The Trump administration will stop counting lives saved in its cost-benefit analyses of air pollution regulations, and instead will only consider the cost to businesses. “It’s a seismic shift that runs counter to the [Environmental Protection Agency]’s mission statement, which says the agency’s core responsibility is to protect human health and the environment,” The New York Times reported this week. “The change could make it easier to repeal limits on [fine particulate matter and ozone] from coal-burning power plants, oil refineries, steel mills and other industrial facilities across the country.”

Declaring the demise of climate policy is practically a weekly media event these days. “The climate agenda’s fall from grace over the past year has been stunning—in scale and scope,” wrote Axios’s Amy Harder in this week’s installment, noting that the president recently withdrew from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. “Whether this collapse in climate-change ambition proves permanent or temporary will shape the planet—which is still warming in unprecedented ways—and trillions of dollars in global energy investment.”

Of course, the “collapse” has not been stunning in any way: It is precisely what the Trump team promised, and the international repercussions are precisely what experts predicted. But more importantly, can one even call it a collapse? The vague phrase “the climate agenda” is doubtless intended to conjure Greta Thunberg and the Green New Deal, and yes, that agenda has been summarily abandoned by a lot of politicians of late. But Trump does have a climate agenda. It’s just a negative and bloody one, as it’s intertwined with his authoritarianism.

Consider the U.S. military invasion of Venezuela. However murderous and abusive Maduro’s regime, killing some 75 people to kidnap him and having no clear plan to stabilize the country—except to exploit oil reserves that would blow 13 percent of the global carbon budget by 2050, making life costlier and more precarious for everyone but oligarchs—is clearly not a humanitarian intervention. It’s an intervention, albeit a very clumsy one, on behalf of the business interests Trump’s chummy with.

It’s the same principle on display with Greenland. Trump is proposing a forced takeover of a sovereign territory in order to dictate the terms of extraction of rare earths and fossil fuels, while seizing a slice of the rapidly melting Arctic pie. The administration claims this is a matter of national security, but it’s hard to see how overturning the NATO table and smashing it to smithereens will make ordinary people safer—particularly if this unleashes Russia and China to pursue similarly imperialist plans. What it will do is enrich the companies that get lucrative contracts.

Authoritarianism is a response to climate change, as numerous people have warned for years. That includes imperialism and the race to secure resources, the criminalization of protest, and anti-immigration policy. It’s not an attempt to prevent global warming, but rather an attempt to protect a chosen few—to build a wall, whether figurative or literal, around a certain class of people.

The new EPA policy, which explicitly rejects lives saved as a lesser concern than business profits, exposes this line of thinking. You’ve heard it before, though. Fighting climate change would be too costly, so the narrative goes. Costly to whom? Not fighting climate change is already very costly to everyone else, whether in terms of affordability or lives lost.

Insofar as there is hope in all this, it lies in the mounting body of evidence that this approach is in fact extremely unpopular. Voters overwhelmingly oppose the Trump administration’s moves to shut down climate research. They oppose gutting the regulations limiting pollution. And they increasingly see the connection between the climate crisis and the cost-of-living crisis. The authoritarian sales pitch has always been about convincing voters that they are to be a part of the protected class. More and more people are now saying they’re not convinced.

Current U.S. plans to exploit Venezuelan oil reserves would burn through 13 percent of the global carbon budget needed to keep warming under 1.5 degrees, the Guardian
reports.

RFK Jr. Forgot What Makes Us Healthy

The recently released inverted food pyramid has a lot of problems. Emily Atkin cuts to the heart of the matter.

This is my biggest problem with the new food pyramid. It treats food as a purely biological input rather than a public ecological choice—as if health exists on a separate plane from the land, water, and climate that make nourishment possible in the first place. Thinking this way may make sense for individual bodies in the short term. But in the long term, and in the aggregate, it’s deeply irresponsible.

You cannot build a healthy society on top of an unhealthy biosphere. The climate, water, soil, and land that produce our food are as important to our health as the food itself. Without them, all our talk of “healthy eating” becomes a kind of denial—pretending we can thrive while the systems that keep us alive break down.

