Union of Concerned Scientists Global Warming

Senators have the herculean task of ensuring that our nation’s future is in the hands of appropriate leaders. Through the Senate confirmation process, they are responsible for vetting nominees for the most senior leadership positions in federal agencies.

There are more than 1,300 positions requiring Senate confirmation, many of whom will shape policies and programs that rely heavily on scientific expertise and knowledge. These are positions critical to protecting public health and the environment, keeping the nation’s food and drug supplies safe, and advancing US interests. Senators need to ensure that nominees are the right fit for the job and avoid costly mistakes that risk human lives and the health of our planet.

Some positions you may have heard of include the Under Secretary for Nuclear Security for the Department of Energy; the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering for the Department of Defense; Administrators for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Transportation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); and Directors for the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

My colleagues have raised concerns already about President-elect Trump’s picks to lead the EPA, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Department of Justice, and why the new NOAA administrator must understand and advocate for science.

Appointees’ Science Savvy Matters

Why should we care that presidential appointees know how to understand and apply science appropriately in their decision making? One key reason is that President-elect Trump’s scientific understanding does not inspire confidence, so senators should at least make sure the people running the executive branch have a firm grounding in science.

Perhaps you remember “Sharpiegate” in 2019, when then-President Trump doctored the forecast path of Hurricane Dorian with a black Sharpie maker. He altered the official weather forecast to suggest the hurricane might strike Alabama. Despite corrections from the National Weather Service, President Trump continued to insist he was correct, creating public confusion about who needed to evacuate and where emergency response resources would be needed. This put American lives and livelihoods at risk and wasted taxpayer dollars.

Senators evaluating nominees who will oversee policies and programs deeply rooted in science should vet them for the following:

1. Strong scientific background. Does the nominee know their quarks from their quasars or their atoms from their amino acids? Do they consult bona fide experts in the subject matter?  Do they check for people posing as experts who are really purveyors of disinformation or misinformation?  Do they check the potential conflicts of interests of the experts they consult? A strong grasp of technical material is essential for making rules that keep us safe, for instance from environmental contaminants such as the carcinogenic gas ethylene oxide.
2. Analytic skills. The nominee should be able to analyze complex data, interpret scientific research, and apply findings to policy or program development and implementation. Maximizing electric grid reliability, for instance, requires our leaders to integrate data about the costs and benefits of energy storage options considering multiple factors such as local growth projections, increased electricity demand, solar and wind profiles over time, energy generation by fossil gas technologies, and policy incentive impacts.
3. Critical thinking. Look for someone who questions assumptions, even questions their questions about the assumptions! A nominee should be aware of the heuristics and biases that challenge all human cognition and set up strategies to address these limitations. For instance, biases that block funding for all federal research that uses fetal tissue put at risk advancements in vaccines, transplants, and treatment of degenerative diseases like Parkinson’s.
4. Communication skills. The nominee must be able to communicate complex scientific concepts so clearly that your grandma (and even the President) will understand. For instance, explaining nuclear toxicology concepts is important for helping the public understand why and how to avoid radiation exposure.
5. Problem-solving abilities: They should be adept at identifying problems and developing innovative, science-based solutions. There will be no shortage of opportunities to test this skill, especially during periods such as “danger season,” the time of year when climate change impacts like hurricanes, extreme heat, and wildfires peak and collide with one another.
6. Ethical judgment: Senators must ensure the nominee has a strong sense of scientific integrity and intellectual honesty, as they will be making decisions that can significantly impact public health and safety. Why? Because lives and livelihoods are at risk. Lessons from prior administrations and examples of anti-science actions during the first Trump administration are well-documented by UCS.
7. Collaboration and teamwork: The nominee should play well with others, including scientists, policymakers, and members of the public who are directly or indirectly affected by their programs. The nominee has a particular responsibility to respect and defend the federal scientific workforce because these experts are essential for keeping people and our planet safe and healthy.
8. Adaptability: Having the ability to adapt to new scientific developments and changing policy landscapes is a must because science evolves, as does the social-ecological system scientists are working within. Nominees will need to integrate the latest science with other considerations as they decide on the optimal solutions to complex problems.
9. Leadership skills: This includes the ability to inspire and guide teams, and to make tough decisions when necessary. The captain of the ship needs to navigate through a sea of scientific jargon, uncertain evidence, and different assumptions and values. Dialogue on the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty is just one example issue where leadership plays a critical role in global stability, in this case in preventing a runaway arms race.
10. Passion for public service: A genuine commitment to using science to benefit society and improve public policies is a must. Taxpayer dollars will pay this nominee’s salary, so I want them acting in my best interest.

Some of these might seem like “no duh” suggestions. But we don’t have to look too far back to see when a lack of scientific expertise, a lack of respect for scientific methods, or a predilection for ignoring science resulted in preventable death and disease, or profound harm to our planet. For senators who find science daunting, this simple rubric can help to highlight who should be trusted to lead federal departments and agencies that rely on science to address the important concerns and needs of their constituents.

As 2024 winds down, with its parade of climate-and extreme weather-fueled disasters, people across the nation are feeling the sharp pinch of rising insurance premiums and dropped policies. There are other factors at play here—including growing development in flood-prone and wildfire-prone areas and fundamental inequities and information gaps in the insurance market—but all of that is being exacerbated by worsening flooding, wildfires and intensified storms. Policymakers and regulators must act quickly because the market is not going to solve this problem on its own, and it’s definitely not going to do it in a way that protects low- and middle-income people. 

Please see earlier blogposts I’ve written on this topic to learn more.  

More data transparency is urgently needed 

Despite the many headlines and heart-breaking stories about the impact of high insurance costs and dropped policies, there’s a lack of publicly available, granular data on where and how much premiums are increasing and why.  

Earlier this year, the US Department of the Treasury’s Federal Insurance Office (FIO) and the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) announced a first-ever data call to assess how climate risks were affecting the insurance market. This is a voluntary effort and some states, including Florida, Texas and Louisiana, have already signaled they will not participate. That’s a problem because these are also states where consumers have experienced sky-rocketing rate increases and insurers dropping policies or even exiting the market entirely—and they are highly exposed to climate risks. 

According to an annual report from the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), “The data call required participating insurers to submit ZIP Code-level data on premiums, policies, claims, losses, limits, deductibles, non-renewals, and coverage types for the ZIP Codes in which they operate nationwide. State insurance regulators sought more than 70 data points. An anonymized subset of the data was shared with FIO.”  

Yet, none of that data has been shared publicly. That’s why UCS has joined in signing a letter from a group of organizations, calling on FIO to release the data so it’s available for local planners, policymakers, decisionmakers, scientists and community-based organizations to have a better understanding of how best to address this rapidly growing problem.  

Private insurers are holding a lot of proprietary data that regulators and the general public do not have access to. This creates a gap in information—an information asymmetry—that can prevent people from making informed decisions and prevent the market from functioning well. A lack of freely available, localized information about climate risks and projections is also part of the challenge for many communities and homeowners.  

Congressional oversight is needed 

The insurance crisis is now a nationwide problem, spilling into parts of the country that may not yet be on the frontlines of climate risks, and into the broader insurance market beyond property insurance. Congress must step up to examine the problem and propose solutions, working alongside state regulators.  

That’s why it’s heartening to see that Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and the Senate budget committee are holding a hearing on December 18 on the climate-driven insurance crisis. Among the witnesses is Dr. Benjamin Keys, who has done important work in highlighting the role of climate risks in driving increases in insurance premiums.  

According to his research, homeowners in the US saw their annual insurance premiums increase by an average of 33% or $500 between 2020 and 2023. Further, his work analyzing premium increases at the county level shows a stark correlation with places that are more exposed to climate risks.  

Average annual insurance premiums in the first half of 2023 by county 

Source: Keys and Mulder, 2024 https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w32579/w32579.pdf 

Earlier this week, Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee, chaired by Senator Martin Heinrich (D-NM), released a report highlighting the growing risks of climate change to insurance and housing markets.  

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has also released a recent report and conducted recent briefings on climate change, disaster risk and homeowner’s insurance. One of the challenges they point out is that, even as disasters are worsening, many people are underinsured.  

Low- and moderate-income households are more likely to be underinsured. According to their report: “In 2023, insurers covered $80 billion of the $114 billion of losses attributable to natural disasters, meaning that 30 percent of those losses were not insured.” With insurance premiums increasingly unaffordable, that gap in insurance will likely increase as many people may be forced to go without.  

There are important ways insurance affordability could be tackled by policymakers, including increasing access to parametric insurance, microinsurance programs, and community-based insurance, as well as passing legislation to include means-tested subsidies in the National Flood Insurance Program. Parametric insurance contracts can help simplify and speed up payouts since they are set up based on specific disaster thresholds being crossed (e.g. an earthquake of a certain magnitude or a hurricane with a specific wind speed), rather than being based on an actual evaluation of loss which can take time. Microinsurance programs can provide low-income households access to basic insurance with lower premiums and less comprehensive coverage. Community based insurance is purchased at the community level instead of individual households.  

Insurance companies should also be required to provide more information about why they are increasing rates, how they determine the magnitude of the increases, and what incentives they provide to help homeowners reduce their premiums by investing in risk reduction measures. Regulators must ensure that insurers are not discriminating against low-income policyholders or dropping less profitable lines under the guise of climate impacts.  

Time to act

The crisis in the insurance market we’re seeing today was entirely foreseeable, and largely preventable if we had acted earlier to limit the heat-trapping emissions driving climate change, invest in climate resilience, and enact equity-focused reforms in insurance markets. Climate scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades, and yet the market and policymakers have reacted with short-term strategies because those are the timeframes for determining shareholder value, profits and elections.  

As we look to find ways out of this crisis, let’s keep in mind the continued mismatch in time horizons for decision making in the insurance marketplace and the climate impacts we have unleashed and are locking in for the long term by continuing to burn fossil fuels today. And, in an outrageous contradiction, the insurance industry continues to insure the build-out of fossil fuel infrastructure! 

Data from Swiss Re shows that, globally, insured losses will exceed $135 billion in 2024. Two thirds of that happened in the US, with Hurricanes Helene and Milton alone causing $50 billion in insured losses.

US insurance companies will very likely hike rates again in the new year as global reinsurers reset their rates to reflect the growing costs of disasters worldwide. Rate hikes will hit homeowners hard. Renters, too, as landlords are increasingly passing through this increase in insurance costs in the form of higher rents, thus worsening the housing affordability crunch. More people will find their monthly budgets stretched or be forced to go without insurance and live in fear that they won’t be able to recover from the next disaster.  

The question for policymakers and regulators is whether they are willing to take bold action to help keep insurance available and affordable wherever possible (which unfortunately won’t be everywhere); help people invest in resilience measures to keep their homes and property safer in a warming world; help provide options for people to move away from the highest risk places; and help cut the heat-trapping emissions driving many types of extreme disasters.  

Insurance is one important tool. Let’s make sure it’s working well, guided by the latest science and with strong oversight and equity provisions. And let’s invest in a whole range of necessary actions to complement that because the current insurance crisis is likely just the tip of the iceberg.  

Climate risks are not just affecting the insurance market but also the housing and mortgage markets. And it isn’t just insurance that is increasingly hard to buy, finding safe, affordable housing in places protected from climate extremes is a growing challenge for many low- and middle-income people. 

One thing we can’t afford our policymakers and decisionmakers to do is to deny that climate change is an economic and pocketbook issue.  

As the days grow shorter and I prepare for the holiday season, it’s a fitting moment to reflect on the state of climate litigation—a field that continues to evolve as both a tool for accountability and an arena for climate action. In the past year, we’ve seen significant victories that inspire hope, like the Swiss KlimaSeniorinnen case, which called for an improved government climate action plan; Held v. Montana, where young plaintiffs won the first U.S. trial court ruling affirming a constitutional right to a safe climate; and in Hawaii, which settled a landmark transportation-related case that will fund critical efforts to decarbonize its transit system. These victories illustrate the power of courts to advance meaningful progress in climate governance and highlight the growing importance of science and scientists in providing the evidence needed to inform these legal decisions. 

Yet, progress often feels frustratingly slow. In the U.S., cases challenging fossil fuel companies for decades of climate disinformation remain stalled, tied up by the defendants in procedural wrangling that prevents them from being heard on their merits, delaying justice for affected communities. It’s a familiar frustration: will 2025 finally be the year these cases move forward?  

While I’ve learned not to make bold predictions on this front, I remain cautiously optimistic. In fact, last week the U.S. Department of Justice weighed in on this with two key Supreme Court briefs supporting state-level climate lawsuits. In both cases, the DOJ sided with local governments, arguing that their claims against fossil fuel companies for misleading the public about climate harms should proceed under state law. These briefs underscore a clear federal stance on the importance of preserving state-level legal avenues to address deceptive practices.  

Although US Courts in the U.S. have made progress in hearing other types of climate-related cases, the lack of substantive rulings in disinformation lawsuits is a glaring gap. 

Similarly, even cases that appear to be securing meaningful outcomes often face uncertainties. In the Milieudefensie et al. v. Shell case, for instance, the Dutch courts upheld the ruling that Shell must act to reduce emissions in line with the Paris Agreement. However, the appeal process revealed uncertainties about the precise scale and timing of these reductions, exposing challenges of translating scientific evidence into clear legal mandates. 

This tension—between exciting breakthroughs and persistent delays—underscores the complexity of litigation’s role in climate governance. Courts are emerging as critical players in climate action, especially as a lack of political will and obstruction by fossil fuel interests continue to impede bold outcomes and accountability in international processes like the COP negotiations. I previously wrote about expectations for the incoming Trump presidency, positioning courts as an essential backstop for accountability in the U.S. in the absence of federal leadership. 

The ability of courts to enforce obligations, act on science, and elevate human testimony has never been more crucial. With this in mind, here are three key developments that I believe will shape climate litigation in 2025. 

International Courts Grapple with Climate Change Action  

2025 will undoubtedly be defined by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and its advisory opinion on states’ obligations to combat climate change. The ICJ hearings, which wrapped last Friday, drew unprecedented global engagement, with a historic number of countries and organizations submitting arguments. These comments repeated an often-shared plea for justice, sustainability, and progress, emphasizing the need for international cooperation rooted in sound science and human rights. 

The ICJ’s advisory opinion has the potential to set a new benchmark for climate accountability. While not legally binding, such opinions hold significant moral and legal influence. They can guide future litigation, encourage governments to align their policies with scientific imperatives, and clarify the responsibilities of states under international law to protect vulnerable populations from climate harms. 

This moment at the ICJ builds on a growing trend of international courts stepping into the climate governance arena. In 2024, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) issued a landmark advisory opinion affirming that greenhouse gas emissions constitute marine pollution under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). ITLOS went further, clarifying the obligations of states to prevent, reduce, and control emissions, protect marine ecosystems, and collaborate internationally to address climate-related ocean impacts. While the ruling didn’t impose specific measures, it established UNCLOS as a legal framework for climate accountability that complements other treaties like the Paris Agreement and provides a pathway for legal action. 

Similarly, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) held hearings on climate change and human rights earlier this year, with a focus on the Americas. Submissions from states, NGOs, and individuals emphasized the disproportionate impact of climate change on vulnerable populations,  the need for regional cooperation, and corporate accountability. The IACHR’s forthcoming ruling could further solidify the link between climate action and human rights, providing another layer of legal precedent for addressing the climate crisis. 

Together, these international judicial interventions highlight a growing recognition of the courts as key arbiters in the fight against climate change. When diplomatic negotiations falter, judicial action serves as a complementary pathway, providing a critical counterbalance, grounded in evidence and accountability.  

A Surge in Greenwashing Litigation 

Another defining feature of 2025 will be the continued rise of greenwashing lawsuits. These cases, which challenge companies for making deceptive claims about their climate commitments or sustainability efforts, are becoming a cornerstone of climate litigation. Over 140 such cases have been filed globally since 2016, with 47 new filings in 2023 alone.  

