Crossposted from The Journal of Uncharted Blue Places
You can also catch me at meteorblades.bsky.social
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration unveiled its plan Wednesday to slash Biden-era fuel-economy standards for passenger cars from 50.4 miles per gallon to just 34.5 mpg by 2031. If finalized, it will mark the second time Donald Trump has sabotaged the effort to reduce vehicle inefficiency and pollution. He and his gang might as well be slashing tires.
By any honest measure, the Trump regime’s rollback of Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards isn’t merely policy malpractice. It’s another reason “war” might as well be included in the renaming of every federal department and agency, not just Defense. The proposed retreat on standards comes wrapped in one of the GOP’s favorite disguises — a promise of “freedom.” It’s a cover so flimsy it dissolves the moment you touch it, revealing Big Oil and its puppets grinning beneath.
The idea is designed not just to weaken standards now but also to cripple the ability of future administrations to strengthen them. It’s also to undermine the transition to electric vehicles, which is of a piece with the sabotage of solar and wind sources of electricity.
The Republican “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” eliminated penalties for automakers who fail to meet efficiency targets, no matter how strong or weak they are. And if the rollback holds, communities living near highways — disproportionately Black, Latino and low-income — will for decades breathe the extra pollution less efficient cars will spew in the same way they once sucked ruinous leaded gasoline fumes into their lungs.
Kathy Harris of the Natural Resources Defense Council warns that Trump is “sticking drivers with higher costs at the pump, all to benefit the oil industry,” predicting that households could end up paying hundreds of extra dollars for fuel each year. The regime insists that the relaxing of standards will reduce new vehicle prices — the average of which now is $49,766— by roughly $1,000.
Seriously?
Albert Gore III of the Zero Emission Transportation Association, described this tactic as scapegoating EVs for rising vehicle prices, even though the real drivers are tariffs, supply-chain shocks, and manufacturers pivoting to luxury SUVs. “The cost is dramatically exaggerated and the benefit is always ignored,” he said, recalling ferocious past industry resistance to seat belts and air bags, opposition that delayed their being government-mandated by many years despite the lives they save.
Trump in 2020 rolled back fuel standards that had been set by President Barack Obama, altering a mandated annual 5% improvement in fuel efficiency to just 1.5%. The American Council for an Energy‑Efficient Economy at the time projected the decision would increase U.S. fuel consumption and carbon emissions for decades, adding to the atmosphere “at least 131 million metric tons of CO2 annually by 2035” and consuming an additional 11.7 billion gallons of gasoline a year under the weakened standards.
Before final adoption of those 2020 standards, a Consumer Reports analysis asserted safety would be undermined and environmental harm increased as Americans would lose tens of billions in fuel savings over time, amounting to an extra $3,300 over the life of a new vehicle compared with staying on the stronger standards.
Trump’s move was overridden by President Joe Biden, with new standards adopted in 2023 calling for an 8% annual improvement in fuel efficiency.
Dan Becker of the Center for Biological Diversity says in “one stroke” Trump is now worsening “the thirst for oil, high gas pump costs, and global warming.” The industry gets freedom to keep pushing gas-guzzlers. Consumers get higher gasoline bills. The climate gets burned.
The Biden standard would have saved drivers $35 billion in fuel costs over the lifetime of their cars. The proposed rollback sacrifices those savings for what Gina McCarthy, EPA administrator in Obama’s second term, called “backwards thinking” that leaves the U.S. stuck with inefficient gas-burners while China sprints ahead in clean-car innovation.
As Elizabeth Kolbert points out in the Weekly Eco-Video below, it’s as if someone who makes kerosene lamps were introduced to an electric light bulb as an alternative and chose to stick with kerosene instead. Whatever one thinks of its governance, China will own the clean new industries while the U.S. clings to the dirty past. As in so many other arenas, the Trump team is driving us into a ditch. The standards proposal, like much of the regime’s fossil-fuel-friendly energy policies, is a prescription for national decay amid global crisis.
