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 14) and ‘renewable energy development’ (D 6). By articulating how their climate and clean energy agenda can address these bread-and-butter concerns, Democrats can leverage their advantage on climate to win voters’ trust on what will likely be the most significant issues in 2026 and 2028.”

One of the troubles with climate change in political discourse is that some people’s understanding of environmental politics begins and ends with the spotted owl logging battles in the 1990s. This is the sort of attitude that drives the assumption that affordability policy and climate policy are not only distinct but actually opposed. But that’s wildly disconnected from present reality.

Maybe Tom Steyer isn’t the guy to illustrate that! But his political fortunes, either way, don’t say much at all about climate messaging more broadly.

A new study finds that babies of mothers “whose drinking water wells were downstream of PFAS releases” died at almost three times the rate in their first year of life as babies of mothers who did not live downstream of PFAS contamination. Read The Washington Post’s report on the study here.

More than 200 environmental groups demand halt to new US datacenters

An open letter calls on Congress to pause all approvals of new data centers until regulation catches up, due to problems such as data centers’ voracious energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and water use. From The Guardian’s report:

The push comes amid a growing revolt against moves by companies such as Meta, Google and Open AI to plow hundreds of billions of dollars into new datacenters, primarily to meet the huge computing demands of AI. At least 16 datacenter projects, worth a combined $64bn, have been blocked or delayed due to local opposition to rising electricity costs. The facilities’ need for huge amounts of water to cool down equipment has also proved controversial, particularly in drier areas where supplies are scarce.

These seemingly parochial concerns have now multiplied to become a potent political force, helping propel Democrats to a series of emphatic recent electoral successes in governor elections in Virginia and New Jersey as well as a stunning upset win in a special public service commission poll in Georgia, with candidates campaigning on lowering power bill costs and curbing datacenters.

Read Oliver Milman’s full report at The Guardian.

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

Climate advocates “worry they are losing the information war,” The New York Times reported this week. Climate disinformation is pervasive, and “only 21 of the nearly 200 countries that signed the Paris Agreement” signed a declaration at this year’s U.N. climate conference about trying to address that. While polls show the public is concerned about climate change, bogus claims about clean energy being unreliable or damaging are “steadily growing, amplified by social media,” and those urging policy responses to the climate crisis are increasingly “labeled ‘alarmists’ who propose radical solutions,” wrote reporters Lisa Friedman and Steven Lee Myers.

This is depressing, maddening stuff. TNR has been covering climate obstructionists’ transition from straightforward “denial” to these more elaborate forms of disinformation since at least 2020, and in recent years the problem has only gotten worse.

But I have a quibble: Climate advocates aren’t losing the information war. They’re losing the money and power war. That’s an important distinction—not least because it requires a different approach, one focused on radically curbing the influence of money in politics. And while losing the money and power war might seem even grimmer than losing the info war, there’s actually a ray of hope in all this.

It’s not just that 65 percent of Americans say they’re at least “somewhat worried” about climate change. Per the latest large-scale survey from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 48 percent say people in the United States are being harmed “right now,” with 46 percent saying “they have personally experienced the effects of global warming.”

If you say you have “personally experienced the effects of global warming,” you are basing that in part on concrete experience—even if you can be influenced in how you interpret that experience. In the Obama years, the percentage of people who said they personally experienced the effects of global warming was in the 20s and 30s, but it has risen steadily since then, and in the 2020s has never dropped below 40 percent.

The experiences of climate change are going to become easier, not harder, to recognize in coming years. Perhaps the fossil fuel industry and its allies are pushing disinformation so wildly right now because they know this is an uphill battle. Arguably, they have already lost it. They cannot possibly win the information war when the information every day becomes more observable with the naked eye—and in people’s finances. Will people easily dismiss climate and affordability policy as “radical” as their homes tank in value, food and insurance costs spiral, and severe weather destroys their homes, finances, and lives? Maybe not.

Where climate obstructionists clearly are winning is the policy arena—the money, the power. The Trump administration is taking a sledgehammer to nearly every climate-friendly policy enacted by the prior administration. Tech titans and big banks are backing off their once-shiny promises to reduce their emissions, and the race to build more data centers for AI is slowing or even reversing the energy transition. Establishment Democrats are backing away from climate policy out of fear of losing elections to Republicans—even though there’s not a ton of evidence that this is a good strategy, and ample evidence for the opposite strategy.

What the climate obstructionists are also in danger of winning is the nihilism war. As Aaron Regunberg and other writers at TNR and elsewhere have pointed out, the fossil fuel industry is, to a certain extent, counting on people’s limited energy and constant discouragement. “Big Oil wants us........

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