Figuring out what the thugs are up to so we can stand up to them
It would be tempting to dismiss Trump’s many functionaries as idiots, because many of them are. Here, for instance, is a transcript of leaked audio from a recent staff meeting led by acting FEMA director David Richardson, a man with no experience in disaster management (but who did write what the reliable Kate Aronoff described as a bad autobiographical novel with the inspired title War Story). Anyway, put yourself in the place of the FEMA staff hearing this highly relatable anecdote:
"The other day I was chatting with my girlfriend, she's from Texas. She's got like huge red hair. Like, she's from Texas. And I said something and she said, well, you know, oh, I know what it was. I said, how come it takes so long to drive 10 hours from Galveston to Amarillo? And she said, well, you know, Texas is bigger than Spain. I didn't know that. So I looked at the map. Texas is huge! I mean, if you put it in the middle of Europe, it takes up most of Europe up. However, they do disaster recovery very, very well, and so does Florida, okay. So, we should be able to take some lessons learned on how Florida and Texas do their disaster recovery, we’ve got to spread that around and get other folks do it some way. And there should be some budgeting things that they have, I bet. I bet Governor Abbott has a rainy day fund for fires and tornadoes and disasters such as hurricanes, and he doesn't spend it on something else"
But if there’s endless idiocy at work (some of it as cover—if I was taking flak for my $400 million flying bribe I’d start tweeting about Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen too), there’s also a kind of underlying feral cunning. All the stupid stuff heads in the same direction.
For example, the administration last week announced it would get rid of the Energy Star program, which rates various appliances by their efficiency so that consumers (and landlords and building owners) can make wise choices.
“The Energy Star program and all the other climate work, outside of what’s required by statute, is being de-prioritized and eliminated,” Paul Gunning, the director of the E.P.A. Office of Atmospheric Protection, told employees during the meeting, according to the recording obtained by The New York Times. Mr. Gunning’s office itself is also slated for elimination.
This is a program begun by Republicans—former EPA administrator William K. Reilly wrote a fond reminiscence yesterday for the Washington Post, who pointed out that if you were actually worried about, say, waste, then this would be the last program to cut
The program costs $32 million in annual federal outlays to administer but has saved consumers $200 billion in utility bills since 1992 — $14 billion in 2024 alone. The averted air pollution, which was the EPA’s initial objective, has been considerable, equivalent to the emissions of hundreds of thousands of cars removed from the road.
But what if you wanted to burn more fossil fuel? What if you wanted to stretch out the transition to cheap, clean renewable energy? Well then it would make a lot of sense.
Or take yesterday’s news, from EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, vowed that he would eliminate the “start-stop” technology in cars because “everyone hates it.” This feature keeps your car from idling at stoplights—when you tap the accelerator the car turns back on. It’s not mandatory for carmakers, and drivers can turn it off with a button. But, as Fox News points out,
The feature can improve fuel economy by between 4% and 5%, previous EPA estimates showed. It also eliminated nearly 10 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year as of 2023
Meanwhile, energy secretary Chris Wright, according to excellent reporting in Heatmap News today, is taking federal money designed to convert a steel plant to electricity and hydrogen and instead using it to convert the steel plant to…the fossil fuel it’s already using. The company, its CEO explained, is working with the Department of Energy to “explore changes in scope to better align with the administration’s energy priorities,” and those priorities, of course, are to use more energy.
Occam’s Razor, I think, would lead us to say that many things the Trump administration does are simply designed to waste energy, because that is good for the incumbent producers, i.e. Big Oil. That’s not a particularly sophisticated rule for understanding their actions, but remember: Trump was bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry, and that industry has always wanted us to waste energy. Remember all that endless Trump nonsense about low-flow shower heads? They cut the use of hot water by about forty percent. Ditto incandescent bulbs, which use 75-90 percent more energy, and which Trump is trying to bring back. It’s strange to be pro-waste, but there you are. This administration is garbage in every way.
That all of this costs consumers money is obvious—but we don’t really pretend to care about consumers any more. Remember: two dolls and five pencils apiece. No, the ultimate customer for the Trump administration is the oil industry. And really for the GOP as a whole: it became increasingly clear this week that the Republican Congressional majority is all too willing to gut the IRA, even though that will come at a big price to consumers, in its effort to help Big Oil.
And Big Oil is in trouble. Power demand in New England hit an all time low in late April, because so many homes now have solar panels on top. In, um, Saudi Arabia solar arrays are springing up left and right. Bloomberg’s David Fickling chronicles the “relentless” switch towards spending on clean energuy, albeit too slowly to hit the most important climate targets. A new global poll of business executives found that 97 percent were eager to make the switch to renewable energy for their companies, on the grounds that
Electricity is the most efficient form of energy, and renewables-generated electricity a value-add to businesses and economies. In many countries, fossil fuels, with their exposure to imports and volatility to geopolitical shocks, are a liability. For business, this isn’t just inconvenient. It’s dangerous. Volatility drives up costs, turns strategic planning into guesswork and delays investment.
That’s how sensible people with sensible goals—like making their businesses work, think. But it’s exactly the opposite of how our government now imagines its role. The DOE put their strategy pretty plainly in a filing to the Federal Register yesterday: their goal, they said, was “bolstering American energy dominance by increasing exports and subsequently the reliance of foreign nations on American energy.” If you’re a foreign government, that about sums it up: either you can rely on the sun and wind which shine on your country, or you can rely on the incredibly unreliable U.S. China, meanwhile, is essentially exporting energy security, in the form of clean energy tech.
So the goal for the rest of us, as we resist Trump and resist climate change, is pretty clear: do everything we can to speed up this transition to clean energy, here and everywhere. Solar works, solar is cheap, and solar is liberating. Courtesy of Johann Saether in Norway, here’s the Sun of the Week, from the global gallery at Sunday.earth, where I hope you’re planning your event for September 21
In other energy and climate news:
+Well, we’re finding out what doesn’t work. The giant “direct air capture” plant in Iceland, designed to filter co2 out of the air, has always been hopelessly expensive. But it also is failing to capture enough carbon dioxide to cover its own emissions—that is, it’s making the problem worse. Reykjavik’s weekly newspaper Heimildin had the data and also the reactions from good people around the world who had signed up to reduce their carbon footprints
“I’m 65 years old and retired when I was 60. One of the things I wanted to do in my later years was reduce my carbon footprint,” says Michael de Podesta, who worked for the UK’s National Physical Laboratory for most of his life, where he studied cold fusion, including debunking it. Michael is one of 21,000 subscribers to Climeworks, but after paying his subscription dutifully for about two years, he began to have doubts. Finally, he wrote on his widely read blog and asked a simple question: Am I a gullible idiot?
“I paid £40 [around 7,000 ISK] a month for fifty kilograms of CO2. I was supposed to get around 600 kilograms a year. I paid them right up until October last year and by then I had paid them to dispose of almost 2.2 tonnes of CO2 and got the tonne for around £800 [135 thousand ISK],” says Michael. He says the project seemed promising at first. He saw coverage of the project in the scientific journal Nature, one of the most prestigious in the world. The science was certainly there: CO2 can be sucked out of the atmosphere and Climeworks’ plans were ambitious.
However, Michael quickly noticed that no matter how much he paid, no CO2 had been captured and disposed of in his name. The math didn’t add up when the energy requirements were examined more closely.
Meanwhile, the project’s Swiss sponsor, Climeworks, told Zurich media yesterday that they were laying off many of their employees, arguing that the problems in Iceland were due to “ice and snow causing certain mechanisms to freeze.”