Critics will rightly note that we don’t just need more efficient cars but also a lot fewer cars and a lot more mass transit, bicycle friendly roadways, faster intercity passenger trains, and urban areas designed around the concept of 15-minute cities. The critics say raising fuel efficiency in light of that is just a modest tweak. All true.
However, more transformative transportation changes will take decades to fully achieve even at top speed, and we cannot afford decades of delay in adopting cleaner individually owned vehicles that people aren’t, in the aggregate, going to give up until alternatives are widely accessible. Cars aren’t going to vanish overnight. So the ones still on the road — human driven or autonomous — must be electric. That’s something we can achieve rather quickly. But weak fuel economy standards will delay this transition as surely as cutting electric car subsidies. Together these myopic policies will finish off already suffering U.S. automakers as China ever more dominates the world market for EVs. Another negative notch for a Trump economy that’s already killed 58,000 manufacturing jobs since April.
Every rollback of the growth of clean energy and the products it fuels is an accelerant of climate change. Every delay is a death sentence in slow motion. Every smog-laden mile we bake into the nation’s future is one we will pay for in asthma inhalers, heat-wave deaths, rising oceans, and lost technological ground. Every refusal to speed up the green transition shackles the U.S. to a dying paradigm. A three-for: wrecking the environment, the economy, and public health. The retreat on efficiency standards is one more of the plethora of short-sighted, greed-fueled, scientifically illiterate, socially damaging policies that must be undone when this misbegotten regime is ended. Fixing will take far, far longer than the wrecking.
—Meteor Blades
WEEKLY ECO-VIDEO
GREEN BRIEFS
Every week, Dan McCarthy at Canary Media spotlights a chart relevant to the excellent site’s focus on clean energy. The latest — Solar and wind are meeting — and exceeding — new power demand:
See also:
TRUMP YANKS “RENEWABLE” OUT OF NAT’L RENEWABLE ENERGY LAB IN OMINOUS RENAMING
Don’t expect the Trump-renamed National Laboratory of the Rockies to be putting out any more reports like these.
From 1977 to 1980, I worked on the non-technical side at the Solar Energy Research Institute in Golden, Colorado. SERI’s mission was two-fold: 1) research and develop solar and wind tech — the wind being generated by the sun; 2) provide information to state and local governments about the legal picture regarding solar and wind. It was exciting times in the then-nascent field when solar cells cost tens of dollars each (instead of less than a dollar today). The average wind turbine had a capacity of 100-kilowatts then, and there were none in the water (compared to today’s average of 9.7-9.8 megawatts for the 13,000+ turbines installed offshore).
Ronald Reagan came along and butchered the budget for renewables, including SERI’s. But the lab survived and got a name change to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in 1991. It got a bigger budget and higher status under George H.W. Bush, and more funding still under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
Now Donald Trump has again changed the name, this time to the National Laboratory of the Rockies. The director says, “The new name reflects the Trump administration’s broader vision for the lab’s applied energy research ...” Trump’s obsession with killing wind turbines and hatred of solar does not bode well. Sounds like the opposite of an upgrade.
Dan Gearino at Inside Climate News interviewed Democrat Bill Ritter, the governor of Colorado from 2007 to 2011. He said suggested that the name change reflects a mission change, and that ain’t good. “It’s an iconic research facility,” he said. Recounting a trip to Israel as governor, Ritter noted, “The head of their renewable energy laboratory said, ‘I have nothing to tell you because you come from the place that has the best renewable energy laboratory in the world’.”
He lamented, “We’ll no longer be competitive in renewables research with China or India or other countries that are still heading toward the renewable energy transition at a very fast pace.”
—MB
ZILLOW DROPS CLIMATE RISK DATA FROM HOME LISTINGS
The real estate platform Zillow has removed climate risk data from its home listings. The change comes amid complaints from some California real estate agents that predictive data on climate risks in certain areas is hurting their sales and purportedly contain inconsistencies and inaccuracies.
A Sunday New York Times story strongly implied that Zillow had removed climate data from its listings under pressure from the California Regional Multiple Listing Service. Zillow did remove such data across the country, not just in California. The platform has replaced the risk data on its site with links to it at First Street, the non-profit climate risk quantifier from which Zillow obtained the on-site tool.
