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lee zeldin
Speaking to Career EPA Staffers Reveals What Will Be Lost if Trump Guts the Agency
If Zeldin, Musk, or Trump knew a scintilla about actual Environmental Protection Agency employees, they would dare not froth at the mouth with their toxic stereotypes about federal civil servants.
Mar 25, 2025
Neither Lee Zeldin, nor Elon Musk, nor President Donald Trump could possibly look Brian Kelly in the eye to tell him to his face that he is lazy.
They cannot tell Kayla Butler she is crooked.
They dare not accuse Luis Antonio Flores or Colin Kramer of lollygagging on the golf course.
If Zeldin, Musk, or Trump knew a scintilla about them, they would dare not froth at the mouth with their toxic stereotypes about federal civil servants. All four work in Region 5 of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), responsible for pollution monitoring, cleanups, community engagement, and emergency hazardous waste response for Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.
A decimated EPA means less scrutiny for another Flint water crisis, less eyeballs on Superfund sites, and limited ability to investigate toxic contamination after train derailments, such as the incident two years ago in East Palestine, Ohio.
The Midwest is historically so saturated with manufacturing that just those six states generated a quarter of the nation’s hazardous waste back in the 1970s, and it is still today home to a quarter of the nation’s facilities reporting to the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory Program. When I recently visited Region 5’s main office in Chicago, one enforcement officer, who did not give her name because of the sensitivity of her job, told me there are still toxic sites where “we show up [and] neither the state nor the EPA has ever been [there] to check.”
With irony, I visited the office the same week the Trump administration and Zeldin, President Trump’s new EPA administrator, announced they planned to cut 65% of the agency’s budget. Zeldin has since then dropped even more bombshells in a brazen attempt to gut the nation’s first line of defense against the poisoning of people, the polluting of the environment, and the proliferation of global warming gases.
Zeldin announced on March 12 more than 30 actions he plans to undertake to weaken or cripple air, water, wastewater, and chemical standards, including eliminating the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights and getting the EPA out of the business of curbing the carbon dioxide and methane gases fueling global warming. Despite record production that has the United States atop the world for oil, Zeldin said he was throttling down on regulations because they are “throttling the oil and gas industry.”
Last week, The New York Timesreported the EPA is considering firing half to three-quarters of its scientists (770 to 1,155 out of 1,540) and closing the Office of Research and Development, the agency’s scientific research office. Zeldin justifies this in part by deriding many EPA programs as “left-wing ideological projects.” He violently brags that he is “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.”
Impact of Cuts at EPA Felt Deeply, Broadly
Kelly, Butler, Flores, Kramer, and many others I talked with in Region 5 said all these plans are actually a bayonet ripping out the heart and soul of their mission. They all spoke to me on the condition that they were talking as members of their union, Local 704 of the American Federation of Government Employees. Nicole Cantello, union president and an EPA attorney, said the attacks on her members are unlike anything she’s seen in her more than 30 years with the agency. As much as prior conservative administrations may have criticized the agency, there’s never been one—until now—that tried to “fire everybody.”
Flores, a chemist who analyzes air, water, and soil samples for everything from lead to PCBs, said a decimated EPA means less scrutiny for another Flint water crisis, less eyeballs on Superfund sites, and limited ability to investigate toxic contamination after train derailments, such as the incident two years ago in East Palestine, Ohio. He added, “And we have a Great Lakes research vessel that tests the water across all the lakes. It’s important for drinking water, tourism, and fishing. If we get crippled, all that goes into question.”
“People will die,” he said. “There will be additional deaths if we roll back these protections.”
Butler is a community involvement coordinator who works through Superfund legislation to inform communities about remediation efforts. She was deeply concerned that urban neighborhoods and rural communities will be denied the scientific resources to tell the full story of environmental injustice. Superfund sites, the legacy of toxic chemicals used in manufacturing, military operations, mining, and landfills, are so poisonous, they can have cumulative, compound effects on affected communities, triggering many diseases. A 2023 EPA Inspector General report said the agency needed stronger policies, guidance, and performance measures to “assess and address cumulative impacts and disproportionate health effects on overburdened communities.”
Butler is deeply concerned cumulative impact assessments will not happen with cuts to the EPA, denying urban neighborhoods and rural communities the scientific resources to fully expose the horror of environmental injustice. “It’s a clear story that they’re trying to erase.” Butler said of the new administration.
