Trump Administration Erases the Government’s Power to Fight Climate Change

The Environmental Protection Agency rejected the bedrock scientific finding that greenhouse gases threaten human life and well being. It means the agency can no longer regulate them.

By Lisa Friedman, The New York Times, Feb. 13, 2026

President Trump on Thursday announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.

The action is a key step in removing limits on carbon dioxide, methane and four other greenhouse gases that scientists say are supercharging heat waves, droughts, wildfires and other extreme weather.

Led by a president who refers to climate change as a “hoax,” the administration is essentially saying that the vast majority of scientists around the world are wrong and that a hotter planet is not the menace that decades of research shows it to be.

It’s a rejection of fact that had been accepted for decades by presidents of both parties, including Richard Nixon, whose top adviser warned of the dangers of climate change, and the first President George Bush, who signed an international climate treaty.

And it is a knockout punch in the yearslong fight by a small group of conservative activists as well as oil, gas and coal interests to stop the country from transitioning away from fossil fuels and toward solar, wind and other nonpolluting energy.

“This is about as big as it gets,” President Trump said at the White House as a smiling Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, stood by. “We are officially terminating the so-called ‘endangerment finding,’ a disastrous Obama-era policy,” he said.

Mr. Trump called it a “radical rule” that became “the basis for the Green New Scam,” a label the president gives to any effort to curb emissions or develop renewable energy.

Mr. Zeldin called it “the single largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.” He accused Democrats of having launched an “ideological crusade” on climate change that “strangled entire sectors of the United States economy,” particularly the auto industry.

The administration claimed it would save auto manufacturers and other businesses an estimated $1 trillion, although it has declined to explain how it arrived at that estimate.

At issue is what’s known as the endangerment finding, a 2009 scientific conclusion that greenhouse gas emissions pose a danger to Americans’ health and welfare. The finding was based on more than 200 pages of research and evidence.

Mr. Trump, who has called climate scientists “stupid people,” claimed on Thursday that the finding “had no basis in fact.”

For nearly 17 years, the E.P.A. had relied on the bedrock finding to justify regulations that limit carbon dioxide, methane and other pollution from oil and gas wells, tailpipes, smokestacks and other sources that burn fossil fuels. The repeal of the endangerment finding is expected to increase the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent over the next 30 years, according to the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group.

The added pollution could lead to as many as 58,000 premature deaths and an increase of 37 million asthma attacks between now and 2055, the group said.

But on Fox Business on Wednesday, Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, revived a debunked myth to sum up how the Trump administration views carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. “CO2 was never a pollutant,” he said. “When we breathe, we emit CO2. Plants need CO2 to survive and grow. They thrive with more CO2.”

While carbon dioxide can help plants grow, the extraordinarily high levels in the atmosphere are overwhelming natural processes and increasing the frequency and severity of drought, heat waves and other damaging events, according to scientists.

President Barack Obama wrote on social media that the repeal of the endangerment finding means, “We’ll be less safe, less healthy and less able to fight climate change — all so the fossil fuel industry can make even more money.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California promised a court challenge. “If this reckless decision survives legal challenges, it will lead to more deadly wildfires, more extreme heat deaths, more climate-driven floods and droughts, and greater threats to communities nationwide,” he said. California “will sue to challenge this illegal action” and will continue to regulate greenhouse gases, he said.

“We will see them in court, and we will win,” said Manish Bapna, the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The science and the law are crystal clear, and E.P.A. is issuing a rushed, sloppy and unscientific determination that has no legal basis.”

In revoking the endangerment finding, the Trump administration made the legal argument that the Clean Air Act allows the government to limit only pollution that causes direct harm to Americans, and only in cases where the damage is “near the source” of the pollution.

Greenhouse gases, however, collect in the atmosphere where they form a kind of blanket around the Earth, trapping heat from the sun. That is altering the Earth’s climate and intensifying heat waves, drought, hurricanes and floods while also melting glaciers, causing sea levels to rise.

The planet has warmed on average by about 1.4 degrees Celsius, or 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit, since the Industrial Age, according to Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

The action announced on Thursday eliminates limits on greenhouse gases produced by motor vehicles. Transportation is the largest single source of greenhouse gases in the United States. The Biden administration had sought to tighten limits on tailpipe emissions to encourage automakers to sell more nonpolluting electric vehicles. (Restrictions on other pollutants from automobiles, such as nitrogen oxides and benzene, are still in place.)

