richness of the second group, the arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. (You can play with the map here. To toggle between the two groups, hit the button at lower right.) Instead of encasing the roots, these penetrate them. Notice their species richness beyond the boreal forests, especially in the tropics. Interestingly, an arbuscular fungi hot spot isn’t the Amazon rainforest, but the adjacent savanna in Brazil. “When you think where the hottest hot spots on the planet for biodiversity are, most people are going to think about the Amazon rainforest,” Van Nuland said. “But for this type of mycorrhizal fungal group, that’s in the surrounding ecosystem.”

Scientists are still working out what influences the global distribution of ectomycorrhizal and arbuscular fungi. Complicating matters, though, is the fact that the two groups can overlap in the same environments. Bogar, for instance, works in Northern California with Douglas fir trees, which have ectomycorrhizal fungi, and redwoods, which have arbuscular fungi. “Even though to me standing on the ground, they both look like just really tall, beautiful trees that probably have similar ecology,” Bogar said. “From the perspective of a fungus interacting with their roots, they’re profoundly different.”

Scientists taking samples in Tierra del Fuego, Chile Mateo Barrenengoa

Globally, the researchers found that just 9.5 percent of fungal biodiversity hot spots lie within existing protected areas. If an area is deforested to make way for cattle grazing — a particularly acute problem in the Amazon — mycorrhizal fungi lose the partners they need for energy, and the planet loses a powerful symbiosis that naturally draws down carbon into soils. Without a robust population of fungi, nutrients leech out of the system, and soil erosion increases. “There are all these other cascading benefits, beyond just how much carbon physically goes into the bodies of the fungi,” Van Nuland said.

Not only do mycorrhizal fungi have to deal with humans degrading their habitats, but the climate around them is rapidly changing. Van Nuland and his colleagues included historical data in their model, which found that climates that were stable over long periods allowed unique and rare symbioses to evolve between plants and fungi. With the atmosphere now in flux — both with rising temperatures and worsening droughts — those unique symbioses may be at risk, imperiling both plant and mycorrhizal fungus. 

Equipped with the atlas, scientists might be able to better prioritize where they venture in the field to study the fungi, Bogar said. Van Nuland, meanwhile, is trying to determine the best way to conserve these essential fungi, especially the biodiversity hot spots popping up on the map. “We don’t know if the same protection strategies work for mycorrhizal fungi like they do for plant and animal biodiversity,” Van Nuland said. “We are actively researching that right now.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline There’s a surprising climate solution right under your feet on Jul 24, 2025.

From Texas clear to Georgia, from the Gulf Coast on up to the Canadian border, a mass of dangerous heat has started spreading like an atmospheric plague. In the days and perhaps even weeks ahead, a high-pressure system, known as a heat dome, will drive temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in some places, impacting some 160 million Americans. Extra-high humidity will make that weather even more perilous — while the thermometer may read 100, it might actually feel more like 110. 

So what exactly is a heat dome, and why does it last so long? And what gives with all the extra moisture? 

A heat dome is a self-reinforcing machine of misery. It’s a system of high-pressure air, which sinks from a few thousand feet up and compresses as it gets closer to the ground. When molecules in the air have less space, they bump into each other and heat up. “I think about it like a mosh pit,” said Shel Winkley, the weather and climate engagement specialist at the research group Climate Central. “Everybody’s moving around and bumping into each other, and it gets hotter.”

But these soaring temperatures aren’t happening on their own with this heat dome. The high pressure also discourages the formation of clouds, which typically need rising air. “There’s going to be very little in the way of cloudiness, so it’ll be a lot of sunshine which, in turn, will warm the atmosphere even more,” said AccuWeather senior meteorologist Tom Kines. “You’re just kind of trapping that hot air over one part of the country.”

In the beginning, a heat dome evaporates moisture in the soil, which provides a bit of cooling. But then, the evaporation will significantly raise humidity. (A major contributor during this month’s heat dome will be the swaths of corn crops across the central U.S., which could help raise humidity in states like Minnesota, Iowa, and Indiana above that of Florida.) This sort of high pressure system also grabs moisture from the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, which evaporate more water the hotter they get. And generally speaking, the warmer the atmosphere becomes, the more moisture it can hold. Once that moisture in the landscape is all gone, more heat accumulates — and more and more. A heat dome, then, essentially feeds off itself, potentially for weeks, a sort of giant blow drier pointed at the landscape. 

