In Indiana, Putting Up Solar Panels Is Doing God’s Work

A cluster of evangelical groups in the state is pushing for environmental action. Leaders say they’re following the biblical mandate to care for creation.

By Catrin Einhorn, The New York Times, April 21, 2025

The solar panels on the churches were inspired by Scripture.

So were the LED lights throughout the buildings, the electric-vehicle charging stations, the native pollinator gardens and organic food plots, the composting, the focus on consuming less and reusing more.

The evangelical Christians behind these efforts in Indiana say that by taking on this planet-healing work, they are following the biblical mandate to care for God’s creation.

“It’s a quiet movement,” said the Rev. Jeremy Summers, director of church and community engagement for the Evangelical Environmental Network, a nonprofit group with projects nationwide.

In Central Indiana, a patchwork of evangelical churches and universities has been sharing ideas and lessons on how to expand these efforts, broadly known as creation care. Some have partnered on an Earth Day-like celebration they named Indy Creation Fest.

Faith communities of all kinds have been caring for nature throughout history, and many have taken up environmental causes in recent decades. Some religious leaders, like Pope Francis, have made the environment a central focus and have called for action on climate change.

But the efforts in Indiana stand out because they’re springing up in communities that haven’t been as engaged.

Of all major U.S. religious groups, evangelical Protestants are the least likely to hear about climate change during sermons, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center, and the least likely to view global climate change as extremely or very serious. Now, networks of evangelicals are looking to shift that.

“If you frame it as environmentalism, or if you frame it as combating global warming, it suddenly gets really politicized,” said the Rev. Nate Pyle, senior pastor at Christ’s Community Church in Fishers, Ind. “When you frame it as stewardship or caring for the creation that God has given us, people are more open.”

In 2021, the creation care committee at his church led an effort to put solar panels on the building. Some members questioned the move, Pastor Pyle said. But they seemed to come around after learning that the church paid for them through grants and private donations and that the panels would save on energy costs, he said.

The next year, Christ’s Community joined forces with Grace Church, a few miles away in Noblesville, and the Evangelical Environmental Network to sponsor the first Indy Creation Fest, a day of education and family-friendly activities.

Visitors could sample vegan cooking, learn about composting and meet rescued dogs, rabbits and a potbellied pig. “Discover what the Bible says about conservation and sustainability and find out how others in your community are caring for Creation as an expression of their faith,” an announcement read.

Concerns sometimes come up. Is creation care a form of nature worship? (Absolutely not, its advocates say.) Aren’t people more important? (Caring for the environment is part of caring for people, they answer.)

At Grace Church, the creation care committee, called Project Eden, has converted about 10 acres behind the church into a meadow of native plants. Members have diverse interests, said Hannah Miller, who volunteers with the committee and also works for the church. Some are passionate about clean energy, while others care deeply for animals, both wild and domestic.

“The common thing that brought them together was seeing creation care as an integral part of the way that they express their love for God and their love for people,” Ms. Miller said.

Some of the most ambitious work has been undertaken by Englewood Christian Church in central Indianapolis, which has built senior housing with solar panels intended to generate at least as much energy as the building uses. The church also has solar panels on its roof and two electric-vehicle charging stations. Members turned an empty lot nearby into a nature play area for preschoolers with vegetables and native plants. Many in the congregation live nearby and share items like lawn mowers and cars.

Universities are engaged, too. Just over an hour’s drive north of Englewood, two Christian schools, Indiana Wesleyan and Taylor, are home to a smattering of faculty members and students who are active in the movement.

Jennifer Noseworthy, a professor of biology at Indiana Wesleyan, in Marion, Ind., is studying how small, native plant gardens bolster native bee populations. In 2022, she helped start an environmental science major that has been growing every year, she said.

“It’s something that we knew students were looking for, especially students looking for a Christian education,” she said.

Students are often introduced to the concept of creation care for the first time at college, and class discussions sometimes center on why the idea isn’t discussed more at church.

One student at Indiana Wesleyan, Becca Boyd, experienced a crisis of faith in middle school when her concerns about climate change were dismissed in her conservative Christian circle.