Getting rid of the endangerment finding clears the way for the E.P.A. to repeal limits on greenhouse gases from stationary sources of pollution, such as power plants and oil and gas wells, a process that it has begun.

The United States is currently the world’s second-largest climate polluter (after China) but is the nation that has pumped the most greenhouse gases into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. That distinction matters because past emissions of long-lived greenhouse gases significantly contribute to current warming.

Numerous rigorous scientific findings since 2009 have shown that greenhouse gases and global warming are harming public health and directly causing deaths.

Recent research has found that if the planet continues to warm at its current rate, exposure to wildfire smoke would kill an estimated 70,000 Americans each year by 2050, just one example of the health dangers posed by a heating planet. Another study found that deaths from extreme heat in the United States have more than doubled in recent decades.

And as the weather globally gets warmer and wetter, disease is spreading. Last year, 4,947 travelers from the United States contracted dengue, a mosquito-borne disease prevalent in tropical and subtropical climates, while abroad, a 30 percent increase over the previous year, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, nearly all nations agreed to try to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels. That goal has been seen as crucial to avoiding the worst effects of climate change.

Scientists now expect the Earth to warm by an average of around 2.6 degrees Celsius, or 4.7 degrees Fahrenheit, by the end of the century. Mr. Trump has withdrawn the United States from the Paris Agreement, making it the only nation among nearly 200 to do so. He also pulled the country out of the underlying United Nations climate treaty and a Nobel Prize-winning group made up of the world’s leading climate scientists.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, both Democrats, said the E.P.A. had abandoned its responsibility to protect public health and the environment. “This shameful abdication — an economic, moral, and political failure — will harm Americans’ health, homes, and economic well-being,” they said in a statement. “It ignores scientific fact and common-sense observations, to serve big political donors.”

Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, where coal remains a key component of the economy, was one of a handful of lawmakers to publicly praise Mr. Trump’s decision. “This repeal will have a transformational impact on my home state of West Virginia, as these efforts reverse the harmful Democrat attacks on affordable, gas-powered vehicles that West Virginians have endured for far too long,” Ms. Capito said in a statement.

President Trump, whose 2024 campaign got a boost of as much as $450 million from the oil and gas industry, has worked to make it cheaper and easier to keep burning fossil fuels while throttling efforts to build cleaner energy sources such as solar and wind.

Reversing the endangerment finding has been seen as the holy grail for those who deny the science of climate change. That’s because if the repeal is upheld in court, it could also prevent future administrations from restoring regulations to curb greenhouse gases.

Mr. Zeldin and other administration officials said the endangerment finding had been a drag on the economy. They argued that requiring the E.P.A. to tackle climate change harmed consumer choice by limiting the types of automobiles available to purchase.

Some business groups supported the administration’s actions, but others were silent or muted in their response. That’s because trade groups that once opposed the endangerment finding, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have in recent years acknowledged the scientific reality of climate change.

John Bozzella, president of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents most automakers, declined to say whether he supported the move. But he said in a statement that the automobile emissions standards imposed by the Biden administration were “extremely challenging for automakers to achieve given the current marketplace demand.”

Other industry officials said the E.P.A. move would hurt electric vehicle manufacturing. Rescinding the endangerment finding “pulls the rug out from companies that have invested in manufacturing next-gen vehicles across the United States,” Albert Gore, the director of the The Zero Emission Transportation Association, a trade group, said in a statement.

“That this takes place following a record year of global sales of these vehicles shows a clear disconnect between Washington and the market,” Mr. Gore said.

Several business trade groups told the E.P.A. that they were concerned about the legal implications of the agency’s proposal. They said they worried that some states would enact stricter greenhouse gas policies in response, forcing companies to respond to a patchwork of laws in different parts of the country.

Mike Sommers, the president of the American Petroleum Institute, which represents oil and gas companies, said the industry wants to end the regulations that apply to automobiles but that the government should continue to limit carbon dioxide as well as methane emissions from power plants and oil and gas wells. Most of the major oil and gas companies had already invested millions of dollars in pollution controls.