Climate-washing lawsuits are particularly potent because they expose and disrupt the narratives corporations use to greenwash and bolster their reputations while continuing to contribute to the climate crisis. Recent cases have targeted sectors ranging from finance to consumer goods, and the scope is expanding. Courts have ruled against companies for overstating their “net zero” pledges, misleading consumers about the environmental impact of products, and greenwashing their financial products. 

As governments introduce stricter regulations on corporate sustainability claims and public awareness of greenwashing grows, this area of litigation is poised for significant expansion. Beyond penalizing false claims, these lawsuits send a clear message: corporations must back their promises with real, measurable action. 

Post-Disaster and Failure-to-Adapt Cases Gain Ground 

The growing prevalence of climate-related disasters—wildfires, hurricanes, floods—continues to drive litigation targeting both public and private entities. In 2024, lawsuits were increasingly filed in response to catastrophic events, including the Maui wildfires, which devastated communities and underscored systemic vulnerabilities.  

Similarly, earlier this month, the town of Carrboro, North Carolina, file a complaint against Duke Energy, alleging that the utility’s failure to transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy has contributed to intensified weather events, such as flooding and storms, causing significant harm to local infrastructure and residents.  These cases focus on holding governments and corporations accountable for failing to adapt to foreseeable climate risks or mitigate their impacts. 

As courts wrestle with these issues, they are shaping a new era of accountability. Post-disaster cases bring the abstract reality of climate change into sharp relief, translating emissions data into the lived experiences of communities harmed. In 2025, we can expect to see more cases that address the human cost of climate inaction while pushing for systemic change. 

The Critical Role of Courts 

Courts have the ability to enforce accountability in ways that are direct, timely, and rooted in evidence. However, the power of courts to affect change depends on the conditions we create for them to act. This includes fostering robust scientific research, empowering communities to bring cases, and ensuring that legal systems are equipped to handle the complexities of climate litigation. Efforts to integrate science more effectively into legal arguments, help judges accurately interpret technical evidence, and improve access to justice for climate-vulnerable populations are all critical to building a resilient legal framework. Reach out to get involved in our expert working groups and engage in this work with us. 

The ICJ’s deliberations, the rise of climate-washing cases, and the focus on disaster liability all point to the transformative potential of litigation to address the climate crisis. But these legal battles are just one piece of the puzzle. They must be complemented by bold policy action, international cooperation, and a collective commitment to protecting future generations. 

2025 holds immense promise, but it also demands care, creativity, and persistence. While we are facing great challenges in the U.S. and around the world, courts have shown they can play a transformative role in shaping our collective response to climate change. As we look to the year ahead, let us renew our resolve to leverage every available tool—legal, scientific, and political—to combat the greatest challenge of our time. Together, we can create the conditions for a more just, sustainable future. 

Editor’s note: Updates status of investigation into RealPage

Scott Turner’s nomination by President Trump to lead the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has garnered less attention than some of his other cabinet picks. This is surprising given the power he wields over millions of people’s most immediate everyday need—having a place to live.   

As the housing and climate crises continue to collide—destroying homes, displacing communities, and causing instability in the insurance industry—it’s important to understand the background of the person selected to lead the agency responsible for policy and programs to address America’s urgent housing needs.

Turner’s track record of advancing ultra-conservative agendas raises valid concern that he would prioritize developer interests while shifting climate risk onto local governments and individuals.   

What does the HUD Secretary do?

As the head of HUD, Scott Turner would oversee a broad, important portfolio of programs that literally helps keep the roof over many people’s heads.

HUD serves a crucial role in providing access to affordable housing for millions of people, including through rental assistance programs, public housing, and pathways to homeownership. These programs are especially important for low-income households, people who live with disabilities, the elderly and families with young children.  

HUD also provides financial support for community and economic development through its Community Development Block Grant Program. The Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) component of this program is increasingly important in an era of worsening climate-fueled disasters.  

The question is: if Turner is confirmed as HUD secretary, will he keep the people’s interests as his top priority—or will he be more beholden to deep-pocketed real estate and developer interests?  

Potential conflicts of interest 

To get an idea of how he would lead HUD, it’s important to look at who Scott Turner is. He has had a varied career, including stints in the Texas legislature, the first Trump Administration, and the NFL. During his time in the Texas legislature, Turner stuck mostly to the fiscally and socially conservative Tea Party agenda and didn’t file any housing bills.  

Most recently, Turner has served as a Chief Inspiration Officer for JPI—a development firm that specializes in building multi-family homes across the income spectrum. While it’s essential for the nation’s housing secretary to understand the development landscape, their actions must be rooted in the public interest, not real estate industry interests. The Project 2025 chapter on HUD, authored by former HUD Secretary Ben Carson who Turner considers a mentor, encourages the sale of existing public housing to private, profit-motivated developers.

Additionally, Turner’s former employer has a longstanding and well-publicized relationship with RealPage, a private equity-backed software firm that the US Justice Department claimed enables price-fixing, artificially increasing the rents of hundreds of thousands of renters nationwide. While a criminal investigation into RealPage was recently dropped, a civil lawsuit by the DOJ and eight states remains active. As the average American pays more money than ever before to keep a roof over their head, this confluence of interests and influence should raise concerns during confirmation hearings.   

Opportunity Zones  

In his previous role as a senior official at HUD, Turner was celebrated by President Trump and others for his role in promoting Opportunity Zones. Opportunity Zones were a signature economic development effort of the first Trump administration codified in the 2017 tax bill that allowed investors to defer taxes on capital gains by siphoning those gains into a fund that invested in economically distressed areas. 

The architects of Opportunity Zones claimed the program would spur desirable investment in communities and jumpstart economic revitalization, however, the program didn’t lay out tight regulatory guidelines, and the full impact of the policy isn’t yet obvious as investments can be made through 2026 and some forms of investment (like developing or rehabbing housing) can take years to realize.   

What we do know is that real estate is the largest investment category among Opportunity Zone investors. It’s reported that thousands of affordable homes have been financed in hot housing markets like Charlotte and Austin, but how many of those homes are meaningfully affordable or only nominally affordable, stretching buyers and renters thin, is unclear. 

The return of Opportunity Zones was a key component of the president-elect’s campaign platform, and they are poised for extension in the new administration and Republican-controlled Congress.  If Turner’s job is to champion safe, healthy affordable housing, members of Congress should ask how he intends to strongly condition Opportunity Zones to help address the nation’s housing shortage and whether those benefits will flow to those with lower incomes.  

Reversing climate progress at HUD 

In addition to investing in public housing, rental support and providing pathways to homeownership for low-income families, HUD is also tasked with distributing funds for long-term recovery to cities and states after increasingly frequent and costly disasters.  Cuts to disaster response programs in other federal agencies like FEMA proposed in Project 2025 will almost certainly reduce community resilience and may drive up the price tag of long-term recovery that Turner is tasked with administering. 

In the last few years, HUD has adopted climate initiatives to make affiliated properties more energy efficient, weatherize buildings against extreme heat and reduce flood risk. Project 2025 recommends eliminating the agency’s climate programs. The climate denialism of these proposed repeals aside, the conservative playbook’s obsession with reducing government spending simply transfers risk to levels of government and communities less equipped than the federal government to pursue resilience.  

HUD’s climate initiatives are intended to keep communities safer and tackle climate challenges that, if left unchecked, will have increasingly expensive impacts on its assets and risk the lives of people the agency has a responsibility to protect.

Members of Congress should probe Turner on the true, long-term cost of walking away from common sense climate efforts like weatherization and floodplain standards.   

Project 2025 regurgitates rejected policies

It’s too soon to tell just how much of President Trump’s dangerous agenda Scott might be able to realize as HUD Secretary.  Much of the Project 2025 plan for the agency are policies that were rejected or unfinished during the first Trump presidency, which like the coming administration also began with a Republican-controlled congress.

Other parts of President Trump’s agenda like his inhumane threats of mass deportation could make it harder to build affordable homes. With an electorate deeply concerned about making ends meet, it’s important that confirmation hearings reveal who Turner will center in his leadership—a nation struggling with housing costs and growing climate risk or his real estate industry colleagues.    

For the first time, the Arctic Report Card assessed that the Arctic is faltering as a reliable area for storing carbon away from the atmosphere (Natalie et al., in Arc2024). It was its first failing grade after thousands of years holding onto more carbon than released to the atmosphere. As a scientist who has conducted research in the Arctic, this is truly alarming for me. 

This report, issued by NOAA annually since 2006, was a much-anticipated event at the annual American Geophysical Union meeting because the implications matter far beyond the Arctic. 

Grade F: First major “vital sign” shift in its report card

Different factors are at play in terms of whether the Arctic is a net sink or source of carbon. On one hand, warming temperatures increased vegetation in the region with increased uptake of carbon dioxide. However, unprecedented Arctic wildfires combined with soils thawing released even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Methane releases were sustained as well.  

The carbon cycle trend in the Arctic will be a closely watched “vital sign” for Earth’s climate going forward. 

Is this report card for the Arctic, which includes boreal and tundra of northern permafrost regions, a temporary carbon cycle hiccup, or will this be a growing trend as a net carbon source region? 

If the latter, the implications are profound because the Arctic holds an immense store of carbon that, if released, would set off a chain of cascading consequences, including significant global warming.

The implications of these changes are enormous for the Arctic ecosystem, the ways of life of communities living in the region, and for the many unique species that exist there. Moreover, changes in the Arctic have a huge impact on weather patterns north of the equator, including polar vortex disturbances, changes to ocean currents, and extreme heat domes. Shrinking Greenland ice sheet and mountain glaciers also contribute to accelerating sea level rise. 

Meanwhile, the warming climate is leaving Arctic species with little choice but to adapt, but some are finding it harder than others. 

Grade C: Coping or struggling to cope with Arctic change 

A vivid scene reappeared from memory when I learned the findings of the annual Arctic Report Card. It’s from my time in the Arctic aboard the Oden. The Icebreaker suddenly blasted the horn on an unplanned  stop that shuddered the entire ship as the sounds of water pumps that help roll the ship and engines shifting speed reverberated in the ears.   

Biologists had spotted a tiny Arctic cod on top of the ice! We watched as the fish was retrieved for analysis amid plenty of evidence that a seal and a polar bear had been on that spot of sea ice not too long before we had arrived. Given the primary source of polar bear food— ice dependent seals —it likely was their favorite, ringed seal. Now we knew why the fish was on top of the ice and not in the frigid seawater below. These three are species in an Arctic ecosystem that used to be more tightly linked together.  

But the Arctic report card assessed that ringed seals in the Pacific sector of the Arctic have adapted away from their former major food source—Arctic cod — to a new major food source—saffron cod (Quakenbush et al., in Arc2024). This is a cod species shift to warmer seawater from that particular cold seawater with floating sea-ice.  

The surprise is that, despite plummeting sea ice, the ringed seal is currently coping with these changes. It’s a bright sign brought by collaborations among indigenous researchers and other scientists.   

Yet there are more stark signs in the report card overall logging different marine and land species coping with regional changes that differ from the Arctic averages. 

Arctic cod and seawater in glass jar collected from the surface of Arctic sea-ice.  Brenda Ekwurzel 

Case in point is the difference between coastal caribou herds that are coping with the wetter and warmer conditions and the inland migratory tundra caribou herds that are struggling to adapt (decreasing 65% over past two to three decades) (Gunn et al., in Arc2024).  Rain on snow that often freezes can shield vital forage away from inland caribou herds.  Roads associated with mines and railroads are also factors.

If these inland herds fail to adapt to these changes, the caribou’s future in these locations is uncertain. And so too are the ways of life of indigenous communities that are adapting given local traditional levels of reliance on the caribou for food and other essentials. 

NOAA Arctic Report Card 2024 Grade A: Amplified warming in the Arctic, a dubious distinction

This year logged the eleventh year in a row when the Arctic warmed faster than the global average (Ballinger et al., in Arc2024)—quite a feat given the Earth’s global average temperature is on track to being the hottest on record.  

This greater pace of warming has implications for the character and timing of snow cover. The 2023-2024 Arctic winter snow accumulation was above average over Eurasian and North American sectors with the Central and Eastern Canada region logging the shortest snow season in 26 years (Mudryk et al., in Arc2024).   

Amplified warming in a region that has water locked in the form of ice on land for millennia has global significance for coastal communities worldwide.  Mountain glacier and ice sheet contributions to global sea level rise has been a growing proportion with each passing decade.   

Another bright spot this year amid the bad news was that the massive Greenland Ice Sheet had the lowest annual ice mass loss since 2013 (Poynar et al., in Arc2024).   

No doubt about it. That F grade for failing to remain a region that stored more carbon than it released has got to grab the attention of anyone involved with international negotiations in line with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).  The urgency for reducing emissions is a serious Arctic warning. 

Icebergs from a Greenland Ice Sheet glacier that has released large volumes of ice to the ocean over recent years. Brenda Ekwurzel

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is one of the foremost federal science agencies whose foundational work has wide implications and immense value for people’s daily lives and for our economy.

As an economist who is part of an interdisciplinary team focused on understanding climate impacts and advocating for smart solutions, I can tell you that NOAA science and data is crucial for our work at UCS. To give a few examples, we’ve used NOAA sea level rise data to analyze and quantify the impacts of flooding on coastal real estate and critical infrastructure. We use NWS weather alerts for our Danger Season mapping tool. The reality is that climate change now touches almost every aspect of our lives and economy and having robust scientific information gives us the power to confront these challenges effectively.

NOAA also provides critical, widely relied-upon forecasts for hurricanes and marine conditions, monitors wildfire smoke, and contributes to essential global scientific endeavors to help us understand and respond to changes on our planet.

That’s why the Trump administration’s nominee to lead NOAA must live up to a high standard for scientific integrity and make a commitment to safeguard the mission of the agency and the work of its dedicated career staff. When the nominee is announced, here’s what we’ll be looking for and why.  

NOAA administrator must support NOAA’s crucial scientific work

The most important priority for the incoming NOAA administrator is to show is that they understand the breadth and importance of NOAA’s scientific work for our nation and commit to fully supporting that work and fostering an environment where agency scientific experts can do this work without political interference.

It should go without saying, but given the incoming administration’s track record with inappropriate agency nominees, it’s worth stating explicitly: the NOAA administrator should not have conflicts of interest or be beholden to fossil fuel and other special interests.

As my colleague Juan Declet-Barreto wrote in a recent blog post “We need a strong and independent NOAA.”

Here are some of the key responsibilities for the job:

• Familiarity with the core missions and functions of the agency’s six branches—NOAA Marine & Aviation Operations (OMAO), NOAA Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), National Ocean Service (NOS), Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), National Weather Service (NWS), and the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS)—and how their work is closely coordinated and integrated.
• Commitment to uphold and enforce NOAA’s strong scientific integrity policy. This policy helps ensure that the scientists at NOAA do the highest quality scientific work free from harassment and interference, and that the public can rely on and trust NOAA science for that reason.
• Commitment to safeguard NOAA and its work from attacks such as those proposed in Project 2025 that seek to dismantle the agency, privatize core components of its work, and politicize the science it produces. To be clear, NOAA’s line offices work together closely, and dismantling the agency would make it far less effective and, in some cases, unable to provide the services the public needs. Privatizing parts of NOAA such as the National Weather Service makes no sense—and even private companies like AccuWeather have said so. NOAA’s comprehensive and freely available weather and climate information is vital for the public and already being used by private sector entities like TV and radio forecasters and meteorologists. This life-saving information must be freely accessible to all so that everyone can use it and rely on having it, not just those who are able to pay.
• Commitment to advocate for the resources, budget and staffing NOAA needs to do its work well. NOAA’s budget is a very small part of the overall federal budget, and it provides incredible bang for the buck. There will be inevitable attacks on its budget as we saw under the previous Trump administration, and it will be crucial for the NOAA administrator to clearly articulate what NOAA delivers for taxpayers and why it is worth investing in. Draconian cuts will save very little money but can completely hobble the agency’s work. The Secretary of Commerce also plays a vital role in advocating for NOAA’s crucial work which falls within the Commerce Department’s purview and budget.
• Commitment to continue to invest in the tools, data and practices that will keep NOAA’s work at the cutting edge of science, including investing in satellites and earth observation systems, AI weather forecasting tools, integrating community knowledge and science, collaborating with scientific agencies around the world (for example, key data sharing and harmonization agreements), and building public-private partnerships.
• Commitment to protecting marine fisheries, mammals, and ecosystems that are crucial to livelihoods, food security, commerce, planetary health and more.  

