Montana Governor Tells Off Would-Be Banners thumbnail

Montana Governor Tells Off Would-Be Banners

By Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow

Had enough of bans and mandates?

Check out the masterful veto message Montana Governor Greg Gianforte sent the legislature when they tried to ban Styrofoam cups.

Read Governor Gianforte’s full veto message here.

“The free enterprise system works,” Gianforte wrote. “We should let it work, not have the heavy hand of big government unnecessarily meddle with it.”

Truer words never graced the printed page.

“Like many Montanans, I enjoy hot coffee in a Styrofoam cup, because it keeps it hot. And this bill is a hot mess,” Gianforte said in a video on X.

WATCH: Montana Governor Greg Gianforte Tells Off Would-Be Banners

America has reached peak regulation. Government is too complicated, controls too much, and has grown monstrously large.

The Trump/Musk DOGE effort to reduce government is a vitally needed reform, but it is also a case study in how difficult it is to weed out government waste after it has already taken root.

Better to do as Gianforte did and issue an unmistakable “no” at the outset.

“Ultimately, whether to use Styrofoam for take-out orders, packaging leftovers, or providing pre-packaged foods should be a matter for a restaurant or consumer to decide — not the state.”

Right you are, Governor.

Policymakers, confident in the righteousness of their superior wisdom, are ever eager to impose their judgment on the rest of us.

The people we elect should hold their fire and rarely place us under the control of the bureaucrats.

Millions of people making billions of voluntary choices in a free market is the most powerful economic force known to man.

Don’t mess with it.

AUTHOR

Craig Rucker is a co-founder of CFACT and currently serves as its president. Widely heralded as a leader in the free market environmental, think tank community in Washington, D.C., Rucker is a frequent guest on radio talk shows, written extensively in numerous publications, and has appeared in such media outlets as Fox News, OANN, Washington Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Hill, among many others. Rucker is also the co-producer of the award-winning film “Climate Hustle,” which was the #1 box-office film in America during its one night showing in 2016, as well as the acclaimed “Climate Hustle 2” staring Hollywood actor Kevin Sorbo released in 2020. As an accredited observer to the United Nations, Rucker has also led CFACT delegations to some 30 major UN conferences, including those in Copenhagen, Istanbul, Kyoto, Bonn, Marrakesh, Rio de Janeiro, and Warsaw, to name a few.

EDITORS NOTE: This CFACT column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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What America Can Learn from the Iberian Blackout thumbnail

What America Can Learn from the Iberian Blackout

By Center For Security Policy

America can learn from the Iberian Blackout the reality that green energy and one hundred percent renewable power are still subject to the laws of physics.

Not even a week after media reports hailed the fact that “Spain hit the first weekday of one hundred percent renewable power on the national grid” the Spanish government declared a national emergency following a complete collapse of that same grid. The unprecedented outage left tens of millions of its citizens, and those in neighboring Portugal, without power. And the blackout quickly cascaded into a shutdown of mass transit transportation, internet, cellular communications, and water/wastewater services.

Those two events occurring together are not a coincidence – and should serve as a cautionary tale for citizens and leaders in Europe and the Americas who have convinced themselves that “renewables equal resilience” when it comes to the electric grid.

They have convinced themselves that they must attach massive amounts of wind and solar systems to their existing bulk power grids in an effort to stave off “climate change” and to “go green.” Setting aside the arguments about climate change, a main concern should be whether the widespread adoption of grid-scale wind and solar systems makes the grid more resilient.

Unfortunately – it doesn’t – and Spain just proved it.

The Cause of Spain’s Blackout:

People have wondered whether Spain’s blackout could have been induced by or assisted by a malicious cyberattack. Such risks are very real and exacerbated when grids are heavily dependent on wind and solar power generation, which must rely on equipment sourced from a nation hostile to the West: Communist China. But most experts are laying the blame for Spain’s outage on a natural byproduct of an electric grid overly penetrated by wind and solar power generation systems – sub-synchronous oscillations (SSO).