Read Emily Atkin’s full essay at Heated.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

You’d need a full-screen infographic with live updates to keep track of all the MAGA infighting these days. President Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is trashing him in a new Vanity Fair interview. Stephen Miller wants to get rid of Kristi Noem. Marjorie Taylor Greene has called Trump’s comments on Rob Reiner’s death “classless” and “wrong,” and warns that the “dam is breaking” in GOP support for the president. Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, and Tucker Carlson are brawling over their conspiracy theories concerning Charlie Kirk’s death, and also Israel, a topic that likewise divides Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro. Shapiro has in turn denounced Heritage Foundation leader Kevin Roberts for defending Carlson after Carlson hosted white nationalist Holocaust-denier Fuentes on his show. Heritage staffers are also angry about this.

But there’s also another feud that’s been simmering quietly for months: The Make America Healthy Again movement has beef with EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin. This was in theory predictable, given that Zeldin has packed the Environmental Protection Agency with chemical- and ag-industry veterans, while MAHA wants to rid the world of environmental toxins. But the fight was brewing for a while, so it’s interesting to see it finally break out in public. And the exact outcome of the conflict remains to be determined.

The MAHA movement associated with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has always had, shall we say, an above-average rate of producing strange bedfellows. In their pursuit of healthy lifestyles, these groups and influencers advocate vaccine and pharmaceutical skepticism; ridding the nation’s water supplies of both fluoride and the abortion drug mifepristone; returning to raw milk; regenerative agriculture; eliminating soda and sweets from SNAP; and stricter regulation or outright bans of food dyes, preservatives, pesticides, PFAS, microplastics, and other pollutants.

Zeldin’s EPA, however, has been steadily rolling back various chemical regulations and clearing the way for expedited pesticide approvals. In late October, several MAHA advocates met with top EPA officials to “express concerns” about pesticide use and contamination of food. “The response,” according to a post by attendee John Klar at The MAHA Report, “was less than impressive.” Then, two weeks ago, MAHA activists put together a petition calling for Zeldin to be fired, writing that he had “prioritized the interests of chemical corporations over the wellbeing of American families and children.”

This got Zeldin’s attention, leading him to go on what The New York Times’ Hiroko Tabuchi described as a “charm offensive.” First, “he made a surprise appearance at a MAHA holiday reception,” reported Tabuchi. “There, he invited activists to visit him at E.P.A. headquarters the following day. There, he introduced them to senior department heads and promised that the agency would adopt a ‘MAHA agenda.’”

This seems to have earned him at least some goodwill. At The MAHA Report, Klar wrote that Zeldin’s MAHA critics were “encouraged” by his efforts, particularly Zeldin’s insistence that he “remains committed to opposing PFAS” and that the EPA favors “​​a polluter pays model for cleaning up PFAS.”

But it’s hard to believe Zeldin will follow through on any of this. The Trump administration was pretty clear from the get-go that it was out to gut environmental regulation and give chemical companies free rein. As Civil Eats’ Lisa Held noted when reporting on MAHA advocates’ October meeting, all of the top officials whom MAHA advocates met with to demand tighter pesticide regulations had “worked for chemical or agriculture industries in the past.” The EPA just approved two new PFAS pesticides in November and has proposed various regulatory rollbacks for the chemicals.

Where does this go next? It might be tempting to respond derisively to a group going by “Make America Healthy Again” whose complaint seems to be that the Trump administration is poisoning the country with pesticides and PFAS faster than it’s bringing back measles by undermining vaccines. But this tension between MAHA and Zeldin is part of a genuine vulnerability in the MAHA-MAGA alliance—as much as they may agree, disturbingly, on other things. Will MAHA ultimately knuckle under, deciding to hold their noses on pesticides while being placated by RFK Jr.’s vaccine rollbacks and food policies? Maybe—they did ally with Trump in the first place, despite having no reason to believe he would do anything other than gut environmental protections.

But then again, they might yet try to take Zeldin out rather than make nice with the MAGA crowd. And that could be why Zeldin’s suddenly in appeasement mode: In Trump’s administration, no appointee is indispensable.

Temperatures in the past year were the highest on record in the Arctic, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s latest report.

Michigan Lawmakers Introduce Bill to Repeal Data Center Tax Incentives

Backlash to data centers and AI is brewing. On Tuesday, democratic socialist Representative Dylan Wegela and Republican Representative Jim DeSana of the Freedom Caucus jointly introduced a new bill into Michigan’s legislature to repeal the tax incentives instituted in 2024 to entice large tech companies to build data centers in the state. These tax incentives were supported by both Democratic legislators and Governor Gretchen Whitmer. But as concern spreads that data centers may threaten the clean energy transition, strain the grid, increase energy bills, pollute water, and more, it seems some are hoping for a mulligan:

Wegela said it is “absurd to be subsidizing some of the wealthiest corporations in the country.”

