As data center disputes rage across the country, with communities pushing back against mammoth facilities that require chunks of energy, water, and land to fuel the international artificial intelligence race, few places can compare to the debate happening in the northwestern corner of Utah.

Locals and scientists say the Stratos Project, backed by celebrity Canadian investor Kevin O’Leary of “Shark Tank” fame, stands out not just for the way in which it was approved, but also for its size. Initially planned to sprawl across 40,000 acres (the size of Washington D.C.) in Box Elder County, the project would consume up to 9 gigawatts of electricity, which is more than double what the state of Utah uses per year. Mr. O’Leary has boasted that it would be one of the biggest data centers in the world.

Opposition has grown over the past few weeks, after the approval process was fast-tracked by a special state commission called MIDA (Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority) and unanimously approved by the three-person county commission in early May. Many locals say they have had no opportunity for input. In response, Republican officials in the state have softened their previous full-blown support for the project. Gov. Spencer Cox issued an executive order last week requiring “careful consideration” of data centers’ environmental impacts. Utah Senate President Stuart Adams, who chairs MIDA, called for a 75% reduction in Stratos’ acreage footprint in a letter to Mr. O’Leary on Monday. 

Why We Wrote This

The Stratos Project near Utah's Great Salt Lake has scaled back its planned footprint. But scientists still see big risks for the local environment.

Despite initially calling Mr. Adams’ request for such a “haircut” of the project “outrageous,” Mr. O’Leary announced on Thursday that he would cut the footprint of the project in half, removing about 20,000 acres from his plans.  

But thus far this has done little to quell pushback. Scientists say a compromise over acreage does little to alleviate concerns over the ecological impacts that such a project would bring to the Great Salt Lake Basin, a nationally renowned site facing a megadrought.  

“It’s performative,” says Robert Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University, of the promised acreage reduction. He has concluded from his own calculations that the 9 gigawatt project would only require 5,000-7,000 acres. Even still, he says, the energy usage would be 20 times more than what is used by “hyperscale” data centers.

Dr. Davies has also found that such a project could raise the nighttime temperature in the area by up to 12 degrees, which he says would be “transformative.” Among other impacts, that sort of temperature rise would suppress nighttime condensation levels that the already water-stricken ecosystem relies on. “This would be one of the largest single site heat sources on the entire planet,” he adds, “[and] that includes volcanos.” 

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Although he has only committed to a reduction in square footage, and not energy consumption, Mr. O’Leary told the Salt Lake Tribune that the project will no longer be the largest in the world. “That’s off the table,” he said. In his letter to Mr. Adams, Mr. O’Leary cited “incorrect assumptions” for all the alarm around the project, and he has previously claimed that opposition groups were backed by the Chinese Communist Party. But at the same time, Mr. O’Leary has  acknowledged the real political pressures on the ground in Utah, where the Box Elder County project has become an issue even within Mr. Adams’ own GOP primary contest. 

“[Adams] did this for political reasons,” Mr. O’Leary told the Salt Lake Tribune. “He had to. What other choice did he have? He had to answer to all these people.” 

For the past 15 years, scientists have studied a climate doomsday.

Under this worst-case scenario, referred to in the scientific world as “RCP 8.5,” humans continue to burn fossil fuels with abandon through the 21st century and the world heats up by almost 5 degrees Celsius – or 9 degrees Fahrenheit – above preindustrial levels. On a dystopian RCP 8.5 Earth, Florida’s coastline disappears under water, sub-Saharan Africa witnesses more than 85 million climate migrants by 2050, and half of the world’s plant and animal species go extinct. 

It’s a grim forcast. It is also, scientists recently announced, now an “implausible” one.

Why We Wrote This

International scientists decided it is no longer useful to study the most extreme model of runaway global warming. So why are some people upset?

In April, leading scientists for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced that this particular scenario – one of four Representative Concentration Pathways that measure the amount of solar energy trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere under different levels of greenhouse gas emissions – is no longer a reasonable prediction, thanks to the growth of renewable energy and climate policies. 

Some have cheered the news, even as scientists in the same report said that the lower-end emission scenario of RCP 2.6, which aligns with a goal of limiting future warming below 2 degrees Celsius, may now be unrealistic as well. 

Others in the scientific community have rolled their eyes at this announcement of RCP 8.5’s retirement, arguing that RCP 8.5 has been improbable for several years now. Some even assert that this scenario was never indicative of any possible future, but was disingenuously propped up by climate activists who benefited from the grim attention it brought. 

But almost everyone agrees on a fundamental issue: It’s challenging to communicate the complexity and nuance of science to politicians, activists, and the media – especially a science so complicated, and politically charged, as climate change research. 

“After [RCP 8.5] was created, through a game of telephone, people started calling it the ‘business as usual’ scenario,” says Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist who co-authored a 2020 paper arguing that RCP 8.5 was being incorrectly interpreted as our default future without stringent climate mitigation. “It’s useful to have worst-case scenarios. The problem for a while is that people were conflating the worst case with the most likely outcome.”

