Environmental Leader Laments Loss of Bipartisanship on Climate Issues

Gene Karpinski, who retired from leading the League of Conservation Voters after two decades, said the group that once backed G.O.P. candidates now finds it difficult to do so.

By Carl Hulse, NY Times, Aug. 10, 2025

When Gene Karpinski took over as the president of the League of Conservation Voters nearly two decades ago, 20 percent of the candidates the environmental lobbying and political powerhouse endorsed for federal office were Republicans.

Last year, none were.

After almost 50 years as a top progressive advocate in Washington, Mr. Karpinski, 73, retired in the spring from his position leading the L.C.V., which is known for its voting scorecard that rates lawmakers on environmental policy. It was also once known for its record of bipartisanship in backing both Republicans and Democrats for office, a relative rarity for Washington interest groups.

But the polarization of Washington and the growing divide between the parties on climate issues has made bipartisanship much more difficult to embrace. President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s climate law was enacted three years ago over the uniform opposition of Republicans, who repealed large swaths of it in the recent domestic policy legislation President Trump signed into law.

In a recent interview, Mr. Karpinski, a well-known figure on Capitol Hill who started in Washington in 1977 as one of Ralph Nader’s “raiders” and headed the Public Interest Research Group for 21 years, reflected on the shifting politics of environmental policy.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

What do you see as your biggest achievement at the L.C.V.?

On the institutional side, we built it from a staff of about 30 to a staff of over 200, from a budget of $12 million to a budget of over $200 million and a state L.C.V. network that has also grown significantly. Just as importantly in the long run, we won some significant victories, including the biggest climate bill that the world has ever seen, which, as you know, passed in August of 2022 after a failed effort back in 2009 and 2010.

Learned a lot of lessons. So built the institution into a much more significant force, and won some important policies. Along the way, helped win a lot of elections and became the biggest player in the progressive community to help win elections, to elect climate champions and defeat climate enemies.

One of the interesting things about your group was that you were bipartisan — you endorsed candidates from both parties. Did that stay true through the end of your tenure?

When I first started, I would say about 20 percent of our endorsements at the federal level were Republicans. You needed to work both sides of the aisle to get things done. But that has shifted in the last bit of time, as the Republican Party, frankly, has become captured by the special interests, particularly the oil, gas and coal industries, and did their bidding.

The environment was historically a bipartisan issue. You remember in 1990, the Clean Air Act passed with over 400 votes in the House, 88 votes in the Senate. George [H.W.] Bush, the president, proudly signed it. That bill would not pass today, because the Republican Party leadership would not let that happen.

So has it become impossible for an environmental group such as the L.C.V. to get behind Republicans?

Not impossible, but much, much, much more difficult. I think it remains easier at the state level. We have a network of 33 state LCVs across the country. They do the same kind of work we do — do elections and win policies. Because the fossil fuel industry is not as powerful in some of these states, they can find more bipartisan support there. In Washington, it’s not impossible, but it’s not easy. [Representative] Brian Fitzpatrick is a shining example, someone from a swing district in Pennsylvania who has the highest Republican score. I think he’s probably got about a 70 lifetime score [out of 100]. There used to be a lot more Brian Fitzpatricks.

I remember when congressional Republicans were among the leaders of the environmental movement.

When I started in 2006, the guy I recruited to be my vice chair was a guy named Sherry Boehlert [former Representative Sherwood Boehlert, Republican of New York]. When he retired in 2006, he chaired the House Science Committee as a Republican and held hearings on climate change, and talked about the problems with climate change. We had a whole slew of folks we would meet with all the time: [then-Representatives] Chris Shays, Wayne Gilchrist, Connie Morella, Mark Kirk and many, many more. We would meet in their offices and strategize with Republicans who cared about the environment. Right now the list is far too short.

You named the 2022 climate bill as a major achievement. Do you worry it will all come undone?

[Mr. Trump’s domestic policy legislation] was a horrible bill that will significantly hamper the ability to go forward at the federal level. The good news is, in state after state after state, we continue to make progress. In 2017, after Trump became president, we weren’t going to make any progress at the federal level on climate, so we went back to the states, elected a lot of new governors, a lot of state legislators. Literally less than 1 percent of the public lived in a state with a policy that said we need 100 percent clean energy back in 2017. Now over 40 percent of the country lives in a state with 100 percent clean-energy policy, and the programs will continue in most states.