Matthew Eby, founder and chief executive of First Street, told The Guardian that the removal means many would-be buyers will be “flying blind.” This comes right when climate risks are sending home insurance soaring and at the same time lowering asking prices in a few areas where extreme events are expected because of the climate crisis. It’s not the data’s fault that some agents and owners are having a tough time making sales.
Eby challenged those claiming there are inaccuracies in the data to prove their case. “The risk doesn’t go away; it just moves from a pre-purchase decision into a post-purchase liability,” he said. “Families discover after a flood that they should have purchased flood insurance, or discover after the sale that wildfire insurance is unaffordable or unavailable in their area. Access to accurate risk information before a purchase isn’t just helpful; it’s essential to protecting consumers and preventing lifelong financial consequences.”
In a sane world, including such data without redirecting people offsite ought to be legally required the same as disclosure of black mold and walls full of termites. But out of sight, out of mind.
—MB
HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ (OR LISTEN TO)
EIA: Solar + storage soar as fossil fuels stall through September 2025 by Michelle Lewis at Electrek. EIA’s latest “Electric Power Monthly” report (with data through Sept. 30, 2025), once again confirms that solar is the fastest-growing source of electricity in the U.S. Generation from utility-scale (more than 1 megawatt) solar thermal and photovoltaic systems expanded by 35.8%, while that from small-scale systems (e.g., rooftop) rose by 11.2% during the first nine months of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024. The combination of utility-scale and small-scale solar increased by 29% and produced a bit over 9% (utility-scale: 6.85%; small-scale: 2.16%) of total U.S. electrical generation for January-September, up from 7.2% a year earlier. U.S. wind turbines produced 9.8% of total electricity in the first nine months of 2025, up 1.3% compared to the same period last year. Electrical generation for the period from wind turbines plus utility-scale and small-scale solar provided 18.8% of the U.S. total, up from 17.1% during the first three quarters of 2024.
Mural in Orleans California, with coyote leading dam removal on the Klamath River as Yurok wise women observe. (You can see the entire mural here.)
Why America Is Removing Thousands of Dams and Letting Rivers Run Free by Tara Lohan at Wiki Observatory. With more than 550,000 dams in the United States, free-flowing rivers are an endangered species. We’ve dammed, diked, and diverted almost every major river in the country, straightening curves, pinching off floodplains, and blocking passage for fish and other aquatic animals. But this has come at a great cost. Freshwater biodiversity—all the organisms that hail from our rivers, streams, lakes, and wetlands — is among the most threatened on the planet. Dams have played a big role in that demise, pushing fish, mussels, and other animals to the brink, and some over it. In North America, nearly 40% of fish are imperiled, and 61 species have blinked out since 1900. A growing dam removal movement has led to some 2,200 dams being blasted and backhoed from U.S. rivers — most of them in the past 25 years. It’s an extraordinary turn of events for a dam-loving country. Europeans began erecting river barriers soon after they arrived in North America. Massachusetts’s Old Oaken Bucket Pond Dam, built in 1640, is one of the country’s oldest known dams. Thousands more followed across New England, then down the East Coast, and eventually westward. They powered mills that ground corn, cut lumber, forged tack, and produced textiles. As dams raised the height of the water behind them, they also smothered rapids and white water so that logs could be floated from upstream forests—where they were felled—to downstream industry, where they were processed.
Pioneering Salmon Are Exploring Upper Klamath Basin by Juliet Grable at Sierra magazine. The return of salmon to the ancestral land of the Klamath Tribes — which include the Klamath, Modoc, and Yahooskin Paiute people — is a poignant homecoming. “To have made it up through that gauntlet of the two remaining dams and all the way up through Upper Klamath Lake — it’s just a Herculean feat,” says Klamath Tribes chairman William Ray Jr. Tribes, along with federal and state agencies and university researchers, have been collaborating with CalTrout to track the pioneering fish. They have fitted some Chinook with radio tags, which allow biologists to follow them in real time using fixed and mobile antennae. They are also using a fixed sonar station to track fish swimming past the site of the former Iron Gate Dam, which is the lowest of the four dams that were removed in California. So far, the station has recorded nearly 10,000 adult-size fish moving past the site — a 30% increase from last year’s count.