“Two things can be true”

Back when this model was published in 2011, the line chart of greenhouse gas emissions seemed to be rocketing to the sky with a 30% increase over the previous decade. 

But even then, RCP 8.5 set out to show a high-end scenario that relied on an unprecedented fivefold increase in coal use by 2100. Today, “we live in a different world” that uses far less coal, says Dr. Hausfather. So what started as an unlikely worst-case scenario then has become outside of any likely realm of possibility now as renewable energy usage accelerates. 

RCP Database, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, U.S.; National Institute for Environmental Studies, Japan; International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Austria; Global Carbon Budget

“Two things can be true,” he adds. “The [RCP 8.5] scenario was never intended to be the most likely outcome, and we also have made progress in making high-end scenarios less likely because of falling costs of clean energy, increasing global investments in clean energy, and moving away from fossil fuels.”

Some climate scientists say that the thousands of scientific studies that assessed a RCP 8.5 scenario were not only a waste of time and resources, but also distracted researchers from digging into more moderate scenarios that would be more relevant today. 

RCP 8.5 was merely a way to test the model to see what happened when it was pushed really hard, agrees Steven Koonin, who served as Under Secretary for Science, Department of Energy in the Obama administration between 2009 and 2011. Quico Toro with the Anthropocene Institute compared the role of RCP 8.5 to an engineer simulating what would happen if 250 army tanks drove onto a bridge at the same time. That’s not going to happen, but it’s a useful exercise for the engineer to learn about structural weaknesses. 

Dr. Koonin says some activists, journalists, and even scientists ran with this scenario to scare the public into reducing emissions, and some “destroyed the reputations of scientists who dared to say, ‘Wait a minute.’”

Not everyone agrees with that point of view, though.

Chris Field, a climate scientist at Stanford University who co-chaired an IPCC working group between 2008 and 2015, refutes any claims that the scientific community deliberately tried to “mislead people” or encourage climate action “by talking about RCP 8.5.” He credits simulations from this high-emission scenario as inspiring the world to help avoid such an outcome. 

“We wanted to understand a wide range,” says Dr. Field. “It’s important to recognize that no one in the climate community, certainly not the climate modelers or economists, know what the future trajectory of emissions will be.”

Lessons from 8.5 

Climate science is complicated. Not only are Earth’s energy systems complex and intertwined, but they are affected by human behavior. And that, climate scientists say, is incredibly hard to calculate or predict – even if models did not have to consider unknown future societal motivations or policy priorities.

But under current emission trends, the planet looks to be following RCP 4.5, one of the two middle scenarios, expected to bring an average global temperature increase of up to 3 degrees Celsius.

That is “still a very bad outcome,” says Dr. Hausfather.

Every additional bit of warming increases the risk of negative outcomes, he and other climate scientists point out. At just a 2 degrees Celsius increase, studies suggest that there is a greater likelihood of ecological damage such as ocean coral reef collapse. Some studies also suggest that as many as 1 in 4 plant and animal species in the Amazon rainforest and Galápagos Islands could face local extinction. Extreme heat could also impact millions more people and challenge food systems across the world.

And even the RCP 4.5 future assumes that the world continues on the same trajectory of burning less coal and flattening (and later reducing) fossil fuel consumption. The retirement of RCP 8.5’s much more extreme scenario is no reason to backtrack on clean-energy progress, say many climate scientists, even as coal proponents such as President Donald Trump celebrate the news as evidence that climate concerns are overblown. 

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“You have to provide positive pathways”

The real lesson from RCP 8.5 for the next climate model may lie in how it’s communicated to the public while balancing urgency with accuracy. Those activists who conflated the worst-case scenario with the most likely one may have had the opposite of the intended effect, say some scientists.

“[RCP 8.5] was such a scary scenario, requiring so much change of unknown character, that people kind of just threw up their arms and said ‘I’ll leave it to the next generation,’” says Hadi Dowlatabadi, who co-authored a 2017 paper questioning if the world even had the coal reserves needed to power an RCP 8.5 planet. “You have to provide positive pathways for the public rather than scare the bejesus out of them.” 

This week, the Trump administration announced it had struck an unusual deal. The U.S. government will pay TotalEnergies, a French power generation company, $928 million to scuttle its plans to build two wind farms off the coasts of New Jersey and North Carolina. Together, the projects could have powered some 1.7 million homes.

The deal represents a new wrinkle in President Donald Trump’s campaign to jettison America’s nascent offshore wind industry, which many environmentalists see as key to reducing the country’s carbon footprint. Mr. Trump has criticized wind power as ineffective and costly, and his administration has tried to curtail wind infrastructure development. 

“Offshore wind is one of the most expensive, unreliable, environmentally disruptive, and subsidy-dependent schemes ever forced on American ratepayers and taxpayers,” said Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, in a news release announcing the deal on Monday.

Why We Wrote This

The Trump administration’s deal to pay TotalEnergies to shift from wind farms to U.S. fossil fuel investment appears to be a novel use of taxpayer funds. It also fits within a broader White House effort to restrict the offshore wind industry.