What does NOAA do?

NOAA gathers, maintains, analyzes and provides for free an enormous amount of data, scientific information and tools that help us understand climate and weather conditions wherever we live. It also monitors ocean conditions crucial for maritime traffic and fisheries and helps with marine conservation efforts.

To gather this data, it has a powerful array of satellites as well as the much-admired hurricane hunters who fly into the most hazardous weather to improve predictions. These kinds of data are literally lifesaving when extreme weather events like heatwaves and hurricanes threaten, and it’s also incredibly important for our economic prosperity.

Here are just some of the powerful examples of NOAA’s valuable work:

• NOAA’s National Hurricane Center provides seasonal hurricane forecasts and crucial information all through the hurricane season as tropical depressions form and progress. Just in this last year, the accurate and constantly updated forecasts for catastrophic hurricanes Beryl, Helene and Milton, among others, helped save lives and provided emergency responders with the information they needed to protect people and infrastructure. NOAA has also invested in creating and updating numerous related tools like its storm surge  and wind speed products.
• NOAA collects global and localized sea level rise data from tide gauges and satellite altimetry which are analyzed and made available through its sea level rise portal. These data help communities around the nation understand the accelerating rate of sea level rise—largely due to climate change—and the frequency and magnitude of high-tide flooding they can expect as a result. This information is crucial for local planners, infrastructure owners, operators and engineers, homeowners, businesses, and many others.
• NOAA monitors wildfire smoke conditions and maps how those hazards travel hundreds of miles away from the original site of the wildfires. The latest science shows that particulate matter pollution from wildfires is a serious health hazard for people who may need to work or be outdoors, especially for young children, pregnant women and their babies in utero, and people with pre-existing heart or lung ailments.
• NOAA’s marine forecast products are a bedrock source of information for the maritime industry. These products are available in multiple formats and routinely used by the crew of seagoing vessels to navigate and prepare for conditions at sea.
• NOAA is working with the NSF to help the insurance industry better understand and prepare for the impacts of climate change on their businesses. This work could not be more salient as the industry is facing an acute upheaval as extreme weather and climate disasters multiply, and consumers are facing the brunt of raised insurance rates and dropped policies.
• NOAA makes invaluable scientific contributions to global initiatives like the Famine Early Warning System, the Joint Typhoon Early Warning Center and the World Meteorological Organization.

The federal government’s data.gov portal links to more than 100,000 datasets generated or provided by NOAA. Having this kind of information is not just vital to understand the scope of the problems our nation faces but it helps policymakers develop effective policies and solutions so communities across the nation can thrive in the face of a warming world.

UCS will be advocating for a new NOAA administrator who can live up to the task the nation needs them to perform so we can all be safer and prosper.

In 2022 I visited Glacier National Park for the first time with two close friends. We spent five days backpacking through the backcountry, and I was enthralled by the park’s vastness and beauty and the chance to see glaciers for the first time in my life. While I loved camping out in the wild, as a trail runner I couldn’t help but think of ways to travel lighter, cover more territory, and see even more of this breathtaking landscape. After the trip, I found myself studying maps, plotting potential routes, and, eventually, conceiving an ambitious plan: a 75-mile route linking three of the park’s historic lodges. This route offered restocking points and a bed each night, but each leg of the route was about 25 miles long, with over 4,000 feet of elevation gain.

Proposed route through Glacier National Park, proceeding clockwise from the start/finish at the southwest corner. Blue dots indicate the lodges where we planned to stay along the way, and numbers indicate cumulative miles.

Having recently read several books on ultramarathon training, I began to incorporate their techniques into my routine. Like any engineer, I created a spreadsheet to plan my training, then booked the trip for Labor Day weekend.

Training presented its own challenges: I live in Madison, Wisconsin—great for many things, but not exactly mountainous. But Wisconsin does offer the Ice Age Trail, a 1,200-mile national scenic trail that winds through the state, tracing the terminal moraine of the North American Ice Sheet—a massive glacier that once covered much of the continent. The trail, characterized by rugged landscapes, narrow technical trails, and sections affectionately called “rollers” for their endless ups and downs, became my go-to training ground. It felt especially fitting to retrace the path of the last major glaciation while preparing to visit some of the last remaining glaciers in the lower 48 states.

In January, about two months into my training, I joined the Union of Concerned Scientists. This marked a career shift toward direct climate and equity advocacy, where I could use my background in electrical engineering to more directly tackle the climate challenges threatening our planet’s critical resources, including the glaciers I would soon visit. The connection felt profound: I was focusing my personal time on training for a chance to witness these glaciers up close, even as I was now working professionally to mitigate the emissions causing their rapid retreat.

Training on glacial terrain A picture taken on my way up the east bluffs in Devil’s Lake State Park, part of the Ice Age Trail, with Spirit Lake visible in the distance. Photo by Lee Shaver.

The Ice Age Trail zigzags across Wisconsin, and from where I live in Madison, I can access several segments of the trail within a short drive. During training runs, my thoughts were often practical: monitoring my water supply, fending off bugs, calculating carb intake, etc. But I also reflected on the nature of the landscape I was running across.

The trail gave me a unique perspective on how glaciers not only sculpted the land but also influenced human use of it. The flatter lands on one side became ideal farmland, supporting the dairy industry for which Wisconsin is known, while the rugged driftless terrain on the other side, harder to farm, has lower population densities. Even the Ice Age Trail itself follows the edge of these different land uses, often marking the boundary between neighboring farms.

The glaciation process played out over an incomprehensibly long timescale—the ice age that ended about 10,000 years ago had lasted over 100,000 years. By contrast, the glaciers in Glacier National Park are retreating at a disturbingly rapid pace. Some estimates suggest they could disappear by 2030 due to the climate change triggered by human fossil fuel use, which began less than 200 years ago.

The journey through glacier: running on borrowed time

Eventually, after logging over 1,000 miles in preparation, it was time to head to the park. For the trip, I was joined by my friend Brian, a fellow runner from Madison. We arrived in Glacier on Thursday afternoon, and with time to spare, booked a boat tour from our starting point at Lake McDonald. Our guide shared insights into the fragility of the landscape, pointing out the shrinking glaciers and evidence of recent forest fires.

Friday morning we set out on six relatively flat miles through thick forest, carpeted in moss and dense with cedars. We hiked this section to avoid startling bears, as Montana has the largest grizzly population in the lower 48. Next, we joined the Going-to-the-Sun Road for six miles, a necessary but unpleasant stretch due to the noise and fumes from traffic (a reminder of the carbon emissions that threaten the very glaciers we had come to see).

After leaving the road, we began the steep ascent up to Swiftcurrent Pass. Despite training on every hill in Wisconsin, we found ourselves unprepared for the altitude. Climbing during the hottest part of the day was grueling, and we began to feel the effects of the altitude. At the pass, we rested and refilled our bottles before descending into the valley, where we finally glimpsed Swiftcurrent Glacier. From a distance it was hard to grasp the scale of the glacier, but as we descended the pass the sights and sounds of immense waterfalls draining the glacial basin helped us understand just how massive it must be.

Bullhead Lake at the bottom of Swiftcurrent Pass. Swiftcurrent Glacier is visible just below the ridge above. Photo by Lee Shaver.

We followed the chain of lakes out of the valley to Swiftcurrent Lodge, where we enjoyed a much-needed rest after a dinner of mac and cheese. We ended up traveling nearly 28 miles that day, the longest day of the trip.

On Saturday we joined the Continental Divide Trail and made our way up to Piegan Pass. We saw only one other hiker all morning, underscoring how remote and isolated we were. As we climbed, the roar of a distant waterfall grew louder, coming in and out of earshot as we switched back up the mountain. Near the top, we encountered a snowbank across the trail and carefully made our way over. At the pass, we stopped for lunch, gazing out over snow-fed pools that sparkled in the afternoon sun.

After hearing glowing reviews from other hikers, we decided to take the more challenging Siyeh Pass route, adding another 1,500 feet of elevation gain but allowing us to run through a recent burn area with clear visibility. We covered about 21 miles that day, grateful to avoid vehicle traffic by catching a shuttle for the final few miles along the road.

The view from Siyeh Pass trail, with evidence of forest fire in the foreground. Photo by Lee Shaver. Up close and personal with a glacier

On the morning of day three, we experienced deus ex machina—or more accurately, ursus ex machina: Gunsight Pass, our intended trail for the day and the only path back to our starting point, had been closed by park rangers due to bear activity. We hitched a ride to our final hotel and opted for an out-and-back run up to Sperry Glacier instead—a chance to get closer to the ice than we’d anticipated.

After a 3,500-foot climb, we reached Sperry Chalet and paused for a refreshing lemonade. Another 1,500 feet of climbing led us over Comeau Pass to what we thought would be an easy half mile to the base of Sperry Glacier.

Instead, we were reminded of how glaciers shape the land around them. Sperry Glacier sits on the edge of a large basin which is constantly scraped and scoured by the ice that accumulates each year from snowfall, then melts and sublimates in the warmer season. As a result, the “trail” to the base of the glacier is actually a mostly unmarked traverse across a boulder field. Just a handful of cairns, rebuilt each year by volunteers, mark the path around the ridge that hides the glacier from view.

View from the edge of Sperry Glacier across the melt pools and boulder field. Photo by Lee Shaver.

On the other side of the ridge, we were rewarded with spectacular views of crevasses, melt pools, and Sperry Glacier itself. We picked our way over more boulders to reach a US Geological Survey weather station at the base of the glacier. We were completely alone at this point and could hear the constant sound of water dripping from the glacier, and the periodic sound of ice and boulders shifting in the field all around us: the soundtrack of quiet disintegration.

Sperry Glacier, with a USGS weather monitoring station in front. Photo by Lee Shaver.

Exhausted but exhilarated, we made our way back, covering a total of just over 20 miles and 5,400 feet of elevation gain—the most intense day of the trip, which we felt made up for the change in course that took five miles off our planned total.

DayMileageAscent (feet)Highest point (feet)Elapsed time127.84,9407,20310:21220.93,9818,0807:43320.35,4008,0618:42Total69.014,321 26:46Running through Glacier, by the numbers. Reflections on glacier loss and climate action

The weather just before the trip was marked by contrast: a few days earlier, a storm had dropped enough snow to close several miles of road inside the park, but by the time we arrived it had gotten hot enough to melt off nearly all the snow, except for a few lingering piles in the shade at higher elevations. I felt the same contrast as I stood at the foot of Sperry Glacier, feeling both the heat of the sun and the cool breeze blowing over the ice, and I was struck by the reality of the glaciers’ vulnerability.

The prediction that all of the park’s glaciers could be gone by 2030 felt painfully real as we looked out over the landscape. While snow accumulating and disappearing is an annual event as the seasons change, the trend over the last several decades has been a global net reduction in the mass balance of mountain glaciers like Sperry.

The feelings that accompanied this moment were bittersweet; I felt privileged to see something that may be gone in a few short years, but also a sense of guilt that I was seeing something that future generations may be robbed of the opportunity to witness. Glaciers, once thought of as static, timeless icons, have become a fleeting phenomenon, highlighting the urgent need for action on climate change.

The personal meaning of this journey intersected profoundly with my work at the Union of Concerned Scientists. My role focuses on developing solutions for cleaner energy systems and policies to reduce heat-trapping emissions, work that is closely tied to the survival of landscapes like the one I had just run across, as well as the people who inhabit and depend on those landscapes. In Montana and around the world, glaciers support ecosystems, serve as year-round water sources, and regulate the climate, among other important ecological functions. The trip reminded me that the impacts of climate change are not abstract—they are visible, tangible, and current. At home, I train on a landscape shaped by glaciers over a hundred thousand years, but human-caused climate change is re-shaping Glacier National Park within my own lifetime.

Moving forward with purpose

I carry two main insights after running through Glacier: first, the incredible value of experiencing and witnessing these landscapes firsthand; second, the motivation to actively protect and preserve them. My hope is that future generations will be able to visit places like Glacier National Park and stand in awe, as I did, of their beauty and the ancient forces that shaped them. But without meaningful, immediate action, these “icescapes” may not survive to inspire future generations, leaving behind only the evidence of their former grandeur.

This experience changed the way I view both my personal and professional goals. Every mile I ran reminded me of the resilience and adaptability required to face the challenges ahead. It underscored the importance of not only reducing carbon footprints, but actively working to reshape our policies, technologies, and societal structures to build a future where these irreplaceable wonders can endure, and where we can experience them.

As I continue my work with the Union of Concerned Scientists, I’ll carry this journey with me and use it to fuel my dedication to tackling the climate crisis. There’s still hope to protect places like Glacier, but that window of opportunity is narrowing. My experience has reaffirmed that the path forward requires not just awareness, but action—action that can make a difference, just as each small step in my training built toward something greater.

Another year, another legislative session. Much like a sine graph, this year had highs and lows. Also like a sine graph, Union of Concerned Scientists will keep moving forward no matter what (and backward technically, but I am political science major and way out of my depth here, so let’s pretend they only move forward, give me kudos for an awesome simile, and get to the recap!).

Bidirectional EVs Could Be the New Standard

Electric vehicles (EVs) should be a clean transportation and a clean energy solution. That is why we sponsored SB 59 by Senator Nancy Skinner which paves the way for California to require EVs to have the ability to export their power. This could let drivers use these batteries to power critical appliances during emergencies, their homes during power shutoffs, or even the grid when electricity demand is high. (More on this in my colleague Sam Houston’s latest blog.)

The bill made it all the way through the legislature and was signed by Governor Newsom. As exciting as this is, it is only the first step in making sure this capability is standard issue on all new EVs. The California Energy Commission now holds the power to set this requirement, but it will be up to us to make the case that they should.

 As fate would have it, UCS is working to analyze the potential benefits of widespread bidirectional capabilities in CA that will help inform the implementation of SB 59 in the coming year.

Special session takes on big oil and wins

The transition to clean transportation and away from fossil fuels is here. Earlier this month, we saw yet another California refinery announce plans to close its doors. While this is an inevitable part of the transition to clean transportation, and generally good news for the climate and impacted communities, the oil industry will not go down easily. ABX2-1 by Assemblymembers Hart and Aguiar-Curry illustrates this reality.

Over the last few years, California drivers have seen huge spikes in gasoline prices and big oil has seen corresponding, massive windfall profits. With authority granted by the legislature and Governor last year, the state discovered that when refineries did not store enough gasoline before maintenance, prices (and profits) spike. So, refiners were incentivized not to be prepared, and it was drivers who paid the price.

This year, we helped Gov. Newsom take on Big Oil by strongly supporting his special session that resulted in the passage of AB2X-1 allowing the state to require minimum gasoline storage at refineries, limiting refiners’ ability to manipulate the market.

Policies like this will be critical to ensure that the fossil fuels phaseout is equitable and Big Oil doesn’t squeeze every dollar out of California consumers on the way out the door.

A step towards getting water rights right

California’s water rights system is inequitable, unfair and just plain broken. The outdated system essentially allows “senior water rights holders” to use water with reckless abandon, even as the climate crisis worsens, and water supply becomes more constrained.

Over the past few years, we have been fighting to pass bills that would reign in some of the most powerful interests in the state and ensure that they are not using too much water when supply is limited.

This year, we took an important step forward by passing AB 460 by Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, which increases the fines on entities that knowingly steal more water than they are allocated. This is a commonsense step and hopefully the first of many towards a more equitable, sustainable water rights system. 

EV battery end of life bill life ended on Governor’s desk

Due to the necessarily ambitious regulations we fought to pass, California will continue to see a huge increase in the number of EVs on the road. As these regulations drive down emissions, we will also see an increase in battery retirements.