On their own, temperatures soaring over 100 are bad enough for human health. Such high humidity makes it even harder for the human body to cool itself, because it’s harder for sweat to evaporate. Hence 100 degrees on the thermometer feeling more like 110. The elderly and very young can’t cool their bodies as efficiently, putting them at higher risk. Those with heart conditions are also vulnerable, because the human body tries to cool itself by pumping more blood. And those with outdoor jobs — construction workers, garbage collectors, delivery drivers on bikes or scooters — have little choice but to toil in the heat, with vanishingly few laws to protect them.

Read Next After deadly flash floods, a Texas town takes halting, painful steps toward recovery Naveena Sadasivam

The humidity effect is especially pronounced in areas whose soils are soaked with recent rainfall, like central Texas, which earlier this month suffered catastrophic flooding. There’s the potential for “compound disasters” here: relief efforts in inundated areas like Kerr County now have to reckon with soaring temperatures as well. The Gulf of Mexico provided the moisture that made the flooding so bad, and now it’s providing additional humidity during the heat dome.

A heat dome gets all the more dangerous the longer it stagnates on the landscape. And unfortunately, climate change is making these sorts of heat waves longer and more intense. According to Climate Central, climate change made this heat dome at least five times more likely. “These temperatures aren’t necessarily impossible, but they’d be very hard to happen without a fingerprint of climate change,” Winkley said.

Summer nights are warming almost twice as fast as summer days, Winkley adds, which makes heat waves all the more dangerous. As this heat dome takes hold, nighttime low temperatures may go up 15 degrees above average. For those without air conditioning — or who can’t afford to run it even if they have AC — their homes will swelter through the night, the time when temperatures are supposed to come down and give respite. Without that, the stress builds and builds, especially for those vulnerable groups. 

“When you look at this heat wave, yes, it is going to be uncomfortable during the day,” Winkley said. “But it’s especially those nighttime temperatures that are the big blinking red light that this is a climate change-boosted event.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The science behind the heat dome — ‘a mosh pit’ of molecules on Jul 22, 2025.

When former Grist fellow Joseph Lee tells people that his family is from Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts, they invariably look confused about what it means to be from a popular vacation spot for U.S. presidents and celebrities like Oprah. Their confusion deepens when he explains that he’s Indigenous and a member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag nation.

“Their surprise says as much about Martha’s Vineyard as it does about the way this country sees Indigenous people,” Lee writes in his new book, Nothing More of This Land, which was published last week. “Very few people ever say it, but I can always feel an unspoken ‘but I thought you were all dead’ in those moments.”

Throughout his book, Lee grapples with the question of what it means to be Indigenous. It’s a question intricately connected to climate change, Lee says, because it’s a question directly related to land. On Martha’s Vineyard, Lee’s community has long been saddled with the effects of colonization, which fuels both extreme gentrification and rising sea levels. Lee traces the history of his own tribal nation, reflects on being mixed race and living in diaspora, and envisions potential futures unencumbered by colonial constraints.   

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Q. How would you describe the connection between Indigenous identity and climate change? 

A. When you talk about Indigenous people, you have to talk about land. And right now, when you’re talking about land in any context, climate change is the looming backdrop. So many of the challenges Indigenous communities are facing may not be outwardly related to climate change, but they’re impacted by climate change. Fighting for water rights, which I would say is a sovereignty fight and a political fight, is made more difficult and the stakes are higher because of drought. Tensions around land ownership and what we do with our land are also made more complicated by climate impacts like rising sea levels and stronger storms that are eating away at our land. If you’re fighting over land and land you’re fighting over is shrinking because sea levels are rising, it makes that fight much more intense and much more urgent. You could look at salmon and the right to protect salmon and for subsistence lifestyles and all that’s becoming more complicated not just because of overfishing but because the way that salmon and other fish are impacted by warming waters and climate change. Any area of the story that you’re looking at, climate change is present. 