“One of the things that I feel like I heard a lot was that I needed to trust in God more,” Ms. Boyd recalled, “that I was questioning God by wanting to take action in that way with the environment.”

It made no sense to her, and she quietly decided that she was an atheist, she said. But during her senior year of high school, she began exploring her faith again. Then, in her freshman year of college, Dr. Noseworthy introduced her to the concept of creation care.

“It was an answer for me,” Ms. Boyd said.

Now Ms. Boyd is a college fellow with Young Evangelicals for Climate Action. She holds a weekly Bible study called Creation Care and Faith in Action. In one meeting this month, the group discussed how consumer culture in the United States can be a kind of false idol. She has been working to get space for a new pollinator garden on campus. And she helped start a student Sustainability Club, which is working with its counterpart at nearby Taylor University, a club called Stewards of Creation.

Now, as the academic year draws to a close, she’s focused on what’s to come, including educational programming and a clothing swap to encourage students to buy less.

“We’re not going to find ourselves through having more things or more money,” she said. “It’s through the community that we have, and being able to provide a healthy future, not just for ourselves, like, as an individual, but for those around us and those on a global scale, and the people who aren’t even here yet, you know?”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/climate/indiana-evangelicals-creation-care-stewardship.html?searchResultPosition=2

States Sue Over Freeze on Funding for Electric-Vehicle Charging

A lawsuit led by Washington, Colorado and California accuses the Trump administration of unlawfully withholding funds for new charging stations.

By Karen Zraick and Shawn Hubler, The New York Times, May 7, 2025

A coalition of states led by Washington, Colorado and California sued the Trump administration on Wednesday, charging that it was unlawfully withholding billions of dollars allocated by Congress for electric-vehicle charging stations across the United States.

The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law provided $5 billion to states to build stations around the country. So far, 71 stations have been built, with many more in development, according to the research firm Atlas Public Policy.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle, states that federal agencies have unlawfully frozen those funds and halted approvals for new stations, depriving states of critical resources and damaging the growing electric-vehicle industry.

The White House budget proposal released last week said that it was canceling funding for “failed electric-vehicle-charger grant programs.” President Trump had already taken aim at the program in a January executive order, and the Transportation Department followed with a similar memo the next month. But cutting the funding entirely would require approval from Congress, the lawsuit argued.

“The president continues his unconstitutional attempts to withhold funding that Congress appropriated to programs he dislikes,” said Rob Bonta, the California attorney general. “This time he’s illegally stripping away billions of dollars for electric vehicle charging infrastructure, all to line the pockets of his Big Oil friends.”

Nearly two million “zero-emission vehicles” have been sold in California, one-third of the nationwide total and part of a longstanding effort in the famously car-centric state to reduce air pollution. California had been relying on $384 million from the federal program for charging stations, according to Mr. Bonta’s office.

The state has also invested heavily in charging infrastructure from its own general fund and from the proceeds of carbon credits sold to polluters, to the point that public and shared private chargers in California now outnumber nozzles on gas pumps. Across state lines, however, charging is spottier.

The federal program, the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure, or NEVI program, started by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., had aimed to build charging networks beyond urban areas and states like California as part of its effort to combat climate change by accelerating the nation’s transition to electric vehicles.

California officials noted on Wednesday that one of the biggest beneficiaries of a stalled domestic E.V. program would be China, which has a substantial lead in E.V. manufacturing and sales abroad. The biggest losers would be rural states that had expected the federal dollars and Tesla, the E.V. company whose billionaire chief executive, Elon Musk, is a supporter of Mr. Trump. Tesla has the biggest market share of electric vehicles in the United States, although sales were down in the first quarter of 2025.

“When America retreats, China wins,” Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said, calling the withholding of federal funds “yet another Trump gift to China.”

“Instead of hawking Teslas on the White House lawn, President Trump could actually help Elon — and the nation — by following the law and releasing this bipartisan funding,” Mr. Newsom said.

Joining the complaint were the attorneys general of Arizona, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, Vermont and the District of Columbia, all of whom are Democrats.