When EVs do retire, it is critical that we can keep hazardous waste out of landfills and communities while limiting the amount of critical minerals (lithium, cobalt, nickel, etc.) that need to be mined for new batteries.

For two years, we worked on SB 615 with Senator Ben Allen to require all EV batteries to be repurposed or recycled. We negotiated hard with auto makers, recyclers and others for the bill to include robust reporting requirements, producer responsibly and environmental protections.

In the end, we won on all those issues and sent a strong bill to the Governor’s desk. Newsom ultimately vetoed it due to concerns with the cost of implementation in a tough fiscal year for the state.

We now have a roadmap for a strong bill and will keep at it next session. Rest assured, we won’t sleep until all EV batteries are repurposed or recycled at the end of their useful lives.

Clean cars not 4 all

UCS research found that cars that were manufactured before 2004 make up less than one fifth of the cars on California roads but account for more than two thirds of the smog-forming emissions of all cars. That is why we sponsored AB 2401 by Assemblymember Phil Ting to target the state’s limited “Clean Cars 4 All” clean vehicles incentive dollars towards replacing these older cars.

This bill was such a good, science-based, iron-clad idea that it made it all the way through the entire legislative process without a single “no” vote. In the end, the Governor vetoed it citing similar budgetary concerns.

The intention of the bill was to require the state to spend wisely with a pot of money we know is vanishingly small rather than increase costs as the Governor feared. Fortunately, we built momentum on this idea that clearly everyone in the legislature thinks is a worthwhile endeavor.

We will think creatively and work with the Governor to make sure our research results in a positive policy change next year.

Onward

Before the new legislative session begins in January 2025, we will take time to both celebrate our victories, work to support their implementation, and continue working on the bills that ended up on the wrong end of Newsom’s pen.

We will also work on new policy solutions to protect California’s values, combat the climate crisis, clean the air, improve access to water, overcome barriers to clean energy adoption, take on Big Oil, transition cropland to less intensive uses, and many, many other answers to the world’s biggest problems. 

I hope you aren’t tired from riding that sine wave, because next year we are going fully linear with a positive slope (I know I nailed that one).

The Trump campaign has made so many radical promises that it’s hard to know which will come to pass. Yet, we are tracking them knowing that the president-elect’s team is committed to broad and destructive reforms.  An early target of the transition team is the agency where I worked for nearly two decades: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). 

The EPA, like many federal agencies, is run by political appointees. While it’s true that federal agencies have always changed leadership from administration to administration, countless career employees have worked to fulfill their agencies’ missions, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office. Their expertise and institutional knowledge are invaluable—and of great benefit to the public.  

I know this because I lived it, serving at the EPA through the majority of the first Trump administration. Within the Office of Community Revitalization, and across the entire agency—an institution charged with protecting human health and the environment—I saw politically-motivated and industry-driven attacks on science that sought to undermine our core values and mission. 

Lee Zeldin must protect people 

Last week, the President-elect announced former Congressman Lee Zeldin as his nominee to lead the EPA. Zeldin is a loyalist to the President-elect with no relevant environmental background to lead an agency that relies heavily on science to protect the public, and especially environmental justice communities. If confirmed by the Senate, he will be forced to choose between taking the EPA’s mission to serve the public seriously or following through on the Trump campaign’s promise of severe deregulation. 

Deregulation would benefit a small number of big polluters at the expense of people’s health, wallets, and the environment. This is also a major equity concern because heavily polluting industries exist most commonly in communities where Black, Indigenous and people of color, as well as low-income people, live. 

Data shows this is also a concern shared by nearly two-thirds of Trump voters, who worry that the future EPA Administrator will put the interests of polluting corporations ahead of protecting clean water, clean air, and public health. Now that Zeldin is the official nominee, I too share this concern. 

Zeldin has a history of fossil fuel fealty, illustrated by campaign donations and a track record of anti-science votes. During his terms in Congress, he voted against clean air and clean water legislation dozens of times, putting our health, environment, and economy at risk. Frankly, this is not the record of someone seriously interested in protecting people and our environment. 

Lee Zeldin must protect science 

More than two-thirds of the civil servants who power the EPA are scientists, charged with protecting both human health and the environment. They oversee long-term research that may, and often will, span administrations. The speed of science is not meant to be managed under political cycles, and when the pendulum swings too far between administrations, public trust in agencies designed to protect us erodes.

Science-informed public policy requires scientists serving in key agency positions to recommend policy. To do that agencies devote staff time, expertise, and resources to gathering and sharing data and information to make better decisions about policies now and in the future. When scientists are forced or threatened to leave agencies, it severely limits agencies’ ability to advance science-informed policy free from any particular group’s self-interest. It also poses a long-term threat. It could lead to more hazardous air pollutants from power plants and chemical plants.  Or it could mean capitulating to the auto industry, rolling back fuel efficiency standards and sending emissions soaring. Or it could mean putting children’s safety at risk because dangerous pesticides are allowed to flow freely. When federal agencies lose the expertise and knowledge of scientists, anti-science special interests benefit while public health is harmed. The EPA relies on scientists to inform policies that protect people and the environment, and the politicization of facts puts all of us at risk. 

In the first Trump administration, UCS catalogued over 50 instances of political appointees sidelining scientific evidence and attacking scientific integrity. These tactics included censoring scientists, circumventing advisory committees, undermining science-based safeguards, halting, suppressing and altering scientific studies, and driving out over 1,000 scientists and technical experts. President-elect Trump and former Congressman Zeldin are expected to do much of the same in the four years to come: removing experts who could stand in their way of dismantling landmark climate regulations that for decades have kept the air we breathe and water we drink clean.  

Lee Zeldin must protect stability 

The last time Trump was president, his administration sought to impose double-digit percentage budget cuts on the EPA year after year. And, year after year, the EPA saw the departure of hundreds upon hundreds of scientists. Undermining the EPA doesn’t only pose real, tragic health risks—it is in direct defiance of the voters who elected the incoming administration.  

An overwhelming majority of voters, including 81% of voters who supported Donald Trump, want Congress to increase funding for the EPA, or at the very least, keep it the same. Three in four Trump voters oppose attempts to weaken the EPA. And of dire importance to me, after focusing on the EPA’s environmental justice work for years, 72% of Trump voters support increasing funding for communities disproportionally harmed by air and water pollution. Rolling back the progress the EPA has made over its nearly 55-year tenure isn’t just out-of-touch with what communities need—it’s entirely detached from reality.  

Source: EPN 

Ultimately, attacking science endangers our health by compromising protections for the public and for environmental justice communities facing the largest potential impacts from buried science, and weak and ineffective environmental and public health protections. In order to support the EPA’s mission, and ensure they are providing benefits to those most harmed by the current status quo, we need a robust and supported scientific community at federal agencies—both to limit the potential harms of a Trump administration, and to ensure we can have a speedy recovery and reversal of any harmful and damaging policies when the opportunity arises. 

We must protect our future 

Nothing is inevitable, and UCS is ready to fight to keep strong science at EPA. During the first Trump administration, UCS successfully led a lawsuit overturning the EPA’s unlawful ban on scientists serving on advisory committees and restoring integrity to federal decision-making. When the EPA refused to hold a hearing on a proposed rule that would transform how the agency uses science in policy decisions and scientific assessments UCS organized an alternative public hearing, giving a platform to affected communities and experts. UCS brought accountability to the agency, exposing the devastating impacts of the administration’s weakened Clean Water Rule, highlighting its disregard for science and the importance of wetlands and tributaries in protecting drinking water. And UCS helped win additional pollution protections from trucks, and brought a spotlight to the real and devastating impacts reckless, anti-science leadership has on public health. 

I bring up what UCS did from 2017 to 2021, not to diminish the tangible harms accomplished in the first Trump administration, but rather to frame our mission in facing the challenge that lies ahead.  

It is clear that the incoming administration has the entire regulatory state in their crosshairs—which is why UCS is hitting the ground running to save science and save lives.  We intend to continue our work of fully supporting federal scientists through our network and resources in order to protect and limit the loss of the federal scientific workforce. We will also use Senate confirmation hearings to fight unqualified science agency nominations such as Lee Zeldin. We will also support efforts to continue funding programs that support communities via the Inflation Reduction Act.  

Independent science is a public good and it must be protected. 

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post said “In the first Trump Administration, the agency was dealt double-digit percentage budget cuts year after year.” This has been corrected to say, “The last time Trump was president, his administration sought to impose double-digit percentage budget cuts on the EPA year after year.“

2024 is another year of new extremes in climate: this year’s summer was the hottest on record. In particular, July 22 will be remembered as the hottest day recorded, when the global average temperature hit 62.9°F according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service. Heat waves, floods, storms, and wildfires are breaking records and impacted nearly everyone in the United States and its Caribbean territories.  

As we have been doing since 2022, this year we tracked alerts issued by the National Weather Service (NWS) for these extreme weather events during Danger Season—the period between May and October when climate change increases the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events. By mid-August everyone in the US lived in a county that had experienced at least one of these events.  

We saw that climate change is driving a longer Danger Season that affects everyone in the US. That means that the work of key federal agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and National Weather Service (NWS) is more critical than ever. They must be allowed to continue providing accurate and timely forecasts of extreme weather events because these forecasts save American lives.  

According to a proposed policy framework for the Trump Administration, NOAA and other federal agencies will be gutted, leaving us with little protection against the more intense and more frequent extreme weather we experienced this danger season and will continue to experience as global temperatures rise. 

In recent years, Danger Season has ended in October, but in yet another sign of worsening climate change, the Northeast is still facing fire weather amid summer temperatures in November. Here’s what it has brought so far. 

Heat

The 2024 Danger Season opened in late May with a nearly week-long heat wave in southern Texas during Memorial Day weekend, when millions in the US kick off the summer. The border cities of Brownsville and McAllen set daily records at 100°F and 102°F, respectively, while Del Río broke its own monthly record of 109°F, then a few days later it broke that record when temperatures hit 112°F.   

June 19 marked the first-ever excessive heat wave on record for northeast Maine in a nearly nine-day heat wave that stretched from Ohio to the mid-Atlantic. Impacts were expected on transportation infrastructure, as Amtrak warned travelers they may experience delays as trains need to run at slower speeds when tracks get too hot.  

On July 8, the Third Avenue bridge that connects the Bronx and Manhattan in New York City was stuck in the open position because the high temperatures expanded the steel, prompting city crews to hose down the bridge with water to cool it down. 

From June 27 to July 14, heat wave conditions persisted along the West Coast and Pacific Northwest. In Death Valley National Park, temperatures of 128°F grounded rescue helicopters that could not safely fly to rescue motorcyclists affected by heat. And in Washington state, triple-digit temperatures expanded the asphalt along a county highway, causing delays and emergency road repairs.  

However, these reports do not reveal the profound inequities in who is most exposed to climate impacts. I combined data from our Danger Season tracker with population disadvantage data to assess inequities in population exposure. I found a few concerning things.  

While counties with at least 25 percent disadvantaged population experienced, on average, 18 extreme heat alerts during this year’s Danger Season, counties with lower fractions of disadvantaged populations experienced 12 heat alerts. Counties with at least 25 percent disadvantaged populations and the highest numbers of heat alerts are in Arizona and California, as seen in the table below. Riverside County and Imperial County, both in California top the list with 84 and 77 heat alerts.  

Counties with at least 25 percent disadvantaged populations and the highest frequency of heat
alerts during the 2024 Danger Season  Wildfires

Wildfires raged on as well this Danger Season. To give an idea, 404 wildfires—threatening 1.6 million acres—were active in the US as of October 21, 2024 according to American Forests. The Park Fire, affecting Tehama and Butte counties in northern California, started on July 24 (allegedly caused by an arsonist) and burned nearly half a million acres on days when there were already wildfire weather and heat alerts in these and adjacent counties.  

The National Centers for Environmental Information tallies the number of fires and acreage burned; as of this writing, data are available to assess Danger Season impacts between May and August. These show a clear seasonal increasing trend in burned acres per fire, indicating that as peak wildfire season was reached in August, wildfires became more and more destructive.  

Wildfires became more destructive, consuming more acres per fire, as peak wildfire season advanced this Danger Season

The top ten counties with at least 25 percent of their population at disadvantage and number of fire weather alerts in the 2024 Danger Season are in Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah. Harney County, OR, tops the list with 56 fire weather alerts.  

Counties with at least 25 percent disadvantaged populations and the highest frequency of fire weather alerts during the 2024 Danger Season  Flooding and Storms

Near-record warm ocean temperatures, a reduction in Atlantic trade winds and wind shear, and the development of La Niña in the Pacific led NOAA to issue an above-normal hurricane season forecast. And the forecast was accurate—17 named storms. Rapid intensification was the defining characteristic of hurricanes this Danger Season. The list is long, but here are some of the most impactful storms.  

Beryl was a long-lived tropical cyclone (June 28 July 11), strengthening into a Category 5 over the Caribbean and making landfall not once, but twice over the Yucatán Peninsula before making landfall as a tropical storm about 100 miles southwest of Houston. Beryl was also the earliest-forming Category 5 storm on record, and poured 3-6 inches in southeast Texas and up to 2 inches in central and southern parts of Louisiana.  

On August 13, Tropical Storm Ernesto rapidly intensified right before grazing Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Although Ernesto did not make landfall in Puerto Rico or the nearby archipelagos, the storm still delivered winds reaching 50 miles per hour (mph, or 80.5 kilometers per hour) and heavy rainfall of up to 10 inches (25.5 cm) across Puerto Rico.  

By the morning of Wednesday, August 14, around 728,000 customers—nearly half of the island—were left without electricity. Many communities also lost access to drinking water, as the water supply systems depend on electric pumps. Flood warnings were issued throughout the island due to the storm’s impact. This storm highlighted the fragile state of the badly-run energy infrastructure in Puerto Rico. 

Hurricane Helene rapidly intensified from 45 to 80 mph (72.4 to 128.7 km/h), and it was blowing at 140 mph (225.3 kph) less than 36 hours later when it made landfall on September 26 as a Category 4 in the Florida Gulf Coast. In states such as North Carolina, the hurricane battered communities with high percentages of people living with disabilities, people of advanced age, or living in mobile homes, all markers of populations that face significant challenges to recover from such disasters.  

And in perhaps the saddest and most sobering reminder that we are running out of places to be safe from climate impacts, the community of Asheville, NC, more than 500 miles from where Helene made landfall, suffered more than 100 deaths from mudslides and other disasters caused by the storm. 

The ninth hurricane of the 2024 season in the Atlantic was Hurricane Milton, which rapidly intensified into a Category 5 on October 7. Milton resulted in at least 24 fatalities, and brought at least 19 tornadoes to Florida.  

These storms and other precipitation activity across the country brought large numbers of flood alerts this Danger Season. The highest number of flood alerts were in counties in Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Illinois, and North Carolina. These counties have high percentages of people at socio-economic disadvantage. Orange County, TX, tops the list with 131 flood alerts this Danger Season. Newton County, Texas is in third place with 111 flood alerts, and 100% of its population is in disadvantaged status.  

Counties with at least 25 percent disadvantaged populations and the highest frequency of flood alerts during the 2024 Danger Season  Accurate weather forecasts helped save lives from the destruction of Helene and Milton

The National Hurricane Center’s (NHC) initial forecast for Hurricane Milton predicted a landfall location just 12 miles from the spot where the storm actually came ashore four days later.  This early forecast allowed millions of people to evacuate in advance of the hurricane, which undoubtedly contributed to reducing the loss of life from destructive winds and lethal storm surge.  

We need sustained and increased resources for scientists at key federal agencies such as NOAA and its dependencies (NHC and NWS) to do their job of issuing accurate, timely forecasts of extreme weather events that can minimize the loss of life and property. But if Project 2025 comes to fruition as written, the second Trump administration would break up and downsize NOAA (pro tip for the incoming administration: don’t dismantle NOAA; it’s proven that its science saves lives and property from climate impacts. I just wrote about it here).