Q. I also grew up on an island that is a tourism hub, and in so many communities that’s often perceived as the only viable economic driver. Can you talk about what it feels like to be Indigenous in a land that’s become a tourist destination, and how that affects our communities? 

A. In this country, one part of the experience of being Indigenous is the experience of erasure and of being ignored. That’s throughout history, through culture, through politics, through all these spaces. But I think especially in a place like Martha’s Vineyard, it’s even more extreme because the reputation of the place is so big and so specific. Being Indigenous, people are really often not listening to you. The more your land becomes a tourist destination, the harder it is for Indigenous voices to be heard, the harder it is for Indigenous people to hold onto the land. 

In a very concrete way, tourism typically drives property values up. It drives taxes up. And that makes it harder for folks to hold on to land that’s been in the family for generations. And that’s what’s happened in Martha’s Vineyard. Beyond that, I think tourism is just a really, really difficult and unfortunate choice that people have been kind of forced into. When so much opportunity has been taken away or denied from Indigenous communities in these places, tourism is often the only thing that’s left. So it can become like a choice between having nothing and contributing to tourism, which is probably ultimately harming the community and the land, but there’s no other way to make a living. So I think that’s just a really unfortunate reality.

Q. There’s a part in the book where you’re talking about how every time you say you’re from Martha’s Vineyard, people either assume you’re really rich or they think, “Oh, I didn’t realize that people live there.” And that really resonated with me because when I say I’m from Saipan or Guam, people either don’t know what it is or they assume, “Oh, are you military?” And then when I say I’m not military, they are confused. This is a long way of asking: What do you want people to know about your community and your tribe in particular, separate from the broader journey of this book? Is there anything that you wish people knew that this book could convey so that other tribal members don’t have to be on the receiving end of that question?

A. First, I hope that this will help to change the narrative of erasure that has existed about Wampanoag people for most of this country’s history. At the very least, I hope this helps people know that we exist — we’re here. And also, I like to think that it helps to show some of the complexity and diversity of my community: that we have disagreements, we have different perspectives, we have different talents, we live in different places.

Something else that your question made me think of was the question of audience. And I thought about that a lot. Even growing up within the tribe, there was so much just about my own community that I didn’t know. And so I try not to be judgmental of what people know, whether they’re Indigenous or not. And that’s how I really wanted to approach the book. I would hope that Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers can get something out of it, both in terms of learning things, but also hopefully seeing themselves in the pages and this exploration of figuring out who we are and where we want our community to go. 

Q. Another part that really resonated with me and I think a lot of Indigenous readers will relate to is the struggle of what does it mean to be Indigenous if you aren’t living on your land. I was wondering what you hope Indigenous readers will take away from the book in terms of understanding what distance from their land can mean for their identity. 

A. I hope that Indigenous readers will discover what I’ve discovered, which is that there are so many ways to engage with your homelands and your home community, even if you don’t live there. I used to think that I was only engaging if I was there with the tribe doing some cultural tribal event or something, and I realized that there are so many other ways of engaging. I don’t think any of us are less Indigenous because we live somewhere else.

For a long time I felt like if it wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t worth it. If it wasn’t the perfect ideal of me participating in the tribe, I thought I shouldn’t do it. Ultimately what that led to is I just wasn’t doing anything because I didn’t have as many opportunities to go to these tribal gatherings or participate in tribal politics. And so I just did nothing, and I felt the distance sort of growing over the years. What other people can do is realize that there are all these small ways to engage and to try to embrace those, and not let ideas of what it means to be Indigenous be defined by outsiders, or these big colonial structures like federal recognition, for example, or blood quantum.

Q. Why? What’s at stake? Why do you think it’s important for folks to embrace Indigenous identity and why is it important, particularly at this moment? 

A. Circling back to what we talked about at the beginning, we’re not going to be able to address these huge existential crises like climate change if we can’t be at least in some way united as a community, as a people. If we’re always fighting over who belongs and what does it mean to be Indigenous and saying that people are less Indigenous because of XYZ, that takes away our ability to tackle those bigger challenges. Right now we’re facing these serious challenges and that’s what we should be dealing with, so figuring this out is the first step. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Rising seas, vanishing voices: An Indigenous story from Martha’s Vineyard on Jul 22, 2025.