Environmentalists see the administration dismantling offshore wind as shortsighted and damaging to Americans’ pocketbooks. While offshore wind remains more expensive to install and run than other energy sources, costs have fallen significantly in recent years, driven by growing interest from nations and corporations, as well as improving technology. Offshore wind costs have decreased more than 50% globally since 2013, according to a 2024 report from the U.S. Department of Energy. They are expected to keep declining as the industry becomes more established. 

“It’s also just a real hallmark of the administration’s hostility to clean energy at a time when clean energy projects are some of the biggest and cheapest and fastest coming online,” says Ted Kelly, director and lead counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund’s clean energy program. “Instead of encouraging that, we’re now not only discouraging it, but taxpayer money [is] being paid to stop it.” 

The deal with TotalEnergies raises questions not only about the future of offshore wind in the United States but also about the extent of the president’s authority to influence private business transactions. Here’s a look at some of the issues at play: 

How will the deal work?

The Trump administration will essentially refund the $928 million TotalEnergies paid for leases to build Attentive Energy, about 40 miles off New Jersey, and Carolina Long Bay, roughly 22 miles off North Carolina. Federal law mandates these leases, which are typically acquired through a bidding process, for anyone seeking to generate “electricity or other energy product derived from a renewable resource” in the waters off the country’s coasts.

In exchange, the French firm has agreed to redirect that money into oil and gas projects in the United States. Those investments include Rio Grande LNG – a liquefied natural gas plant in South Texas – and unspecified oil projects in the Gulf of Mexico. In the Interior Department news release, TotalEnergies’ CEO Patrick Pouyanné was quoted as saying the development of offshore wind “was not in the country’s interest” and that fossil fuel projects are a “more efficient use of capital in the United States.” The company also pledged not to build any offshore wind projects in the U.S., citing unspecified national security concerns.

Further details about the deal, which was first reported by The New York Times, have not been made public. Environmental advocates interviewed by the Monitor say it is highly unusual for a president to transfer taxpayer funds to a foreign company to prevent private investment. Most of the revenue from offshore leases goes to the Treasury Department’s general fund, which finances daily government operations, and the money TotalEnergies paid for the leases might have already been spent.

TotalEnergies, one of the largest liquefied natural gas companies in the world, already has investments in the Rio Grande plant dating back to at least 2023. The company also appears to hold dozens of leases for oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico. 

It’s unclear how much money the company might now funnel into the Texas plant. It’s also unclear from what source the Trump administration would draw the funds. Some reports have suggested the money will likely come from the Justice Department’s Judgment Fund, which the government uses to pay court judgments and settlements. Neither TotalEnergies nor the Interior Department responded to requests for comment for this story. 

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, an arm of the Interior Department, awarded TotalEnergies leases for both Carolina Long Bay and Attentive Energy in 2022. According to the leases, which are publicly available, TotalEnergies paid $133 million for the land encompassing Carolina Long Bay and $795 million for the territory slated to become Attentive Energy. 

The company was also liable for at least $417,807 in yearly rental payments under the two leases. That breaks down to $164,811 for Carolina Long Bay and $252,996 for Attentive Energy. The leases require annual payments until the sites begin generating electricity for sale. 

Because neither wind farm ever generated power, TotalEnergies would have been obligated to pay the government more than $1.6 million in rent between 2022 and 2025. It’s unclear whether that money was paid, and, if it was, whether the Trump administration will refund it as part of the deal. 

What other actions has the Trump administration taken on offshore wind?

In December, the Interior Department issued a work stoppage halting construction on five wind farms off the East Coast. The administration cited a classified report from the Defense Department claiming offshore wind posed a national security threat. The administration also pointed to a finding in a public Energy Department report that said turbine blades and towers can create radar interference. Radar systems raise their threshold for detection to combat this, the report says, and might “miss actual targets” as a result. 

Each of the farms sued over the work stoppage. Judges, after viewing the classified report, ruled against the government in all five of those cases. The classified report has not been made public, and litigation in the cases is ongoing. 

On his first day in office, President Trump issued an executive order temporarily suspending offshore wind leasing pending an assessment by the Interior Department. He cited “the need to foster an energy economy” that meets rising demand, as well as unspecified impacts on marine life, ocean currents and wind patterns, and energy costs. A federal judge in Massachusetts ruled the order unlawful in December. The Trump administration filed a notice of appeal in February.

Mr. Trump, for his part, has publicly disparaged offshore wind since at least 2012, when the Scottish government sought to build wind turbines offshore from one of his golf courses. In testimony before the Scottish Parliament, he said wind turbines were “ugly” and “noisy” and would cause “almost total destruction” of the country’s tourism industry. Scotland proceeded with construction after defeating Mr. Trump in court.

What do environmentalists say about the deal?

Climate advocates and researchers argue that offshore wind is an effective and efficient method of generating clean energy. They’ve criticized the deal with TotalEnergies as an abdication of the country’s responsibility to lower greenhouse gas emissions.

“This is as much an attack on planet Earth relative to its ecological health as it is an attack on this particular technology,” says Stephen A. Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.