This year’s Danger Season showed us that the climate crisis is in full force and worsening, and we need action to reduce global emissions, adapt to the impacts we can’t avoid, and strengthen the country’s scientific capacity to forecast extreme weather events and protect people.  

It’s November, and heat may not be the first thing on your mind. But here’s why it should be and what you can do to help indoor and outdoor workers stay safe from deadly heat. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has issued a proposed heat health safety standard and is taking comments on it through the end of December. Please weigh in to protect workers’ health and safety.

We’re coming off a summer that was the planet’s hottest on record, and millions of people had to work through it in conditions that are risky for their health—even deadly. Many of us interact frequently with outdoor workers or have friends and family who work outdoors. They work construction jobs, or harvest vegetables and fruit, handle baggage on hot airport tarmacs, clean the inside of planes with the AC turned off in between flights, or deliver packages to our doorsteps. In the United States, outdoor workers face a disproportionate risk of heat-related death, which occurs disproportionately among Black and Hispanic people.

Even now, with fall in the air, we are reminded of the harsh reality that fossil-fueled climate change is causing fall to be warmer across the contiguous US, particularly in the southwest. Phoenix, which has experienced record-breaking extended heatwaves this year, endured an unprecedented four days of temperatures of 110°F or higher in October! California too experienced a late-season October heatwave, made worse by climate change. And the first few weeks in November had weirdly warm temperatures across the Northeast.  

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) monthly outlook for October and November looks to follow this trend in which many parts of the US will have above-average temperatures. Warmer temperatures during the fall months could have repercussions on outdoor workers who worked through dangerously hot conditions this past summer.

Our own research finds that outdoor workers’ exposure to extreme heat can be expected to triple or quadruple between now and midcentury depending on the pace of growth in global heat-trapping emissions. As if this projected increase in extreme heat exposure isn’t daunting enough, outdoor workers are also at risk of collectively losing up to $55.4 billion in annual earnings due to extreme heat.

Is there any good news?

Yes! After years and even decades of calls for action, OSHA has finally proposed heat protection standards to help keep workers safe, and we have an opportunity to urge them to quickly finalize the strongest version of these standards.    

On July 2, 2024 OSHA  announced the release of the Heat Injury and Illness Prevention in Outdoor and Indoor Work Settings rulemaking and on August 30 OSHA officially listed the proposed rule in the Federal Register, requesting public comments by December 30, 2024.  

What it does

OSHA’s goal is to prevent and reduce the number of occupational injuries, illnesses, and fatalities caused by exposure to hazardous heat. It would apply to all employers whose workers take part in outdoor and indoor work across industries and in construction, maritime, and agriculture sectors where OSHA has jurisdiction, excluding emergency responders and people working in air-conditioned spaces.    

OSHA’s standard would require employers to create a plan to evaluate and control heat hazards in their workplace and would clarify employer obligations and the steps necessary to effectively protect employees from hazardous heat.

OSHA has also provided a robust and extensive scientific basis for the rule. Section III of the proposed rule provides these science-based background materials, and OSHA also has a one-stop shop webpage with additional background information and resources.

Critical points for public comments 

UCS, alongside a broad coalition of worker justice and public health professionals, has long been calling for these heat-health protections. We have also been weighing in on the OSHA rulemaking process over the years (2022 and 2023).

We hope that you will submit comments in support of OSHA’s rulemaking.

In a recent blogpost, my former colleague Kristina Dahl summarized the proposed rulemaking, noting that while there are areas for improvement that OSHA should address, this is a strong standard that will help keep workers safer from extreme heat.

As you prepare to submit comments on OSHA’s heat standard, below are points from Kristy Dahl’s overview to keep in mind:

1. Support the strong provisions in the heat protection standard which include:

• The core health-protective measures workers need when it’s hot: water, shade, and rest;
• Provisions that require rest breaks to be paid—a real win that will ensure workers don’t have to choose between their health and their livelihoods. UCS research shows that outdoor workers could collectively be losing billions of dollars in earnings due to worsening extreme heat by midcentury if provisions like this are not in place;
• The inclusion of an initial heat trigger at 80°F, above which certain protective measures go into place, and a high heat trigger at 90°F, when those measures get ramped up;
• Requirements that managers involve non-managerial employees in identifying hot spots in workplaces and in developing plans to monitor employees when it’s hot.

2. Highlight how the standard could be improved:

• Written heat injury and illness protection plans should not be exempted for employers with fewer than 10 employers. There are different means of assessing how many employers and employees this would exempt, but it’s safe to say it’s a lot. Pew Research shows that half of small businesses in the US have fewer than five employees, for example. And the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council has used Census data to estimate that nearly 80% of employer firms have fewer than ten employees.
• OSHA should strengthen protections for temporary and part-time workers, many of whom work in construction and agriculture, as recommended by heat and health experts like Juanita Constible.
• Weak and limited recordkeeping requirements. Under the proposed rule, employers would not be required to keep records of heat illnesses and injuries experienced in their workplaces or how those cases were resolved. Employers would only be required to keep six months’ worth of records of workplace temperatures.
• Fixed length for rest breaks. The rest break policy is set at a minimum of 15 minutes every two hours rather than progressively longer breaks as the temperature rises, as was suggested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in their 2016 recommendations.  
• Shorter-than-needed acclimatization periods. The proposed rule requires employers to implement a gradual period of acclimatization for new workers that is, at a minimum, four days long. Science suggests this is much too short. OSHA’s own data has shown that most workplace heat-related fatalities occur during the first week on the job. And the CDC notes that acclimatization can take longer than one week.
• Improve sedentary work activity protections. We are pleased OSHA included more specificity on what constitutes sedentary work indoors and encourage OSHA to maintain, at a minimum, this language. However, workers’ exposure to sufficiently extreme heat even when sedentary can present serious harms. Given this, we encourage OSHA to consider a stipulation in which the standard does not apply to those engaged in sedentary work activities in environments where the heat index is below 110 °F but does apply in environments above that threshold.
• Monitoring conditions at work sites or with local forecasts. This policy has the potential to provide insufficient protection for workers because measurements from the weather stations used to determine forecasts might differ from measurements at local worksites. Instead, we recommend OSHA strengthen this policy by requiring employers to monitor the on-site heat index or wet bulb globe temperature throughout the day. Alternatively, employers could note that if the daily maximum heat index forecast exceeds relevant thresholds, they would then implement protection measures for the full workday regardless of how temperature and humidity evolve throughout the day.

If you have expertise on worker conditions, public health or if you’re simply interested in submitting a more substantial set of comments you may be interested in reading and lending support to our full set of UCS comments on the heat protection standard. You could also draw from fellow advocate Juanita Constible’s excellent blog post about the proposed rule and this recent helpful NPR interview with experts including Kristina Dahl. We also recommend that you read the proposed rule itself and decide how you’d like to respond. For even more in-depth data, you may wish to review UCS’s reports Killer Heat and Too Hot To Work.

Whatever route you choose, we urge you to consider submitting a comment. The health and wellbeing of the roughly 36 million outdoor and indoor workers in the U.S. depends on this standard being as strong as possible, and it’s up to all of us to ensure it lives up to its potential.

State and local protections to complement the OSHA standard

While we are very close to being able to celebrate a productive end to this long OSHA heat standard journey (since the 1970’s), there are still multiple stages in the rulemaking process that will take months or years to finalize so the work doesn’t stop here.

We also need state and local protection standards. Why you ask? Good question. Currently only a few states and localities have heat protection standards and even when we have a final federal standard, states and localities can do more to tailor their policies to better reflect local conditions and employee needs while also lending to an increase in monitoring and enforcement of these standards so that fewer workers are left to the mercy of their employer. For more on state and local policies, see Public Citizens Scorched States report card and Section III, Part D of the proposed rule.

With your help, we’ll get a strong and final federal rule requiring employers to implement OSHA’s heat-protection standard. Moving forward we will also work to advocate for strong state and local standards. Thank you for your efforts in helping to keep workers safe from dangerously hot working conditions!

It may feel like we are facing a grim reality. Regardless of people’s beliefs, the facts show us the increasing toll from an unaddressed climate crisis. Globally, this year is going strong as the warmest on record and likely one of the coolest we’ll see in the decades ahead. In Spain, recent catastrophic flooding, the most devastating in Europe since 1967, has cost more than 200 lives. And locally, this year marks the second highest number of red flag warnings in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, with fires threatening to damage homes.  

Annual global mean temperature anomalies from January – September 2024 (relative to the 1950-1900 average) from six international datasets. Source: WMO 

In these dire times, it’s a huge relief to see that here in Massachusetts, state legislators rolled up their sleeves to protect their constituents now through steady climate action, passing An Act promoting a clean energy grid, advancing equity and protecting ratepayers, which Governor Maura Healey supports and is expected to sign shortly. This is a huge reason for hope and celebration! 

The legislation includes multiple components to decrease heat-trapping emissions from the electricity, transportation, and building sectors, including streamlining the siting process for clean energy projects, increasing energy storage targets, enabling a robust electric vehicle charging system, and implementing measures to protect ratepayers and reduce overreliance on gas in buildings and homes. In particular, I am celebrating two key achievements of this legislation related to clean energy siting and gas overreliance.  

Advancing faster, more equitable siting of clean energy infrastructure 

While the ability to build quickly is a key component of a clean energy transition, doing so with appropriate attention to the needs of communities, particularly to those who have been most heavily burdened by energy infrastructure and pollution, is just as crucial.  

Our own recent analysis found that to date, infrastructure siting has put a disproportionate burden on environmental justice (EJ) communities where people of color, low-income people, and limited-English proficient speakers live across the state. While close to 50 percent of Massachusetts neighborhoods (2,604 of 4,985 census block groups) classify as EJ neighborhoods, more than 80 percent of existing polluting electricity generating units—with their associated health risks—are located in or within one mile of an EJ neighborhood. 

The existing siting process has resulted in a high concentration of polluting electricity generating units in and near environmental justice neighborhoods. Source: UCS, with Alternatives for Community and Environment, GreenRoots, and the Conservation Law Foundation. 

With that in mind, it’s really encouraging to see that the three key recommendations from our analysis, guided by priorities from the Massachusetts Environmental Justice Table, were included in the new legislation to advance the siting of new clean energy infrastructure in the Commonwealth: 

• requiring a robust cumulative impacts analysis,  

• expanding the state’s Energy Facilities Siting Board to include representation from environmental justice and Indigenous sovereignty perspectives, and  

• integrating public health and climate change as priorities for decision-making.   

Addressing the state’s gas overreliance problem in buildings 

Buildings are the second largest source of heat trapping emissions in Massachusetts. As the state works to achieve its climate goals, it’s essential to explicitly put in place measures to move away from gas use in buildings.   

The new legislation gives particular attention to this issue by: 

• Allowing gas utilities to build networked geothermal projects. This is an important tool to replace fossil fuels for heating and cooling entire neighborhoods.  

• Prioritizing short-term repairs or retiring stretches of gas pipelines instead of continued investments in costly pipe replacements. 

• Considering alternatives such as electric heating and cooking before allowing for more gas hookups. This is good not only for the climate, but for the health of Massachusetts households by reducing indoor air pollution from gas stoves.  

Rising to meet the challenge ahead 

The job is not done yet. Despite this welcome good news, the new legislation does have some concerning elements and leaves plenty of work for the next legislative session. Of particular concern is the inclusion of nuclear fusion as a technology that qualifies for the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard, a tool created to incentivize the generation of energy using commercially available technologies that harvest natural sources that are constantly replenished, like the wind and the sun (hence renewable energy) . The inclusion of fusion, a technology that’s not going to yield any practical source of electricity generation in the foreseeable future, is at best a distraction from the urgent need to decarbonize our electric grid with available and proven renewable energy technologies. 

While this new legislation will build on the state’s climate progress, including recent pieces of legislation like a net zero by 2050 goal, increased investments in offshore wind, and key protections for its most pollution burden communities, there is still a lot of work ahead of us, especially given the incoming Trump administration and the increased importance of state action.  

But for today, I want to express my sincere gratitude to our legislators for passing this bill, to Gov. Maura Healey and her administration for their leadership in prioritizing the health and well-being of their constituents and our shared planet, and giving us this much-needed breath of fresh air. Thank you! 

The fossil fuel industry’s presence at this year’s UN climate negotiations in Baku, Azerbaijan, has been simultaneously heavy-handed and covert. More than 1,770 lobbyists—including the heads of some major oil and gas corporations—have been granted access to the talks, many as guests of the host country. The numbers dwarf those of almost every country delegation and threaten to drown out the voices of Global South nations—not to mention Indigenous peoples, youth, women and others who disproportionately bear the brunt of climate impacts. The industry’s close access to the leaders of the negotiations raises questions about how COP29 will stay on track toward the goals of increasing much-needed climate finance and following through on a fast, fair transition away from fossil fuels.

Even more alarming, the fossil fuel industry’s influence at COPs is deeply entrenched and goes beyond lobbying. We’ve seen it at COP29 with greenwashing by corporations and trade associations, misrepresentations of what science deems necessary to address the climate crisis, and a widening ambition gap due to the insidious effects of fossil fuel influence.

To help parties break free from the grip of fossil fuel interests, here’s a guide to the top five ways the fossil fuel industry is trying to co-opt climate talks—and a call to world leaders to resist them.

1. Showing strength in numbers

Late last week, the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition revealed that at least 1,773 fossil fuel lobbyists have been granted access to COP29, outnumbering nearly every national delegation attending the talks in Azerbaijan. This is a major presence for the industry primarily responsible for driving destructive and deadly climate change and more than all the delegates from the ten most climate-vulnerable countries combined (1,033 people badged).

According to the provisional list of registered on-site participants, major fossil fuel corporations BP, Chevron, Eni, ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies brought a total of 44 lobbyists to COP29. Participating in and influencing COPs has been part of ExxonMobil’s playbook for decades. Darren Woods, the corporation’s chair and CEO, is one of 12 ExxonMobil lobbyists in Baku. By comparison, Guyana—a country vulnerable to floods, droughts, sea-level rise, and other climate impacts (and where ExxonMobil is being sued over its offshore oil extraction projects)—also has 12 representatives at COP29.

2. Obtaining high-level access

But it’s not just the numbers. It’s who’s representing the fossil fuel industry, and who they are consorting with. The heads of several major oil and gas corporations—Aramco, BP, ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies—are included in the provisional registration list as guests of the host country.

ExxonMobil’s Woods showed up at COP29 as a host country guest. He was invited to speak at a high-level meeting convened by the COP Presidency—an unparalleled opportunity to personally cultivate political leaders from around the world and attempt to define the terms of the energy transition in ways that perpetuate reliance on fossil fuel products and grow corporate profits.

Meanwhile, Woods discouraged US President-elect Trump from withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate agreement, saying “The way you influence things is to participate, not to exit.” Ironically, this is one point on which I would agree with ExxonMobil’s CEO—with one significant amendment when it comes to the fossil fuel industry: “The way you influence things UNDULY is to participate…”

3. Refusing to pay up

Climate finance is the top priority for COP29, and one leg of the financial stool is funding for lower income countries to address loss and damage from fossil fuel-driven climate impacts. The year 2024 is on track to be the hottest year on record, with extreme weather events leaving a trail of death and destruction across the globe. While major fossil fuel corporations continue to rake in massive profits, people and communities in the Global South bear a disproportionate burden of these disasters—which is why many in the climate justice movement are campaigning to Make Big Polluters Pay.

Demonstrators at COP29 calling for industries and corporations that have fueled and continue to worsen the climate crisis to be held liable. Source: Kathy Mulvey/UCS USA

According to a new report commissioned by the International Chamber of Commerce, climate-related extreme weather events have cost the global economy more than $2 trillion over the past decade. In a painful irony, this is the same International Chamber of Commerce whose delegation to COP29 includes 33 fossil fuel industry lobbyists—and whose US arm pushes the oil and gas industry’s anti-climate agenda. (Read more in this blogpost by my UCS colleague Laura Peterson).