The progress at the federal level has been severely impacted by the ugly bill and what the [Environmental Protection Agency and Department Of Energy] are doing as well. And the latest E.P.A. proposal coming out very soon — to declare climate change pollution does not impact public health — is appallingly dishonest, and would be deadly for generations to come. We have to continue to play the best damn defense, but we can continue to be on offense in state after state after state.

One of the subjects that emerged in the debate over the so-called big, beautiful bill was a new push to sell public lands for revenue. One of the main priorities of the L.C.V. is to keep public land public. Does it concern you that there’s a new discussion to unload federal property in the West?

It’s absolutely concerning. The good news on that is even most Republicans in the West said that goes too far, because people in the West appreciate, respect and enjoy those public lands, and they bring a lot of resources to the state, which is great. That was a rare example in the moment we’re in where there was bipartisan opposition to that crazy proposal, and therefore it failed.

In recent years, how much did the L.C.V. typically invest in political campaigns?

2024 was our biggest ever. Go back to when I started, it was a little less than $5 million. If you add in the state and federal in 2024, we invested over $160 million in mostly national, but also state elections as well.

But no Republicans?

At the federal level, we did not support any Republicans in 2024. Definitely in some of the states we did. We made support of the Inflation Reduction Act a litmus test. As you know, that passed on a purely partisan basis.

Hopefully that can change again over time, because we want to build back more bipartisan support. But it’s really hard. Even those who want to do the right thing: They fly in the face of leadership, because the leadership on this issue in the Republican Party at the national level is just atrocious. They’ve sold their heart and soul to the big polluters. The polluters are getting their payback, and it’s ugly for the public.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/us/environmental-leader-bipartisanship-climate.html?searchResultPosition=1

How a Carbon Tax Plan in Europe Survived (Mostly)

Austria tried a combination of taxes and rebates to reduce emissions.

By Jim Tankersley, The New York Times, August 7, 2025

A few years ago, Austria adopted a climate policy that taxed carbon emissions, but with a twist: The government sent the money back to taxpayers.

The idea was to reduce the use of fossil fuels but keep Austrians spending. If the plan worked, it would make a dent in the country’s greenhouse gas output but not the national economy.

This year a new government scrapped that plan. But only half of it.

Austria’s leaders decided keep the tax but eliminate the rebate payments, which they called the Klimabonus. The decision was a welcome one to supporters of sharper emissions reductions.

Austria is a relatively small country with a relatively light contribution to global emissions. Still, it has pledged to reach carbon neutrality by 2040, a decade ahead of the European Union target. Its carbon tax plan was meant to be a politically sustainable pillar of that effort.

The goal was to prod people to change their habits, like deciding to drive less and walk or take the bus instead, without denting overall consumer spending or making people furious about higher energy costs. The Klimabonus varied by region, with people receiving more money if they had less access to public transportation, and thus less ability to change their habits. Last year, the annual payment ranged from 145 euros to 290 euros for an adult resident.

Similar tax-and-refund ideas have animated a long line of American climate policy proposals that lawmakers and policy experts have tried push through Congress, going back to the Obama administration.

Those plans never got off the ground in the United States, but they have in other countries. Canada started taxing carbon in 2019 and refunding most of the revenue. That experiment ended abruptly this year, when the new prime minister, Mark Carney, canceled both the tax and the refund payments. The tax had drawn strong criticism from voters at a time of high energy prices and high inflation. Experts suggested that voters didn’t see the refund as an offset, in part because the government didn’t explain it very well.

That wasn’t what happened in Austria. The Klimabonus wasn’t a runaway hit with voters, said Sigrid Stagl, an economist and the founder of the Institute for Ecological Economics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. But it was popular enough that lawmakers decided to keep the carbon tax even when energy prices jumped. The bonus was, she said, “sort of the political defense mechanism” that saved the tax.

What appears to have killed the bonus but saved the tax was cold, hard budget math.

Austria’s economy is stuck in a recession, and its budget deficit has swelled. To comply with European Union rules, the new government had to reduce that deficit by some combination of spending cuts, higher taxes and stimulating economic activity.

Eliminating the bonus saved 2 billion euros, or about $2.3 billion, a year. Cutting the tax would have wiped that savings out.

The chancellor, Christian Stocker, told me there was another reason to scrap the rebate: It wasn’t working like the theory suggested it would.

Austria’s emissions have fallen since the pandemic, though it’s unclear how much of that is attributable to the carbon tax. Mr. Stocker and the vice chancellor, Andreas Babler, both stressed to me that their government remained committed to the 2040 net-zero target.