The electric grids in America and Europe run on alternating current (A/C) electricity, which operates on synchronous frequency (fifty Hz in Europe and sixty Hz in America). Before the widespread introduction of wind and solar systems, the grid was powered by large power plants (such as coal, natural gas, or nuclear) which use big, heavy turbines that spin at a steady rate (again, at either fifty or sixty Hz.) These turbines build up inertia – momentum that resists sudden changes – and they all act a lot like shock absorbers, keeping the grid stable.

In contrast, wind turbines and solar panels connect to the grid through electronic devices called inverters, which don’t spin, don’t provide the same inertia and also inject energy into the grid in an intermittent fashion (such as when the wind is blowing and when the sun is shining). An overall increase in this intermittency and an overall decrease in inertia can cause the grid’s synchronous frequency to drop, causing sub-synchronous oscillation (SSO).

Compare the grid to a child swinging on a swing set in the schoolyard. When the child starts swinging at a steady rate and starts experiencing inertia, he or she moves rather effortlessly through the air in a synchronous fashion. Now imagine someone grabs and pulls and pushes one of the chains on that swing, distorting the child’s momentum. At that point, in order to prevent injury, the child is going to immediately stop swinging and get off the swing.

Similarly, when SSO happens on the grid, its operators, electronic management and protective safety systems will shut the grid down to try to prevent damage. SSO causes vibrations which can ruin equipment, such as turbines, if they shake too much. SSO also causes harmonics, which result in heat that can also destroy grid equipment. The more SSO happens to an electric grid, the faster its components wear out.

The Limits of Green Energy:

To reduce the chance of SSO, many grid operators try to preserve at least half or more of their generation sources from “baseload power” generators such as coal, gas, or nuclear to maintain that synchronous inertia. While some argue that expanding battery energy storage systems (BESS) – Spain maintains only sixty megawatts of battery storage compared to Texas’s 11,000 megawatts – could have helped stave off Spain’s grid collapse, other utility engineers who have reviewed data from Spain’s national electric utility aren’t so sure that it would have made a difference. Ultimately, any amount of grid-scale wind and solar generation complicates grid operations significantly.

Wind and solar have limited dispatchability, which means, unlike fossil fuel or nuclear plants, they cannot ramp up or down to match real-time grid needs, complicating load-balancing during peak demand or sudden disruptions. This means that grid operators must rely on advanced grid management systems and forecasting tools. In general, more complexity usually means less resilience.

Wind and solar power generation systems can play a role in enhancing resilience if they are domestically produced and employed properly – at the local level and focused on the types of electrical loads they can handle. Such micro-grid systems can operate either independently or as an augment to the larger electric grid, and can greatly improve resilience for individual households, facilities or even communities if the larger grid fails. For this reason, resilience-minded emergency managers have applied these systems to their facilities to make them “off-grid capable.”

Ultimately, American leaders who are interested in enhancing energy resilience are best served by focusing their efforts on relegating wind, solar, and battery systems to smaller localized microgrids while changing course on how they treat the bulk power system, as the Trump Administration has already begun through a series of executive orders. Re-embracing base-load power generators, declaring nuclear a renewable energy source by recycling spent nuclear fuel, and securing our electric grid from known hazards, will help keep the lights on in America.

AUTHOR

Tommy Waller

President & CEO.

EDITORS NOTE: This Center for Security Policy column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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Hawaiʻi Condemns Administration’s Illegal Attemp to Interfere with State Lawsuit Against Big Oil thumbnail

Hawaiʻi Condemns Administration’s Illegal Attemp to Interfere with State Lawsuit Against Big Oil

By Hawaii Free Press

Hawaiʻi Sues Fossil Fuel Interests for Climate Deception

(NOTE: Your beloved editor spent about 20 minutes debunking this news release.  See remarks in parenthesis.)

News Release 2025-59 from Office of Attorney General, May 1, 2025

HONOLULU — Attorney General Anne Lopez condemns the U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Hawaiʻi on April 30, 2025, seeking to preemptively halt a separate lawsuit against Big Oil companies for their deceptive conduct leading to the current climate crisis:

(REALITY: Deceptive hysterics by the environmental movement create the artificial sense of ‘crisis.’)