The memo from the Transportation Department to state officials in February said the administration was reviewing the NEVI program and suspending approvals of state plans. The lawsuit asks the court to declare that memo unlawful and to order the administration to release the funds.

A website tracking NEVI funding run by Atlas Public Policy shows that at least $521 million of the money has been awarded, and some $44 million has been spent. Many of the stations already opened are clustered in Ohio and Pennsylvania, the data shows.

Loren McDonald, the chief analyst at Paren, an E.V. analytics company, said the federal government had been a minor player in the E.V. charging space, with most stations built by private companies. Mr. McDonald said it took many states a long time to decide where to build stations and find companies to bid on the contracts, resulting in a lag time in construction. States that already had experience in building charging stations, like Ohio and Pennsylvania, were able to move faster, he said.

Nonetheless, the plaintiffs said, the president’s order has been disruptive.

Attorney General Phil Weiser of Colorado said in a statement that his state stood to lose tens of millions of dollars in funding after making “significant progress,” in laying the foundation for widespread E.V. adoption. Officials had planned to use the federal support to fill gaps in rural Colorado and underserved communities, he said.

“Congress had the foresight to authorize funding to build this important infrastructure,” Mr. Weiser added, “and it must be restored immediately.”

In Washington State, the lawsuit contends, the president’s order has held up $55 million in approved congressional funding for E.V. charging, stalling 40 proposed projects.

The White House and the Transportation Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/07/climate/electric-vehicle-charging-funding-states-lawsuit.html?campaign_id=54&emc=edit_clim_20250508&instance_id=154147&nl=climate-forward&regi_id=66704053&segment_id=197571&user_id=97eb24ff9121d1a70f01fac05f86ea1b

Trump is trashing electric vehicles. China is building cars the world wants.

China dominates global EV sales, while U.S. consumers risk getting stuck on an island of outdated technology.

By Evan Halper, The Washington Post, April 25, 2025

Michael Bickford was excited to get behind the wheel of a Ford F-150 Lightning, but after experiencing the dismal state of the U.S. charging network on a recent road trip, the Portland, Maine, retiree reconsidered.

“I had planned to go fully electric, but I gave up on that when the realities of how difficult that would be here set in,” said Bickford, who is sticking with his hybrid. After pulling his name off the list for the plug-in pickup, he’s holding out for the day the United States catches up to China. He’s in for a long wait.

China is leapfrogging the United States with the availability of more advanced, cheaper electric vehicles, while President Donald Trump is cutting subsidies and making other moves that could leave the U.S. behind. The president’s antipathy toward plug-ins, combined with the U.S. domestic auto industry’s slow rollout of new clean-energy vehicles, is frustrating U.S. motorists who hunger for clean transportation.

“You read about the cars and charging systems they are making in China and think to yourself, ‘Geez, why don’t we have that here?’” Bickford said.

Trump has declared that the Biden administration’s support for electric cars was a Marxist “hoax” that hurt U.S. autoworkers. He is freezing billions of dollars of spending on electric vehicle infrastructure, ripping out charging stations in government buildings, and reversing regulations that incentivize automakers to focus on plug-in innovation. Subsidies for factories that make batteries and other parts have been blocked, triggering a wave of canceled projects. Tax breaks of $7,500 for purchasing plug-ins are targeted for elimination, although Congress will be required to act on the president’s request.

Amid the president’s trade war, meanwhile, Chinese electric cars are unlikely to roll into the United States anytime soon.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright, an oil executive before his nomination, said in a speech last month that the administration’s plan is “to reverse the destructive mandates, forcing everyone to buy EVs that have been wreaking havoc on our auto industry and forcing higher prices and reduced choices on consumers.”

He and Trump argue the policy reversals will usher in a renaissance for U.S. automakers, now free to focus on the gas cars that still generate the bulk of their profits.

But the policy will also ensure the U.S. remains behind in the global EV race. Of the more than 17 million EVs sold in 2024 around the world, according to the China Passenger Car Association and research firm Rho Motion, 76 percent of those cars were made by Chinese companies.