But Mr. Stocker said the Klimabonus was not just meant to be a climate measure.

“It was also a compensation payment to maintain disposable income,” he said. And when it was sent to Austrians, the money “remained in savings accounts at banks. It did not go into consumption. And therefore, the effect we expected was not achieved.”

If you squint, you can see some parallels to Republicans’ recent efforts to hollow out of the climate measures signed into law by former President Joseph R. Biden. But they only go so far.

Mr. Biden and his team built their law around tax incentives meant to spur investment and consumer spending on emissions-reducing technologies like solar power and electric vehicles. By repealing most of those incentives, congressional Republicans generated budget savings to partially offset other tax cuts they liked better. They couldn’t have done that with a carbon tax.

Then again, it seems unlikely that Congress would have passed one in the first place.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/07/climate/austria-carbon-tax-klimabonus.html

EPA places staffers who signed ‘dissent’ letter on leave

By Rachel Frazin, The Hill, July 3, 2025

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is placing staffers who signed a letter of dissent against the Trump administration’s actions and policies on leave.

The EPA says it has placed 144 staffers on administrative leave as it investigates the letter. It’s not entirely clear whether they will face further punishment after the probe.

“The Environmental Protection Agency has a zero-tolerance policy for career bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging, and undercutting the administration’s agenda as voted for by the great people of this country last November,” EPA spokesperson Brigit Hirsch said in a written statement. 

In a letter made public on Monday, current and former EPA staffers said that the administration’s policies “undermine the EPA mission of protecting human health and the environment.”

They expressed concerns about five issues in particular, saying that the administration is undermining public trust, ignoring scientific consensus to benefit polluters, reversing EPA’s progress in America’s most vulnerable communities, dismantling the Office of Research and Development and promoting a culture of fear.

“Your decisions and actions will reverberate for generations to come. EPA under your leadership will not protect communities from hazardous chemicals and unsafe drinking water, but instead will increase risks to public health and safety,” the staffers wrote to Administrator Lee Zeldin.

In response, the EPA said Monday that it would “continue to work with states, tribes, and communities to advance the agency’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment.”

Nicole Cantello, president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 704, which represents EPA employees in the Midwest, told The Hill that putting staffers on administrative leave was ” blatant retaliation by the Trump administration.”

“We don’t swear an oath to the Trump administration, we swear an oath to the Constitution  and so we don’t feel  like we violated that oath or that we did anything wrong by signing this letter,” she said, adding that some of the staffers who were placed on leave are actually “crucial players in trying to implement Trump’s policies at EPA.”

Zeldin told reporters in January that staff who are “not committed” to President Trump’s directives should not be there. 

“I don’t believe that anyone should be here at EPA who is not committed to the agency mission and the lawful directives coming from the duly elected president of the United States,” he said at the time.

The EPA previously fired staff who worked on issues related to environmental justice and tackling pollution in underserved communities, arguing that it did not align with the administration’s position on diversity, equity and inclusion.

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/5383820-epa-staffers-trump-dissent-letter-zeldin/

A carbon tariff is the right way to confront China on trade

Climate-friendly tariffs would penalize countries that undercut American companies with dirtier production.

Op-ed by Ely Sandler and Daniel Schrag, The Washington Post, June 23, 2025

President Donald Trump’s tariffs are in limbo, struck down by one federal court and temporarily reinstated by another. Congress, with its slim Republican majority, seems unlikely to enact them into law. Beyond the legal or political fights, however, the motivating question behind the tariffs remains: How should America respond when trading partners tilt the scales, whether through unfair subsidies, trade barriers or lax environmental regulation?

Fortunately, there’s an alternative approach in Congress that can build on Trump’s trade agenda more effectively, more durably and, potentially, with a much broader coalition of support: holding trading partners responsible for the pollution that gives them a leg up in manufacturing.

At its core, this is a question about China and a handful of other countries whose advantages are powered, quite literally, by cheap and dirty energy. China is the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide and the world’s largest exporter. Those facts are not unrelated. Despite an impressive rollout of clean energy, China’s factories still run overwhelmingly on coal. This makes China’s exports far dirtier than goods produced in America.

The answer might therefore lie in a smarter kind of tariff — one that scales based on the carbon dioxide emissions produced during manufacturing. A bill to do just that was recently introduced by two Republican senators; similar proposals have drawn bipartisan support in the past.