“One of the reasons why we wouldn’t support that is because we do support the federal regulation of methane, and we’re focused on reducing our emissions as an industry,” Mr. Sommers said in a recent call with journalists.

The drive to repeal the endangerment finding began well before President Trump was re-elected to the White House. It was an objective in Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for overhauling the federal government.

“The endangerment finding has been abused by the E.P.A. to justify regulations that do not comport with the Clean Air Act,” said Thomas J. Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, a conservative research group that promotes fossil fuel energy. “If Congress thinks the E.P.A. should regulate CO2 as a pollutant they should say so affirmatively in law so that E.P.A. has a clear mandate.”

In discarding the endangerment finding, Mr. Zeldin is reversing positions he took as a member of Congress from Long Island from 2019 to 2023. During that time, he voted several times to address climate change, including a vote against an amendment to a spending bill that would have prohibited the E.P.A. from applying the endangerment finding. He even joined the Climate Solutions Caucus, a bipartisan group of House members.

In 2022, he ran unsuccessfully for governor of New York on a pledge to allow and accelerate natural gas drilling. After becoming Mr. Trump’s E.P.A. administrator, Mr. Zeldin ridiculed climate change and said he hoped to “drive a dagger” through it by repealing the endangerment finding.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/climate/trump-epa-greenhouse-gases-climate-change.html

Carney Stakes Canada’s Auto Future on E.V.s as It Pulls Away From the U.S.

Prime Minister Mark Carney announced several measures Thursday aimed at making Canada a global leader in electric vehicles and rescuing an industry ravaged by U.S. trade policy.

By Ian Austen and Jack Ewing, The New York Times, Feb. 10, 2026

Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada announced on Thursday a sweeping plan to offer billions of dollars in incentives and tax breaks for auto industry investment designed to help turn Canada into a global leader in electric vehicles.

The new policies, Mr. Carney said, were meant to transform Canada’s economy and make it less reliant on a single trade partner after President Trump’s economic assaults and threats on Canada’s sovereignty have frayed relations between the two nations.

“We must take care of ourselves,” Mr. Carney told reporters at an auto parts factory near Toronto. “We cannot control what others do.”

Canada’s auto industry, which employs about 125,000 workers, is vital to the country’s economy and is closely intertwined with the United States. Mr. Carney’s effort to stake the country’s future to electric vehicles is part of his campaign to stand up to the United States, which has won him plaudits at home and abroad.

“Canada is an auto nation, the auto industry is central to our story,” Mr. Carney said. “The auto industry is the core pillar of the Canadian economy.”

Mr. Trump has inflicted significant pain on Canada’s auto industry, which exports about 90 percent of its vehicles to the United States, imposing a 25 percent tariff on Canadian vehicles. Mr. Trump has said he does not want cars sold in the United States to be made in Canada and wants to drastically increase domestic production.

But Mr. Trump’s dismantling of the trade policies that have knitted together the North American auto industry has led to a sense of urgency for Canada to look for alternative markets and strategies.

Canada’s plan aligns the country with a shift to electric vehicles that is well underway in Europe and China. But Mr. Trump and Republicans in Congress are doubling down on vehicles powered by fossil fuels, eliminating incentives that encouraged people to buy electric vehicles.

Canada is a relatively small market for U.S. automakers, but it is a major supplier of components and finished vehicles. The biggest danger for U.S. automakers may be that they are becoming increasingly isolated from foreign markets and disconnected from technological trends sweeping the rest of the world.

Most auto executives expect electric vehicles to eventually become the dominant technology in the United States, even if that shift takes longer than elsewhere.

“I see this as Carney showing the leadership that the U.S. should be showing the world right now,” said John Helveston, a professor in the engineering department at George Washington University. “I see this as Canada deciding someone needs to be an adult and start putting forth policies to embrace the future.’’

Mr. Carney agreed last month to open a crack in Canada’s exclusion of Chinese made electric vehicles through a 100 percent tariff that was introduced to match a similar U.S. measure. Canada will allow a small number of Chinese E.V.’s into the Canadian market at a low tariff rate.

The announcement of the Chinese deal was followed by an agreement between Canada and South Korea that may lead to Korean automakers building Canadian factories for vehicles and batteries. Expanding the presence of Asian companies in Canada could ultimately hurt U.S. companies at a time when they are already losing ground in other parts of the world.