The same U.S. auto companies that for years complained vocally about aggressive government actions aimed at speeding the transition to EVs now worry damage from federal abandonment of the transition will be long-lasting.

“We are all going to EVs globally. It is just a question of when,” said Ellen Hughes-Cromwick, a former chief global economist at Ford. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the industry group representing all the major U.S. vehicle manufacturers, urged Trump in a November letter to preserve the tax breaks for EV buyers and emissions rules that push automakers to innovate and sell electric models. Plug-in technology is advancing so rapidly, with longer battery ranges and expanding charging networks, that analysts expect consumer preference for the cars to eventually overtake that of gas vehicles.

It all puts an industry crucial to the U.S. economy in a precarious place, with analysts warning there is only so long U.S. auto giants can rely on tariffs to wall consumers off from Chinese offerings. Europe has already bent to consumer demand, with drivers eagerly buying up reliable EVs with sticker prices as low as $20,000 from red-hot Chinese EV makers like BYD, short for “Build Your Dreams.” Last month, BYD announced it had fulfilled a dream of many motorists by unveiling electric cars that could be fully charged in five minutes.

The starting price of the new fast-charging BYD cars sold in China is under $28,600, more than 10 percent cheaper than a Tesla Model 3 there.

“If those products were to come to the U.S., the auto industry here would be in deep trouble,” said Alexander Edwards, president of Strategic Vision, a market research firm that advises automakers. They could lure masses of motorists who right now have no interest in going electric, he said.

Electric vehicles, including plug-in hybrids, now account for 19 percent of all cars sold worldwide, up from just 4 percent five years ago. Chinese models account for 17 of the 20 top-selling plug-ins globally, according to CleanTechnica. The only U.S. company that ranks on that list is Tesla, and it is fast losing market share. Tesla vehicle deliveries plunged 13 percent the first quarter this year.

In Brazil, where Ford has stopped making cars altogether, its former factory is now owned by BYD, which dominates the country’s fledgling but fast-growing EV market. Sales of EVs in Brazil grew 85 percent in 2024. A local lawmaker wants to change the name of the street where the factory sits from Henry Ford Avenue to BYD Avenue. BYD and other Chinese EV companies are steadily growing their market share in Europe, with BYD building a plant in Hungary and other Chinese brands eyeing factories in Poland and Spain.

“We’re on an island, vulnerable and not playing offense anymore,” Michael Dunne, a prominent auto industry consultant, said at a recent Washington gathering of energy and Western auto officials hosted by SAFE, a nonprofit focused on U.S. energy security. “We cannot remain on this island here in North America and just hope for the best.”

Detroit executives, criticized for years for focusing on gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks, are now trying to catch up while navigating the shifting winds from Washington.

Soon after the president signed an order directing a pivot away from EVs, Ford CEO Jim Farley was warning shareholders that the company needs to urgently lean in on electric. He highlighted in a call how motorists around the world are rapidly shifting to EVs and markets where American vehicles were long king are now being “dominated by the Chinese.”

Farley himself had a Xiaomi electric car delivered from Shanghai to Chicago and drove it for months, telling a podcaster in October how he marvels at this vehicle that was designed and manufactured by a cellphone company.

He said Ford is retooling its strategy around EVs with a moonshot-like effort to replicate the Chinese model of innovating cheap, high-tech vehicles in a division walled off from the company’s legacy production lines.

General Motors says it is racing to develop a breakthrough in battery technology that would reposition it as a major player in the EV race.

Both Ford and GM did not answer detailed questions from The Washington Post. But the companies have consistently said they need to see more U.S. consumer EV demand to expand their offerings. And consumers here often won’t consider them because the U.S. charging network is so bad.

Federal investment in U.S. charging infrastructure has been frozen altogether by Trump after the Biden administration was able to deliver only a couple hundred of the half-million chargers it promised by 2030. Tens of thousands of planned chargers may never get installed. China already has nearly 20 public chargers for every one in the United States, and Europe has four times as many chargers as the U.S.