For Kelly, an on-site emergency coordinator based out of Michigan, the rollbacks and the erasing of the story of environmental harms have an obvious conclusion. “People will die,” he said. “There will be additional deaths if we roll back these protections.”
What these workers also fear is the slow death of spirit amongst themselves to be civil servants.
Start with Kelly.
I actually talked to him from Chicago by telephone because he was out in Los Angeles County, deployed to assist with the cleanup of the devastating Eaton Fire that killed 17 people and destroyed more than 9,400 structures.
Between the Eaton Fire and the Palisades Fire, which took another 12 lives and destroyed another 6,800 buildings, the EPA conducted what it said was the largest wildfire hazardous materials cleanup in the history of the agency, and likely the most voluminous lithium battery removal in world history—primarily from the electric and hybrid vehicles and home battery storage people were forced to leave behind as they fled.
During a break, Kelly talked about how nimble he and his colleagues must be. He has worked cleanups of monster storms Katrina, Sandy, and Maria, and the East Palestine trail derailment. Based normally out of Michigan, he recalled a day he was working in the Upper Peninsula on a cleanup of an old abandoned mine processing site. He received a call from a state environmental emergency official asking him to drop what he was doing because 20 minutes away a gasoline tanker truck had flipped over, spilling about 6,000 gallons of gasoline onto the roads and down through the storm sewer into local waterways.
When he arrived, Kelly asked the fire chief how he could help. He was asked to set up air monitoring. But then he noticed anxious contractors who were wondering if they were going to get paid for their work. “They’re ordering supplies, they’re putting dirt down to contain this gasoline from getting any further,” Kelly said. “But they’re like, ‘Are we going to get paid for this?’”
“I found the truck driver who was talking to their insurance company. So I get on the phone with the insurance company and say, ‘Hey. This is who I am. This is what’s happening here. You need to come to terms and conditions with these contractors right now or EPA’s going to have to start taking this cleanup over!’”
The insurance was covered. Kelly said he could not have been so assertive with the insurance company without a robust EPA behind him.
“It’s one thing to be able go out and respond to these emergencies, but you have to have attorneys on your side,” Kelly said. “You’ve got to have enforcement specialists behind you. You’ve got to have people who are experts in drinking water and air. You can’t just have one person out there on an island by themselves.”
“Cruel for the Sake of Being Cruel”
Butler wonders if whole communities will become remote islands, surrounded by rising tides of pollution. The very morning of our interview, she was informed she was one of the thousands of federal workers across the nation who had their government purchase cards frozen by Elon Musk, the world’s richest human and President Trump’s destroyer of federal agencies. In launching the freeze, Musk claimed with no evidence, “A lot of shady expenditures happening.”
Butler threw shade on that, saying the purchase system is virtually foolproof with multiple layers of vetting and proof of purchase. She uses her purchase card to buy ads and place public notices in newspapers to keep communities informed about remediation of Superfund sites.
She has also used her card to piece together equipment to fit in a van for a mobile air monitor. The monitor assists with compliance, enforcement, and giving communities a read on possible toxic emissions and dust from nearby industrial operations.
Kramer wonders how many more scientists will follow in his footsteps to see that the work keeps getting done.
“I literally bought the nuts and bolts that feed into this van that allow the scientists to measure all the chemicals, all the air pollution,” Butler said. “I remember seeing the van for the first time after I bought so many things for years. And I was like ‘Wow this is real!’”
Not only was the van real, but air monitoring in general, along with soil monitoring—particularly in places like heavily polluted Southeast Chicago—has been a critical tool of environmental justice to get rid of mountains of petcoke dust and detect neurotoxic manganese dust in the air and lead in backyards.
“Air monitoring created so much momentum for the community and community members to say, ‘This is what we need,’” Butler said.
Kramer is a chemist in quality assurance, working with project planners to devise the most accurate ways of testing for toxic materials, such as for cleanups of sites covered in PFAS—aka “forever chemicals”—from fire retardants, or at old industrial sites saturated with PCBs from churning out electrical equipment, insulation, paints, plastics, or adhesives. His job is mostly behind the scenes, but he understood the meaning of his work from one visit to a site to audit the procedures of the Illinois EPA.
The site had a small local museum dedicated to the Native tribes that first occupied the land. “The curator or director told us how the sampling work was going to bring native insects back to the area and different wildlife back to the streams,” Kramer said. “It was kind of a quick offhand conversation, but it gave me a quick snapshot of the work that’s being done.”
Kramer wonders how many more scientists will follow in his footsteps to see that the work keeps getting done. He remembered a painful day recently when a directive came down that he could not talk to contractors, even those who happen to work in the same building as he does.
