Today, fifteen Democratic members of Congress sent a letter to Vice Admiral Nancy Hann, acting Administrator of the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), demanding answers about efforts by President Trump and Elon Musk to unlawfully dismantle the crucial agency. In their letter, the representatives cite multiple reports of drastic planned cuts and the related invasion of the agency by Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) lieutenants, including 30-year-old Twitter engineer Nikhil Rajpal, now listed in the NOAA directory at [email protected].

In their letter, the members state:

“There have been credible reports of DOGE personnel disregarding security checkpoints, rifling through personal belongings, demanding access to computers, emails, and other sensitive information, and adding employees’ names to lists on their clipboards if they are perceived to have resisted. While this is happening at core NOAA facilities in the Washington, D.C. region, our constituents who work at NOAA labs and regional facilities across the nation fear for their jobs and their families’ futures.”

“Our constituents and the American people deserve answers from the Trump administration as to what their plan is and what authorities the administration is using to bully and intimidate NOAA employees with the ultimate goal of dismantling the agency.”

The letter was led by U.S. House Natural Resources Committee Ranking Member Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) and Water, Wildlife and Fisheries Subcommittee Ranking Member Val Hoyle. The other signatories were Jimmy Panetta, Frank Pallone, Salud Carbahal, Seth Magaziner, Sarah Elfreth, Suzanne Bonamici, Raúl Grijalva, Mike Levin, Ed Case, Joe Neguse, William Keating, Kathy Castor, and Jamie Raskin.

House Science ranking member Zoe Lofgren has also sent a letter to acting administrator Hann.

There will be a rally in support of NOAA at the Department of Commerce on Tuesday afternoon.

Full text of the letter:

On Friday night, an email anonymously sent from “Budget and Planning,” apparently within the Office of the Chief Financial Officer, re-froze spending on programs related to climate, clean energy, and civil rights in defiance of multiple judicial restraining orders. Programs frozen range from the Clean School Bus Program to Grants to Reduce Air Pollution at Ports.

The full text is below.

Democratic members of Congress turned away from EPA headquarters, Feb. 6, 2025

To review:

On January 27th, Matthew J. Vaeth, the acting director of the White House Office Management and Budget, issued a memorandum demanding a government-wide freeze on all programs related to climate, the environment, civil rights, and reproductive health.

On Tuesday, January 28th, the EPA froze all spending:

“The agency is temporarily pausing all activities related to the obligation or disbursement of EPA Federal financial assistance at this time. EPA is continuing to work with OMB as they review processes, policies, and programs, as required by the memorandum.”

On January 29th, the Senate confirmed Lee Zeldin as Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, with the Democratic senators from Arizona, Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego, as well as John Fetterman (D-Pa.) joining all Republicans in support.

That same day, Judge Loren AliKhan issued a restraining order against the funding freeze.

On January 31st, Judge John McConnell issued another restraining order against the funding freeze.

On February 3rd, Judge Loren AliKhan issued a strengthened restraining order against the Trump administration’s wide-ranging freeze on funding obligations related to climate and civil rights.

On February 4th, the 24-year-old Elon Musk acolyte and effective-altruism cultist Gaultier Cole Killian was officially designated an EPA employee at [email protected].

That same day, the EPA’s acting chief financial officer, Gregg Treml, announced compliance with the restraining order:

“Consistent with the Order, the agency’s financial system will now enable the obligation of financial assistance. This includes programs within the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, including federal financial assistance in the State and Tribal Assistance Grants, Brownfields, and Superfund.”

On February 6th, Democratic members of Congress were blocked by security guards from entering EPA headquarters. They then spoke to the press with environmental leaders from civil society in front of the building.

That same day, a review of financial assistance programs was announced by EPA acting deputy administrator Chad McIntosh, a former Ford environmental executive appointed to the EPA in the first Trump administration.

Email text:

As an openly eco-fascistic Republican Party works to dismantle the democratic experiment of the United States of America, the Democratic Party is one of the last remaining bulwarks, but only if it abandons the failed tools of neoliberalism and becomes a revitalized opposition party built upon civic democratic principles, capable of regaining the mantle of the working-class party in order to win against increasingly stark odds at the local level and the national stage.

The 448-odd members of the Democratic National Committee are gathering this week at National Harbor, Maryland to elect new leadership for the Democratic Party on Saturday morning. On Thursday, the candidates will gather in person at Georgetown University for a final forum, with the DNC chair candidates running in prime time with MSNBC anchors Jen Psaki, Symone Sanders, and Jonathan Capehart.