Hughes-Cromwick, now a fellow at the center-left think tank Third Way, said her own driving experience underscores what a heavy lift it will be to catch up to China. She said navigating her Ford Mach-E plug-in from Michigan to New Jersey recently was a white-knuckle experience. She repeatedly encountered broken chargers and had to call for help when the plug got stuck in her car at one stop.

At a Walmart in Ohio, she was driving circles around the parking lot looking for the charging station her car’s software identified as available, only to learn from a greeter in the store that it had been removed. Hughes-Cromwick had just 20 miles of range left on her battery. She barely made it to a functioning station.

“It was unbelievable how bad it was,” she said. “It was a rough start to the trip.”

Hughes-Cromwick said the auto manufacturers can fix the charger shortage by following the lead of Tesla, which built its own charging network to conform with the cars it makes. That’s the model used in China, where the car companies operate like government-backed start-ups. But that’s expensive. Tesla lost money for 18 years before making a profit. Sustaining such losses is more difficult for publicly traded, legacy automakers, who face pressure from shareholders to grow quarterly profits.

Meanwhile, Trump’s freeze on subsidies is causing companies to abandon plans to build factories making EV components in the U.S. after the administration froze subsidies. Scrapped projects include billion-dollar battery factories in Georgia and Arizona.

Even some fans of the president’s industrial policies are unnerved.

“It is not good that they have taken some of these steps” to undermine EV sales and innovation, said Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing. “Car companies are going to have to tell this administration, ‘You will be faced with half-built factories here if you don’t stop this war on clean energy vehicles.’ They will hopefully start to listen. I don’t think this administration wants its legacy to be a landscape where they have vacant plants in places like Tennessee with weeds growing in the parking lot.”

The U.S. is beset with finger-pointing. Industry executives and GOP lawmakers say mandates from Democratic administrations and states like California forced automakers to make ill-timed investments, before consumer demand and chargers were in place.

“They caused these car companies to lose tens of thousands of dollars per vehicle,” said Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio). “They did everything wrong.”

As the industry lobbied against a phaseout of the internal combustion engine, China’s government was seeding dozens of EV companies with tens of billions of dollars.

“These incredibly cheap, high-quality EVs from China are impossible to match if you don’t have the U.S. government helping manufacturers make this transition,” said Ann Carlson, former chief counsel for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. “The shortsightedness of the industry in not seeing the trend would be toward electrification has put them in a precarious position. Now, Trump blocking every effort to assist that transition leaves us in a very dicey place.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/04/25/auto-evs-trump-china-electric/

New Pact Would Require Ships to Cut Emissions or Pay a Fee

A draft global agreement sets a fee for cargo ships, which carry the vast majority of world trade, to pay for their greenhouse gas emissions.

By Somini Sengupta, The New York Times, April 11, 2025

Amid the turmoil over global trade, countries around the world reached a remarkable, though modest, agreement Friday to reduce the climate pollution that comes from shipping those goods worldwide — with what is essentially a tax, no less.

An accord reached in London under the auspices of the International Maritime Organization, a United Nations agency, would require every ship that ferries goods across the oceans to lower their greenhouse gas emissions or pay a fee.

The targets fall short of what many had hoped. Still, it’s the first time a global industry would face a price on its climate pollution no matter where in the world it operates. The proceeds would be used mainly to help the industry move to cleaner fuels. Some of it could also go to developing countries most vulnerable to climate hazards. The accord would come into effect in 2028, pending approval by country representatives at the agency’s next meeting in October.

Given the widespread support for Friday’s terms, the head of the organization expressed hope it would be adopted in October with few or no changes.

The agreement marks a rare bit of international cooperation that’s all the more remarkable because it was reached even after the United States pulled out of the talks earlier in the week. No other countries followed suit.

“The U.S. is just one country and that one country cannot derail this entire process,” said Faig Abbasov, shipping director for Transport and Environment, a European advocacy group that has pushed to clean up the maritime industry. The agreement is the “first binding decision that will force shipping companies to decarbonize and switch to alternative fuels.”

The agreement applies to all ships, no matter whose flag they fly, including ships registered in the United States, although the vast majority of ships are flagged in other countries. It remained unclear whether or how Washington might respond to the fee agreement.