“I see them every day,” Kramer said. “They come say hi to me. They know my child’s name. Being told that I couldn’t respond if they came to my desk, looked me in the face, and said, ‘Good morning,’ is just such an unnecessary wrench into our system that just feels cruel for the sake of being cruel.”
Staff Stifled, Heartbroken
The culture of fear is particularly stifling for one staffer who did not want to give her name because she is a liaison to elected officials. Before Zeldin took over, she would get an email from an elected official asking if funding for a project was still on track and “30 seconds later,” as she said, the question would be answered.
Her job “is all about relationships,” keeping officials informed about projects. Now, she said just about everything she depends on to do her job has basically come to a halt. “Everyone’s afraid to say anything, answer emails, put anything in writing without getting approval. Just mass chaos all the way to the top.”
“I feel like I made a promise to them that I would be there for what they needed,” she said. “And I feel like I’ve been forced to go back on that promise.”
Relationships are being upset left and right according to other staffers. One set of my interviews was with three EPA community health workers who feel they are betraying the communities they serve because their contact with them has fluctuated in the first months of the Trump administration. They’ve had to shift from silence to delicately dancing around any conversation that mentions environmental justice or diversity, equity, and inclusion.
They did not want to be named because they did not want to jeopardize the opportunity to still find ways to serve communities historically dumped on with toxic pollution for decades because of racism and classism.
“Literally since January 20, my entire division has been on edge,” said one of the three. “We kind of feel like we’re in the hot seat. A lot of people working on climate are afraid. If you’re working with [people with] lower to moderate income or [places] more populated by people of color, you’re afraid because you don’t want to send off any flags to the administration.”
The tiptoeing is heartbreaking to them because they see firsthand the poisoning of families from chemicals the EPA has regulated. One of the health workers has painful memories of seeing the “devastated” look on mothers’ faces when giving them the results of child lead tests that were well above the hazardous limit. “I feel like I made a promise to them that I would be there for what they needed,” she said. “And I feel like I’ve been forced to go back on that promise.”
Remembering Their Mission Boosts Morale
Despite that, and despite President Trump’s baseless ranting, which included saying during the campaign that “crooked” and “dishonest” federal workers were “destroying this country,” these EPA staffers are far from caving in. Nationally, current and former EPA staff last week published an open letter to the nation that said, “We cannot stand by and allow” the assault on environmental justice programs.
Locally in Region 5, the workers’ union has been trying to keep morale from tanking with town halls, trivia nights, lunch learning sessions, and happy hours. In a day of quiet defiance, many of the 1,000 staffers wore stickers in support of the probationary employees that said, “Don’t Fire New Hires.” Several of the people I interviewed said that if Zeldin and the Trump administration really cared about waste and inefficiency, they would not try to fire tens of thousands of probationary workers across the federal system.
One of them noted how the onboarding process, just to begin her probationary year, took five months. “It wastes all this money onboarding them and then eliminating them,” she said. “That’s totally abusing taxpayer dollars if you ask me. It’s hard enough to get people to work here. We’re powered by smart people who went to school for a long time and could make a lot of money elsewhere.” Federal staffers with advanced degrees make 29% less, on average, than counterparts in the private sector, according to a report last year from the Congressional Budget Office.
“We’re supposed to be this nonpartisan force that’s working for the American people, and attacks to that is a direct attack on the American people.”
Individually, several said they maintained their morale by remembering why they came to the EPA in the first place. Flores, whose public service was embedded into him growing up in a military family, said, “I didn’t want to make the next shampoo,” with his chemistry degrees. “I didn’t want to make a better adhesive for a box… the tangible mission of human health and environmental health is very important me.”
The enforcement officer who wanted to remain anonymous talked about a case where she worked with the state to monitor lead in a fenceline community near a toxic industry. Several children were discovered to have elevated levels of lead in their blood.
“People’ lives are in my hands,” she said. “When we realized how dire the circumstance was, we were able to really speed up our process by working with the company, working with the state, and getting a settlement done quick. And now all those fixes are in place. The lead monitoring has returned back to safe levels, and we know that there aren’t going to be any more kids impacted by this facility.”
One of the community health workers I interviewed said her mission means so much to her because at nine years old she lost her mother to breast cancer after exposure to the solvent trichloroethylene (TCE). That carcinogen is used in home, furniture, and automotive cleaning products. The Biden administration banned TCE in its final weeks, but the Trump administration has delayed implementation.
