A Climate ‘Shock’ Is Eroding Some Home Values. New Data Shows How Much.

By Claire Brown and Mira Rojanasakul, The New York Times, Nov. 19, 2025

Even after she escaped rising floodwaters by wading away from her home in chest-deep water during Hurricane Rita in 2005, Sandra Rojas, now 69, stayed put. A fifth-generation resident of Lafitte, La., a small coastal community, she raised her home with stilts.

But this year, her annual home insurance premium increased to $8,312, more than doubling over the past four years.

She considered selling, but found herself in a dilemma. As insurance costs have risen, area home values have fallen, dropping by 38 percent since 2020. The roadsides around her house are dotted with for-sale signs.

“They won’t insure you,” Ms. Rojas said. “No one will buy from you. You’re kind of stuck where you are.”

New research shared with The New York Times estimates the extent to which rising home insurance premiums, driven higher by climate change, are cascading into the broader real estate market and eating into home values in the most disaster-prone areas.

The study, which analyzed tens of millions of housing payments through 2024 to understand where insurance costs have risen most, offers first-of-its-kind insight into the way rising insurance rates are affecting home values.

Since 2018, a financial shock in the home insurance market has meant that homes in the ZIP codes most exposed to hurricanes and wildfires would sell for an average of $43,900 less than they would otherwise, the research found. They include coastal towns in Louisiana and low-lying areas in Florida.

Changes in an under-the-radar part of the insurance market, known as reinsurance, have helped to drive this trend. Insurance companies purchase reinsurance to help limit their exposure when a catastrophe hits. Over the past several years, global reinsurance companies have had what the researchers call a “climate epiphany” and have roughly doubled the rates they charge home insurance providers.

Benjamin Keys at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Philip Mulder of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the authors of the study, which was published this week, have called these swift changes “a reinsurance shock.” For some Americans, these changes have made it unaffordable to remain in homes they have lived in for decades.

“Homeowners don’t appreciate or don’t understand that we are living in a much riskier world than we were 25 years ago,” Dr. Keys said. “And that risk? They have to pay for it.”

After analyzing 74 million home payments — which included mortgage, taxes and insurance and were made between 2014 and 2024 — the researchers found that a rapid repricing of disaster risk had been responsible for about a fifth of overall home insurance increases since 2017. Another third could be explained by rising construction costs.

The researchers estimated the effects of the reinsurance shock on home prices in the ZIP codes most vulnerable to catastrophes. They found that rising insurance premiums weighed down home values by about $20,500 in the top 25 percent of homes most exposed to catastrophic hurricanes and wildfires, and by $43,900 in the top 10 percent.

Buying a home has long been seen as a way to lock in predictable housing costs. But the fast-increasing burden of insurance is catching some homeowners by surprise.

Last year, Ms. Rojas’s brother-in-law, who lived down the road in Lafitte, decided to sell his home to escape the area’s rising premiums. It sold for $150,000, which is what it cost him to build it in 1984. He estimated he lost about $75,000 on the sale, after accounting for the cost of renovations.

In parts of the hail-prone Midwestern states, insurance now eats up more than a fifth of the average homeowner’s total housing payments, which include mortgage costs and property taxes. In Orleans Parish, La., that number is nearly 30 percent.

A hundred miles north of Lafitte, the small city of Bogalusa, La., lies further inland. Nevertheless, Cristal Holmes saw her insurance premium more than quadruple in 2022, to $500 per month, on top of her $700 monthly mortgage.

Ms. Holmes, a single mother who was working 56 hours a week at a warehouse, struggled to keep up with the higher bills. She fell behind on mortgage payments after her work hours were reduced to 35 per week. She worried she couldn’t stay in her home.

Similar stories are playing out all over town. Ms. Holmes’s real estate agent, Charlotte Johnson, said her office was getting phone calls every day from people who said they could no longer afford their rising insurance premiums. For many, dropping insurance is not an option, because banks refuse to offer or maintain mortgages for people without coverage.

That means owners are being forced to choose between accepting home insurance policies they can’t afford or risking foreclosure.

Buyers face their own obstacles. High insurance prices and interest rates are making it harder than ever for first-time buyers to purchase homes, said Nancy Galofaro-Cruse, a senior loan officer with CMG Home Loans who works with many of Ms. Johnson’s clients. She estimated that more than a third of would-be buyers in the area backed out of the market this year after insurance and interest rates pushed their total monthly housing costs out of reach.

It’s not just the hurricane-prone coasts that have been affected by the reinsurance shock. In Colorado, where wildfires and hail pose the biggest threats to homes, the average homeowner’s premium has more than doubled in the last decade and median premiums have increased 74 percent since 2020.