A State Department official said only that the U.S. didn’t participate in the negotiations.

Ships mostly run on heavy fuel oil, sometimes called bunker fuel and more than 80 percent of global goods move by ships. The industry accounts for around 3 percent of global greenhouse emissions, comparable to the emissions from aviation.

The agreement reached Friday is far less ambitious than one initially proposed by a group of island nations that had suggested a universal assessment on emissions.

After two years of negotiations, the proposal sets out a complicated two-tiered system of fees. It sets carbon intensity targets, which are like clean-fuel standards for cars and trucks. Ships using conventional shipping oil would have to pay a higher fee ($380 per metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent produced) while ships that use a less carbon-intensive fuel mix would have to pay a lower fee ($100 for every metric ton that exceeds the fuel standard threshold).

It is expected to raise $11 billion to $13 billion a year, according to the Organization’s estimates.

“It is a positive outcome,” said Arsenio Dominguez, the organization’s secretary-general. “This is a long journey. This is not going to happen overnight. There are many concerns, particularly from developing countries.”

The threshold would get stricter over time. It could allow the industry to switch to biofuels to meet the standards. That is a contentious approach, since biofuels are made from crops, and growing more crops to make fuel could contribute to deforestation.

The new shipping-fuel standards are meant to spur the development of alternative fuels, including hydrogen.

There were objections from many quarters. Developing countries with maritime fleets said they would be unfairly punished because they have older fleets. Countries like Saudi Arabia, which ship huge quantities of oil, and China, which exports everything from plastic toys to electric cars worldwide, balked at proposals to set a higher price, according to people familiar with the negotiations.

“They turned away a proposal for a reliable source of revenue for those of us in dire need of finance to help with climate impacts,” said Ralph Regenvanu, the climate minister for Vanuatu, in a statement after the vote.

In the end, countries that voted in favor of the compromise agreement included China and the European Union. Saudi Arabia and Russia voted against it.

The United States pulled out of the talks entirely.

The global shipping industry agreed in 2023 to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions by around 2050. Last year, it followed up on that commitment with a more concrete plan, taking the first steps toward establishing an industrywide carbon price.

Projections by the International Chamber of Shipping, an industry body, found that it would have a negligible effect on prices. “We recognize that this may not be the agreement which all sections of the industry would have preferred, and we are concerned that this may not yet go far enough in providing the necessary certainty,” said Guy Platten, the council’s secretary general. “But it is a framework which we can build upon.”

Claire Brown contributed reporting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/climate/cargo-shipping-emissions.html?campaign_id=54&emc=edit_clim_20250413&instance_id=152483&nl=climate-forward&regi_id=66704053&segment_id=195923&user_id=97eb24ff9121d1a70f01fac05f86ea1b

Trump’s EPA Plans to Stop Collecting Greenhouse Gas Emissions Data From Most Polluters

Climate experts expressed shock and dismay at the move. “It would be a bit like unplugging the equipment that monitors the vital signs of a patient that is critically ill,” one said.

By Sharon Lerner, ProPublica, April 10, 2025

The Environmental Protection Agency is planning to eliminate long-standing requirements for polluters to collect and report their emissions of the heat-trapping gases that cause climate change. The move, ordered by a Trump appointee, would affect thousands of industrial facilities across the country, including oil refineries, power plants and coal mines as well as those that make petrochemicals, cement, glass, iron and steel, according to documents reviewed by ProPublica.

The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program documents the amount of carbon dioxide, methane and other climate-warming gases emitted by individual facilities. The data, which is publicly available, guides policy decisions and constitutes a significant portion of the information the government submits to the international body that tallies global greenhouse gas pollution. Losing the data will make it harder to know how much climate-warming gas an economic sector or factory is emitting and to track those emissions over time. This granularity allows for accountability, experts say; the government can’t curb the country’s emissions without knowing where they are coming from.

“This would reduce the detail and accuracy of U.S. reporting of greenhouse gas emissions, when most countries are trying to improve their reporting,” said Michael Gillenwater, executive director of the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute. “This would also make it harder for climate policy to happen down the road.”