“The loss of her rippled throughout our community,” the worker said of her mother. “She was active in our church, teaching immigrants in our city how to read. The loss of her had such a large impact.” She said if the EPA were gutted, so many people like her mother would be lost too soon. “We play critical roles beyond just laws and regulations,” she said. “We do serve vital functions for communities based on where the need is the most.”
The same worker worried that if an agency as critical to community health as the EPA can be slashed to a shell of itself, there is no telling what is in store next for the nation. “I know people don’t have a lot of sympathy for bureaucrats,” she said. “But I think what is happening to us is a precursor to what happens to the rest of the country. We’re supposed to be this nonpartisan force that’s working for the American people, and attacks to that is a direct attack on the American people.”
One of her co-workers seconded her by saying, “We’re fighting for the American people and we are the American people. We all began this job for a reason. We all have our ‘why.’ And that hasn’t changed just because the administration has changed, because there’s some backlash or people coming after us. Just grounding yourself with people whose ‘why’ is the same as yours helps a lot.”
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'Not Acceptable': Trump EPA Teases Evisceration of Scientific Research Office
"Every decision EPA makes must be in furtherance of protecting human health and the environment, and that just can't happen if you gut EPA science," said one Democratic lawmaker.
Mar 18, 2025
Climate campaigners on Tuesday accused the Republican head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency of a "calculated betrayal of public health and the environment" after House Democrats obtained documents outlining the possible elimination of the EPA's science research office—whose work underpins the agency's anti-pollution policies.
The Democratic staff on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee reviewed the proposal, which was shared with the White House last Friday and called for the EPA Office of Research and Development (ORD) to be eliminated as a national program office, with 50-75% of its 1,540 staffers dismissed and the rest reassigned to EPA positions that "align with administration priorities."
The ORD employs chemists, biologists, doctors, nurses, and experts on wetlands and other issues who contribute to research on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), or "forever chemicals," in drinking water; contamination in drinking water caused by fracking; the impact of wildfire smoke on public health; and other environmental matters. The New York Times reported that the proposed cuts—which follow President Donald Trump's call to slash the EPA's overall budget by 65%—would cost jobs at the agency's major research labs in North Carolina and Oklahoma.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) ranking member of the House science panel, told the Times that closing the office would mean the EPA was no longer meeting its legal obligation to use the "best available science" to draft regulations and policies.
"Every decision EPA makes must be in furtherance of protecting human health and the environment, and that just can't happen if you gut EPA science," Lofgren said, noting that the ORD was created by Congress and cannot be unilaterally dismantled by the executive branch.
The plan to eliminate the ORD "sells out our public health," said the Federation of American Scientists.
During his campaign, Trump promised the fossil fuel industry he would work to slash regulations meant to protect public health. On Tuesday, Chitra Kumar, managing director of the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said making it harder for the government to "set protective health standards" is likely "exactly what this administration is aiming for."
"The scientists and experts in this office conduct and review the best available science to set limits on pollution and regulate hazardous chemicals to keep the public safe," said Kumar. "We're talking about soot that worsens asthma and heart disease, carcinogenic 'forever chemicals' in drinking water, and heat-trapping emissions driving climate change. The administration knows, and history shows, that industry will not regulate itself."
With an EPA spokesperson saying Tuesday that "no decisions have been made yet," Kumar said that "it's paramount that the administration hear: This is not acceptable."
"Everyone, including President Trump and his Cabinet's children and grandchildren, would feel the consequences of this move, not to mention the most polluted communities, predominantly Black, Brown and low income, who would bear the brunt," said Kumar. "Is the administration’s ideology and pledge to industries that strong that they are willing to put their own loved ones at risk?"
The potential closure of the ORD would represent another victory for the authors of Project 2025, the right-wing policy blueprint that called to shutter the Department of Education and impose work requirements for Medicaid recipients.
The agenda's chapter on the EPA calls for the elimination of programs in the ORD and claims that the office is "precautionary, bloated, unaccountable, closed, outcome-driven, hostile to public and legislative input, and inclined to pursue political rather than purely scientific goals."
Project 2025's authors have particularly called for the termination of the ORD's Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS), which informs toxic chemical regulations by assessing their effects on human health. As ProPublicareported earlier this month, Republicans in Congress are pushing legislation that would prohibit the EPA from using IRIS' chemical assessments to underpin regulations and other policies.