New England is on the brink of clean energy victories. Why are Democrats embracing gas? by Benjamin Storrow at Climatewire. New England’s clean energy aspirations have survived a tumbling turbine blade, a ballot referendum and a stop-work order from a president who's hostile to wind power. The question now is whether the region's green dreams can endure a pivot to natural gas by its political leaders. Three of the largest clean energy projects in New England’s history are nearing completion after a decade-long push to curb its reliance on gas, bolster its electric grid and slash planet-warming pollution. But even as the finish line comes into sight, some of the region's leaders are considering plans that are antithetical to the climate goals that sprung those projects to life. Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat, has openly embraced the idea of building gas pipelines. Massachusetts lawmakers briefly considered, then rejected, a plan to water down the state’s climate targets. And the whole region has effectively pressed pause on offshore wind development.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro
After Years of Sparring, Gov. Shapiro Abandons Pennsylvania’s Landmark Climate Initiative by Audrey Carleton at Capital & Main. In the final floor debate over the state’s budget, the Republican minority leader of Pennsylvania’s state House said a landmark climate initiative was a “specter” holding back the state. “After today,” he said. “that specter will be gone.” He was celebrating what environmentalists and some Democratic lawmakers have for weeks been warning the state not to do: Leave the regional carbon-trading program that it set out to enter in 2019. A key pillar of former Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s climate legacy, the 10-state compact caps the amount of planet-warming emissions that power plants within it are allowed to release. It also requires the plants to purchase the ability to emit carbon via quarterly auctions, whose proceeds are invested in environmental initiatives like energy efficiency and renewable energy projects. Trade unions and fossil fuel industry trade groups have long argued the carbon trading program would stymie the state’s energy industry and lead to higher utility bills. Environmentalists saw the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, known as RGGI, as an effective way to curb emissions from the power sector, though some argued the program did not go far enough. The state’s entry into the compact fueled years of partisan sparring and two unresolved lawsuits that await a verdict from the state Supreme Court. As part of the deal to abandon the compact, Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro’s administration, a party in both cases, is pulling out of the lawsuits.
What the Shutdown Revealed About Food and Agriculture Policy by Rebekah Alvey and Lisa Held at Civil Eats. Now that the government shutdown is over, SNAP is returning to its typical operations, said Katie Bergh, senior food assistance policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. But for many households, getting full benefits will not erase the impact of the shutdown. Without assistance, SNAP recipients may have opted to buy groceries in lieu of paying an electric bill or car payment, for example, and are now potentially falling behind in their bills. “All of that chaos and disruption is going to have long-term impacts for the households that were struggling to follow what was happening and waiting on their benefits in the interim,” Bergh said. The funding package passed by Congress to end the shutdown fully funds SNAP through Sept. 30, 2026. But as states were dealing with uncertainty due to the shutdown, they were also implementing OBBB policy changes that could permanently kick individuals off the program.
WEEKLY BLUESKY POST
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The economics of enhanced geothermal are not good.
"When something fails the economic test this badly, there’s only one conclusion: it’s not the right application of technology...its promoters are being dishonest when they say it’s working, and is competitive with other forms of energy. It’s not."
— Justin Mikulka (@justinmikulka.bsky.social) 2025-12-03T12:28:32.297Z
ECOPINION
Can the war on coal still be won? by Michael Grunwald at Canary Media. Ten years ago, I embedded in the war on coal.I spent a month inside the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, watching an organization renowned for tree-hugging, grassroots activism use boring legal and economic strategies to shut down coal-fired power plants in red and blue states. Sierra’s litigators and organizers had quietly helped retire one-third of America’s coal fleet in five years — 190 plants in all, about one every 10 days — driving some of the first significant emissions reductions on Earth. [...] Now, a decade later, Donald Trump has declared war on the war on coal — or, as he insists everyone in his administration call it, “clean, beautiful coal.” So it seems like a good time to see how things are going on the battlefield. The short summary is that Beyond Coal is still winning, and America is continuing to reduce its reliance on the black stuff. But Trump and the artificial-intelligence boom are complicating the war on coal’s endgame.