Mr. Carney said Canada would still push for a return to free trade in auto and auto parts during this year’s review of the agreement between the United States, Canada and Mexico, but acknowledged that Mr. Trump does not share that objective.

He said that the measures he announced Thursday would “make our industry world leading regardless of the outcome” of those trade talks.

“This is what a confident country does,” Mr. Carney said.

Last month in a widely lauded speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Mr. Carney, while not naming Mr. Trump, made clear that the American president had caused an irreparable “rupture” to the world political and economic order and called on other middle powers to form a protective alliance.

He underscored that theme on Thursday, repeatedly emphasizing that Canada was in “active discussions with a range of new investors,” outside the United States.

The auto assembly and parts manufacturing business is almost entirely based in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, While it was historically dominated by the Detroit-based vehicle companies, all of which have been in Canada for over a century, Toyota and Honda now account for about three quarters of Canadian production.

Since his return to office last year, Mr. Trump’s economic policies have led to the loss of thousands of Canadian auto jobs. Stellantis abandoned a plan that had been partly subsidized by the Canadian government to build a Jeep model at a factory in Brampton, Ontario, and moved production to Illinois. General Motors last week laid off about 700 workers at its pickup truck plant in Oshawa, Ontario, and closed a plant that made electric delivery vans in southwestern Ontario.

The leaders of Detroit automakers have also soured public opinion in Canada by appearing to appease Mr. Trump. Last month, Bill Ford, the executive chairman of the car company that bears his family name, took Mr. Trump on a tour of its assembly plant in Dearborn, Mich. During the visit, Mr. Trump said that the United States no longer needs the trade deal with Canada and Mexico.

“The problem is we don’t need their product,” Mr. Trump said.

Mr. Carney on Thursday officially eliminated a mandate to move to zero emission vehicles by 2035, which had been opposed by automakers. Instead, he introduced tougher emissions standards on all vehicle manufacturers, which the government estimated would lead to electric vehicles making up 90 percent of sales by 2040.

The government is also restoring consumer rebates for electric vehicle purchases, a program that expired last year that will start at 5,000 Canadian dollars or $3,600. Mr. Carney said that those rebates will not apply to Chinese-made E.V.s.

Mr. Carney said that the government would give credits to automakers who build cars in Canada that they can sell to other companies to allow them to import foreign-made vehicles duty free into the country. It will also offer 3 billion Canadian dollars, or $2.2 billion, for plant investments, cut corporate tax rates for zero emission vehicle makers and allow accelerated tax deductions for investments in E.V. plants and equipment.

The trade groups that represent Detroit automakers and Toyota and Honda have both said they welcome the Canadian plan, specifically the incentives for electric vehicles. U.S. carmakers said they also supported the elimination of the zero-emission mandate and incentives for electric vehicles.

“We respect the government’s efforts to both sustain and encourage automotive investment in Canada,” the Global Automakers of Canada, the trade group that includes the two Japanese companies, said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/05/world/canada/carney-canada-electric-vehicles-trump-trade.html?searchResultPosition=1

More Outer Banks homes fall after historic storm batters North Carolina coast

At least four homes along the Cape Hatteras National Seashore have crumbled amid high winds and rough surf.

By Brady Dennis, The Washington Post, Feb. 2, 2026

It happened again. And again. And again.

Three more homes along North Carolina’s Outer Banks collapsed into the sea overnight Sunday and into Monday morning, bringing the total to four since a winter storm over the weekend battered the barrier islands with snow, high winds and roiling surf.

Officials with the National Park Service said the latest collapse happened about 9 a.m. Monday along an erosion-plagued stretch of coastline, hours after two other unoccupied houses met a similar fate. Those incidents followed the demise of a nearby home in the early-morning hours on Sunday.

The latest collapses left fresh heaps of debris littering the beaches and miles of surf near Buxton, a small town along the Cape Hatteras National Seashore where 19 homes have surrendered to the sea since the middle of September.

The beach in front of the entire village of Buxton remained closed Monday, and Park Service spokesman Mike Barber said in a statement that the agency “advises everyone to stay away from the collapse sites and the surrounding beach area, due to potentially hazardous debris.”