Steve Hakes, an insurance broker with Rocky Mountain Insurance Center in Lafayette, Colo., has seen clients consider homes in wildfire-prone areas, only to back out when they can’t find affordable insurance. High prices and limited availability have pushed him to advise buyers to look for insurance early in the homebuying process.

And in California, 13 percent of real estate agents surveyed by an industry trade association said they’d had deals fall through in 2024 after buyers couldn’t find affordable insurance coverage.

Colorado regulators are aware of the threats these dynamics pose to the real estate market and are exploring a wide range of fixes, said Michael Conway, the Colorado insurance commissioner.

“We don’t want a situation where the insurance market is effectively decimating the real estate market,” he said.

As insurance becomes more expensive, home values will need to adjust for potential buyers to afford their monthly costs, industry analysts say. And if home values fall, lower property tax revenue could mean less money for local governments to pay for essential services or affect the ability of those governments to borrow money.

Clarence Guidry reached a breaking point this year when he got a quote to insure his home in Lafitte, La. He’d pay a $20,000 annual premium but if a hurricane struck, he’d be on the hook for the first $50,000 in damage before the insurance company would pay out.

His lender wouldn’t let Mr. Guidry, who goes by Rosco, keep his mortgage without home insurance. But keeping his home insured against damage from hurricanes would mean stomaching monthly payments that are at least 40 percent higher than the rest of his monthly mortgage and property taxes combined.

Over the last decade, as the number of wildfires and storms has mounted, losses have exceeded the revenue insurance companies receive from home insurance policies across the United States. In Louisiana, 12 companies, including Mr. Guidry’s insurer, became insolvent after a wave of hurricanes between 2021 and 2023. (Most private insurers do not cover flood damage, which is handled separately under a federal program.)

Insurance companies’ own costs have climbed in recent years for a variety of reasons, including higher construction costs, higher interest rates and President Trump’s tariff policies.

But the changes in the insurance market have begun to put a higher price on risk. Reinsurers have been driving these effects, Dr. Mulder said.

“These reinsurers are looking at a lot of the same data as insurers, but at a much bigger scale and with more sophistication,” he said.

Politicians, homeowners, economists, state insurance commissioners and real estate agents have long worried that insurance costs will rise so much that they will begin to pull down home values.

According to the study by Dr. Keys and Dr. Mulder, which was published as a working paper in the National Bureau of Economic Research, this is already happening in some areas.

Jesse Keenan, an associate professor of sustainable real estate and urban planning at Tulane University, said the direct evidence of this phenomenon remained limited and there were factors beyond insurance that affected local home prices.

But there are increasingly troubling signs in some markets, he said.

“The New Orleans housing market is exhibiting signs of failure that are imposing stress on the financial system around it,” he said.

Overall, U.S. home prices have risen about 55 percent since 2018, but New Orleans prices have increased by only 14 percent, less than the rate of inflation over the same time period.

Even in states where heavy regulations have kept costs down, there are signs that home insurers will continue to raise premiums to align more closely with disaster risk. New rules in California allow insurance companies to pass rising reinsurance costs on to consumers. One consumer advocacy group, citing the effects of similar changes in other states, has estimated this provision could raise net premiums significantly for homeowners.

Back in Lafitte, Mr. Guidry was running the numbers for his own budget. Against the advice of his financial adviser, he took money out of his retirement account to pay off his home loan. The plan now is to self-insure for wind and hail damage. That means he and his wife will have to pay out of pocket to repair their home if another severe storm hits.

In forgoing coverage, the Guidrys join some 13 percent of U.S. homeowners who are uninsured, according to Census Bureau data. Insurers continue to drop people in many areas.

“Now, we’ve got to take the gamble,” Mr. Guidry said.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/11/19/climate/home-insurance-costs-real-estate-market.html?searchResultPosition=1

Missing at U.N.’s Climate Meeting: American Executives

Many business leaders are skipping the annual United Nations climate summit in Belém, Brazil, or are attending events in other cities.

By Ivan Penn and David Gelles, The New York Times, Nov. 12, 2025

Top U.S. government officials are skipping the annual United Nations climate summit for the first time in 30 years. And many American corporate executives appear to be following their lead.

Though few executives have joined President Trump in calling climate change a hoax, some have recently suggested that it is perhaps not deserving of as much attention as it has been getting. Their attitude is not so much climate denial as it is a rejection of the past framing of the issue, a stark shift from the advocacy and commitments made at summits held under different political conditions.

The leaders of America’s biggest companies once made pledges to stop polluting, formed coalitions to fund the energy transition and called on governments to pass laws that would reduce planet-warming emissions. But at this year’s U.N. climate summit, no prominent American leaders made the trip to in Belém, Brazil, a city on the edge of the Amazon rainforest.

“Obviously, it has to do with the political climate in the U.S.,” said Sonia Dunlop, chief executive of the Global Solar Council, a trade organization.