Bill Gates
Lessons for Climate Advocates From the Bill Gates ‘Climate Hack’ by Liam Kavanagh at DeSmog. To learn from the Gates incident, we must first examine his full message, briefly paraphrased below. The text in bold shows the key rhetorical strategies that Gates employed in his hack: The climate movement must get past its doomsday mindset. The truth is this — climate change is bad but with the aid of technology we will contain it to reasonable levels (less than 3° C) and adjust to its consequences. That’s our only realistic option. We need to focus on lives, not tenths of a degree. Put another way, the ‘hard truth’ that Gates wants to break to us is that our only option is the one corporations wanted all along: We can burn fossils until it stops making dollars and cents because technological breakthroughs will soon make green business profitable — and we can largely adapt to whatever damage we do. But how was Gates able to make so much news? Here, I’ll examine the specific tendencies that Gates exploited, and how to prevent further narrative capture.
Dismantling the Endangered Species Act will hurt a lot more than just wildlife by Sophie Hurwitz & Matt Simon at Grist. For more than 50 years, the Endangered Species Act has saved thousands of animals and plants from threats like poaching, habitat loss, and pollution. It brought bald eagles back from the brink of extinction, reestablished grizzly bear populations on public lands, and safeguarded the redwood forests that play host to dozens of vulnerable animals. In total, it has prevented the extinction of 99% of the species it has protected. In mid-November, Donald Trump announced his regime plans to weaken or eliminate key provisions of the law that protect vulnerable species from extractive activities like oil drilling. The proposed changes would limit federal agencies’ ability to consider potential future impacts on a species — such as the impacts of climate change — when deciding which species to list. In addition, the so-called blanket rule, which bestows species listed as threatened with the same protections as those listed as endangered, would be canceled.
The Supreme Court’s Ethics Code Is a Joke. Big Oil Knows That by Aaron Regunberg at The New Republic. Oil companies want the Supreme Court to intervene to dismiss lawsuits that challenge corporations over their deceptions regarding climate change. Amy Coney Barrett and Samuel Alito both have big conflicts of interest on that front. Big Oil has tried five times since 2021 to get the Supreme Court to step in and dismiss these lower court cases, and so far the court has rejected them all. But now the industry is trying once again, petitioning the justices to take up a case filed by the City and County of Boulder against ExxonMobil and Suncor. Last spring, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that, after seven long years of delay tactics by the industry, this case could finally advance to discovery and trial. That’s what Big Oil hopes to stop.
RESEARCH & RESOURCES
Satellites spot rapid “Doomsday Glacier” collapse. Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica — widely known as the "Doomsday Glacier" — is changing more quickly than almost any other ice-ocean system on the planet. Its future behavior remains one of the biggest unknowns in forecasts of global sea-level rise. Over the past 20 years, a floating ice shelf associated with the glacial system has been fracturing. Researchers at the University of Manitoba published a new study in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface that offers the most detailed account yet of how this slow breakdown has unfolded.
The evolution of news coverage about climate change as a health issue: a decadal analysis in China, India, and the USA. Examining more than 5,000 newspaper articles spanning 2012-2023 from the three countries, researchers found that even though there has been an increase since 2019 in articles connecting climate to public health in the three countries, “only a small fraction were substantively focused on the public health relevance of climate change [suggesting] that media attention to the intersection of climate change and public health is both scarce and inconsistent.” Published in The Lancet.
Widespread revisions of self-reported emissions by major US corporations. Researchers found that 58% of self-reported greenhouse gas emissions from publicly traded firms are subject to revision after their initial disclosure. Corporations tend to understate rather than overstate their emissions. In fact, “the volume of emissions understated surpasses the amount overstated by more than a factor of two. This bias towards underreporting could mask the true environmental footprint of these companies, thus undermining global climate mitigation efforts that depend on accurate data to track and incentivize reductions.” Published at Nature Climate Change.
OTHER GREEN STUFF