Photos and videos by local residents that were posted online captured the most recent collapse, as the gray-shingled home’s wooden pilings snapped and buckled in the morning sun. Nearby, a septic tank sat exposed to the tides. “There it goes,” a resident recording the video says.

Other images foretell what inevitably will be a slow cleanup. Shingles and furniture cushions, siding and twisted lumber sat in soaking piles along the beach. “The debris field is scattered for miles to the south and out to sea,” one resident wrote.

The fallen homes were not the only casualty of the storm, which brought blizzard-like conditions to Hatteras Island, with winds gusting to 45 mph and waves off Cape Hatteras reaching up to 20 feet.

On Monday morning, the North Carolina Department of Transportation said that N.C. 12, the key roadway through the Outer Banks, remained closed in multiple places “as we continue to see ocean overwash from this weekend’s nor’easter.”

While the storm that wreaked havoc in the area had moved out to sea, the National Weather Service warned Monday that a high-surf advisory would remain in effect and that “large breaking waves of 8 to 12 feet” remained possible.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2026/02/02/outer-banks-homes-winter-storm-collapse/

Trump’s biggest climate rollback stalls over fears it will lose in court

Trump officials have delayed finalizing the repeal of the agency’s “endangerment finding” over concerns the proposal is too weak to withstand a court challenge.

By Jake Spring, The Washington Post, Jan. 29, 2026

Trump officials have delayed finalizing the repeal of a landmark legal opinion key to their effort to eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate rules because of concerns the proposal is too weak to withstand a court challenge, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential information.

The EPA’s 2009 “endangerment finding” concluded that greenhouse gases harm public health, establishing the basis for regulating them under the Clean Air Act. Repealing the finding would end the agency’s regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks.

The White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which reviews agency regulations, has expressed concerns over the strength of the scientific and economic analysis of the proposed repeal, the people said.

EPA officials are resisting revisions to the policy and arguing that the regulation should be finalized and announced publicly in its current form as soon as possible, they added.

“OIRA, EPA, and the entire administration are working in lockstep to execute on the President’s deregulation agenda,” said Allie McCandless, a spokeswoman for the Office of Management and Budget, which oversees OIRA.

EPA spokeswoman Brigit Hirsch confirmed in a statement that the repeal proposal was sent to OIRA on Jan. 7, but did not respond to questions about disagreement over revising the policy. The endangerment finding was used to “justify trillions of dollars in greenhouse gas regulations,” and the agency is following the law in seeking to repeal it, she said.

OIRA’s public calendar lists meetings through Feb. 10 to discuss the proposal with lobbyists, industry groups and health and environmental advocates.

The EPA’s policies to curtail greenhouse gas emissions will not make a large enough difference to the global climate to justify the enormous costs that regulations impose, said Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

“These rules impose vast costs on the American economy and the American people,” Furchtgott-Roth said. “They need to be abolished.”

Furchtgott-Roth said that repealing the endangerment finding would also bolster the EPA’s proposal to end Biden-era limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, which it issued in June and has yet to finalize.

The agency’s scientific argument for repealing the endangerment finding, released in July, primarily relied on an Energy Department report that was written last spring by a working group of five known climate skeptics. Scientists say the report is riddled with errors. And advocates, including the Environmental Defense Fund, have sued, saying the secretive way the department produced the report violated federal law. The working group has since been disbanded.

“Their work was obliterated. The criticism leaves nothing standing,” said David Doniger, a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The EPA has pursued an ambitious legal strategy of rewriting and finalizing rules as quickly as possible to force them into the court system, experts say, aiming to receive favorable rulings before the end of Trump’s term.

But the agency missed its goal of finalizing the repeal of the endangerment finding by the end of 2025, and target dates for undoing other Obama- and Biden-era regulations have also slipped.

The people familiar with the discussions said OIRA Associate Administrator Jeffrey Clark is the main official pushing for EPA to strengthen its endangerment proposal.Ask The Post AIDive deeper

Clark, formerly a deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department during the George W. Bush administration, worked on the case resulting in the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision Massachusetts v. EPA. In that decision, the court ruled the agency had the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. Two years later, the EPA issued the endangerment finding.

Doniger said that the legal arguments have not changed since that ruling, while the scientific basis for regulating greenhouse emissions has been bolstered by more intense heat waves, storms and wildfires.