MSNBC guest anchor Luke Russert will moderate the forum for Vice Chair of Civic Engagement and Voter Participation candidates, and Mo Elleithee, Executive Director of Georgetown University’s Institute of Politics and Public Service, a Fox News contributor and DNC at-large member, will moderate the forums for Vice Chair, Secretary, Treasurer, and National Finance Chair candidates. As a voting DNC member, Elleithee has pledged not to vote for the offices he is moderating and has avoided participating in the process (e.g. by signing nominating petitions or conversing with candidates).

After an opening reception Wednesday night, the standing committees meet Thursday morning, with council meetings in the afternoon, overlapping with the candidate forum an hour away. According to the proposed schedule, the only full open meeting of the committee will take place early Friday morning, followed by caucus and council meetings. The resolutions committee will consider submitted resolutions, and the credentials committee will recommend a determination for the status of the disputed Alabama delegation.

The order of elections on Saturday, according to the proposed rules of procedure, is: Chair, Treasurer, Secretary, National Finance Chair, Vice Chair for Civic Engagement and Voter Participation, and the three other Vice Chairpersons, all of whom are members of the DNC executive committee. The fifth vice chair, the head of the Association of State Democratic Committees (ASDC), will be elected at a later date.

Chair

DNC Chair candidates Jason Paul, Dr. Quintessa Hathaway, Marianne Williamson, Martin O’Malley, Ben Wikler, Ken Martin, and Nate Snyder

The race to succeed Jaime Harrison as DNC chair appears to be a two-man contest between Ken and Ben.

The public mockery of “environmentalists” for concern about climate pollution began with a The New York Times op-ed by an Ayn Rand acolyte on August 28, 1971. Published with the headline “No, Breathe Easier,” mining executive and propagandist Eugene Guccione falsely claimed that “we are winning the war on pollution” and then called the greenhouse effect “idiocy”.

Unaware that particulate concentration is decreasing, “environmentalists” talk about the New Ice Age Theory. The build-up of dust in the air, so goes the argument, will screen out the sun and we’ll all be turned into ice.

Then there is the Greenhouse Effect Theory. The build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, so goes this particular idiocy, will cause a temperature increase throughout the planet… and we’ll drown in the tidal wave resulting from the melting of the polar ice caps, or roast to death.

These so-called theories contradict each other. We cannot both freeze and roast at the same time. It’s either or. But relax. It’s neither. We won’t freeze because there is no such thing as a build-up of particulates in the air, as lots of tests indicate. Nor will we roast because at the present level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere it would take about 957 years to triple the current level. Such speculations have no more scientific validity than the prediction that my puppy dog, at his present growth rate, would be fifteen feet long and weigh 900 pounds at age five.

The next week, the Times published a response from climate scientist Stephen Schneider, noting Guccione’s op-ed was both factually wrong and dangerously optimistic about the threat of pollution-induced climate change.

Guccione, a chemical engineer who embraced the ideology of free-market economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Alan Greenspan, was then the editor of Engineering & Mining Journal. He later edited Mining Engineering journal and chaired the Mountain States Lime cement plant in Utah as well as the free-market Committee for Monetary Research and Education. He continued to rail against environmental legislation for impeding the coal and oil industries, argued for subsidizing the domestic oil industry to compete with the Soviet Union, and fulminated against taxation as a form of mugging.

By the 1980s, the Times was running regular climate-denial advertorials from Mobil (and after a merger, ExxonMobil) on its op-ed pages into the 2000s. The tradition continued in the Internet age with dynamic greenwashing Web campaigns co-developed by the Times and ExxonMobil.

Full text of the Guccione op-ed:

Nearly 500 Floridians are trapped in Milton’s path as it nears landfall tonight. Fort Myers’ Lee County Jail is 1500 feet from the tidal estuary of the Caloosahatchee River. The jail, a hulking, near windowless facility with 457 beds that serves as the main booking facility for the county, lies in Lee County’s Hurricane Evacuation Zone A. The county ordered all free people in Evacuation Zones A and B to flee by Tuesday evening, but Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno decided not to evacuate the 477 inmates in the overstuffed jail to safety.

The National Weather Service is warning that as Hurricane Milton makes landfall tonight, it will push the Gulf of Mexico waters past Cape Coral and into the Caloosahatchee, with tropical-storm-force winds bringing a storm surge of up to 6 feet of water into the estuary.

The Lee County Sheriff’s office confirmed to Hill Heat this morning that there are no plans to evacuate the facility.

“Inmates will be evacuated to top floors in case of flooding,” public information officer Julie Martin told Hill Heat, and the “kitchen is staffed and has two weeks of food for inmates and staff.”