Previous iterations of the summit have drawn influential chief executives including Tim Cook of Apple, Darren Woods of Exxon and Brian Moynihan of Bank of America. The absence of such figures has been interpreted by attendees as further confirmation that the United States under Mr. Trump has turned its attention away from climate efforts.

Mr. Woods was at an event on Friday in São Paulo sponsored in part by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. But he skipped the Belém summit after attending previous gatherings in Baku, Azerbaijan, and Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

“Our company — I think more generally the industry — doesn’t take issue or exception to the objective in terms of what the world is trying to do with emissions,” Mr. Woods said during the event in São Paulo. “I think our challenge, and where we have a lot more debate, is how we’re trying to accomplish that.”

Humanity’s challenge should not be framed as how it can “get rid of oil and gas,” he said. It should focus on ridding the planet of “emissions associated with the combustion of oil and gas,” he added.

That sort of position has been on display during the summit in Belém as the U.S. business community tries to navigate what some describe as a minefield. One big concern is that top executives who publicly commit to addressing climate change could end up hurting their companies by riling up Mr. Trump and his aides.

Since returning to office in January, the president has aggressively dismantled federal climate efforts.

On his first day in office, he withdrew the United States from the Paris climate agreement and declared an energy emergency, which he has used to justify additional fossil fuel projects. Since then, the Trump administration has slashed regulations aimed at limiting pollution, attacked the renewable power business and moved to boost coal, gas and oil production.

This year, several big technology companies acknowledged that they would not meet their climate targets because of their investments in power-hungry data centers needed for artificial intelligence. Even before Mr. Trump’s second term began, many of the country’s biggest financial firms had quit their industry climate alliances. And after speaking out against Mr. Trump’s rollback of climate policies during his first term, many chief executives have gone quiet this time around.

“It may not be worth a particular C.E.O. coming to COP to talk about what they already are doing,” said Dan Carol, a senior director of climate finance at the Milken Institute, using the acronym for the U.N. summit, which is known as the Conference of the Parties.

Some big American companies sent other executives to Belém — the chief sustainability officers of Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Mastercard all attended the summit there.

Mr. Carol’s group, a research organization created by Michael Milken, the bond financier pardoned by Mr. Trump, held a climate investor symposium on Sunday and Monday in São Paulo, more than 1,500 miles from Belém. It was one of several climate-related corporate events in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, the two cosmopolitan metropolises in the south of Brazil.

Some U.S. energy executives like Mr. Woods of Exxon attended those events instead of the summit. In addition to the Trump factor, visitors to this year’s summit have been stymied by the paucity of hotel rooms and other infrastructure limitations in Belém.

Mr. Carol said investors were still interested in projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But the kinds of investments they are looking at are shifting, with certain varieties clearly on hold as the long arm of the White House reaches and shapes conversations in Brazil.

Exhibit A for how corporate executives are changing their tone, at least in the minds of some scientists, came last month in a memo from Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder. In it, he warned against climate change alarmism and said it “will not lead to humanity’s demise.” Many saw his comments as a reversal of his past positions on climate change, and Mr. Trump and many Republicans seized on it as a win for their side.

But just days before the summit in Belém, Mr. Gates said at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., that any suggestion that he had reversed his position that climate change was a global problem was “a gigantic misreading of the memo.”

Mr. Gates said he intended to spend more money on climate mitigation.

“I didn’t think the memo was going to convert the nonbelievers into believers, and sure enough, it didn’t convert them,” he said.

Mr. Gates’s move to clarify his position has only intensified concerns among world leaders, environmentalists and others that business leaders are retreating under pressure from the Trump administration.

The White House has dismissed the meeting in Belém. “President Trump will not jeopardize our country’s economic and national security to pursue vague climate goals that are killing other countries,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, told The New York Times this month.

Sebastian Buckup, managing director of the Center for Nature and Climate at the World Economic Forum, said he did not believe there was a “boycott that can be traced back to political positions.” But he noted that as the debate around climate became more routine, “many of these things have moved down the hierarchy of the company.”

Among those noticeably absent from this year’s U.N. summit are some of the most prominent U.S. electric utility executives.

Calvin Butler, president and chief executive of Exelon and the chairman of the Edison Electric Institute, the industry’s main trade organization, is not attending the summit because of scheduling conflicts, a spokeswoman said. He told The Times in a recent interview that he remained committed to “driving what we do to net zero.”

Several investment banks and big tech firms also sent executives to events in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro ahead of the meeting in Belém.

At the Milken event in São Paulo on Monday, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat, harshly criticized the Trump administration for refusing to send anyone to the summit. He also said that he was “surprised not every damn governor is out here” and that corporate executives should not retreat from events like the climate summit, despite the potential blowback from Mr. Trump.