Over its lifetime, the Energy Department says, a coal-fired power plant produces 90 times more greenhouse gas emissions than a wind farm. 

Research suggests that offshore wind is more reliable than onshore wind, because the turbines tend to be larger, and the wind is stronger, faster, and more consistent over open ocean. South Fork Wind off the coast of New York – one of the country’s few completed offshore wind projects – produced electricity more than 92% of the time during its first year of operation, according to the farm. 

Offshore wind has gained traction particularly in New England, which boasts some of the highest energy costs in the nation. Regional advocates see the technology as an answer to those prices because the farms can be deployed close to major coastal population centers, which reduces transportation costs. Offshore wind also tends to produce the most energy during winter, when energy needs spike for heating. 

As the war in Iran has sent oil prices soaring, Brad Campbell, president of the Conservation Law Foundation in Boston, says renewable energies like offshore wind could help insulate consumers.

“Offshore wind is a homegrown energy supply. We’re not dependent or vulnerable to price spikes from disruption of international markets,” Mr. Campbell says. “It provides stability, particularly to the electric grid, when there are disruptions to oil and gas supply.” 

What kind of impact will the deal have on offshore wind development in the U.S.?

With the Trump administration’s offshore wind losses in court, the president might be seeking new ways to move against the industry, says Mr. Kelly, from the Environmental Defense Fund.

“They might turn their attention to trying to prevent any more projects from getting started,” he says. 

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Mr. Campbell, who is also a lawyer, questions whether the president has the authority to conduct this kind of deal. In general, Mr. Campbell says, the president cannot spend money that has not been appropriated by Congress.

“It’s not merely unorthodox, but it’s unlawful,” he says. “There is no known authority for the president to spend a billion dollars of taxpayer dollars to stop a private investment.” 

George H.W. Bush, trying to discredit then-Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential race, christened Boston Harbor as the “dirtiest harbor in America.”

The unsavory title stuck. By the time Mr. Bush delivered his rebuke from a boat in the harbor, Americans nationwide already knew the waterway for its filth. It had, in 1966, inspired the hit song “Dirty Water” by The Standells. In 1989, Boston was pumping some 480 million gallons of raw sewage into the harbor daily. Mr. Bush, then the vice president, gave the harbor another nickname during the campaign: “The Harbor of Shame.”

“It was embarrassing,” says Jim Costin, a longtime resident of Winthrop, which sits on the harbor. He also owns Belle Isle Seafood, a local eatery.

Why We Wrote This

Boston is joining the list of cities that are achieving results after sustained harbor cleanup efforts. Some towns will soon see the return of recreational shellfishing, a New England tradition.

As of January, Mr. Costin and others can take pride in the harbor.

The Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries has declared parts of Boston Harbor clean enough for recreational shellfishing for the first time in a century. Since many shellfish are filter feeders that pump water through their gills, waterborne contaminants tend to build up in their bodies, making them bellwethers for overall water health. If the shellfish are free of pollutants, it’s a sign the water is cleaner.

Shellfishing will soon be allowed in some areas off the coasts of Winthrop, just northeast of the city, and in Hingham and Hull, two towns on the southern end of the harbor. Residents will have to wait for the towns to create regulations, and shellfishing might still be prohibited during times of low water quality, such as after heavy rains. Still, a region with a legendary reputation for fresh, high-quality seafood has reason to celebrate. (Try an authentic clam chowder recipe.) 

“It speaks a lot to all of the hard work that was done to clean up the harbor, to make quality of life [better] for not only the people that live here, but also the marine life,” says Joanne Coletta-Levine, a spokesperson for Schooner’s, a seafood restaurant in Hull.

Cities and states across the country have worked to clean up waterways since 1972, when the Clean Water Act made it illegal to discharge pollution into water without a federal permit. Between 1972 and 2001, the share of U.S. waterways clean enough for fishing increased by more than 10 percentage points, according to a 2018 study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics that analyzed some 50 million water samples.

The act also provided cities with billions of dollars to build or improve water treatment facilities. Cities such as Portland, Oregon; New York; and Baltimore have also seen success cleaning up their harbors.

Yet the level of triumph has varied, says Brad Campbell, president of the Conservation Law Foundation in Boston. Though Massachusetts invested billions into cleaning up the harbor, other municipalities have struggled to take care of toxic waste from industrial facilities. Many cities – Boston included – still face challenges from sewage pollution that flows into waterways during storms. Nevertheless, Mr. Campbell says Boston stands out.

“With the cleanup, it’s become an enormously attractive place for people to live, work, and play,” he says.

Decades of work on the harbor

Massachusetts all but banned shellfishing in Boston Harbor in 1925, amid growing nationwide concerns about the safety of oysters. The state limited shellfishing there to specially licensed commercial harvesters. The shellfish had to be purified at a plant in Newburyport, about 40 miles north of Boston, before they could be safely eaten.