The program has been collecting emissions data since at least 2010. Roughly 8,000 facilities a year now report their emissions to the program. EPA officials have asked program staff to draft a rule that will drastically reduce data collection. Under the new rule, its reporting requirements would only apply to about 2,300 facilities in certain sectors of the oil and gas industry.

Climate experts expressed shock and dismay about the apparent decision to stop collecting most information on our country’s greenhouse gas emissions. “It would be a bit like unplugging the equipment that monitors the vital signs of a patient that is critically ill,” said Edward Maibach, a professor at George Mason University. “How in the world can we possibly manage this incredible threat to America’s well-being and humanity’s well-being if we’re not actually monitoring what we’re doing to exacerbate the problem?”

The EPA did not address questions from ProPublica about the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. Instead, the agency provided an emailed statement affirming the Trump administration’s commitment to “clean air, land, and water for EVERY American.”

The agency announced last month that it was “reconsidering” the greenhouse gas reporting program. In a little-noticed press release issued on March 12, when the EPA sent out 24 bulletins as it celebrated the “most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin described the reporting program as “burdensome.” Zeldin also claimed that the program “costs American businesses and manufacturing millions of dollars, hurting small businesses and the ability to achieve the American Dream.”

Project 2025, the far-right blueprint for Trump’s presidency, suggested severely scaling back the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program and also described it as imposing burdens on small businesses.

In contrast, climate experts say the EPA reporting program, which tallies between 85% and 90% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., is in many ways a boon to businesses. “A lot of companies rely on the data and use it in their annual sustainability reports,” said Edwin LaMair, an attorney at the Environmental Defense Fund. Companies also use the data to demonstrate environmental progress to shareholders and to meet international reporting requirements. “If the program stops, all that valuable data will stop being generated,” LaMair said.

The loss of that data could have a devastating effect on the world’s ability to rein in the disastrous effects of the warming climate, according to Andrew Light, who served as assistant secretary of energy for international affairs in the Biden administration. Light noted that addressing the dangerous and costly extreme weather events requires international collaboration — and that our failure to collect data could give other countries an excuse to abandon their own reporting.

“We will not get to the kinds of temperature stabilization needed to protect Americans against the worst climate impacts unless we get the cooperation of developing countries,” Light said. “If the United States won’t even measure and report our own emissions, how in the world can we expect China, India, Indonesia and other major growing developing countries to do the same?”

In its first months, the Trump administration has shown waning support for the reporting program. The EPA left the portal through which companies share data closed for several weeks and, in March, pushed back the emissions reporting deadline. Then last Friday, a meeting held with several program staff members raised further questions about the fate of future data collection, according to sources who were briefed on the meeting and asked not to be named for fear of retribution.

At the meeting, political appointee Abigale Tardif, who is principal deputy assistant administrator of the EPA’s office of air and radiation, instructed staff to draft a rule that would eliminate reporting requirements for 40 of the 41 sectors that are now required to submit data to the program. Tardif did not respond to inquiries from ProPublica about this story. Political appointee Aaron Szabo, who was present at the meeting and is awaiting confirmation as assistant administrator to the office, declined to answer questions, directing a reporter to EPA communications staff.

Before joining the EPA, Tardif and Szabo worked as lobbyists. Szabo represented the American Chemistry Council and Duke Energy among other companies and trade groups and Tardif worked for Marathon Petroleum and the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers Association.

Some climate advocates noted that industry stands to benefit from the elimination of greenhouse gas reporting requirements. “T​he bottom line is this is a giveaway to emitters, just letting them off the hook entirely,” said Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director with the Climate and Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Cleetus derided the choice to stop documenting emissions as ostrich-like. “Not tracking the data doesn’t make the climate crisis any less real,” she said. “This is just putting our heads in the sand.”

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-epa-greenhouse-gas-reporting-climate-crisis?campaign_id=54&emc=edit_clim_20250410&instance_id=152318&nl=climate-forward&regi_id=66704053&segment_id=195752&user_id=97eb24ff9121d1a70f01fac05f86ea1b

Climate policy should involve building stuff

The Trump administration’s crusade against lowering emissions shows a frustrating lack of imagination.