The American Chemistry Council, which represents more than 190 corporations, called on EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to disband IRIS earlier this year, and the Republican lawmaker who introduced a bill to end the program represents a district where formaldehyde maker Hexion has a plant.
The push to close the ORD, according to former official Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta, is the result of a "multi-decade... attack on the risk-assessment process, in particular."
Without the ORD and IRIS, Orme-Zavaleta told the Times, "the agency will not be fulfilling its mission, and people will not be protected. They will be at greater risk. The environment will be at greater risk."
John Noel, deputy climate director for Greenpeace USA, said the push to close the ORD and end its risk assessment work suggests that Zeldin "seems to believe his job is to serve corporate polluters rather than the American people."
"For decades, these EPA regulations have been a critical line of defense against harmful pollution, protecting public health, and tackling the climate crisis," said Noel. "Yet even these safeguards have never been enough. This year alone, our country has been ravaged by extreme hurricanes, devastating wildfires, and record-breaking heat—in large part, consequences of pollution. Instead of holding these industries accountable, the EPA is giving them a free pass."
“EPA exists to protect our health and environment—not to gut the very safeguards that protect us," said Noel. "As the climate crisis grows, the agency must reverse this reckless course and recommit to its core mission: protecting people and not the economic interests of polluting corporations."
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Trump, Zeldin, and Wright Want to Set America’s Rivers on Fire Again
The Trump administration is trying to turn back the clock on environmental and climate regulations. But they can’t control physics. Or the falling cost and rising efficiency of renewable energy.
Mar 14, 2025
I spent part of the morning reading the Powell memo—the famous document written by the future Supreme Court justice in August of 1971 arguing that American business and industry had to get its act together so it could dominate the country’s political life and prevent the threats to “the American system” from “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.”
In the short run, Justice Lewis Powell was unsuccessful—the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had been formed a few months before his memo, the Clean Water Act passed a few months after. As William Ruckelshaus, the first administrator of the EPA (and a Republican appointed by a Republican president) said, the agency “has no obligation to promote agriculture or commerce; only the critical obligation to protect and enhance the environment.” Over the next years the agency enacted a critical series of rules that—with surprising speed—cleaned America’s air, rivers, and lakes, and became the template for similar laws around the world.
The job for those of us who care about the future is to continue insisting on reality.
But the forces Powell helped set in motion with his memo to the Chamber of Commerce never accepted the premise that American business should be regulated—as he had recommended, they built a powerful set of institutions—think tanks, tv stations, publishers, and above all political lobbies—and now, 54 years later, they would appear, on the surface, to have won their final victory. Lee Zeldin, a distant successor to Ruckelshaus as EPA head, announced what he called the “greatest day of deregulation in American history.”
As the Times explained, under Zeldin’s plan the agency
would unwind more than two dozen protections against air and water pollution. It would overturn limits on soot from smokestacks that have been linked to respiratory problems in humans and premature deaths as well as restrictions on emissions of mercury, a neurotoxin. It would get rid of the “good neighbor rule” that requires states to address their own pollution when it’s carried by winds into neighboring states. And it would eliminate enforcement efforts that prioritize the protection of poor and minority communities.
In addition, when the agency creates environmental policy, it would no longer consider the costs to society from wildfires, droughts, storms, and other disasters that might be made worse by pollution connected to that policy, Mr. Zeldin said.
In perhaps its most consequential act, the agency said it would work to erase the EPA’s legal authority to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by reconsidering decades of science that show global warming is endangering humanity. In his video, Mr. Zeldin derisively referred to that legal underpinning as “the holy grail of the climate change religion.”
The reason, he said, was to help the president “usher in a golden age of American success.”
It was language echoed in a second extraordinary speech, this one by Energy Secretary Chris Wright, speaking to fellow oilmen in Houston, who promised to “unleash human potential” mostly through the use of artificial intelligence, which would require “unlimited energy.” Yes, he said, we’ve already increased the amount of carbon in the atmosphere by 50%, but climate change is simply “a global physical phenomenon that is a side effect of building the modern world.” (That is a phrase that will live in infamy)
The triumphalism of those speeches is in some ways well founded—as the Trump administration ravages university budgets, as its allies turn once-great newspapers into mouthpieces, and as the GOP Congress marches in complete lockstep threatening even to impeach those judges who might rule against this crusade, it’s hard to see precisely how they’ll be stopped. Yes, there will be widespread resistance (join us at Third Act and many other groups on April 5, for the next big round of rallies), and yes there will be lots and lots of court cases. (Some good news on that front this week, as the Supreme Court denied an industry request to keep states and cities from suing them for climate damages). But for the moment these hard-faced men with greed as their compass occupy the political high ground. For the moment they can do much of what they will.