For clean-harbor advocates, it’s taken decades to get from that point to cleaner waters. Three lawsuits in the early 1980s attempted to force the Metropolitan District Commission, a state agency that managed water supply and sewage in Boston, to clean up the harbor. At the time, two MDC water treatment plants were dumping some 350 million gallons of minimally treated wastewater into the harbor each day, according to a 2018 study by University of Massachusetts Boston and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

In 1985, U.S. District Judge A. David Mazzone ordered that the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, which replaced the MDC in 1984, build a new water treatment facility. Since then, the MWRA has spent about $6.6 billion cleansing the harbor, says Stephen Estes-Smargiassi, the agency’s director of planning and sustainability. He has been working on the cleanup for nearly 40 years.

The resource authority’s spending includes opening a new treatment plant on Deer Island near Winthrop, cleaning up urban beaches, and building a pipe system to funnel treated wastewater to the ocean where it can be diluted. While other municipalities funded new or upgraded treatment plants with federal grants, the Deer Island plant largely used money from consumers’ water and sewer bills.

The plant on Deer Island now treats about 365 million gallons of wastewater daily. In contrast to prior treatment plants, all of its discharges are treated to legal standards.

Challenges remain, says Chris Mancini, executive director at Save the Harbor/Save the Bay, which has advocated harbor cleanup since the 1980s. Like many older cities, Boston uses a combined sewage overflow system, meaning that wastewater and stormwater collect into one pipe. Normally, this water safely flows to a treatment plant. But heavy rains can overwhelm the system and cause untreated water to flow into nearby waterways.

Still, the cleanup has reduced such overflows and led to quality of life improvements – such as making the harbor swimmable. It has also spurred economic growth, says Emilly Schutt, a staff scientist at Save the Harbor/Save the Bay.

“This is a working waterfront,” she says. “People are making their livelihood being on the water, and so having a clean system for them to do that is providing jobs.”

A return to local seafood

And, now, the cleanup has revived the age-old New England tradition of digging up your own seafood.

“It’s good news for the residents of the town, and also for residents of the commonwealth,” says Kurt Bornheim, Hull’s harbormaster. “This is going to open up a lot of opportunities.”

Harbormasters such as Mr. Bornheim enforce marine laws, manage boat passage, and maintain water infrastructure like docks. They’re primarily responsible for designing a web of rules to regulate shellfishing in their communities. For Hull, that includes developing a permitting process and hiring an additional employee to help patrol the beach.

Mr. Bornheim, who has served as Hull’s harbormaster for nearly three decades, is taking the new challenge in stride. He has enrolled in classes at Cape Cod Community College to renew his certification as a shellfish constable, municipal officers charged with enforcing shellfish regulations. Mr. Bornheim says the primary catch for Hull’s recreational shellfishers will be softshell and surf clams – though he hopes residents will soon be able to cultivate oysters, too.

Hull residents might soon be able to enjoy those same clams in local restaurants. Ms. Coletta-Levine, the spokesperson for Schooner’s, says the restaurant is looking forward to serving more local catch.

“We’d love to support our local economy and the people that live here,” she says. “What’s not to get excited about local, fresh seafood?”

Mr. Costin, the owner of Belle Isle Seafood in Winthrop, doesn’t anticipate the announcement changing how he runs his business. He already sources many clams locally – though, for now, they are treated at a purification plant. Yet, as a Winthrop native, he is excited to see the harbor cleaner than it was when he began working at Belle Isle as a teenager.

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Back then, the waters of the harbor were brown, polluted by sewage, and fishless, he says. Mr. Costin envied those living on Cape Cod, who had long waded into the waters of the Atlantic to dig up their own dinner.

Now, he says, his Winthrop neighbors can do the same.

President Donald Trump and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin on Thursday ushered in a new era of climate regulation, effectively rescinding a 16-year-old foundation for federal policies to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide.

The White House says the move will unshackle a needlessly regulated energy sector, though many climate scientists see the step as undercutting action on an urgent priority for the United States and the world.

Since 2009, what’s known as an “endangerment finding” by the EPA has classified greenhouse gases (GHGs) as a threat to public health. In turn, that designation has served as a legal basis for emissions regulations. In undoing it, Trump administration officials argue the endangerment finding stood on shaky legal ground.

Why We Wrote This

President Donald Trump and his team held a “Clean, Beautiful Coal” event this week and are rescinding a rule that enables the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases. But the moves come as renewable energy sources including solar are increasingly in demand.

Opponents of Thursday’s action will appeal, and courts will ultimately play a key role in deciding. Both sides agree the stakes are high.

“It has the broadest impact on EPA’s legal authority, this agency that literally has one job, to protect human health and the environment,” says Meredith Hankins, the federal climate legal director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an international environmental advocacy group. “They are just walking away from that responsibility.”

Mr. Zeldin, in announcing the reversal, said “The Trump EPA is strictly following the letter of the law, returning common sense to policy, delivering consumer choice to Americans and advancing the American dream.” 

Unless blocked in court, the move represents the most aggressive rejection of climate change policies by the Trump administration thus far. It also comes as renewable energy sources are increasingly competitive in price – and popular even among Trump voters – compared with coal and other fossil-fuel energy sources.