“We fight back,” Mr. Newsom said before heading to Belém.

At the opening of a leaders’ meeting ahead of the main U.N. climate summit, the former New York mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced more investment to tackle climate problems. Mr. Bloomberg pledged to invest $100 million from his foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, to accelerate efforts to cut emissions of methane — one of the most potent planet-warming gases.

Some business executives from other countries also made the trek to Belém. Among them was Andrew Forrest, the Australian billionaire behind Fortescue, a mining company.

Between intermittent downpours, Mr. Forrest welcomed guests to his ammonia-powered boat, which emits fewer pollutants than traditional ships. Former Vice President Al Gore was among them.

Mr. Forrest said he had come to the U.N. meeting to demonstrate that some business leaders remained committed to tackling climate change. He lamented that a proposed international deal to reduce emissions from the shipping industry had been derailed by “a certain president not wanting to be proven wrong by the rest of the world,” a reference to the Trump administration, which scuttled the talks.

But Mr. Forrest added that the economics of clean energy were moving in the right direction, and he expressed optimism that the coming decades would see rapid reductions in planet-warming emissions.

“History always delivers,” he said. “In the end, right will win out.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/business/un-climate-corporate-executives.html?searchResultPosition=3

An E.P.A. Plan to Kill a Major Climate Rule Is Worrying Business Leaders

Some carmakers and energy executives say the plan would trigger costly litigation and spur individual states to create a patchwork of tighter rules.

By Karen Zraick and Lisa Friedman, The New York Times, Oct. 25, 2025

The Environmental Protection Agency is promising to erase a scientific finding that underpins climate regulations nationwide. But some business leaders said they are wary that the move could lead to a costly legal quagmire.

The rule, known as the “endangerment finding,” is the conclusion by the E.P.A. that greenhouse gases endanger public health and therefore must be regulated by the federal government. Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, has said the agency would repeal the finding, claiming that the burden to industries of cutting greenhouse gas emissions is more harmful than a warming planet.

And yet carmakers, electric utilities and even the oil and gas industry have asked the E.P.A. to tread carefully. If the federal government were to stop regulating greenhouse gases, it could clear the way for states and municipalities to sue companies for damages from climate change. And it could spur individual states to come up with their own pollution limits, creating a patchwork of regulations. Environmental groups have also promised to sue the E.P.A. if it repeals the finding, leading to more uncertainty for businesses.

“This is something that the vast majority of industry didn’t ask for and doesn’t want,” said Zach Friedman, the senior director of federal policy at Ceres, a nonprofit group that submitted a letter from 59 companies and investors opposing the E.P.A. plan.

Brigit Hirsch, a spokeswoman for the E.P.A., said in a statement that rescinding the endangerment finding would “unlock regulatory clarity like never before” and said the finding had led to heavy costs, particularly for the auto industry. “We live in a democracy, and as such private companies are welcome to make decisions as they see fit,” she said.

Human activities, mainly the burning of coal, oil and gas for energy, have produced the greenhouse gases that have been the primary driver of climate change for more than half a century. Carbon dioxide, methane and other gases have accumulated in the atmosphere and are warming the planet by trapping the sun’s heat. That has contributed to more intense wildfires and heat waves, rising seas and extreme weather events.

In its proposal to repeal the endangerment finding, the E.P.A. cited a recent Energy Department report that downplayed the severity of climate change. That report was written by five prominent climate contrarians chosen by the Trump administration.

Their work has been sharply criticized by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the American Meteorological Society and more than 85 climate scientists in the United States, who found that the Trump administration’s climate report has numerous inaccuracies and misrepresents climate science.

Scott Saleska, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona, said the evidence that supported the endangerment finding 16 years ago has only grown stronger since then. Air temperatures have increased, sea levels have risen, ocean acidification has worsened. Heat-related deaths are rising, smoke from wildfires is increasingly severe and the spread of climate-enabled diseases is on the uptick.

Ignoring that evidence, as the E.P.A. appears poised to do, Dr. Saleska said, “puts an exclamation point on the idea that science, as the best method the human species has ever come up with for discerning objective reality, has no role in this government.”

Few business leaders raised the threat of climate change in their opposition to the E.P.A. plan, and many in fact argued for loosened emissions standards. The administration has linked the repeal of the endangerment finding to the rollback of strict limits on tailpipe pollution imposed under the Biden administration, something most automakers and oil companies are eager to see.

Indeed, many companies stressed that they are on board with the Trump administration’s energy agenda, which involves promoting oil, gas and coal, and pulling back from clean energy like solar and wind.

But they still said the federal government should retain the ability to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

Rescinding the endangerment finding “will serve not as a path to regulatory stability, but rather a route to prolonged legal battles, possible market fragmentation and technological stagnation,” wrote Jim Kliesch, the director of regulatory affairs at American Honda Motor Company Inc.