And yet and yet and yet. There are some forces they can’t control. One is physics. You can prattle all you want, as Zeldin did, about how ending efforts to address climate change will “decrease the cost of living for American families,” but thanks to global warming the price of insurance is going through the roof—the latest data I’ve seen from, say, Summit County, Utah shows premiums doubling, and in some cases going up 300%. That’s if you can get it at all—in the wake of the LA fires, California’s largest insurer said this week that “writing new policies doesn’t make any sense at this time.”
And if you can’t control physics, you also can’t control—at least completely—engineering and economics, the disciplines that have led in recent years to the breakout of renewable energy. On the same day as Wright’s speech belittling clean power, these numbers emerged from the consultant Wood MacKenzie:
The U.S. installed 50 gigawatts (GW) of new solar capacity in 2024, the largest single year of new capacity added to the grid by any energy technology in over two decades. That’s enough to power 8.5 million households.
Why do you think the energy industry spent record amounts on Trump’s election? (Fracking baron Wright and his wife gave $475,000). It’s precisely because of the size of this threat.
As Abby Hopper, the president of the Solar Energy Industries Association put it: “Solar and storage can be built faster and more affordably than any other technology, ensuring the United States has the power needed to compete in the global economy and meet rising electricity demand. America’s solar and storage industry set historic deployment and manufacturing records in 2024, creating jobs and driving economic growth.”
As the CEO of NextEra Energy (which builds both gas and renewable plants) explained at the same conference that Wright addressed:
The cost of gas turbines and the skilled labor to install them are both up threefold from just two years ago, and new gas infrastructure faces years-long delivery backlogs. Renewables plus batteries, he said, are the cheapest, fastest, and easiest way to meet the surging power demand from data centers driven by the acceleration in artificial intelligence.
“We’ve got to be really careful here, from an affordability standpoint, about the choices that we’re making. What we don’t want to do is drive ourselves to only one solution—that being a gas-fired solution—that’s now more expensive than it ever has been in its history,” he said. “It just so happens that the most economic solution comes with clean energy benefits, as well.”
And as the technology keeps getting better, so do the numbers—a U.K. study released today found that rooftop solar alone could supply two-thirds of the world’s electricity.
Zeldin, Wright, Trump—they want to take us back to the glory days before 1970, when rivers caught on fire. And to do so they’ll try to take us back to the days before 1958—word came yesterday that the federal government was planning to break the lease on the Hawaii facility that supports the carbon observatory on Mauna Loa.
“It would be terrible if this office was closed,” atmospheric scientist Marc Alessi, a fellow with the Union of Concerned Scientists advocacy group, said.
“Not only does it provide the measurement of CO2 that we so desperately need to track climate change, but it also informs climate model simulations.”
Others said the Trump administration had already made their work harder, after the White House froze credit cards held by agency employees for a 30-day period under DOGE’S “cost efficiency initiative.”
“It has already become very difficult to continue our global greenhouse gas monitoring network,” an atmospheric scientist involved in NOAA’s measurements said, asking not to be named.
“It requires continuous shipping of sampling equipment black and forth all over the world. Suddenly, we cannot use our government-issued credit cards anymore… It looks like our monitoring program will soon be dead,” the scientist said.
But even if they stop monitoring carbon it will continue accumulating—in fact, the instrument at Mauna Loa showed that CO2 passed the 430 parts per million mark for the first time this week. And even if the federal government does all that it can to shut down renewable energy, the embarrassing numbers will keep piling up—Texas, world capital of hydrocarbons, set remarkable records this week for renewable energy generation.
In just the first week of March, the ERCOT power grid that supplies nearly all of Texas set records for most wind production (28,470 megawatts), most solar production (24,818 megawatts), and greatest battery discharge (4,833 megawatts). Only two years ago, the most that batteries had ever injected into the ERCOT grid at once was 766 megawatts. Now the battery fleet is providing nearly as much instantaneous power as Texas nuclear power plants, which contribute around 5,000 megawatts.
The job for those of us who care about the future is to continue insisting on reality (hats off to those Texans who rallied outside the conference that Wright addressed, and that’s why you’re supposed to set aside Sept 20-21 for Sun Day). Wright, Zeldin, Musk, Trump—they have powerful sticks to try and beat reality into submission. But reality has a way of biting back.
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