Recent polls show strong Republican support (61% in a Pew Research Center survey) for solar energy farms, alongside other energy sources, amid concerns about high electricity costs. The economy has been continuing to move away from fossil fuels, with GHG’s declining by about 1% a year since 2007, according to the Rhodium Group. The Trump policy changes, while not erasing that trend, may slow it considerably.

The administration sees the rollback as a boost to the economy, saying the endangerment finding is “unnecessarily expensive.” Cars are one key sector that will be affected, because the finding served as the legal foundation for regulating vehicle greenhouse emissions under the Clean Air Act.

The decision, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a news briefing this week, will save the American people $1.3 trillion in “crushing regulations.” She also said the savings would include reduced costs for new vehicles of around $2,400 for “popular light duty cars, SUVs, and trucks.”

The endangerment finding is also the foundation for regulating coal and gas power plants and the methane levels produced by both the oil and gas industries.

Thursday’s rollback comes a day after President Trump, Mr. Zeldin, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum met at the White House, where Mr. Trump hosted a “Clean Beautiful Coal” event, casting the coal industry as pivotal to U.S. energy production going forward.

Mr. Trump signed an executive order directing the Defense Department to prioritize long-term, on-demand power purchases with coal-based power plants for future military installations.

Efforts that unraveled the endangerment finding

Last July, the Heritage Foundation released a policymaker memo titled “Reversing the EPA’s Endangerment Findings on Greenhouse Gases.” Authors Kevin Dayaratna and Diana Furchtgott-Roth argued that it is inconclusive whether GHGs harm human health.

“The critical question is whether [carbon dioxide], a component of the ambient air, which is crucial for life on Earth, can be considered ‘air pollution,’” the report’s analysis reads. “The answer is ‘No.’ The Clean Air Act was not designed for the regulation of such essential components of the air that humans and animals breathe.”

The backing for the Trump administration’s argument supporting the reversal of the endangerment finding comes from an Energy Department report, “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate,” which has been used to justify diminishing the credibility of the rules precedent.

The overwhelming scientific consensus is that climate change is occurring, is the result of human activity, and poses severe risks for ecosystems and the human economy. The Trump administration’s report reflects the conclusions drawn last summer by a working group of scientists outside that consensus, formed by Energy Secretary Wright. Group members John Christy, Judith Curry, Steven Koonin, Ross McKitrick, and Roy Spencer held closed-door meetings to produce their sweeping report.

The EPA’s rationale for striking down the endangerment finding is based on the report’s suggestion that GHG regulations have minimal climate impact.

“The report was harshly criticized by many scientists, including the National Academy of Sciences, which put together a very detailed report that basically showed the Department of Energy report was completely wrong,” says Michael Gerrard, an environmental law professor at Columbia University.

On Jan. 30, U.S. District Judge William G. Young of Massachusetts ruled that the panel’s meeting was illegally convened, violating the 1972 Federal Advisory Committee Act’s transparency requirements. The panel violated the act, the judge ruled, by not opening its meetings to the public.

Judge Young, first appointed in 1985 by President Ronald Reagan, declared: “These violations are now established as a matter of law.”

What’s next for climate regulation?

The rescission of the endangered finding is expected to wipe clean most U.S. policies geared toward reducing emissions, starting with emissions standards for trucks and cars.

States, environmental groups, and industry stakeholders are expected to appeal in court against the administration’s move. The pathway for challenging the repeal starts with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and could make its way to the Supreme Court – a process that could take years.

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The EPA’s endangerment finding had its legal roots in a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Massachusetts v. EPA. The court has become more conservative in the intervening years, setting up a potential swing against the tenor of its prior ruling, Professor Gerrard says.

If the issue reaches the Supreme Court, oral arguments might be influenced by the 2022 decision in West Virginia v. EPA, which established that, under what legal scholars call the “major questions doctrine,” the EPA’s authority to control emissions is limited. The ruling holds Congress, not agencies, responsible for making major policy decisions. Professor Gerrard says that if the case is won on those grounds, it could hinder a future president from reversing the current administration’s action – unless Congress provides that authority.

In the early morning hours of Jan. 8 last year, Marisol Espino lost the home she shared in Altadena with her father, child, sister, and sister’s children to the Los Angeles wildfires. Since then, she moved at least 10 times before finding an apartment where she could stay for a little while. Now she spends hours each day getting her son to and from school. Her old neighbors, she says, remain close, even if they are scattered.

But “we kind of still feel stuck,” she says. “A lot of us can’t even believe it’s been a year because a lot of us feel like we haven’t made progress.”

Her sentiment is shared in Pacific Palisades, another Los Angeles community that was devastated. “There’s a little frustration that [recovery is] not faster, but there’s also recognition from previous nearby experiences that this takes five years or more,” says Patrick Healy, a retired LA newscaster turned Palisades historian.

Why We Wrote This

Wildfires devastated LA-area communities about a year ago. There are some signs of recovery, but many residents remain uncertain about whether, or when, they will be able to rebuild their homes.