The American Petroleum Institute, which represents oil and gas companies, wrote that “federal government action is a necessary part of the solution” to climate change and said it believed the E.P.A. had the authority to regulate greenhouse gases.

The Edison Electric Institute, a trade association representing the electric power industry, said that if without a federal role in regulating greenhouse gases, states and cities could “attempt to fill that perceived void through increased regulatory requirements that could vary significantly from one jurisdiction to the next.”

But other business groups supported removing the endangerment finding. The National Mining Association, which represents mining companies, and the Steel Manufacturers Association backed the agency, as did energy associations from several states, including coal and gas-rich Wyoming.

Changing federal regulations is typically a lengthy process, and the E.P.A. was required to solicit and review public comments about potential changes. The Trump administration is aiming to finalize the repeal before the end of the year, according to several E.P.A. officials.

When the public comment period closed on Sept. 22, the agency had received more than 500,000 comments, about 2 percent of which have so far been posted on the E.P.A.’s website, according to an analysis Wednesday by InfluenceMap, a London-based sustainability think tank. In its report on the comments released so far, the group said that companies and trade groups across many sectors of the economy were concerned about the legal viability of the agency’s proposal, and some proposed weakening greenhouse gas standards instead of jettisoning them.

“I was definitely surprised to see the level of concern that some of these companies and industry associations are voicing about the proposal, especially the companies that have traditionally tried to weaken emissions standards,” said Leo Menninger, a senior analyst for the group. “They’re generally concerned about the entire framework being removed.”

Repealing the finding would almost certainly lead to litigation that could eventually reach the Supreme Court. The endangerment finding, which dates from 2009, came out of a Supreme Court decision two years earlier, Massachusetts v. E.P.A., in which the justices concluded that greenhouse gases were pollutants, and that the agency was obligated to determine whether they were a danger to public health.

Nixing the finding could also have another unintended consequence for fossil fuel producers: It would potentially weaken a primary argument that they have used to fight some of the lawsuits filed against them in state courts.

The industry has said in court that the E.P.A. has exclusive authority to oversee emissions that cross state lines, overriding other state and federal laws. (Plaintiffs in many of the suits have countered that their lawsuits are based on corporate misbehavior, not actual emissions.) But if the E.P.A. removes its own authority to regulate emissions, that could open up the potential for some lawsuits against the industry to proceed more easily.

In its proposed rule, the E.P.A. said the Clean Air Act and the structure of the federal system would still block such lawsuits, even without the endangerment finding in place. But that reading of the law would most likely be challenged in court.

“I think that’s one reason why Trump didn’t try to do this in his first term,” said Robert Percival, director of the environmental law program at the University of Maryland’s law school. “They were warned that it was too dangerous to open up this Pandora’s box.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/25/climate/endangerment-finding-auto-energy-lawsuits.html?campaign_id=54&emc=edit_clim_20251028&instance_id=165314&nl=climate-forward&regi_id=66704053&segment_id=209493&user_id=97eb24ff9121d1a70f01fac05f86ea1b

The Kids Who Sued Trump Just Lost Big in Court. Or Did They?

A federal judge threw out their climate lawsuit against the president a few days ago. But legal experts say there was a silver lining in the judge’s opinion.

By Karen Zraick, The New York Times, Oct. 18, 2025

When a judge threw out a lawsuit this week accusing President Trump of violating the Constitution, it was a major setback for a group of young people trying to fight climate change in the courts.

But the ruling had a silver lining. The judge also said the plaintiffs had successfully argued that climate change constitutes a “children’s health emergency.”

Legal experts said that language reinforced a yearslong strategy by an organization called Our Children’s Trust, a public-interest law firm, to put children and young people in the courtroom and on the stand to argue that governments should do more to rein in global warming.

Daniel Metzger, a senior fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, said the judge’s opinion offered “very detailed guidance for designing cases that can overcome the challenges this one faced.”

The court “went out of its way,” he said, to establish that the plaintiffs in the case, Lighthiser v. Trump, had successfully tied health risks for children to the Trump administration’s climate policies. “It didn’t have to,” Mr. Metzger said. But by doing so, the ruling — even though it’s a clear loss for the plaintiffs — “will shape how other courts weigh similar arguments” in the future.

The strategy of filing climate lawsuits with children and young people as plaintiffs has become a fixture of the legal landscape worldwide in recent years. It can win sympathy and public attention for a case, but it has its risks, too.

For the plaintiffs, there is the risk of putting children or young people on the stand and exposing them not only to cross-examination but also potential public criticism or attacks more broadly. As for the defense, young plaintiffs can raise difficult questions about when or how aggressively to go about cross-examining people who might be as young as elementary-school age.