There are contingency plans to evacuate the inmates to Lee County’s Core facility farther inland, Martin stated. The core facility currently has 1169 inmates and 47 spare beds.

Lee County Sheriff spokesman Nestor Montoya told the Fort Myers News-Press that all inmates are “safe”.

Lee County Jail is one of several carceral facilities in Florida not being evacuated from the fossil-fueled Milton.

Update October 10: The Lee County Sheriff’s Office reports that there is power and running water at the jail, with no flooding from Hurricane Milton.

At her Tuesday campaign rally in Wisconsin, Vice President Kamala Harris said that Trump “literally promised Big Oil companies and Big Oil lobbyists he would do their bidding for $1 billion in campaign donations.”

The Harris for President campaign issued the following press release today.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that a “megawealthy coterie of oil tycoons” are “banking on promises” from Donald Trump to deliver his dangerous Project 2025 agenda that is even “more stridently pro-fossil fuel than Trump’s first administration.”

Trump already offered control of White House policy to oil barons while asking for $1 billion to his campaign.

These Big Oil donations solicited by Trump are being investigated as a “blatant quid pro quo” by Senate investigators and “make the magnates among some of Trump’s biggest donors and represent an increase from past election cycles.”

Trump promised to issue “immediate approvals” for Big Oil’s dangerous schemes while asking them to put him back in the White House.

Oil lobbyists are already drafting ready-made executive orders for Trump to sign to give them tax handouts, increase costs on Americans, and pollute our environment.

Trump has even said that he would cut “environmental agencies” and the Department of Interior, which are critical to protecting public lands and ensuring clean air and water for all Americans.

Harris for President spokesperson Joseph Costello released the following statement:

“Oil barons are salivating because climate denier Donald Trump promised to do their bidding while asking them to bankroll his run for the presidency. Trump’s promises to Big Oil would sacrifice good paying jobs that are driving an American energy and manufacturing boom, and instead give billion dollar handouts to corporations at the expense of working families and a healthy future for our children.

“Under the Biden-Harris administration, America is more energy independent than ever. Vice President Harris cast the tie breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, creating hundreds of thousands of good paying energy jobs and making the biggest climate investment in world history. But Trump promises to dismantle all this progress and sell out America’s future for his own personal gain.”

Today, U.S. Senators Joe Manchin (I-W. Va.) and John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, released the Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024, to accelerate the permitting process for energy and mining projects of all types in the United States, in particular by limiting the National Environmental Policy Act.

Manchin:

“The United States of America is blessed with abundant natural resources that have powered our nation to greatness and allow us to help our friends and allies around the world. Unfortunately, today our outdated permitting system is stifling our economic growth, geopolitical strength, and ability to reduce emissions. After over a year of holding hearings in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, thoughtfully considering input from our colleagues on both sides of the aisle, and engaging in good faith negotiations, Ranking Member Barrasso and I have put together a commonsense, bipartisan piece of legislation that will speed up permitting and provide more certainty for all types of energy and mineral projects without bypassing important protections for our environment and impacted communities. The Energy Permitting Reform Act will advance American energy once again to bring down prices, create domestic jobs, and allow us to continue in our role as a global energy leader. The time to act on it is now.”

Barrasso:

“For far too long, Washington’s disastrous permitting system has shackled American energy production and punished families in Wyoming and across our country. Congress must step in and fix this process. Our bipartisan bill secures future access to oil and gas resources on federal lands and waters. We fix the disastrous Rosemont decision so that we can produce more American minerals instead of relying on China. We permanently end President Biden’s reckless ban on natural gas exports. And we ensure we can strengthen our electric grid while protecting customers. This legislation is an urgent and important first step towards improving our nation’s broken permitting process.”

The official summary:

This bill generally reduces restrictions on the federal permitting process for mineral and energy projects.

The bill revises the judicial review process for these projects, including by setting a 150-day deadline for filing civil actions seeking judicial review of a federal agency decision to grant or deny authorization of energy or mineral projects.

The bill establishes deadlines for acting on applications for various energy and mineral projects. For example, the bill sets deadlines for the review of (1) federal coal lease applications, and (2) right-of-way applications with respect to renewable energy projects on public land.

From 2025 to 2029, the Department of the Interior must hold at least one offshore wind lease sale and at least one offshore oil and gas lease sale per year.

The bill also revises electric transmission requirements, including by (1) expanding the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC’s) authority to include issuing a permit for the construction or modification of certain types of interstate electricity infrastructure without a specified Department of Energy (DOE) designation, and (2) requiring the assessment of the reliability impacts of certain proposed federal regulations.

The bill also sets a deadline for DOE to approve or deny certain liquefied natural gas export applications. If DOE does not meet the deadline, applications will be deemed approved.