With property and other financial losses estimated between $95 billion and $164 billion, the Eaton and Palisades wildfires are the most costly disaster in the LA area’s history. Beginning Jan. 7 and burning for more than three weeks, the fires killed 31 people, destroyed 13,000 homes mainly in Altadena and the Pacific Palisades, and left thousands more uninhabitable. An October report showed about 80% of Altadena residents and 90% of Pacific Palisades residents were not living in their homes.

Gallagher Re, map data from OpenStreetMap

The fires came amid an insurance crisis, with carriers pulling out of high-risk areas over the last few years and forcing many homeowners onto a state-run plan that was more expensive for less comprehensive coverage. The statewide gap in private insurance coverage for single-family homes is estimated at up to $1.3 trillion. In many cases, residents’ decisions to rebuild may be determined by whether they had insurance, and if their coverage pays enough for them to stay in one of the nation’s most expensive real estate markets.

Both Altadena and Pacific Palisades have deep roots and homeowners who have lived there for decades – many of whom could not afford to buy into their neighborhoods at today’s rates. Survivors also understand that some of their neighbors may not be interested in a years-long rebuild, and that selling an empty lot could bring a substantial windfall.

Still, some optimism is spreading in each community as businesses begin to reopen and some building gets underway.

“Every day I go and I see a new house going up,” says Veronica Jones, president of the Altadena Historical Society. “In that state of recovery, there’s a feeling of hope … It’ll be not the same, of course, but we will be Altadena.”

Historic change

Residents in Pacific Palisades and Altadena are frustrated by a lack of clarity regarding who qualifies for financial assistance, what resources are available to homeowners and renters, and by the malaise of loss and displacement.

“This is by far the single most significant event in the century since the [Pacific Palisades] was founded,” says Mr. Healy, secretary of the neighborhood’s historical society.

The fire destroyed every essential community element: homes, schools, most businesses and churches “just disappeared,” he says.

Gallagher Re, map data from OpenStreetMap

In both areas, residents have expressed concern that building back might erase the neighborhoods’ distinct characters. If too many properties go to developers, they argue, the focus will be on profit, not spirit.

“I’m all about things getting better and looking better and being better for the community,” says Ms. Espino. “I don’t want it to be better and not affordable for us who were there before, and we just permanently get displaced and essentially shoved out of our community that was ours.”

Ocean Development and Black Lion Properties – two developers active in the recovery – did not respond to requests for interviews.

“A lot of human stuff”

A survey by the Department of Angels – created by the California Community Foundation and Snap founder Evan Spiegel to help residents affected by the fires – shows just over one-third of survivors said they would rebuild no matter what. Two-thirds of people whose homes were a total loss said out-of-pocket costs are an obstacle, and about one in five plan to sell their lot and move on.

A handful are back in rebuilt homes. Many are still trying to figure out how to bridge the gap between temporary housing and the years it may take to piece together funding, find a contractor, and complete construction. At the same time, they are managing jobs, families, school, and the trauma of disaster.

“It’s not just a real estate project,” says Bea Hsu, president and CEO of the nonprofit Builders Alliance. “There’s a lot of human stuff going on here that is very real.”

Builders Alliance is connecting fire-impacted homeowners with homebuilders. An online portal allows owners to search an address and find turnkey designs in a range of prices that fit the parcel.

“Their eyes really open. I think there were a number of people who, through the course of the year, had come to believe that they could not afford to rebuild. And maybe this is helping people think about it again,” she adds.

Shumin Zhen isn’t there yet – she wants to rebuild the condo she lost in Altadena, even though she has no idea what it will cost or how she’ll get the money to do it. She and her husband found temporary housing nearby in a Pasadena apartment complex for seniors.

Ms. Zhen’s story underscores the difficulties of recovery. She has tried to use publicized resources, like mortgage assistance, but was turned down. Her insurance policy for additional living expenses expires in January, so she’ll have to pay rent on top of her mortgage.

State of California, California Department of Insurance, California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection

The median loss for survivors – those who lost their homes and those whose homes were damaged – is $200,000. Net losses for more than half of them exceed their annual income.

Many lawsuits have been filed over both fires. In the Palisades and Malibu, homeowners are suing state and city agencies, claiming a mismanaged response made damages worse. Ms. Zhen is among those who are suing Southern California Edison, forgoing settlements offered by the utility company, which acknowledges its equipment may have started the Eaton fire. The offer, says Ms. Zhen, would be a “huge loss” for her.

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Meanwhile, she says, she is changed by the fires.

“Life is not about stuff,” she says. “Life is about happiness and health.”

The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to reduce the number of lakes, streams, wetlands, tributaries, and other waterways covered by the Clean Water Act, which regulates the amount and type of pollutants allowed in bodies of water. By some estimates, as much as 55 million acres of wetlands will no longer be subject to the law.

Advocates for greater protections say broader regulations are necessary to protect public health – especially safe drinking water – and the environment. But people working in agriculture, construction, and other businesses say the regulations are burdensome and represent government overreach.