For example, in the Montana case thrown out this week, the Justice Department declined to cross-examine two of the underage plaintiffs, ages 17 and 11, during a two-day hearing last month.

That hearing, held before Judge Dana L. Christensen in the federal court in Missoula, had moments of drama.

In the case, filed in May, a group of 22 young people led by Our Children’s Trust sued the federal government, arguing that three of President Trump’s executive orders promoting fossil fuels would intensify climate change, threatening the health of young people and violating the Constitution’s guarantees of life and liberty. Government lawyers countered that the lawsuit was meritless and should be dismissed.

Jorja McCormick, 17, of Livingston, Mont., was one of the plaintiffs who took the stand, testifying about the difficulties of caring for her horses during wildfires. Later, listening to a defense argument that involved making a point about laws against speeding, she scribbled a note to her lawyer. “People get a choice on how fast they go on the highway,” she wrote. “We can’t choose how much coal is driven through my town.”

Later her lawyer, Julia Olson, read the note in court, saying, “The plaintiffs always make me cry, Your Honor.”

But the case could not overcome what the defendants — the president and a dozen federal agencies — said was its fatal flaw. They argued that it was a facsimile of a case filed a decade ago by Our Children’s Trust, Juliana v. United States.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (the same court that would hear an appeal in this case) previously had dismissed Juliana, finding that the political branches of government, not the courts, were the appropriate venue for the plaintiffs’ demands. Judge Christensen essentially concluded that his hands were bound by the precedent set by that earlier decision.

Ms. Olson has vowed to appeal his decision.

After the lawsuit was dismissed, Adam Gustafson, the acting head of the Justice Department’s environmental division, called it a “sweeping and baseless attack on President Trump’s energy agenda” and said the judge was correct to conclude that legal precedent blocked the case.

Jonathan Adler, a professor at William & Mary Law School in Williamsburg, Va., who is not involved in the litigation, said the lawsuit was built on “fanciful” theories and its dismissal wasn’t particularly surprising. Having young plaintiffs may make cases “a more interesting drama” for publicity reasons, he said, but it doesn’t add legal heft. “This litigation is more about the court of public opinion than the courts of law,” he said.

Despite the recent setback, Our Children’s Trust has had some high-profile successes with the strategy of putting young people at the center of climate lawsuits. The group won a closely watched case in Montana State Court in 2023, and came to a settlement last year in a lawsuit against Hawaii’s Department of Transportation.

Patrick Parenteau, an emeritus professor at the Vermont Law and Graduate School, was also unsurprised by the decision in the Lighthiser case, given the precedent. But he called the judge’s 31-page opinion groundbreaking, and said it would help build a body of law on climate change and its effects on children. “No other U.S. court decision has gone this far,” he said.

He also pointed to similar cases in Colombia and Germany, as well as a recent International Court of Justice advisory opinion on the legal obligations of states with regard to climate change, which was spurred by a yearslong campaign led by students from Pacific island countries. That court’s ruling, while lacking an enforcement mechanism, said that governments must protect people from the “urgent and existential threat” of climate change.

The Juliana case has no path forward in U.S. courts since the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal. However, Our Children’s Trust is now bringing it to an international body: the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which is part of the Washington-based Organization of American States.

In a petition filed last month, the group argued that the United States had violated international law by blocking access to justice for the young plaintiffs. James R. May, a professor at Washburn University School of Law who worked on the filing, said it was the first time that the International Court of Justice’s new climate opinion had been invoked in a legal action.

Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center, said it was exceedingly rare to have testimony about climate change in a U.S. federal court. Having minors on the stand was also somewhat rare, though it has happened in a few notable cases in the past, including Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, a watershed Supreme Court case that cemented free speech rights in schools, according to Lisa V. Martin, a professor at the University of South Carolina’s Joseph F. Rice School of Law. That case started with students’ plans to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam War.

And in her closing argument at the recent hearing in Montana, Ms. Olson invoked another case in which children were plaintiffs: Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court case that declared segregation in schools unconstitutional.

“I think it’s a great thing when children are able to access the courts to assert their rights,” said Professor Martin, who is not connected to the Lighthiser case. “This is one of the few parts of democracy where they can easily participate. They can’t vote, and so that takes them out of some of our other democratic processes.”

Professor Parenteau also pointed to the risks and limitations of climate litigation. In the Lighthiser case, the legal risk is that an appeal could result in an even stronger decision by the Ninth Circuit against the plaintiffs, one that could potentially be affirmed by the Supreme Court. For example, a ruling on the ability of plaintiffs to sue over presidential executive orders could have broad consequences for all sorts of cases.