“People see it right outside their windows. So they’re just not going to win on the science,” Doniger said. “It is EPA’s duty under the Clean Air Act to curb the emissions that are driving those disasters.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2026/01/29/endangerment-finding-repeal-delay/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F469c079%2F697b9a5c130502561e5f51cd%2F596a47adade4e20ee3700f08%2F29%2F68%2F697b9a5c130502561e5f51cd

Democrats are shying away from climate messaging. One of their own is fighting back.

There’s a schism within the Democratic Party about whether talking about climate change is the right message to win back control of Washington.

By Amelia Davidson & Kelsey Brugger, Politico, Jan. 25, 2026

One of Congress’ loudest climate hawks is trying to fend off a push within his party to abandon calls to combat climate change as left-leaning agenda-setters are plotting to reclaim both chambers of Congress in the midterms.

“There’s a thing out there called a ‘climate husher,’” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, posted as part of a long social media thread last week.

“Anyone who cares about what fossil fuel pollution is doing to Earth’s natural systems needs to ignore these so-called ‘climate hushers’ — people who think Dems should stop talking about climate,” he said.

In a later interview about his posts, Whitehouse warned these “climate hushers” have also made their way into strategy conversations on Capitol Hill. He noted he’s been present for some of them, which he described as “polling presentations made to the Senate Democratic Caucus in a so-called strategy retreat that didn’t ask about climate change … There’s this massive blind spot.”

In recent years, Democrats have been handwringing over the best messaging on environmental issues to reach an electorate that cares about “kitchen table” matters – and doesn’t uniformly consider the rapidly warming planet to be one of them. Environmentalists made a strong argument during the 2024 presidential campaign that the climate crisis should be a motivator in electing Kamala Harris — but the contest went to Donald Trump.

Now Democrats are increasingly showing they have decided it’s a losing message to tout the ways in which they’d curb fossil fuel production to thwart the most dire effects of climate change. Instead, they’re choosing to focus on policies that would lower energy costs and lean hard into affordability talking points embraced by Trump and congressional Republicans.

Whitehouse understands the importance of talking about affordability — for years he’s spoken about the climate crisis as a threat to the global economy.

His social media thread notes that people are feeling the economic burdens of climate change throughout the country, from home insurance hikes to drops in property values.

That’s the message Democrats should lean into, he said, rather than shy away from.

“When leaders don’t talk about something, enthusiasm falls among voters,” Whitehouse wrote in his post. “In politics, you can often make your own wind, or you can make your own doldrums.”

This is something Democrats are grappling with on Capitol Hill. Interviews with a half dozen House and Senate Democrats revealed how many are still struggling with how to discuss climate change, a problem they consider existential but that doesn’t register among voters’ top immediate concerns.

Some are talking nearly exclusively about competitive prices for clean energy — largely in hopes of beating Republicans at their own messaging game.

“My theory of the case is that the argument that I’ve been making for 30 years is finally breaking through,” said Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.), a former clean energy professional.

“The urgency of climate change means that we have to focus on it especially when it’s not as salient with the American people, if we are to be the leaders we claim to be,” he added. “But I think that’s largely a separable conversation from what is the best way to talk about it in any given moment, that has the most ability to move public opinion.”

Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, who is on track to be the next Senate Democratic whip, has a similar perspective.

Last year, he removed “climate hawk,” along with other self-descriptions, from his bio on X. And during an event this fall affiliated with New York Climate Week, he said that “those of us in the climate community who are used to making a more broad argument about where we are in the sweep of history have to get comfortable making a more immediate argument that says the reason prices are going up is a deliberate policy choice of the Republican Party.”

Schatz said in a statement last week that he and Whitehouse were united in their ideas around “climate action,” but he also doubled down on the importance of affordability messaging at this time.

“There are think tanks and advocacy organizations that are dedicated to the proposition that climate action is incompatible with affordable energy, but those factional rivalries have been overtaken by events,” Schatz said. “Cheap is clean, and clean is cheap.”

Recent actions from the Democrats’ Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition, or SEEC — of which Casten is vice-chair — have also focused squarely on energy costs and the ability of clean energy to lower Americans’ bills.

At a SEEC press conference earlier this month meant to respond to the last year of energy and environment policy under President Donald Trump, a roster of climate-focused Democrats spoke nearly exclusively about energy prices. “Trump lied; Energy costs are up,” read the main sign at the presser.

Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.), a member of the House Natural Resources Committee, said in an interview that Democrats need to focus on energy prices because Trump has used that as a justification for executive actions that bolster oil and gas.

“People, when they see the ways in which the energy policies that are serving big oil are hurting their pocketbooks, it makes it more tangible for why folks should care, in addition to the welfare of the planet,” Stansbury said.

Meanwhile, Republicans have picked up on the Democrats’ shift in talking points and have used it to their advantage.

“You actually see on the left, this debate going on right now, where a lot of people within the Democratic Party, they are talking about how they’ve lost the narrative, or the culture war, on climate,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said on Fox Business this month.

Left-leaning thinkers and independent analysts have also argued that Democrats may have gone too far in following the lead of environmental groups they say were out of touch with most Americans.

Columnist Matt Yglesias argued in a New York Times op-ed that Democrats should not be hostile to oil and gas. Longtime energy expert Daniel Yergin wrote in Foreign Affairs about the “troubled energy transition” and the need for a “pragmatic path” forward. And Veteran Democratic operative Adam Jentleson started the think tank the Searchlight Institute to curb the influence of the “groups” on party positions, including climate.

Rep. Kathy Castor of Florida, the top Democrat on the Energy and Commerce’s Energy Subcommittee, downplayed the notion that congressional Democrats were at odds over how to message on climate change. Talking about affordability need not negate the focus on the impact of climate change, she said.

“I think they are one in the same,” Castor said. “Take my community in Florida. We’re still recovering from Hurricane Helen and Milton and people understand that those storms were supercharged because the Gulf was very, very hot, very warm. And the rain was unlike anything we’ve ever seen. So they are trying to afford rebuilding their homes and paying their property insurance and also suffering higher rate increases.”

Whitehouse in an interview acknowledged some shortcomings to Democrats’ past depictions of climate change “as sort of a moral imperative, as an intangible thing floating out there, something that will affect polar bears,” but said the solution wasn’t to be silent in calling out the harmful impacts of fossil fuel emissions and the influence of oil and gas companies on Trump administration policy.

Ultimately, there’s only so much he can do to press his case. In recent months he has organized forums on climate change as the senior Democrat on the Environment and Public Works panel, toured red states to talk about rising insurance rates related to natural disasters spurred by global warming and said he has commissioned his own polling on the issue.

Those activities, plus delivering speeches and crafting social media posts, are among the limits of what he can achieve with his party in the minority and his colleagues making their own messaging choices.

He isn’t giving up.

“Democrats and environmental groups’ climate messaging for years has been crap, and so if you go back to that crap messaging, obviously it’s not going to succeed,” Whitehouse said. “But that doesn’t mean that the alternative is to throw in the towel.”

Andres Picon and Timothy Cama contributed to this report.

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/25/democrats-climate-affordability-trump-00745597?is_magic_link=true&experience_id=EXYF89KVT5UQ&template_id=OTJIR2CRKUD6&template_variant_id=OTV632IE7RALS

Trump Is Obsessed With Oil, but Chinese Batteries Will Soon Run the World

Op-Ed by Dan Wang, The New York Times, Jan. 19, 2026

Wang is a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and the author of “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.”

President Trump has an unconcealed hunger for natural resources from abroad and the power they could grant him. He declared that the United States intervened in Venezuela to “take the oil,” betting that investors would put up at least $100 billion to revive a decrepit industry. His gamble is that countries will still want to buy oil from America to power their cars, trucks, ships and planes for decades to come.

Though China is the world’s largest oil importer, its leader, Xi Jinping, is less brash about coveting foreign resources. The country’s leadership is pushing intensively at substituting electricity for oil.

Chinese technology companies are paving the way for a world that will be powered by electric motors rather than gas-guzzling engines. It is a decisively 21st-century approach not just to solve its own energy problems, but also to sell batteries and other electric products to everyone else. Canada is its newest buyer of EVs; in a rebuke of Mr. Trump, its prime minister, Mark Carney, lowered tariffs on the cars as part of a new trade deal.

