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mauna loa
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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Surging Atmospheric CO2 Hits Level Unseen in Millions of Years
The only way to stop this march to a fully tropical globe is to stop burning gasoline and diesel in our vehicles, and to stop generating electricity and heating our homes with coal and fossil gas.
Jun 07, 2023
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced Monday that parts per million of carbon dioxide in our planet’s atmosphere averaged 424 ppm in the month of May, reaching a level not seen for millions of years. In May 2022 it was only 421 ppm so this is a tremendous jump on a year over year basis. It probably reflects the resurgence of the world economy as the COVID pandemic has transitioned to an endemic infection and governments have dropped most prophylactic measures.
NOAA administrator Dr. Rich Spinrad observed, “Every year we see carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere increase as a direct result of human activity. Every year, we see the impacts of climate change in the heat waves, droughts, flooding, wildfires and storms happening all around us. While we will have to adapt to the climate impacts we cannot avoid, we must expend every effort to slash carbon pollution and safeguard this planet and the life that calls it home.”
Carbon dioxide is a potent greenhouse gas which prevents the heat of the sun’s rays from radiating back out into outer space through the atmosphere at the same rate they used to before the industrial revolution. Keeping more heat on earth means hotter oceans and more powerful hurricanes and cyclones, along with hotter air and more desiccation of soil and forests, leading to more wildfires. Those newly common wildfires in Canada are now blanketing the US Midwest and Northeast with heavy smog.
The only way to stop this march to a fully tropical globe is to stop burning gasoline and diesel in our vehicles, and to stop generating electricity and heating our homes with coal and fossil gas.
The Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego partnered with NOAA, taking its own measurements at Mauna Loa, and found virtually the same concentrations of CO2 and the same huge leap since last year this time.
Civilization has never faced such a high average temperature of the earth’s surface, which is a direct result of the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Scripps Oceanography geoscientist Ralph Keeling is in charge of the Keeling curve created by his father in the late 1950s.He remarked, “Sadly we’re setting a new record. What we’d like to see is the curve plateauing and even falling because carbon dioxide as high as 420 or 425 parts per million is not good. It shows as much as we’ve done to mitigate and reduce emissions, we still have a long way to go.”
The Scripps site notes that carbon dioxide levels are more than 50% higher than they were in 1750 before the steam engine and the Industrial Revolution. There was then about 280 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere and it was cold.
Here is the scary part. Human civilization is only about 5,000 to 6,000 years old, characterized by the emergence of cities and role differentiation such that not everyone had to farm– there was room for blacksmiths and tinsmiths and merchants and astronomers and story-tellers. People learned to read and write, to record discoveries and pass them on to the next generation. Elam in Iran and Sumer in southern Iraq were among the earliest such civilizations.
From that time to this, there were just about 280 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It sometimes fell a little or rose a little but it stayed in that range.
We don’t know if a world of 424 ppm CO2 is compatible with civilization. Civilization has never faced such a high average temperature of the earth’s surface, which is a direct result of the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Intense hurricanes that flatten electric and telecommunications lines time and again (see: Puerto Rico) could be hard on civilization. Flooding of our major coastal ports could likewise be rather a peril. What if the New York Public library is inundated?
As Dr. Keeler said, this wasn’t the outcome we expected this year, and it is not the direction in which we want the planet to go.
The last time there was this much CO2 up there was the Pliocene, roughly 3-4 million years ago.
I have observed,
“Temperatures in the middle Pliocene were on average 2-3 degrees C. (3.6 – 5.8 degrees F.) higher than today. The Arctic was 10 degrees C. hotter than today’s. Seas were roughly 90 feet higher. Some places now wet were desert-like. See this link for what would happen to five cities under this scenario.
This 90 feet sea level rise is therefore almost certainly baked in and will occur, over the next few hundred years (oceans are huge and cold and take time to warm up). I wouldn’t buy real estate in Miami or lower Manhattan with an idea of passing it on to your grandchildren. Any beachfront property is ephemeral.