Earlier this year, Azerbaijan, the host country for COP29, announced a Climate Finance Action Fund to be capitalized with $1 billion in voluntary contributions from fossil fuel-producing countries and oil, gas, and coal companies. However, the fund’s launch—set for Climate Finance Day at COP29—has been quietly postponed. The shelving of the fund marks a small victory for advocates who had decried the initiative as a problematic distraction from the imperative for the United States and other wealthy nations— the responsible parties at these UN climate talks—to collectively provide at least $1 trillion per year in grants or very low-interest loans. National and international policymakers must be wary of voluntary approaches that low-ball polluters’ responsibility, risk granting them social license, and could give them inappropriate influence over decisions about how the funds are spent.

4. Conniving to cash in

Even as the fossil fuel industry avoids paying its fair share of the mounting costs of fossil fuel-driven climate harms, fossil fuel subsidies bankrolled by governments (and taxpayers) around the world soared to $7 trillion in 2022, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Here at COP29, ExxonMobil’s Woods added insult to these compounding injuries when he demanded that governments create “incentives” for companies to transition to less carbon-intensive energy sources. The problem: ExxonMobil has its own misleading, dangerous definition of “advancing climate solutions” that its lobbyists are no doubt pitching to COP29 decisionmakers. The corporation’s “low carbon” roadmap relies heavily on technologies such as carbon capture and storage and hydrogen that cannot deliver steep emissions cuts in the critical period between now and 2030. In an interview with The New York Times while he was at COP29, Woods bragged that he resisted investor “pressure to get into the wind and solar business”—and ExxonMobil’s stock soared as the company doubled down on oil and gas.

While fossil fuel industry lobbyists continue their efforts to delay the urgently needed phaseout of oil, gas, and coal, they’re simultaneously trying to co-opt the clean energy transition by demanding subsidies from governments for technologies that aren’t likely to play a material role in meeting 2030 climate targets. Countries must resist any attempt by the fossil fuel industry to swindle funding that should rightly be put toward climate finance desperately needed by nations in the Global South.

5. Greenwashing, diverting attention, and capturing the conversation

During the first week of COP29, I didn’t catch any fossil fuel industry lobbyists in the act of lobbying at the Olympic Stadium where the talks are being held, as such conversations are most likely taking place behind closely guarded doors staffed with security. But the fossil fuel industry’s presence is pervasive and prominent:

• The COP29 Presidency hired Teneo—a public relations firm with close ties to the oil and gas industry—to enhance its image ahead of the talks.
• The Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter—a voluntary initiative launched at COP28 by oil and gas corporations and condemned by hundreds of civil society organizations as a greenwashing ploy—has predictably resurfaced at COP29 after minimal visibility or progress over the past year.
• Events in the business pavilion have been sponsored by oil and gas corporations including Chevron, ExxonMobil, SOCAR, and TotalEnergies.

I’ve spent hours walking around the pavilions in the Blue Zone, where the official negotiations take place, and the public Green Zone, collecting numerous examples of corporate greenwashing. I’ve seen posters promoting natural gas as “the cleanest of hydrocarbons,” dozens of “net zero” claims, and cartoons touting the deployment of problematic technologies over proven climate solutions.

In the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) pavilion, I found a banner announcing that “oil touches our daily lives in different ways.” In oil-producing regions of the world, that statement is painfully true—people suffer health problems, environmental devastation, displacement, and loss of livelihoods and cultural heritage.

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Friday Nbani Barilule, who leads the Lekeh Economic Development Foundation in Nigeria, took the opportunity to share how oil touches his life and that of others in the Niger Delta region where he lives and works. Watch his testimony here and read more in my blogpost about last month’s Niger Delta Climate Change Conference.

Overcoming fossil fuel industry influence with public policies, investor action, and climate litigation

Fossil fuel corporations and their surrogates shouldn’t have a seat at the negotiating table where climate policy is being made. Allowing them access is like setting the cat loose among the pigeons. Corporations such as BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell—which have engaged in a decades-long campaign to deceive the public and policymakers and block or delay climate action—have repeatedly shown that they can’t be trusted as good-faith players in climate policymaking.

Even as they continue to exert undue influence over climate policy, major fossil fuel corporations insist that we focus only on governments to advance climate action. Shortly after new evidence emerged that Shell and other oil and gas corporations knew of the planet-heating effects of their products as early as 1954, a Dutch appeals court overturned an earlier order requiring Shell to cut its global warming emissions by 45% by 2030. In celebrating the ruling, Shell urged people to “lobby governments rather than Shell to change policies and bring about a green transition.”

UCS and our allies will continue to lobby governments, and we’ll continue to work with climate-conscious investors to pressure corporations to slash their heat-trapping emissions and align their lobbying with their stated support for the Paris climate agreement. And we recognize the symbiotic relationship between international climate negotiations and climate litigation. UCS’s Science Hub for Climate Litigation is building a community of scientists to help meet the great demand for scientific expertise to inform litigation and legal action around the world.

As the United States and other nations grapple with surging disinformation and drastic anti-climate political change, COP29 has an opportunity to show the world that international diplomacy remains a vital means to address the global climate crisis. As the fossil fuel industry employs a range of strategies to co-opt and derail the process, negotiators must exercise political will to overcome these schemes. We’ll measure world leaders’ success in COP29 decisions that begin to remedy the harms people around the world are already experiencing, accelerate the phaseout of fossil fuels, and fund an equitable global transition to clean energy.

As the second week of the UN climate talks, COP29, get underway in Baku, Azerbaijan, negotiations are reaching a critical stage.

Nations remain far apart in reaching agreement on a new climate finance commitment from richer countries and will need to double down on efforts over the next few days to secure an ambitious outcome. Finance is the top priority for this COP and is the linchpin to help lower-income nations transition from fossil fuels to clean energy, close the energy poverty gap, adapt to climate impacts, and address mounting loss and damage.  

What the science says is needed for international climate finance

As a report from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) points out, the goal of tripling renewables and doubling energy efficiency by 2030 that countries agreed to last year in Dubai requires investments on the order of $1.5 trillion annually. The International Energy Agency confirms that midcentury climate goals can be met but will require trillions of dollars for renewable energy, energy efficiency, grid transmission, and energy storage. Those investments will deliver huge climate and public health benefits from reduced fossil fuel pollution. Meanwhile, the latest UN Adaptation Gap report estimates that the finance gap for adaptation is $187-359 billion per year. And with every year of delay on robust climate action, loss and damage is piling up across the world. 

US election results cast pall over COP29 opening days

The US election results, coming just days before COP29 started, certainly cast a pall over the opening days of COP29. The United States is the largest historical emitter of heat-trapping emissions and a major player at these negotiations. The prospect of an incoming Trump administration that has threatened to exit the Paris Agreement and roll back key climate and clean energy policies is deeply concerning, especially against a backdrop of rapidly worsening climate impacts and a continued rise in global heat-trapping emissions. Unfortunately, with a prospective anti-science administration that seems hellbent on undermining global diplomacy, we can fully expect that they will follow through on their threats.  

While some politically and economically popular clean energy provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act may prove durable and action from forward-looking states and businesses will be significant, there’s no doubt that a lack of robust federal leadership will leave US climate action hobbled for a time. Other nations—including the European Union nations and China—and states and businesses in the US will need to step up to fill the void.  

Nevertheless, here at COP29, the Biden administration still represents the US, and, despite the election outcome, has an important opportunity to show leadership, take responsibility, and champion ambitious outcomes in these negotiations. These global outcomes can also help set north star goals for what’s needed well past the term of the next administration.  

UCS delegation at the COP29 venue. Credit: Rachel Cleetus, UCS.

Ahead of COP, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) joined over 80 US-based groups in sending a letter urging the Biden administration to support an agreement to collectively provide at least $1 trillion annually in climate finance for lower income nations. UCS is also calling on the Biden administration to announce an ambitious emissions reduction commitment for the country—aka a nationally determined contribution (NDC)—for 2035. That will give the climate advocates, subnational actors, and others who support climate action an important goal to rally around through the Trump administration’s term and beyond. Cutting emissions sharply by ramping up renewable energy and transitioning away from fossil fuels is good for the nation’s economy and for public health, in addition to contributing to global climate efforts to stave off the worst impacts of climate change.

Climate finance negotiation status at COP29 

Week one of COP29 saw little progress on the core issue of climate finance—or the new collective quantified goal (NCQG)—with the negotiating text still at a lengthy 25 pages and containing a lot of bracketed options showing areas where nations have still not reached consensus. The key and contentious issues of the overall quantity of finance, the quality of the sources finance (e.g. public grants versus loans), and how to define which nations will be part of the contributor base will be punted to the ministerial segment, which gets underway in the coming days.  

On the issue of expanding the contributor base, it was encouraging to see China announce that it has already provided and mobilized $24.5 billion in climate finance for developing nations since 2016, which closely matches estimates of China’s south-south finance contributions from US-based experts at WRI.  

A new study recently released by the Independent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance (IHLEG), underscored the need for climate finance to be made available to developing countries (not including China) on the order of at least $1 trillion annually by 2030, and $1.3 trillion by 2035. This is the third report of the IHLEG, which has been providing an independent perspective on the finance agenda since COP26. Overall, the report estimates that “the global projected investment requirement for climate action is around $6.3–6.7 trillion per year by 2030.” The report also warns that if countries fail to marshal sufficient funding in a timely way, the task of cutting emissions becomes much harder, requiring more money more quickly, and that funding needs for adaptation and loss and damage will also rise sharply as climate change worsens.  

Another new study, from the Global Solidarity Levies Taskforce, shows opportunities for raising funds from innovative sources to help meet climate finance goals. Options could include a cryptocurrency levy (which could raise $5.2 billion annually), a tax on the ultra-wealthy (which could raise $200-250 billion annually), and a plastics production levy (which could raise $25-35 billion annually). These kinds of options should be additive to what is committed directly by richer nations through public finance and would require global tax agreements outside of the UN climate talks.  

Adaptation and Loss and Damage Funds need more contributions at COP29 to deliver for climate-vulnerable nations

During the first week of COP29, there was a signing ceremony to finally get the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage operationalized so it can start receiving and disbursing funding for lower income nations often coping with the most extreme impacts of climate change. The World Bank is serving as the trustee for the Fund and the Fund’s first executive director, Ibrahima Cheikh Diong, began his four-year term this month.  

Global civil society representatives meet with new UN Fund for Loss and Damage Executive Director Ibrahima Cheikh Diong. Credit: Rachel Cleetus, UCS

While this marks important progress for this hard-won fund, the amount of actual funding collected remains woefully inadequate. At COP29, only one new contribution has come in—$19 million from Sweden—bringing the overall amount to $720 million thus far. Last year at COP28 in Dubai, the United States contributed a paltry $17.5 million to the fund.  Without a significant ramp-up in pledges, this fund will not deliver justice for those on the most acute frontlines of the climate crisis. And to ensure ongoing predictable and adequate levels of funding, it’s crucial for the NCQG agreement to also include specific provisions for funding for loss and damage.  

Meanwhile, the UN’s Adaptation Fund is also suffering from gross underinvestment. So far, that fund has only raised contributions of around $61 million from donor countries, far short of its annual goal of $300 million. And richer countries are still far off track from delivering on their pledge to double adaptation finance to at least $40 billion annually by 2025.  

Adaptation has historically received much less attention and funding than emissions reduction efforts and is much less attractive for private sector, profit-driven investments. It must get appropriate attention in the NCQG outcome, and it’s especially important to ensure the focus is on grant-based funding so as not to feed into the cycle of debt with which low-income nations are already contending. 

What countries need to do in final week to guarantee a good COP29 outcome

The midpoint of climate negotiations is always a challenging time. Not enough progress has been made thus far at COP29, and the clock is ticking for nations to reach consensus on a range of crunch issues. This is the time for major emitting nations, especially richer countries, to show leadership and negotiate in good faith to maintain trust and credibility. There are some hopes that the G20 summit happening simultaneously this week in Brazil can deliver some helpful climate breakthroughs from major economies that could contribute to advancing proceedings at COP.  

The major presence and influence of fossil fuel lobbyists at COP29 continues to be alarming. As my colleague Kathy Mulvey notes: “Countries must resist any attempt by the fossil fuel industry to swindle funding that should rightly be put toward climate finance desperately needed by Global South nations.”   

The science is clear that without urgent collective action, the world could be on track for a catastrophic rise in global average temperatures of up to 3.1°C above pre-industrial levels this century. Meanwhile, extreme climate-fueled disasters—like hurricanes Helene and Milton in the United States, devastating floods in Spain, and Typhoon Man-yi that just hit the Philippines—continue to batter people and economies around the world.  

As the final week marathon gets underway, UCS will join civil society colleagues to make sure the voice of the people is loud and present at COP29, and that world leaders feel the pressure to deliver science-aligned, ambitious, and equitable outcomes. We have already participated in press conferences (see here and here), engaged in direct advocacy with negotiators, and joined in public actions at COP29—all geared toward pushing forward our key asks.  

Cat sitting on cardboard house in Baku’s Old City. Ashley Siefert Nunes/UCS.

And for a more light-hearted take, check out the cats of Baku, who have also joined forces with us in meowing for more climate finance.  

As the climate crisis advances unchecked, the work of federal agencies dedicated to protecting our health and the places where we work, play, worship, produce food, energy, and shop has become critical and are now at great peril. One such agency is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which provides the scientific bedrock of data needed to protect our health, homes, and livelihoods from climate change and other environmental threats.

This year’s heat waves, hurricanes, flooding, and wildfires for millions across the country shows that people in the United States rely on the scientific data and information that thousands of federal scientists tirelessly churn out and make available for decision-makers, emergency responders, and the general public. From providing operational meteorology for forecasting heat waves or hurricanes with days or weeks in advance, to longer-term assessment of global and regional climate patterns, federal agencies provide data that saves lives.

But if Project 2025–the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the incoming second Trump administration–is implemented, NOAA will be dismantled, downsized, or some parts of it put in private hands, compromising or outright eliminating the valuable services the approximately 11,000 employees who work there provide to the country.

In general, the new Trump administration presents grave threats to priorities on climate, energy, and justice. Project 2025 would be a disaster for the country and climate, as it intends to politicize the climate and environmental science that informs policy-making, promote an energy agenda based on fossil fuels, attack bedrock environmental protections, and eliminate the use of the Social Cost of Carbon in government estimates of the cost of climate change, among others.  In this post I will focus on Project 2025’s ill-advised designs for NOAA.

NOAA scientists’ data saves lives. Project 2025 would dismantle the agency.

NOAA’s work is crucial for monitoring and understanding climate change, and each of its various divisions play an integral role in protecting our ecosystems and communities. NOAA does a lot of important work in partnership with communities to protect them from climate and increasing resilience. For example, the Climate Adaptation Partnerships (CAP, formerly known as the Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments, or RISA) program collaborates with researchers, decision makers, and communities to support resilience in the face of climate risks such as storms, droughts, flooding, extreme heat and wildfires. These partnerships have resulted in, for example, the creation of weather forecasting tools that help maritime operators make better decisions around vessel routes and schedules to navigate the icy waters of the Arctic. This fantastic story map showcases local CAP work with local communities to address extreme heat, dust storms, water/drought planning, fire and disaster planning, among others across the country.

NOAA has many key divisions that perform critical work to inform decision-making around climate change and its impacts. Here is a listing of the most important ones.

The National Hurricane Center‘s (NHC) mission is to “save lives, mitigate property loss, and improve economic efficiency by issuing the best watches, warnings, forecasts, and analyses of hazardous tropical weather and by increasing understanding of these hazards”. 

The NHC works closely with the National Weather Service (NWS), an office best known for its vital role in providing extreme weather alerts for the 122 Weather Forecast Offices across the country. Using data from satellites and advanced models, NWS and NHC warn the public of impending storms, floods, and heatwaves, helping save lives and minimize damage. Travel across the country by water, land, and air is safer in part thanks to timely extreme weather data. And NHC’s forecasts have been improving over the past few decades: storm track errors, a common metric of the accuracy of storm path forecasts, have gone down in recent years according to a report from the American Meteorological Society.