The bill authorizes FERC to extend the deadline for beginning construction for certain hydropower projects that were licensed by FERC.

Full text

The Climate Justice Alliance quickly announced their opposition to the legislation.

Elizabeth Yeampierre, Executive Director at UPROSE and CJA Board Co-Chair responds:

“Rather than another handout to dirty industry, we should be advancing forward thinking legislation that jumpstarts a Just Transition through locally led, proven climate solutions such as community owned wind and solar. We need legislation like the Environmental Justice for All Act that ensures safeguards and strong protections for communities, and takes into account the cumulative impacts our neighborhoods have faced for decades.”

Juan Jhong Chung, executive director of the Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition:

“Again and again, Sen. Manchin has steadfastly demonstrated his commitment to corporate giants rather than community constituents. Our position is very clear—-and grounded in the stakes of this moment in the climate crisis and in the Just Transition we desperately need to address it. We call on our policymakers to reflect this urgency, and at the least, not aim to derail climate justice work for corporate interests and financial profit.”

Readers of the New York Times opened their papers today to a giant photo of Donald Trump appearing above the headline “Geologists Say It’s Not Time to Declare a Human-Created Epoch”. (The photo of Trump was attached to a different story.) The article, written by reporter Raymond Zhong (who has been on the climate beat for two and a half years), appeared online yesterday with the headline “Are We in the ‘Anthropocene,’ the Human Age? Nope, Scientists Say.”

“A panel of experts voted down a proposal to officially declare the start of a new interval of geologic time, one defined by humanity’s changes to the planet,” the article summarizes. Zhong quotes panel members Aarhus University geologist Jan A. Piotrowski and University of Wales Trinity Saint David stratigrapher Mike Walker, who voted against the proposal.

The chair and second vice-chair of the panel in question, the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) within the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), have now forcefully announced the vote was a sham and should be considered “null and void”.

In brief, the alleged voting and the process surrounding it is open to challenge based on the grave violation of the ICS Statutes and thus must be considered null and void.

They report that the improper vote was instigated by Peking University geologist Liping Zhou, first vice-chair of the panel, and University of Florence paleoclimatologist Adele Bertini, secretary, despite opposition from the chair, University of Leicester geologist Jan Zalasiewicz, and second vice-chair Martin J. Head, a stratigrapher at Brock University.

Zalasiewicz and Head note that “a large majority of SQS members who took part in the alleged voting” (11 out of 16) were “not eligible as voting members at the time they cast their votes,” as they had been members of the subcommission for more than 12 years. The five eligible members do not represent a needed quorum for a vote to take place.

Moreover, the sham vote was held even as a Geoethics Commission report on the workings of the subcommission’s Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) was being reviewed by the president of the IUGS, geologist John Ludden. Zalasiewicz requested the report be distributed to the subcommission members before any vote was held, but Zhou and Bertini ignored him and pushed forward the sham vote, with members notifying the New York Times about the fraudulent result. Ludden released the report to the SQS and the AWG on March 5th, after the Times story was published. According to Zalasiewicz,

The findings of that report included: that the AWG, in preparing its proposal, was unfairly treated, via conflicts of interest, application of different standards than to other working groups, and unreasonable requests and restrictions, while insufficient time was allowed for comment on the proposal, and the AWG were not asked to provide feedback on the discussions as would be normal practice. The Geoethics Commission further observed that the process as a whole between AWG/SQS/ICS/IUGS was dysfunctional; it thus recommended the urgent suspension of any voting procedures (though not examining their validity).

Panel member Naomi Oreskes, a historian of climate science, responds:

The irregularities in the SQS voting procedures strongly suggest that the SQS did not make its decision on scientific grounds. The argument put forward by the AWG—and overwhelmingly endorsed by the AWG membership—was never given a fair hearing.

What’s particularly sad about this to me—as a person who cut my teeth in field geology—is that by rejecting the Anthropocene proposal, the SQS suggests to the world that they are unwilling or unable to recognize what we all can now see: that we do indeed live in the Anthropocene. By denying the obvious, the stratigraphers threaten to undermine the credibility of the science that they claim to be protecting.

The full text of the press statement from Profs. Zalasiewicz and Head and Zalasiewicz’s report to the subcommission, are below.

Governors

The incumbent governors in Kentucky and Mississippi were re-elected in Tuesday’s two gubernatorial elections. Kentucky’s Democratic governor Andy Beshear was re-elected, and used his acceptance speech to personally thank Hadley Duvall, a rape survivor who spoke out powerfully against the extreme position on abortion held by Beshear’s opponent. Beshear will now get another term to promote new manufacturing and EV jobs despite the legislature’s best efforts to prop up King Coal.