The cycles of drought and monsoon flooding were extreme in the west of North America during the Middle Pliocene, and we are already seeing some evidence of this deadly one-two punch in California in the twenty-first century.
And Florida was underwater in the middle Pliocene.
The good thing is that some of the worst consequences of climate change can still be avoided, if we make a major push to get our energy from solar panels and wind turbines and to electrify our transportation.
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As CO2 Levels Build Up Like 'Trash in a Landfill,' Earth Has Hottest May on Record
"This is unquestionably an alarming sign."
Jun 05, 2020
The Earth just experienced its hottest May on record; scientists said Friday--just a day after it was announced that atmospheric CO2 levels hit a new high.
Scientists at Europe's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) announced the temperature record Friday. The agency said that globally, last month was 0.63degC warmer than May's 1981-2020 average. That tops the previous warmest May, which occurred in 2016, by 0.05degC.
The last 12-month period, C3S added, was nearly 0.7degC warmer than average.
\u201c\ud83d\udce2May #temperature highlights from #Copernicus #C3S:\n\n\ud83c\udf21\ufe0fGlobally, it was the warmest May in our record, at 0.63\u00b0C above average\n\ud83c\udf21\ufe0fAlthough May was colder than average in Europe, spring 2020 was overall 0.7\u00b0C warmer than the norm\n\nMore detail\u27a1\ufe0fhttps://t.co/2gh0WRIv7A\u201d— Copernicus ECMWF (@Copernicus ECMWF) 1591340633
"The last month has been the warmest May on record globally, and this is unquestionably an alarming sign," Freja Vamborg, a scientist at C3S, toldCNBC.
The agency added in its new findings:
Outside Europe, temperatures were most above average over parts of Siberia, where they were up to 10degC above average. They were also much above average over western Alaska, along the Andes bordering Chile and Argentina, and over regions in West and East Antarctica. It was also much warmer than average over western North America, the far north and south of South America, north-western, central and south-western Africa, and south-eastern Asia.
The "highly anomalous" temperatures in parts of Siberia follow a warmer than-ever April for the Arctic and evidence of the emergence of so-called "zombie fires"--reignited fires from last year's Arctic wildfires that continued to survive by smoldering underground.
The new data from European scientists follows NOAA's Thursday announcement that atmospheric CO2 levels also hit new highs last month.
The levels recorded at the Mauna Loa Observatory show a seasonal peak of 417.1 parts per million in May, the highest monthly reading ever recorded.
Record high daily averages hit last month had already sparked urgent calls for bold climate action.
The trend of the planet-heating gas in the atmosphere is unmistakable.
\u201cThe annual rate of increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past 60 years is about 100 times faster than previous natural increases, such as those that occurred at the end of the last ice age 11,000-17,000 years ago. \nhttps://t.co/N2OgzMqiOU\u201d— NOAA Climate.gov (@NOAA Climate.gov) 1591279344
"Progress in emissions reductions is not visible in the CO2 record," Pieter Tans, senior scientist with NOAA's Global Monitoring Laboratory, said. "We continue to commit our planet--for centuries or longer--to more global heating, sea level rise, and extreme weather events every year."
The record atmospheric CO2 levels come as the global coronavirus pandemic has triggered global economic shutdowns, but the resulting emissions drops and pollution declines were not enough to budge CO2 levels.
Geochemist Ralph Keeling, who runs the Scripps Oceanography program at Mauna Loa, explained why global emissions are likened to "trash in a landfill."
"People may be surprised to hear that the response to the coronavirus outbreak hasn't done more to influence CO2 levels," he said. "But the buildup of CO2 is a bit like trash in a landfill. As we keep emitting, it keeps piling up."
"The crisis has slowed emissions, but not enough to show up perceptibly at Mauna Loa," Keeling continued. "What will matter much more is the trajectory we take coming out of this situation."
The new data comes as global policymakers mark World Environment Day, a moment United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres took to say, "To care for humanity, we MUST care for nature."
"Climate disruption is getting worse," Guterres said in his message, urging all parties to "commit to a green and resilient future."
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