This hurricane season, NOAA’s forecasts were so accurate that Hurricane Milton made landfall only 12 miles north of the location the first forecast had predicted. Hurricane Helene’s loss of life was reduced in the Gulf Coast in part due to an early and accurate forecast that made possible evacuation orders well in advance of landfall in Florida. UCS’ own Danger Season tracker of extreme weather alerts and impacted communities depends on alerts issued by the NWS.

NWS’ Weather Forecasting Offices (WFOs) responsible for issuing extreme weather alerts cover all 50 states, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands (not shown in the map but covered by the San Juan WFO). https://www.weather.gov/srh/nwsoffices

The National Ocean Service (NOS) provides valuable data on economic, environmental, and social pressures impacting our coasts, Great Lakes, and oceans. From coastal erosion to pollution, NOS’s science helps states and communities manage these resources sustainably. 

The Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) program develops foundational climate science research to understand climate events such as tornadoes, hurricanes, ocean currents, El Niño and La Niña events, as well as the health of coastal environments. OAR plays a major role in the U.S. Global Change Research Program, tracking climate patterns and assessing long-term impacts of climate change for the country via the comprehensive National Climate Assessment.

The data produced is essential for global scientific understanding and informs local and national climate policies. In addition, OAR’s research improves weather forecasting models, helping to predict severe weather and air quality issues more accurately. These efforts save lives by providing advanced warning and helping communities prepare for hurricanes, wildfires, and air pollution events. OAR also monitors the Arctic’s rapidly changing environment, as it significantly influences global weather patterns and sea levels. From melting sea ice to shifts in marine life, this research is vital to understanding and adapting to climate impacts. 

Data from scientific agencies inform the National Climate Assessment, which in turn provides critical information for policymakers at all levels of government on existing and future climate change risks and opportunities in the US and its territories. https://nca2023.globalchange.gov/downloads/NCA5_Report-In-Brief.pdf 

The National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) operates NOAA’s satellite programs, which monitor climate and weather conditions globally. These satellites provide essential data on everything from sea surface temperatures to hurricane tracking, giving communities and policymakers the data needed to prepare for extreme weather. 

NESDIS manages the satellite programs that inform the U.S. Drought Monitor, an assessment of drought conditions used by, for example, the US Department of Agriculture to trigger disaster declarations and eligibility for low-interest loans for farmers across the country. Drought.gov.

The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) supports sustainable fishing practices and protects marine species, a critical part of maintaining balanced ocean ecosystems that can withstand climate pressures.  

The Office of Marine and Aviation Operations (OMAO) and NOAA Corps oversee NOAA’s fleet of ships and aircraft used for research and data collection, essential for on-the-ground climate and ecosystem studies.  

Project 2025 would eliminate unbiased data

Though NOAA does not make policy recommendations, the science and scientific data that it produces informs fact-based assessments of climate and other environmental threats that serve as the basis for policymakers to make sound policies. By creating and advancing climate science research, NOAA lays the unbiased, scientific bedrock of data and information for decision- and policy-making that can deliver for us a climate-resilient future. Investing in their work and supporting their mission to understand climate change will benefit current and future generations. 

But Project 2025 would change all of that, proposing that NOAA “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories” (see page 664 in Mandate for Leadership.) This is ill-advised for many reasons.

Climate-augmented extreme weather events have little regard for state boundaries, and are influenced by global and regional atmospheric and oceanic conditions. As such, nationwide data collection and analysis provides the most scientifically-accurate information that can be used to issue forecasts and projections to protect people across the country.

Privatization of public services–a change proposed by Project 2025 for NOAA’s weather forecasts–does not automatically equal better services. Handing essential services to private operators needs to come in with clear accountability and performance metrics to guarantee service levels, and must ensure that towns, counties, or states with less resources are not left without access to these critical data. Without equity in access to service, privatization could also mean that regions with higher risks for heat, hurricanes, or flooding risks, to name a few, could be forced to pay more to access weather forecasts or alerts.

Recent experiences in privatizing critical services such as electricity generation and distribution in the US territory of Puerto Rico, for example, have resulted in degraded, life-threatening reliability of a vital utility, largely due to lack of accountability and performance metrics in privatization contracts.

Why we need NOAA now more than ever

All public agencies, including NOAA, should be held accountable by the public and the rest of government to ensure they fulfill their mission and make the best possible use of taxpayers’ money. But this is not what the second Trump administration and Project 2025 intend to do.

If the first Trump government is any indication, the intention is to dismantle, intervene, and politicize NOAA in order to facilitate profit-making for industries that make more money the more they pollute and the less they have to invest in technologies or processes to reduce the harmful impacts of their activities. The fossil fuel industry can deny all they want, but the health and ecosystem impacts will not be willed away; they will just continue to be passed down to communities across the planet and the country, and the progress that has been made in addressing climate impacts and environmental quality and in reducing injustices and inequities will be rolled back.  

We need champions like NOAA to stand strong in the face of climate change. Their research, policies, and environmental protections are essential building blocks for a sustainable and just future. The first Trump government took a wrecking ball approach at perverting the roles and missions of scientific agencies and offices that protect us.

The incoming second Trump government has an intentional and dangerous blueprint in Project 2025 to repurpose the public services NOAA provides in order to line the pockets of the fossil fuel and other polluting industries. NOAA has a clear track record of providing the best science available to protect against loss of life and property in the face of worsening climate change and must be protected.

Last month, 44 climate scientists from 15 countries wrote an open letter to the Nordic Council of Ministers highlighting the risk of a potential collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a critical ocean current system in the Atlantic Ocean. In the letter, the climate scientists stress that the risk of an AMOC collapse due to climate change has been greatly underestimated according to new observational evidence.

Not only would the collapse of the AMOC lead to “catastrophic” impacts on the Nordic countries (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, and Finland), but it would also shift weather patterns worldwide. For the United States, an AMOC collapse would lead to warmer ocean temperatures and greater sea-level rise along the East Coast, leading to devastating impacts on fisheries and ecosystems in the coastal Atlantic Ocean, as well as greater flood risk to coastal communities and infrastructure.

The potential collapse of the AMOC—which could happen within this century, or be triggered within this century and play out over a longer timeframe—comes as a result of climate change caused by additional heat-trapping emissions like carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But what exactly would cause the AMOC to collapse? And if it does, could climate mitigation efforts restart the AMOC to its original circulating strength?

What is the AMOC?

To understand what exactly the AMOC is, a better question to start might be: why does the Earth’s climate system exist? Because the Earth is a sphere, it receives incoming light (electromagnetic radiation) from the sun at different intensities depending on what latitude you’re located at. For example, the polar regions of the planet receive indirect light from the sun, as the sun’s rays are spread out over a larger surface area. Closer to the Equator, the sun’s rays are more direct. This unevenness in sunlight leads to regions closer to the Equator to be warm and regions closer to the North and South Poles to be cold.

The Earth’s climate system does not like imbalances in heat! And that’s why the AMOC exists: it does everything in its power to mix the warm and cold regions together in order to establish an equilibrium. Both the ocean and atmosphere play a role in this mixing—the AMOC is the oceanic piece of this circulation that brings warm ocean water up from the equator to the northern Atlantic Ocean, and then transports colder water back to the equator in an attempt to even out the differences in temperature (Figure 1).

Figure 1. The AMOC is an oceanic circulation that transports warm, fresh water from the Equator to the North Atlantic and cold, salty water from the North Atlantic to the Equatorial region. Figure from NOAA.

In addition to transporting warmer water north and cooler water south, the AMOC also mixes an imbalance in salt levels in ocean water. Water near the Equator is much less salty than water in the North Atlantic. Why? The Tropical Atlantic Ocean receives significantly more rainfall than the North Atlantic, where it rains much less. More rainfall in the Tropical Atlantic Ocean results in less salty water. This imbalance in the climate system forces the AMOC to transport fresh, warm (low density) water north and salty, cold (high density) water south.

The AMOC is a vital circulation of our climate system, and because of all the warm water it transports to the North Atlantic, human civilization has flourished in very high latitudes in Europe, as well as allowing the development of complex ocean dwelling life and ecosystems.

Picture Quebec City in Canada and London in the UK. Quebec City is famous for its winters with snow and sub-zero temperatures. London, on the other hand, barely receives snow, even during the winter season. But here’s the kicker—London is significantly further north (closer to the North Pole) than Quebec City. London is warmer despite it being further north in part due to the existence of the AMOC, which brings warm water up from the Equator to northern Europe.

What causes the weakening and potential collapse of the AMOC?

As global temperatures warm due to human-caused climate change, the Greenland ice sheet is melting rapidly, leading to vast amounts of freshwater entering the North Atlantic. Because of this, the ocean waters in the north are less salty and less dense than before. This partly reduces the density imbalance between the Equator and the northern Atlantic Ocean, resulting in the AMOC to weaken or potentially collapse (Figure 2).

The idea of a potential AMOC collapse is not new: some scientists were already thinking about this in the early 1960s. However, with the advent of sophisticated climate models in recent decades, climate scientists are better able to study what exactly happens when freshwater increases in the north Atlantic Ocean, forcing the weakening of the AMOC.

Figure 2. AMOC strength over the past 1,600 years according to paleoclimate data. The y-axis shows the temperature anomaly in the North Atlantic—a cooler temperature indicates more sea ice/freshwater melt entering the North Atlantic. Figure from Oceanography | Vol. 37, No. 3 p.24. What would happen if the AMOC weakens or collapses?

In the early phases of a weakened or collapsed AMOC, huge changes would be expected in the local climate of northern Europe. Scandinavia, the UK, Iceland, and Ireland would experience winters much colder than currently observed, with weather becoming even more unpredictable. In fact, in the open letter published last week, there is a dire warning that a weakening AMOC “would potentially threaten the viability of agriculture in northwestern Europe.”

But the impacts of a weakened or collapsed AMOC would spread worldwide. As the AMOC circulation weakens, warm water would start to pool up against the eastern North American coast, leading to significantly warmer ocean temperatures and higher sea level rise compared to other regions across the globe. Near the tropics, monsoon patterns and other tropical rainfall belts would shift. Globally, the circulation of the atmosphere, which governs where weather patterns set up, would change in intensity. All of this as a result of an oceanic circulation in the Atlantic Ocean slowing down.

How likely is this scenario?

Why did this group of scientists suddenly sound the alarm? In the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report, published in 2023, scientific consensus stated that there was a “medium chance” the AMOC would collapse before the end of the 21st century. However, four recent peer-reviewed observational studies have found that the AMOC is in fact already showing signs of collapse (see references 6-9 in the open letter).

In one study published in Science Advances, scientists developed a physics-based early warning signal for an indication of when AMOC could be heading towards a collapse. Unfortunately, they found that based on observations, the AMOC has already weakened so much that the Earth is closing in on a tipping point with the AMOC potentially collapsing.

If the AMOC did collapse, it would be nearly impossible to bring it back to life. In physics-based and climate modeling simulations, the AMOC experiences something called hysteresis. Hysteresis is a phenomenon where any change to a system, such as the AMOC, depends on its history. The AMOC has existed and persisted for thousands of years in the stable pre-industrial climate. Therefore, it’s difficult to force the AMOC out of its current circulation state. If we reach the tipping point of an AMOC collapse, it would be very difficult to change back to a circulating state, simply because the AMOC would need a lot of push to get it going again.

What are climate scientists demanding?

Dozens of climate scientists have sounded the alarm for the Nordic Council of Ministers. They do not discuss the potential of the AMOC collapse lightly, as it would directly affect and have devastating impacts on the communities that many of these scientists live in.

Perhaps even more alarming is the language around their call to action: they recognize that adaptation for citizens in the Nordic countries to an AMOC collapse is not a “viable option,” and that the leaders of these countries should instead “take steps to minimize this risk as much as possible.”

The scientists call on the leaders of these countries to use their international standing to push world governments to take drastic steps to cut the release of heat-trapping emissions and stay close to the 1.5-degree Celsius target set by the Paris Agreement. However, current estimates from the United Nations Emissions Gap Report predict we’re on track to warm 2.6-3.1 degrees Celsius.

Will the world’s governments and corporations heed the warning from these scientists? We hope so. Countries must do everything in their power to drastically reduce heat-trapping emissions, and we must hold governments accountable to protect the oceanic circulation in the Atlantic Ocean, and limit the risk of its collapse and the potential to upend civilization in northern Europe and beyond.

The former governor of New York, Mario Cuomo, famously said, “you campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.”

But if you campaign with lies, you will govern with lies.

Donald Trump and JD Vance just became President- and Vice President-elect by relying heavily on cruel, hateful, and disinforming rhetoric. Throughout the campaign, both candidates, their spokespeople, and surrogates relied on overt, unapologetic racism, on targeted anti-trans ad buys and messages, and on attacks on climate change science, policy, and progress, to name just a few examples of their key messages.

We should expect them to spread more hate speech and disinformation after they are inaugurated. And we should understand that we don’t have to stand by helplessly when they do.

Lies our president-elect told us

Disinformation, the intentional spreading of lies, is a form of propaganda. Those who wield it as a political tactic have three main goals: to spur and stoke division, to reinforce political and cultural identities that weaken discourse and democracy, and to maintain or reinforce existing power structures and undermine progress.

The Trump-Vance campaign stoked political division by amplifying Russian disinformation about the federal government’s response to Hurricanes Helene and Milton. This content dovetailed perfectly with their campaign’s anti-immigrant, anti-government, and anti-US-support-for-Ukraine narratives.

There are many ways in which Russia, a petrostate, benefits from its state media outlets and from social media accounts spreading lies during the US election process, but an obvious one is that Russia profits from a US government that undermines international climate negotiations and progress by withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement.

Joseph Goebbels, the chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, disclosed the “secret of propaganda” when he remarked that “those who are to be persuaded by it should be completely immersed in the ideas of the propaganda, without ever noticing that they are being immersed in it.”

Over the past decade or so, we have seen strategic and successful efforts from the fossil fuel industry and its allies to cement disinforming narratives into political and cultural identity, and the Trump-Vance campaign joined in whole-heartedly. In their statements and posts, climate science and solutions denial overlapped with other conspiratorial thinking—about COVID19, global economic initiatives, drivers of migration, immigrants themselves, and antisemitism.

It’s hard to find common ground on climate policy when a significant proportion of the public has been sold lies about climate science, scientists, advocates, and progress. This, of course, is the point. Climate disinformation is intended to deny science, deceive the public, delay action, or dodge responsibility. In so doing, it maintains the power of the fossil fuel industry and its political allies and locks the world’s people into an increasingly dangerous future.

Quid pro quote

Come January, the fossil fuel industry has a powerful and shameless ally in the White House. We can expect even fewer brakes on worst impulses and actions in the second Trump administration.

During the 2024 campaign, candidate Trump reportedly offered to “roll back a slew of environmental regulations in exchange for $1 billion in campaign contributions” from the fossil fuel industry. If these allegations are true, it is astonishing and appalling that the President-elect solicited a campaign contribution in exchange for anti-environmental (and anti-health) action, and even quoted his price.

A Senate investigation into the issue has been stymied, lawmakers say, because big oil and gas companies are not responding, though “none of them have denied the accuracy of the reporting.”

Big Oil companies are demonstrated purveyors and chief beneficiaries of climate disinformation, but they’re not in it alone. Big Tech, including some companies that own large online search engines and social media platforms, are fossil fuel industry accomplices—they too spread and profit off climate lies, greenwash their own business practices, and support anti-climate officials, including President-elect Donald Trump.

What to expect while we’re reflecting

I’m not saying, better the devil you know, but this isn’t our first go-around with a Trump administration.

We should be confident that how candidates Trump and Vance behaved in the election is once again how they’ll govern, and that because of the strategic thinking behind Project 2025, a second Trump White House will be better prepared to do serious, long-term harm to the US government, the people in the country, and our climate.