Though the United States is often portrayed as lagging on climate, American manufacturers in sectors such as aluminum, cement, steel and fertilizer are significantly cleaner than what we import from abroad. That’s largely due to America’s abundant natural gas, which pollutes far less than coal. This means that in a world where companies have to pay for the carbon dioxide they emit, goods made in America become more competitive.

The Foreign Pollution Fee Act, which is currently going through budget reconciliation, was introduced by Republican Sens. Bill Cassidy (Louisiana) and Lindsey Graham (South Carolina). It would impose a tariff based on how much carbon dioxide the exporter has emitted. Markets such as Britain and the European Union, which are similar in carbon intensity to the U.S., would be exempt, while heavy polluters such as China and Russia would pay more. Although structured differently, the bill would function like the E.U.’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, a climate-focused trade measure that aims to raise revenue and support domestic industry.

In our analysis of the proposed legislation, we highlight three key opportunities that make this bill especially timely in light of the recent tariff rulings.

First, carbon tariffs generate revenue. We estimate that the proposal could raise up to $198 billion over five years, nearly triple what the U.S. collected in tariffs over all of last year. Though this is probably an upper bound, as trade reshuffling could lower the revenue potential, others’ more conservative models still put the figure in the tens of billions or hundreds of billions.

Second, the tariffs would give American industry a competitive edge against exporters to the U.S., especially China. American products are less carbon-intensive than most imports covered by the bill — in some instances, over 90 percent cleaner. According to one analysis, this could lead to a nearly 10 percent increase in U.S. manufacturing for a sector such as cement and more than a 7 percent increase for iron and steel.

Third, the proposed legislation from Graham and Cassidy is not paired with a domestic carbon price — a deliberate choice to make the bill more acceptable to Republican lawmakers and to voters, who have rebelled against carbon taxes in other countries. This might be a politically necessary concession, but it comes with a cost.

Pairing carbon tariffs with a carbon price at home would increase revenue and strengthen the policy’s legal footing under international trade rules, which typically require alignment between domestic and border measures. More important, without a carbon price, America’s emissions advantage might erode as other countries decarbonize and U.S. firms face no comparable incentive. With superior access to capital and technology, American industry is well positioned to outperform dirtier global competitors, but only if policy rewards investment. The carbon price could be phased in gradually, giving U.S. manufacturers time to adapt and invest without undermining energy output today.

There are still trade-offs to consider. Like all tariffs, the proposal would raise the cost of imported goods, risking inflation. Unlike most carbon-related border measures, it is based on the value of imports rather than an explicit carbon price, a design that could provoke pushback from U.S. trading partners. These are valid concerns. But so is the need to protect American industry and lay the groundwork for carbon pricing that rewards cleaner production and lowers emissions. Neither the president nor congressional leaders in either party should pass up such an opportunity.

Ely Sandler is a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. Daniel Schrag is the Sturgis Hooper professor of geology and a professor of public policy at the Kennedy School.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/06/23/tariffs-china-trade-carbon-emissions/

Summer evenings are getting warmer nationwide

By Alex Fitzpatrick, Axios, June 17, 2025

Summer evenings are getting warmer across much of the U.S. — especially in Nevada and other parts of the Southwest — amid climate change, a new analysis shows.

Why it matters: Higher overnight temperatures can have health consequences for vulnerable groups, as well as increase demand for air conditioning.

• That, in turn, can strain electrical grids and increase energy demand, fueling a vicious cycle with more greenhouse gas emissions.

Driving the news: Average summer nighttime temperatures increased between 1970 and 2024 in 96% of 241 locations analyzed in a new report from Climate Central, a research and communications group.

• Among cities with an increase, temperatures rose by 3.1°F on average.

Zoom in: Reno, Nevada (+17.7°F), Las Vegas (+10°F), El Paso, Texas (+8.9°F) and Salt Lake City (+8.2°F) saw the biggest increases.

What they're saying: "There's a lot of work ahead of us, and we don't have all the answers," Brian Beffort, sustainability manager for Reno's Washoe County, recently told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

• "I'm focused on trees because they check the most number of boxes: They clean the air. They prevent stormwater. They cool things off ... There's a lot of planning that we need to do. But that's not the only intervention that we need."

Between the lines: Hundreds of U.S. cities are experiencing more frequent warmer-than-average summer nights "with a strong climate change fingerprint," Climate Central says.

That's based on the group's "Climate Shift Index" — a method of measuring climate change's impact on local daily temperatures — and the 1991-2020 climate normals.