The EPA’s proposal to scale back the rule known as “Waters of the United States” is the latest of several changes reflecting the priorities of different administrations. President Joe Biden expanded the rule to include any body of water that has a significant impact on traditional navigable waterways. But a court challenge led to a 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Sackett v. EPA, which struck down that change. Sackett also determined that only permanent waterways qualified for federal jurisdiction and limited the types of wetlands that qualify.

Why We Wrote This

The EPA plans to reduce the scope of an old federal law that regulates waterway pollutants. The agency’s proposal reveals how far-reaching the rules are and how they affect multiple stakeholders.

The EPA says its proposed change aligns the rule with the Sackett decision. It defines waterways subject to the rule as “relatively permanent,” and requires a “continuous surface connection” to traditional waterways. The new definition affects wetlands in particular. It’s now in a public comment period before being finalized.

There’s a wide range of interests in the rule. Associations including those representing homebuilders, the petroleum industry, and forest owners, plus the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, filed amicus briefs in the Sackett case arguing for reduced federal authority; support for broader protections came from environmental and conservation groups, a coalition of Indian tribes, and others.

The Monitor spoke with three people from industries impacted by the EPA proposal. The interviews are edited for clarity and length.

Stacy Woods, a research director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, who studies waterways:

[The proposal says] wetlands will have to be connected to a water body, like a river, that already falls under the Clean Water Act on the surface. And this definition completely ignores how water moves in ways we can’t always see from the surface, like through soil or underground connections.

The proposed changes don’t just focus on what waters we can see from the surface; they also limit clean water protections to what they’re calling relatively permanent waters. So, [permanent waters] are those that flow year-round, or at least during the wet season. But we know that water bodies like ephemeral or intermittent streams can create connections between other water bodies, and those temporary water features, along with that groundwater, really facilitate a water-to-water pathway that ultimately leads to our drinking water. While these proposed changes might sound like they are only targeting certain wetlands, temporary streams, and some ditches, the reality is that it puts all of our water at risk, including our drinking water.

The Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that wetlands in the U.S. provide $7 trillion in benefits each year. So, that’s to fishing, recreation, water quality, and flood control. [Our research estimates] that the 30 million acres of wetlands in the Upper Midwest alone provide nearly $23 billion in residential flood mitigation benefits each year.

Healthy wetlands can capture and store carbon where it would otherwise contribute to a warming planet. The current estimates are that wetlands track and store more than 30% of soil storage carbon on Earth. But when wetlands are damaged or destroyed, such as what we expect to happen when these protections are lessened, they can release that stored carbon as methane, carbon dioxide, or other heat-trapping gases that can accelerate climate change.

Roger Isom, president and chief executive of the California Cotton Ginners and Growers Association and the Western Tree Nut Association:

We do a lot of what we call tidal drainage. So, we’ll irrigate one field. There’s tile drainage underneath; it collects [the groundwater], and we move it to another field. And all of that at one point or another was in [the rule], and then another time it isn’t. And, so, probably the biggest thing is certainty. Just knowing, are we in the rule? Are we not in the rule?

We know the San Juan River, Sacramento River, the tributaries; obviously, those are in. They’re navigable waters. That’s been the base interpretation. But then we start talking about canals and drainage ditches. We’re like, well, wait a minute. When we think about navigable, those aren’t navigable.

We had hoped that the [Sackett] decision was going to give us that certainty. [The EPA proposal] is the rule coming out of that. So, we hope [this proposal will offer certainty]. But we’re not going to know until the next administration and see what they might do with it.

We’ve changed our practices to make sure we don’t exceed or cause problems in the river. For example, a few years ago, we had [the insecticide] diazinon show up in the San Joaquin River, and through the Irrigated Lands program, we were able to find the growers, find out what happened, and change some practices. And we haven’t had that issue since that time. So, we definitely change what we do because, hey, we live here, we drink the water here, we breathe the air here. And, so, it’s a balance.

On the surface, [the EPA proposal] looks like it’s addressed our biggest concerns. But we hope that it does get finalized and stays this way.

Jocelyn Brennan, interim executive director, Home Builders Association of the Central Coast in California

California is in a unique situation compared with some other states, because we do have, arguably, the most stringent environmental laws of any state. I think what our industry partners are concerned about is that the state will step in with more stringent regulations. And then it will just be a different regulatory agency that we’re dealing with, versus federal.

Builders and developers, when they’re looking at site feasibility and they see a wetland or a tributary, or some body of water, and they know that’s going to require additional mitigation, maintenance, and permitting, they’re going to keep looking for a better site. When they’re doing a constraints analysis, that’s really pretty prohibitive, because they know that it’s going to be a lot of extra time and extra cost.

In theory, [the EPA proposal] helps. It should open up additional lands for development.

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Some other states will completely benefit from [the proposed changes], and it will be great, and reduce a lot of unnecessary regulations. We’re all for, obviously, protecting the environment. But some [regulations] are for standing water that’s there when we have a good rain, and it’s gone a week later. And, so, this makes a lot of sense to us.

California is experiencing a housing crisis. And yet, the building industry is the most regulated industry in California compared with other states. And thus, we have a housing crisis. So, any type of regulations that don’t make sense, that can be streamlined, are a tool to address the housing crisis.