Editorial, The Washington Post, March 29, 2025

President Donald Trump is coming at climate policy with the ferocity of a wildfire. He has ridiculed regulations on carbon emissions and gutted agencies designed to carry them out. His Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Lee Zeldin, has vowed to eliminate rules wholesale, starting with his agency’s 2009 finding that greenhouse gases pose a public health threat, which undergirds most federal climate actions.

The EPA said in a statement that these moves will “Power the Great American comeback,” casting regulations as a drag on the economy. But this view exposes a basic misunderstanding of the fight against climate change. It is not only about restricting economic activity. Far more important to the effort — and what should excite this administration — is building stuff.

Fighting climate change should involve energizing the economy, including by expanding solar and wind power, which are already the fastest-growing sources of electricity in history and are proliferating in many Republican-led states. The country also needs added transmission lines to make the electrical grid more resilient and to move energy around the country as needed. And it needs advanced nuclear reactors, still in development, which have the potential to spark an energy renaissance. Other technologies, including batteries with expanded storage and more efficient electric vehicles, are important, too.

All such building projects could create jobs and boost gross domestic product growth while sharpening the United States’ competitive edge against its adversaries. Trump should view this not as some left-wing agenda, but as an opportunity.

Unfortunately, Trump — whose campaign was heavily funded by fossil fuel interests — has adopted a posture of “no.” He has halted new leases for wind and solar projects on federal lands or waters, and is seeking to terminate $14 billion in grants already awarded for climate-friendly developments. He paused about $3 billion in funding for the creation of electric vehicle chargers, while Republicans in Congress are considering scrapping tax credits for EV owners. And his tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico threaten to drastically limit developers’ access to equipment needed to build transmission lines.

This is a mistake, both politically and on policy grounds. Seventy-eight percent of Americans want more solar energy, a Pew Research Center survey found last year. Seventy-two percent want more wind energy. And two-thirds of Americans, including 46 percent of Republicans, say that limiting their “carbon footprint” is either very or somewhat important to them.

Moreover, demand for electricity is projected to explode in the years ahead, largely due to the dizzying growth of energy-guzzling data centers. The Trump administration no doubt wants to meet this need by expanding the production of fossil fuels, which has been at historic heights for years. But shutting out wind and solar makes no sense, and not only because doing so would worsen carbon emissions; it would also restrict energy supplies that the country needs.

The administration’s crusade to eliminate existing climate regulations is self-defeating as well. Undoing the EPA’s “endangerment finding” on greenhouse gases, which Zeldin describes as “the holy grail of the climate change religion,” would take years and almost certainly lose in court since the science supporting it has strengthened so much over the years. Trump’s efforts to do away with regulations on methane similarly will smash into reality: Many natural gas companies have already invested millions of dollars in reducing emissions of the potent greenhouse gas and are unlikely to change course, especially since the European Union’s regulations on methane remain in place.

The Trump administration’s embrace of the tired climate denialism that Republicans have toyed with for years shows a frustrating lack of imagination. The president has positioned himself as an ally of the nuclear industry, which has a historic opportunity to innovate with safer and more effective reactors, due to reforms to the approval process that Congress passed last year. Yet when Trump speaks about his energy policies, it’s almost always “drill, baby, drill.” Why not make advanced nuclear technology a signature goal of his presidency?

And why not push for permitting reforms for all energy projects, as last year’s bipartisan bill from then-Sen. Joe Manchin III (I-West Virginia) and Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyoming) sought to do? Trump might be unlikely to suddenly start supporting solar and wind projects. But if Republicans whose states benefit from these industries press him, perhaps he’ll ease up, as he has started to do with electric vehicles thanks to his relationship with Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

This won’t happen so long as Trump and his advisers wrongly view promoting cleaner energy as a mere progressive ideal. Such cramped thinking can only lead to lost opportunities.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/03/29/trump-climate-policy-zeldin-economy/