“If they’re going to be coming here—and I don’t think most people want them coming here, especially at this scale—then at the bare minimum we should be taxing them the same as everyone else,” Wegela said.

The existing data center laws provide sales and use tax exemptions for big tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Related and others that are behind many centers. The tax revenue would otherwise go to the state’s school aid or general fund.

Read Tom Perkins’s full report at Inside Climate News.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

What should we make of billionaire Tom Steyer’s reinvention as a populist candidate for California governor, four years after garnering only 0.72 percent of the popular vote in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, despite obscene spending from his personal fortune? Is it evidence that he’s a hard man to discourage? (In that race, he dropped almost $24 million on South Carolina alone.) Is it evidence that billionaires get to do a lot of things the rest of us don’t? Or is it evidence that talking about climate change is for losers and Democrats need to abandon it?

Politico seems to think it’s the third one: Steyer running a populist gubernatorial campaign means voters don’t care about global warming.

“The billionaire environmental activist who built his political profile on climate change—and who wrote in his book last year that ‘climate is what matters most right now, and nothing else comes close’—didn’t mention the issue once in the video launching his campaign for California governor,” reporter Noah Baustin wrote recently. “That was no oversight.” Instead, “it reflects a political reality confronting Democrats ahead of the midterms, where onetime climate evangelists are running into an electorate more worried about the climbing cost of electricity bills and home insurance than a warming atmosphere.”

It’s hard to know how to parse a sentence like this. The “climbing cost of electricity bills and home insurance” is, indisputably, a climate issue. Renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuels, and home insurance is spiking because increasingly frequent and increasingly severe weather events—driven by climate change—are making large swaths of the country expensive or impossible to insure. The fact that voters are struggling to pay for utilities and insurance, therefore, is not evidence that they don’t care about climate change. Instead, it’s evidence that climate change is a kitchen table issue, and politicians are, disadvantageously, failing to embrace the obviously populist message that accompanies robust climate policy. This is a problem with Democratic messaging, not a problem with climate as a topic.

The piece goes on: “Climate concern has fallen in the state over time. In 2018, when Gov. Gavin Newsom was running for office, polling found that 57 percent of likely California voters considered climate change a very serious threat to the economy and quality of life for the state’s future. Now, that figure is 50 percent.”

This may sound persuasive to you. But in fact, it’s a highly selective reading of the PPIC survey data linked above. What the poll actually found is that the proportion of Californians calling climate change a “very serious” threat peaked at 57 percent in 2019, fell slightly in subsequent years, then fell precipitously by 11 points between July 2022 and July 2023, before rising similarly precipitously from July 2024 to July 2025.

Why did it fall so quickly from 2022 to 2023? Sure, maybe people stopped caring about climate change. Or maybe instead, the month after the 2022 poll, Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, the most significant climate policy in U.S. history, and people stopped being quite so worried. Why did concern then rise rapidly between July 2024 and July 2025? Well, between those two dates, Trump won the presidential election and proceeded, along with Republicans in Congress, to dismantle anything remotely resembling climate policy. The Inflation Reduction Act fell apart.

I’m not saying this is the only way to read this data. But consider this: The percentage of respondents saying they were somewhat or very worried about members of their household being affected by natural disasters actually went up over the same period. The percentage saying air pollution was “a more serious health threat in lower-income areas” nearby went up. Those saying flooding, heat waves, and wildfires should be considered “a great deal” when siting new affordable housing rose a striking 12 percentage points from 2024 to 2025, and those “very concerned” about rising insurance costs “due to climate risks” rose 14 percentage points.

This is not a portrait of an electorate that doesn’t care about climate change. It’s a portrait of an electorate that may actually be very ready to hear a politician convincingly embrace climate populism—championing affordability and better material conditions for working people, in part by protecting them from the predatory industries driving a cost-of-living crisis while poisoning people.

This is part of a broader problem. Currently, there’s a big push from centrist Democratic institutions to argue that the party should abandon climate issues in order to win elections. The evidence for this is mixed, at best. As TNR’s Liza Featherstone recently pointed out, Democrats’ striking victories last month showed that candidates fusing climate policy with an energy affordability message did very well. Aaron Regunberg went into further detail on why talking about climate change is a smart strategy: “Right now,” he wrote, “neither party has a significant trust advantage on ‘electric utility bills’ (D 1) or ‘the cost of living’ (R 1). But Democrats do have major trust advantages on ‘climate change’ (D........

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