The bottom line: It isn't just daytime highs getting warmer in much of the U.S., but evening lows, too.

https://www.axios.com/2025/06/17/summer-nights-warmer-climate-change?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosam&stream=top

Many coastal communities are flooding more than we thought, researchers find

Researchers installed sensors inside stormwater drains and cameras above them in three North Carolina communities. They found a startling amount of flooding.

By Brady Dennis, The Washington Post, June 2, 2025

Fast-rising seas have forced some coastal communities to endure flooding far more frequently than previously thought, and much more often than federal tide gauges would suggest, according to a new findings from researchers in North Carolina.

“I view it as a harbinger of what’s to come,” said Katherine Anarde, an assistant professor of coastal engineering at North Carolina State University and one of the lead authors of the study, published Monday in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

To document the true prevalence and duration of flooding, researchers installed sensors inside stormwater drains and cameras above them in three North Carolina communities — Beaufort, Carolina Beach and Sea Level.

What they found was startling.

During a single year, from May 2023 through April 2024, they logged 26 days of flooding in Beaufort, 65 days in Carolina Beach and 128 days in Sea Level. Many of those floods — defined as water getting on a nearby road — happened on sunny days, and very few were associated with large storm events.

The frequency of flooding was “an order of magnitude greater” than the official number of what are known as high-tide flooding days projected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which maintains a network of tide gauges along the coastlines.

The reason tide gauges are “poor indicators of flooding,” the authors write, is not any fault with the instruments, which have long measured water levels in the ocean and serve various purposes. Rather, the existing tools often underestimate the true extent of flooding on land because they “do not measure rainfall runoff, groundwater contributions to flooding, or the effects of local drainage infrastructure,” the study found.

Monday’s study offers insights into a reality that a growing number of coastal communities will face, or already are facing: that infrastructure built for another time and another climate is not equipped to handle the higher tides and persistent flooding fueled by rising seas.

The researchers also argue that many places would benefit from more measurement of water on land, where flooding actually occurs, rather than relying primarily on tide-gauge-based estimates that can miss the nuanced factors that influence localized flood frequency and duration.

“If you don’t know where it’s flooding and why it’s flooding, you might create expensive designs for infrastructure that are counterproductive,” Anarde said.

While the study focused on three low-lying communities in North Carolina, its authors say the findings have relevance for many places along the nation’s coastlines, particularly throughout the Southeast.

Roads, sewer systems, stormwater outfalls and drainage ditches in such places were often “designed for sea levels 100 years ago or more,” said Miyuki Hino, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill environmental social scientist and another of the lead authors.

But as seas have risen in recent decades and land in many places has subsided, or sunk, communities throughout the Gulf and Southeast Atlantic coasts have grappled with more persistent flooding. “The problems we are seeing here are extremely likely to be problems we are seeing elsewhere,” Hino said.

In a series of articles last year, The Washington Post documented how the American South has experienced one of the most rapid rates of sea-level rise on Earth since 2010. At more than a dozen tide gauges spanning from Texas to North Carolina, sea levels are at least six inches higher than they were in 2010 — a change similar to what occurred over the previous five decades.

That shift has forced a reckoning in more and more places, from drowning wetlands in Louisiana to waterlogged septic systems in Florida. Some roads are increasingly falling below the highest tides, leaving drivers stranded or delayed. Insurers have raised rates or scaled back coverage in vulnerable places, creating angst about future home values in flood-prone corners of the United States.

Such problems are likely to proliferate over time, as sea levels continue to rise and coastal flooding becomes more frequent and pervasive.

“We are already seeing the start of permanent inundation,” Hino said.

Already, high-tide floods have happened in the Southeast about five times as often as they did in 1990, NOAA oceanographer William Sweet told The Post last year. “We’re seeing flooding in a way that we haven’t seen before,” said Sweet, who leads the agency’s high-tide flooding assessments.

That figure could be modest compared with what lies ahead. High-tide floods in the region are expected to strike 15 times more frequently in 2050 than they did in 2020, Sweet said.

As sea levels continue to rise, the impacts of repeated flooding will continue to worsen, Hino said. And communities need a more granular understanding of their specific vulnerabilities — to plan not only for what lies ahead, but also for what is already happening.

“The physical forces are heading in one direction. What we do [about it] is an open question,” Hino said. “This is not a problem for decades into the future, or generations in the future. This is a problem of today.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/06/02/coastal-flooding-north-carolina/