It doesn’t take a crystal ball to predict that we will see continued

• attacks on the truth-tellers, that is scientists and science-based advocates,
• efforts to exacerbate political and social division rather than to help people suffering from climate-fueled disasters,
• lies about climate-fueled disasters and risks (anyone remember Sharpiegate?),
• fuel for conspiratorial thinking that undermines trust in democracy, institutions, science, and other people.

Yes, the administration will change in January 2025, but some things won’t. When confronted with climate disinformation or by conspiratorial thinkers, it’s still best not to waste time on bad faith arguments or in playing scientific whack-a-mole. It’s still best to speak with curiosity and empathy with people you love who’ve been disinformed. It’s still kind and wise to ask them where they’re getting their information, and why it resonates with them.

And if people you care about are attracted to conspiracist thinking, boy, have you got an ACTUAL conspiracy for them—the actions of the fossil fuel industry and its pals (see here, here, and here).

Hold Big Tech accountable, too

I often hear that in the United States, taking action to stop the spread of climate disinformation online is impossible because of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. I think that, to a certain extent, this is a red herring. As an analogy, I have a right to my opinion but I don’t have the right to publish that opinion in the New York Times.

Many platforms and search engines already have editorial policies, including policies against certain categories of mis- and disinformation. An oft-cited criterion for removing mis- or disinforming content is that, as Meta/Facebook writes, it “directly contribute(s) to the risk of imminent physical harm.”  That’s why, with climate impacts being ever more heavily borne around the world, it’s important to demand that platforms include climate disinformation in their lists of barred content.

Here are some other demands UCS, as part of the global Climate Action Against Disinformation coalition, has for Big Tech:

• Throttle bad actors’ posts. Online climate-disinforming content originates from a small number of accounts. If accounts repeatedly defy anti-disinformation policies, platforms can “throttle” or delay content from those accounts, fact-checking BEFORE allowing posts to go live and spread falsehoods and harm.
• Don’t profit. Platforms and search engines can simply STOP advertising, monetizing, and amplifying climate disinformation.
• Do better. We can all work together to demand that search engines and social media platforms develop new, counter disinformation policies and/or strengthen and enforce existing ones.

Struggle on

There’s a long, hard road ahead of us and a lot of uncertainty. One thing I am sure about is that no effort to clean up and safeguard the systems that inform (and too often, disinform) the world will be wasted. Counter disinformation work is crucial to building a world in which facts, science, truth matter, and democracy ultimately prevails.

Today, it has become clear that former President Donald Trump will return to office for a second term, after a close and hard-fought election.

There’s no denying it: this is a very difficult outcome for us and for everyone who cares about a safe and sustainable future. There’s every reason to expect that a second Trump administration will pose a risk to our values and priorities at least as severe as the first term, if not more.

President-elect Trump’s path to the White House has been an unprecedented campaign of disinformation, threats, divisive language, and dangerous policy promises. It’s understandable to look ahead to the next four years with serious worry—but while we shouldn’t underestimate the risk, we can’t afford to despair. The challenges the planet faces are too urgent for complacency or cynicism.

Here at the Union of Concerned Scientists, we knew a second Trump term was a real possibility, and we’ve prepared for the challenges ahead. There’s hope in our unique approach: by combining science-backed analysis with grassroots advocacy, UCS has a 50-plus year track record of success, regardless of who’s in the White House.  

We—and our supporters across the country—have a vital role to play in defending the progress we’ve made at the federal level, advancing our goals at the state level, and exposing and pushing back against the abuses that are likely to come. We’re clear about the threats we face but we must move forward with hope and determination. 

Our priorities for the next year and beyond include:

•  Launching a new national campaign to defend science in government decision-making from day one. When science is sidelined, people get hurt. With your help we will work to limit political attacks on government scientists and experts, stop suppression of scientific research, fight unqualified science agency nominations, and defend against other anti-science action in the Project 2025 agenda.
• Protecting democracy, state by state. This election was marred by efforts to undermine the right to vote—through voter-roll purges, restrictive laws, and rampant disinformation. We will continue to work and expand our Election Science Task Force and push to improve free and fair elections at the state level through science-based best practices, including fair representation, better ballot design, and more transparent election data.
• Safeguarding and advancing clean energy and climate-safe infrastructure. The investments made in the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law are having an impact—creating jobs and changing the trajectory of the energy economy in red, blue, and purple states. We have an opportunity to work across the partisan divide in Congress and the states to defend those vital investments and make sure the path toward a cleaner, safer future stays in place. And we are already set up and working in states across the country to forge more ambitious policies to cut pollution, advance equity, and build a thriving future—we can and will press on.
• Holding corporate bad actors accountable. Through our Science Hub for Climate Litigation, we’re providing research and expertise to inform legal cases in the United States and around the world that seek to hold Chevron, ExxonMobil, and other powerful fossil fuel companies and their allied organizations accountable for fraud and for climate damages.
• Relentlessly pushing for long-term solutions that protect science. Wewill work to advance federal legislation that permanently establishes scientific integrity principles and practices across the federal government, prevents excessive and undue influence of corporate special interests, and undoes the damage caused by recent Supreme Court decisions that undermine the ability of federal agencies to implement equitable science-based policies.

To learn more, you can read this series of blog posts from our team laying out the challenges ahead and the strategies we’re putting in place to confront them.

• A Second Trump Administration Threatens an Assault on Climate, Energy, and Justice Priorities by Chitra Kumar, managing director of the Climate and Energy program.

• A Path Forward for Science and Democracy by Jennifer Jones, program director of the Center for Science & Democracy.
• It’s an Unpleasant Déjà Vu for Clean Transportation Advocates by Don Anair, deputy director and research director of the Clean Transportation program.
• What a Second Trump Administration Means for Food and Farms by Karen Perry Stillerman, deputy director of the Food and Environment program.
• Can Advocates Reduce Nuclear Dangers and Advance Nuclear Justice Under a Trump Administration? by Tara Drozdenko, director of the Global Security program.
• States Must Step Up by Juliet Christian-Smith, Western States regional director.

In the remaining months of the Biden administration, we’ll keep fighting for progress—and after the inauguration we’ll prioritize defending the investments and policies we’ve worked so hard to implement.

We’ll defend USDA’s efforts to fund conservation and fulfill their commitment to end discrimination in the agriculture sector. We’ll fight to protect investments in clean transportation infrastructure, support state efforts to fill in the gaps that will emerge at the federal level, and keep the spotlight on industry actors trying to prevent the transformation of our transportation system. And we’ll pass the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act at home and work across civil society and national borders to block the resumption of nuclear testing and reduce the risk of nuclear war.

We know that it will be difficult. The Trump agenda is a threat to democracy, to equity and justice, to public health and the climate. We must work tirelessly to counter these threats—and side by side with a broad coalition of allies. We will look beyond this election cycle to build power in the long term. And with your support, we will.

Read what UCS experts expect from the second Trump administration on climate and energy, food and agriculture, global security, science and democracy, and transportation.

Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Louis Brandeis was the first to call states the laboratories of democracy. States have unique power in our federalist system to advance change. Indeed, UCS’ state-based strategies have focused on advancing some of the most innovative policies at the state scale, including cap and trade and zero-emission vehicle standards. Both have subsequently been adopted widely. 

For the past four years, states like California have benefited from federal leadership that has made historic investments in climate action, clean energy, water, and clean transportation. We knew we could rely on the federal government to grant California regulators the ability to pass forward-looking policies necessary to make our air breathable. 

Contrast that with what we experienced in President Trump’s first term: more than 200 documented attacks on science by the administration, total disregard for the need for climate action, the sidelining of science during the pandemic that resulted in people being hurt, prioritizing the interests of polluters, and doors previously open to ambitious state regulations slammed shut. 

It’s about to get tough again for state leaders focused on the forward-looking climate, energy, water, transportation, food, and security policies that President-elect Trump and Project 2025 are seeking to dismantle and defund. But there is still progress to be made. As my UCS colleague in California, Don Anair, notes: even during the first Trump administration, there were successes in California for climate, clean energy, and clean transportation.

States must go all in on offense

Fortunately, California continues to have a governor and legislative leadership who understand the importance of driving down emissions, protecting frontline communities, and transitioning away from fossil fuels as quickly and equitably as possible.

While our colleagues and partners in Washington, DC, will be playing tough defense on the issues we care about—like fighting attacks on federal science and scientists, opposing anti-science federal nominees, defending regulations that protect health and safety for people across the US—states like California will have to go all in on offense. 

Here in California, advocacy organizations like UCS will need to look for new funding sources for the investments our climate and communities desperately need. We will need to find creative solutions to transition away from combustion vehicles without the certainty of our vehicle regulations. We will have to develop clean energy, ensure communities have access to safe and affordable drinking water, build out electric vehicle charging infrastructure, transition irrigated land to more sustainable uses, and much more—all with an oppositional force in the White House. 

Across the Western states, UCS has worked hard for years to have a robust presence and partnerships with many allied stakeholders who will help us pass policies. I am confident we can show the country and the world that a way forward on the issues we care the most about is still imminently possible.   

Now, more than ever, states must step up.

California can continue to lead

UCS will continue to prioritize work in California. The state continues to be the fifth largest economy in the world and an international leader on climate change. During the Biden-Harris administration, UCS was able to drive important change in the Western States, and we will continue to do so. 

• At the California Air Resources Board (CARB), we will continue to push for the most health protective transportation regulations possible, proving to the nation that a zero-emission vehicle transition is possible. 
• At the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) we will continue to ensure that utilities are planning for 100% clean energy by 2045. 
• At the California Energy Commission (CEC), we will work to plan for an integrated clean energy and transportation future that includes bidirectional electric vehicles. 
• And at the State Water Board we will ensure that groundwater is protected and water rights are appropriately tracked and enforced.
• At the legislature, with the help of Governor Newsom, we will pass legislation to remove barriers to clean energy deployment, protect scientists from political interference, transition away from fossil fuels in the transportation and energy sectors, and give all Californians access to safe and affordable drinking water. 

While we expect the second Trump administration will do its best to put up roadblocks and barriers all along the way to California’s efforts, UCS will continue to advance science-based solutions at the state scale for a safer and healthier world.

Read what UCS experts expect from the second Trump administration on food and agriculture, global security, science and democracy, transportation, and engaging with states.

After a hard-fought close election fueled by an active campaign of disinformation, Donald Trump has won the presidency.

As advocates for solving the climate crisis, it is daunting to take stock of the new hurdles we see to progress, especially at a time when the deadly and costly impacts of climate change are so clear across the nation.

While the Union of Concerned Scientists and our supporters have deep concerns about what will come next, we know there are no sides in science. Facts do not bow to politics. The next hurricane doesn’t care if you are conservative or liberal or what political party you belong to. The science is clear: the climate crisis is real and worsening. People need real solutions and that’s what we’ll be fighting for.

Trust they will do what they said in the campaign 

We expect the new administration to attempt a long list of harmful actions to undermine climate progress, many of them outlined in the Project 2025 manifesto. UCS is primed to resist and fight back; not all of these actions are foregone conclusions—science, statutes, and public engagement will all serve to limit the worst. How much damage is done at the federal level to the progress we have made will also depend on the election outcomes in the House of Representatives and the role it will play. The Supreme Court—which has been increasingly hostile to federal agencies—could also be a deciding factor in key instances.

At the same time, enormous clean energy momentum is already underway in states and localities all across the country, supported by shifts in governing agendas to include climate action as a priority, strengthened climate- and health-harming pollution standards, and forward-looking investment policies at the local, state, and federal levels. That commitment to the future can remain as a bulwark against repeated attacks on climate progress from the executive branch—but much is still at risk of being lost, precisely when the world requires a redoubling of action, not a slip.

All-out attacks on climate action

The fact remains that when it comes to critical climate and public health protections, federal action is key, which is what makes the threats from a Trump administration so concerning. Based on the actions of the first Trump administration, how he campaigned, and what Project 2025 has laid out, these are some of the actions we are expecting and will respond to:

• Giveaways to the fossil fuel industry, paid for by people and the environment. Donald Trump’s campaign promises included supporting unfettered expansion of oil and gas production while reversing pivotal new clean energy provisions that facilitated the transition away from fossil fuels. This represents an outright pendulum swing from the Biden administration’s whole-of-government approach to tackling climate change. It indicates a shift in prioritization of interests, underscored by new findings that Trump’s PACs received more than $75 million from oil interests to continue receiving sweet deals from federal taxpayer subsidies while evading accountability.
• Attacks on science-informed standards and agendas. The new administration’s dramatic shift in agenda will be underpinned by actions that undermine trust in science and the capacity of administrative agencies to undertake good decision-making. We will be watching out for attempts to defund federal agencies and target career staff who have institutional knowledge and scientific expertise; rolling back or undermining agencies’ scientific integrity policies; manipulating the data and analyses used to justify public health and environmental protections; stopping essential scientific studies that advance our understanding of public health pollution harms as well as climate science, impacts, and solutions; and nominating egregious, unqualified cabinet appointees who care about power and profits, not the public interest or the mission of their agencies (such as Rex Tillerson and Scott Pruitt) 
• Regulatory rollbacks. Critical climate and public health standards that hold polluters to account—such as standards limiting climate and health-harming pollution from coal- and gas-fired power plants and fossil fuel extraction and transport—are at extreme risk of attempted weakening or outright abandonment. While the previous Trump administration ultimately saw many of its efforts fail in the courts due to neglect of statutory obligation and basic facts, even failed attempts still result in lengthy delays, which translate into significant, widespread, life-shortening, and climate-exacerbating impacts.
• Legislative rollbacks. Polluting industries have already pushed Congress to roll back provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act. However, this law is benefiting people and forward-looking companies all across the nation, meaning complete roll backs are unlikely—but we expect targeted efforts to continue, especially to undo those provisions posing the greatest threat to fossil fuel industry interests.
• Threats to environmental justice and equity. The Biden administration took several historic steps to advance environmental justice priorities but many of them are likely to be in danger under a Trump administration—including efforts under the Justice40 Initiative to help ensure targeted funding and resources for disadvantaged communities, EPA grant programs to help clean up pollution in overburdened communities, and a whole-of-government approach to embed environmental justice in the work of all agencies.  
• Undermining of climate diplomacy. Trump has promised to again exit the Paris Agreement —the international agreement to try to limit the worst impacts of climate change, thus undermining global climate progress. As a rich nation and a major carbon emitter, the United States has an outsize responsibility and is key to achieving the goals of the agreement. Stepping away from it would affect US credibility and could potentially impact its ability to secure cooperation on other geopolitical, trade, and security issues that are in the national interest.

Indeed, this is a tough moment for desperately needed climate and energy progress, but we will not give up—and we want you to fight with us.

We will fight back. Join us!

We will work to defend against rollbacks to public health safeguards and climate policies that are grounded in science and delivering tremendous benefits to people. We will highlight the importance of the work of agency scientific experts including on climate and clean energy issues, and we will call out the manipulation of science and analysis undertaken to justify polluter handouts. We will relentlessly oppose anti-science Cabinet nominees who prioritize the interests of polluters and special interests over the health and safety of people and communities, and we will support legal challenges to rollbacks of pollution standards.

UCS will continue helping to inform the science that helps underpin climate litigation, which continues to proliferate and evolve. Across the United States and its territories, dozens of communities, states, and tribes are suing the fossil fuel industry over climate deception and damages. Since the adoption of the Paris climate agreement in 2015, 86 climate lawsuits have been filed worldwide against major oil, gas, and coal corporations. Some of these cases seek compensation for climate damages, others aim to force these companies to reduce global warming emissions, still others seek to end false climate- and environment-related claims. These kinds of actions will likely gather force under a Trump administration.

UCS is mobilizing immediately with the 17,000 scientists in our network and with partners to launch an emergency campaign to fight attacks on federal science and scientists, and stop the Trump administration from politicizing science and firing the experts who help protect our communities, families, and the planet. But we will need everyone—not just scientists—to stand up for the critical role of science for climate, for health, for the well-being of all.

We will share more about these and other efforts in the weeks ahead.