In Mississippi, Republican governor Tate Reeves defeated Democratic Public Service Commissioner Brandon Presley, whose campaign for Medicaid expansion and against Reeves’ corruption was not enough to overcome Mississippi’s strong Republican tilt.

Virginia

In Virginia, Democrats kept their majority in the state senate by a 21-19 margin, and flipped control of the House of Delegates, winning at least a 51-48 majority. (The Republican candidate is holding on to a slim lead in the race for HD 82, but that race has not been called.) The majority maker was Climate Cabinet-endorsed Michael Feggans in HD 97, where investments to protect Virginia Beach from flooding are an important issue. Joshua Cole, a Mountain Valley Pipeline opponent endorsed by both Climate Cabinet and Lead Locally, won his election for HD 65 around Fredericksburg. With Lead Locally’s support, activist Nadarius Clark was elected to represent the Suffolk-based HD 84.

Climate Cabinet also endorsed Russet Perry in her successful Loudon County race for SD 31, where she prevailed over a far-right son of a billionaire. For his leadership backing clean energy investments in a swing district centered around Newport News, Climate Cabinet had endorsed Democratic senator Monty Mason (D-SD 24). Mason was narrowly defeated by Danny Diggs, causing a net loss of one seat for Virginia Senate Democrats. Nevertheless, the June primary victories of Senators-elect Lachrese Aird, Jennifer Carrol Foy, and Saddam Azlan Salim, along with the retirement of Dominion Energy ally Dick Saslaw, will likely add up to a more progressive and unified Democratic caucus in the senate next year.

With these results, Virginia is likely to continue as the clean energy leader of the South. Democrats have dealt a serious blow to governor Glenn Youngkin’s plans to dismantle the climate progress made under his predecessor. In interviews with Inside Climate News, environmental leaders previewed their strategy for expanding rooftop solar and offshore wind even as Youngkin, who is described as “mostly hostile to climate policy,” remains in office for two more years. Inside Climate News notes:

One area where the Democrats now hold complete control is over the State Corporation Commission, or SCC, the regulatory body that oversees insurance, businesses, and—critically for the state’s climate goals—utilities. In Virginia, the dominant utilities are Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power Company. 

The SCC is meant to set utility rates that are fair for both consumers and companies. It also approves or denies the utilities’ decarbonization plans, which are needed to comply with emissions reductions mandated in the Clean Economy Act. 

At the moment, the SCC is not fully operational. While two members are needed for the SCC to issue rulings, only one seat on the three-person board is filled. But SCC positions are legislative appointments, meaning with Democrats in the majority, they now control who will fill the two empty positions. 

“The future of the SCC is in their hands,” said Shelby Green, a researcher at the Energy and Policy Institute, a watchdog group.

The Biden administration is spending billions on the National Clean Hydrogen Strategy, even recently celebrating Hydrogen Day on October 8 (because hydrogen’s atomic weight is 1.008) to “mark a symbolic opportunity to celebrate hydrogen—clean hydrogen, specifically—and the crucial role this element plays in supporting a robust, equitable clean energy future for all Americans.”

“There’s a lot to like about hydrogen as a fuel source,” climate journalists such as David Gelles gush.

The only problem is that “clean hydrogen,” also known as “green hydrogen”—that is, hydrogen gas generated using renewable electricity—isn’t particularly “clean” or “green,” although it’s less polluting than “gray” and “blue” hydrogen, produced from natural gas.

Unfortunately, even “green” hydrogen is a powerful greenhouse pollutant.

As an important paper from Environmental Defense Fund scientists Ilissa Ocko and Steven Hamburg explains, hydrogen is unavoidably leaky, because it’s such a small molecule, and like methane, has a high short-term warming effect. In fact, one of hydrogen’s main warming effects is to increase the atmospheric lifetime of methane. Methane breaks down in contact with the hydroxyl (OH) radical formed when ultraviolet light interacts with ozone (O₃) and water vapor (Hâ‚‚O). Hydroxyl also reacts with hydrogen molecules (Hâ‚‚), so significant hydrogen pollution means atmospheric methane doesn’t break down. Thus, Ocko and Hamburg find:

Hydrogen’s 100-year greenhouse warming potential (GWP) is twice as high as previously thought, and its 20-year GWP is 3 times higher than its 100-year GWP. Hydrogen’s maximum GWP occurs around 7 years after the initial pulse of emissions, with a range of 25 to 60 based on uncertainties, and a central estimate of 40.

In short, “green” hydrogen isn’t.