For more than half a century, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development, or ORD, has furnished the EPA with independent research on everything from ozone pollution to pesticides like glyphosate. Last week, after months of speculation and denial, the EPA officially confirmed that it is eliminating its research division and slashing thousands more employees from its payroll in the agency’s quest to cut 23 percent of its workforce. The latest moves add to the nearly 4,000 personnel who have already resigned, retired, or been laid off, according to the agency’s calculations. 

The decision came directly on the heels of a Supreme Court order that greenlit the Trump administration’s efforts to downsize and restructure the federal government. 

With approximately 1,115 employees — just 7 percent of the EPA’s head count at the start of President Donald Trump’s second term — the research office has played an outsized role in helping the agency fulfill its legal mandate to use the “best available science” in its mission to protect human health and the environment. ORD science has underpinned many of the EPA’s restrictions on contaminants in air, water, and soil, and formed the basis for regulations on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS — also known as “forever chemicals” — in drinking water; deadly fine particulate matter in air; carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere; and chemicals and metals like asbestos and lead.

“Without a research arm, it will be very difficult for EPA to issue new standards for air or water pollutants, toxic chemicals, pesticides, or other hazards,” said Michael Gerrard, faculty director of the Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. 

ORD, which works with states, local governments, and tribes in addition to its federal work, has six national research programs, each one focused on a different aspect of health and the environment. Research being undertaken at those centers included studying how to safeguard water systems from terrorist attacks, understanding the impacts of extreme weather on human health, and modeling the economic benefits of reducing air pollution.

The EPA said it is moving some of ORD staff into other parts of the EPA, including into its air, water, and chemical offices and a new Office of Applied Science and Environmental Solutions within EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s office. The agency said the moves will save taxpayers nearly $750 million and produce an agency that closely resembles the shrunken version of the agency that existed under President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. The aim, the agency said, is to “prioritize research and science more than ever before.” 

In an email to Grist, an agency spokesperson called media reports about the disbanding of ORD “biased” and denied that the changes will affect the quality of EPA science. “Friday’s announcement is not an elimination of science and research,” the agency said. 

But former EPA employees and environmental advocates say disbanding ORD will both weaken the EPA’s research capabilities and put its scientific independence at risk of political interference.

“Part of the reason why ORD is a separate office is to preserve scientific integrity,” said Chris Frey, an associate dean at North Carolina State University who worked in the office on and off from 1992 to 2024, most recently as its Assistant Administrator under former president Joe Biden. “From a societal perspective, it’s a huge win for the public that those decisions be based on evidence and not just opinions of stakeholders to have a vested interest in an outcome.” The EPA hasn’t said how many ORD scientists will be allowed to continue working at the agency. 

Already, the U.S. regulatory system gives chemical companies like 3M and DuPont a large degree of influence over how the chemicals they produce are controlled, a strategy that has been known to fail. Under the Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA, the EPA has 90 days to assess a chemical’s risks before it hits the market. 

The EPA’s decision to dissolve ORD and integrate a portion of its scientists into the agency’s policymaking infrastructure stands to benefit chemical companies and industrial polluters by rubbing away the boundaries between science and politics, science advocates argue. Research conducted at ORD not only grounded new EPA regulations, it also provided the scientific basis for TSCA enforcement. 

“There’s lots of ways that ORD speaking truth about impacts of pollutants was inconvenient for regulated industry,” said Gretchen Goldman, president of the nonprofit science advocacy organization the Union of Concerned Scientists. “They’re probably celebrating over this.” 

Despite recent wins, industry trade and lobby groups are pushing for even more freedom. Last week, on the same day the EPA announced it was disbanding ORD and a day after the EPA separately exempted dozens of chemical factories and power plants from Biden-era air pollution and emissions rules, the American Chemistry Council’s President and CEO Chris Jahn floated the idea of making changes to the Toxic Substances Control Act in an interview with The Washington Examiner. 

“EPA Administrator Zeldin, the White House, Congress are all looking at this right now,” he said, “to potentially make some updates to TSCA to make it work more effectively for the long run.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This EPA research office safeguarded Americans’ health. Trump just eliminated it. on Jul 21, 2025.