He also said he believed that Our Children’s Trust, which he supports and has donated to but has no formal relationship with, might have more success in electoral politics than in courts of law. Climate change is “ultimately a political issue,” he said. “It may be that these kids could have more of an influence on parents and grandparents in the voting booth than they are in the courtroom.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/18/climate/climate-lawsuit-children-montana-trump-health.html?campaign_id=54&emc=edit_clim_20251019&instance_id=164735&nl=climate-forward&regi_id=66704053&segment_id=208212&user_id=97eb24ff9121d1a70f01fac05f86ea1b

Trump's Coal Revival Is All Smoke and No Future

Op-ed by Seth Feaster and Dennis Wamsted, The New York Times, Oct. 7, 2025

The two-unit Cumberland coal plant in northwestern Tennessee, owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority, is one of the largest coal-fired power plants in the United States, capable of supplying electricity to as many as 1.4 million homes when it is running.

But lately, the plant has been failing right when customers need electricity the most.

In the middle of the heat wave that hit the eastern United States this June, one of the units tripped offline, forcing the T.V.A. to declare a power emergency and ask customers to cut back on electricity use. For consumers, this meant raising the temperature of their air-conditioning on some of the hottest days of the year.

Cumberland’s problems run so deep that the T.V.A. plans to retire the 52-year-old units in 2026 and 2028. It has warned the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that keeping the plant open any longer would require significant investment and create economic and reliability risks.

“Clean, beautiful coal” has become a mantra for the Trump administration. But it is neither clean nor beautiful. More to the point, it is neither economical nor reliable — central concerns for utilities and power producers across the country. In contrast, wind and solar energy and battery storage, which the administration actively opposes, are less expensive, more reliable and far better for the climate.

Most of the coal mined in the United States today fuels aging electric power plants such as Cumberland that are costly to maintain and increasingly unsound. It’s why America gets just one-third as much electricity from coal as it did in 2007, when power production from coal peaked. Since then, large coal-fired plants have been steadily replaced by cheaper, cleaner and more efficient alternatives. In 2025 alone, 23 units are scheduled to close or be converted to gas by utilities and other power producers. From 2026 to 2030, 109 more units are expected to stop burning coal, according to research by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, where we work.

The Trump administration is betting that forcing coal plants to stay open, offering $625 million to upgrade plants, giving away coal on federal land, cutting pollution limits and opening more land to coal mining will spark a turnaround for coal-fired power generation. But while these measures could prolong the operating lives of some coal plants for a short period, they will not reverse the decline of an industry hurtling into economic and technological obsolescence.

Coal-fired power plants are essentially steam engines, a technology the railroads abandoned in the 1950s and ’60s. They are practically identical to the first coal-fired plant, built in 1882 by Thomas Edison to produce electricity in New York City.

But power technology and grid operations have evolved significantly over the past two decades, first by the rise of generation that has no fuel cost (wind and solar) and more recently by battery storage, which can send power to the grid as needed. Batteries in Texas now store power when demand is low and solar generation is high (think 10 a.m.) and then send that power back into the system when demand is high (around 7 p.m.).

This capability, which didn’t exist in the grid until recently, is sharply lowering spikes in power prices and reducing consumer costs. It’s also enabling even more low-cost renewables to be built and reducing the old approach of building expensive fossil-fueled plants dedicated to meeting periods of peak demand.

Coal plants, in contrast, cannot respond quickly to changes in grid demand. Many of them lose money across the day when power prices are low, since they cannot easily stop running in response to low demand.

While coal power struggles with high fuel, operation and maintenance costs, solar and battery storage costs are projected to continue falling while performance improves, further undercutting coal’s competitiveness.

Because the batteries large enough to store electricity for the grid are based on the same technology as batteries for consumer electronics and electric vehicles, they benefit enormously from global investment and research. As a result, energy storage density, a key measure of performance, has been improving by 5 percent or more annually. Solar panels have also seen consistent increases in efficiency combined with falling costs.

Battery storage and solar have other key advantages that conventional power plants do not. Both can be built at nearly any size, from small residential units to large, high-power utility projects. They can also be built almost anywhere, helping utilities avoid costly transmission upgrades and other infrastructure investments.

These advantages have increasingly undercut the economics of coal generation. The problem has gotten so severe that many utilities, even in coal-friendly states, have converted or are planning to convert their existing coal plants to burn natural gas to keep them open and operating. Think about that for a minute: It is often cheaper and more reliable to retrofit a coal plant to burn gas than to keep operating it as is.

Gas is the preferred option for the T.V.A. saddled with the Cumberland coal plants. It is building a 1,450-megawatt combined-cycle natural gas plant as a replacement.

The Trump administration is likely to push the T.V.A. to continue operating the facility past its planned closure dates, regardless of the cost and reliability implications for consumers. The Department of Energy has already forced a Michigan utility to keep the J.H. Campbell coal plant open — despite long-term, state-approved plans to close it in May — which cost $29 million in the first five weeks alone. Consumers, including many who are not even served by the utility, will ultimately be forced to pay for these actions.