Though Americans have been slow to embrace electric vehicles, Chinese households have learned to love them. In 2025, 54 percent of new cars sold in China were either battery-powered or plug-in hybrids. That is a big reason that the country’s oil consumption is on track to peak in 2027, according to forecasts from the International Energy Agency. And Chinese E.V. makers are setting records — whether it’s BYD’s sales (besting Tesla by battery-powered vehicles sold for the first time last year) or Xiaomi’s speed (its cars are setting records at major racetracks like Nürburgring in Germany).

These vehicles are powered not by oil but by domestically generated electrical power that comes from coal, nuclear, hydropower, solar and wind.

In 2000, China produced only one-third of the amount of electrical power that the United States did; by 2024, it produced nearly two and a half times U.S. levels. China’s surging energy investments went substantially into building new plants for burning coal, which the country possesses in abundance. But over the past decade, it has also moved fast on building cleaner energy sources, especially wind and solar.

China now generates more electricity each year than the United States and the European Union combined. It has close to 40 new nuclear power reactors under construction, compared with zero in America. Last year, Beijing announced work on a new hydropower dam in Tibet that will have triple the capacity of China’s Three Gorges Dam, currently the world’s largest power station.

China isn’t just building gigantic amounts of power; its businesses are reshaping technological foundations to electrify the world.

China spent decades trying to build world-leading automotive champions; the results were not impressive until E.V.s arrived. Their adoption allowed Chinese automakers to stop trying to beat the Germans at building better combustion engines and leverage their greater expertise in electronics instead. If an E.V. is a smartphone with tires, then it makes sense that the country that makes most of the world’s electronics would also make nearly half of its cars.

Several technologies had to mature before they could be electrified. The lithium-ion battery was invented by American and Japanese scientists before Chinese companies took over most of this industry in the 2010s. The United States also used to dominate the production of rare-earth magnets, the crucial product in electric motors; China makes more than 90 percent of these magnets today. In addition to batteries and magnets, the writer Noah Smith identifies power electronics and embedded chips as the main drivers of the new electric age.

The oil-burning products that can now instead be powered by batteries and electric motors include not only cars, but also bikes, buses and even some boats. Heavy industry and temperature control for buildings are being electrified, too. And a future in which many noisy, gas-powered household tools can be electrically powered is in reach: Even the foul and loud lawn mower and leaf blower are gradually being replaced by a more gentle thrum.

Some products may never be electrified. Battery packs will probably not power a long-haul flight or container ship (though cleaner fuels are possible). But the opportunity to electrify almost everything else will grow over the next decade, and China is leading the charge.

The southern city of Shenzhen, which has been producing Apple products for two decades now, is leveraging its expertise in electronics — as well as more advanced batteries, magnets and chips — to remake whole categories of transportation and household and industrial products into the image of the smartphone. As the world moves on from combustion engines and into batteries, it will be looking away from oil producers and toward factories in Shenzhen.

The United States is far behind this competition. On the one hand, Elon Musk has done more than anyone else to raise the status of electric vehicles and create their associated technological improvements. But the broader U.S. industrial base has mostly shed its capabilities in batteries and rare-earth magnets, in part out of a deliberate effort to move these factories to China. American companies building drones or other products of the new electric age are also far behind their Chinese competitors.

Electrification demands engagement with the messy world of building power plants and manufacturing at scale, which are China’s strengths. But Silicon Valley has instead preferred to work in the realm of highly profitable digital businesses. Technologists like Sam D’Amico (who is making a high-powered electric-induction stove) and Ryan McEntush (a venture capital investor) have lately sounded the alarm at how comprehensively ahead Chinese capabilities have become.

The United States could compete on building better drones and electric vehicles if its businesses had greater access to electrical power and a vital industrial base. But it is governed by a president who is enthusiastic about powering the future with fossil fuels and has a personal pique against wind turbines, calling them the “SCAM OF THE CENTURY!” His administration is slow-walking approval of and canceling new solar and wind projects while favoring coal and gas — which makes it more difficult to electrify. No product is more important than batteries in electrification, yet an infamous ICE raid targeted a Korean company that was constructing a battery factory in Georgia. Meanwhile, Mr. Trump’s tariffs have hamstrung American manufacturing, which has lost around 70,000 jobs since April.

America had better shape up before losing out to an electric age ushered in by Beijing. Otherwise, it will be stuck with outmoded products at home while China conquers markets through better technology.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/19/opinion/trump-energy-china-future.html