These costly stopgap measures are largely performative. They will not prevent coal’s declining importance as an electricity generation resource. The alternatives are simply less expensive, more reliable and quicker to build.

Seth Feaster and Dennis Wamsted are analysts at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/07/opinion/coal-electricity-solar-batteries.html?searchResultPosition=1

Trump to World: Green Energy Is a Scam and Climate Science Is From ‘Stupid People’

In a remarkable United Nations address, the president lashed out at wind turbines, environmentalists and allies around the world while dismissing the dangers of climate change.

By Somini Sengupta and Lisa Friedman, The New York Times, Sept. 23, 2025

President Trump went on a rant against climate change at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, calling it the “greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” and saying that the scientific consensus on global warming was created by “stupid people.” He also berated countries, including close allies of the United States, for adopting renewable energy.

It added up to an extraordinary diatribe that ignored the human suffering exacted by the heat waves, wildfires and deadly floods that are aggravated by the burning of fossil fuels and, at the same time, stood at odds with the rapid expansion of renewable energy all over the world.

He chose his two targets, demonizing immigrants and green energy, and called them a “double-tailed monster” that he claimed, without evidence, are “destroying” Europe. Both subjects play well to his base in the Republican Party. But it was remarkable that he said all this to a global audience.

“You need strong borders and traditional energy sources if you’re going to be great again,” he said. “I worry about Europe, I love the people of Europe. I hate to see it being devastated by energy and immigration.”

His attacks on clean energy appear to be part of an effort by the White House to derail European Union’s legally binding targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and stoke a political backlash against Europe’s clean energy advances.

Wind and solar power are generally among the cheapest forms of energy in much of the world, according to independent energy analysts, and global investments in renewables exceed investments in coal, oil and gas.

“Trump continues to embarrass the U.S. on the global stage and undermine the interests of Americans at home,” Gina McCarthy, who served as the United States climate policy director in the Biden administration, said in a statement. “He’s rejecting our government’s responsibility to protect Americans from the increasingly intense and frequent disasters linked to climate change that unleash havoc on our country.”

Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, defended Mr. Trump’s comments and said in a written statement, “Whether it’s called global cooling, global warming, or climate change, the radical climate agenda continues to destroy many great countries around the world.”

On his first day in office, Mr. Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement, a voluntary pact among nearly 200 nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It is the only country to have done so. His administration also has thwarted renewable energy projects, stripped federal incentives for wind and solar power and removed climate-science data from government websites. It has also commissioned a report downplaying the consequences of climate change.

European lawmakers see the expansion of clean energy as a way to ensure energy security and not rely on the imports of oil and gas. Mr. Trump, on the other hand, has urged Europeans to buy more U.S. oil and gas. The administration has received a pledge from the European Union to buy $250 billion in U.S. energy every year through the rest of the president’s term in exchange for some relief from tariffs.

The United States is already the world’s leading exporter of natural gas and the biggest producer of oil, and the Trump administration is encouraging new development. Mr. Trump has also signed executive orders to expand the burning and mining of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel.

According to overwhelming scientific consensus, the burning of coal, oil and gas has raised the average global temperature by well over 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, compared to the preindustrial era, and has exacerbated deadly heat, fires and floods.

He referred to global warming as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated” and upbraided world leaders for sticking to an international agreement to limit global temperature rise and transition away from fossil fuels. The moment was all the more remarkable because the United States is responsible for the largest share of global emissions since the Industrial Revolution.

“I’ve been right about everything and I’m telling you that if you don’t get away from the green energy scam, your country is going to fail,” he said.

Mr. Trump assailed environmentalists for wanting to “kill all the cows,” a claim for which there is no evidence. Cattle produce methane emissions, a potent greenhouse gas, and for that and other reasons, some environmentalists have urged people to eat less meat.

The speech lasted 56 minutes, more than three times longer than the 15-minute limit on remarks by world leaders on the General Assembly podium. He criticized countries in Europe, including Britain, where he received a royal welcome last week, for expanding their renewable energy infrastructure.

Germany, he claimed, “was being led down a very sick path both on immigration by the way and energy.”

Jennifer Morgan, who has served as Germany’s climate change envoy, said European countries saw clean energy as a way to ensure their energy security and to expand their economies. To build a strong Europe, she said, it is necessary to “tackle climate change to avoid people having to leave their homes.”

One of Mr. Trump’s longer digressions involved the idea of “a carbon footprint,” the notion that individuals or groups, through their actions, produce varying amounts of greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide. He called it “a hoax made up by people with evil intentions.”

The term was popularized years ago by oil companies as part of a rebranding effort.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/23/climate/trump-climate-energy-united-nations-unga.html?searchResultPosition=1