Attorney General Lopez said: “We have an obligation to the people of Hawaiʻi, to do everything in our power to fight deceptive practices from these fossil fuel companies that erode Hawaiʻi’s public health, natural resources and economy. The federal lawsuit filed by the Justice Department attempts to block Hawaiʻi from holding the fossil fuel industry responsible for deceptive conduct that caused climate change damage to Hawaiʻi.”

(REALITY: “Sher-Edling gives a lot of money to the national Democrats and we must reward them.”)

Governor Josh Green, M.D. states: “Hawaiʻi suffered a devastating climate-driven, wildfire-initiated disaster on Maui that resulted in the tragic loss of 102 lives and billions of dollars in damage. This climate-related wildfire was the deadliest in United States history in more than a century.”

(REALITY:  Anybody who identifies a specific weather event as evidence of global warming is a fraud.)

“The use of the United States Department of Justice to fight on behalf of the fossil fuel industry is deeply disturbing and is a direct attack on Hawaiʻi’s rights as a sovereign state,” added Attorney General Lopez. “The state of Hawaiʻi will not be deterred from moving forward with our climate deception lawsuit. My department will vigorously oppose this gross federal overreach.”

(TRANSLATION: We will proceed in Hawaii’s grotesquely politicized state courts until such time as the federal courts order us to cease and desist.)

Notwithstanding the federal lawsuit, Governor Josh Green M.D., and Attorney General Lopez today announced a lawsuit against fossil fuel companies for their deceptive conduct and failure to warn about their products’ climate change danger, now harming Hawaiʻi’s public health, infrastructure, natural resources and economy. The lawsuit was filed in the Circuit Court of the First Circuit.

(See? Told you.)

“The climate crisis is here, and the costs of surviving it are rising every day,” said Governor Green. “Hawaiʻi taxpayers should not have to foot that bill. The burden should fall on those who deceived and failed to warn consumers about the climate dangers lurking in their products. This lawsuit is about holding those parties accountable, shifting the costs of surviving the climate crisis back where they belong, and protecting Hawaiʻi citizens into the future.”

(REALITY: If ‘big oil’ is made to pay Sher-Edling and Hawaii for ‘climate change,’ consumers’ fuel costs will go up.  This is an attempt to impose a judicially-mandated fuel tax.  Money comes out of your pocket and into the State treasury.)

The state’s lawsuit names seven groups of affiliated fossil fuel companies and the American Petroleum Institute, the largest oil and gas trade association in the United States. It alleges seven causes of action against all defendants, including violations of Hawaiʻi’s Unfair or Deceptive Acts or Practices Statute, failure to warn, harm to public trust resources, public and private nuisance, trespass, and negligence. The lawsuit also alleges civil aiding and abetting against the American Petroleum institute.

(REALITY: Parr Pacific, operator of Hawaii’s only oil refinery, is not named because this is a politically-motivated sham lawsuit designed to fleece only outsiders.)

“These defendants had a duty to warn people about the climate dangers associated with their products, or to mitigate those dangers. But they did neither of those things,” said Attorney General Lopez. “Instead, they put profits ahead of people and facilitated the increased use of their dangerous products through decades of deceptive conduct. They violated Hawaiʻi law, harmed all Hawaiʻi residents, and will now be held accountable in a Hawaiʻi court.”

(REALITY: The oil industry launched in 1859 with ‘Drake’s Well’ at Titusville, PA.  Big Oil’s first act was to save the whales.  Kerosene quickly replaced boiled whale blubber for home lighting.  Whales should counter sue Sher-Edling for genocide.)

The lawsuit filed today details the history of defendants’ deceptive conduct, and many of the resulting harms inflicted on the state of Hawaiʻi as a result of that conduct. Some key excerpts from the complaint filed today:

• “Climate change has already impacted and will continue to harm Native Hawaiian traditional and customary practices including upland forest practices, traditional agriculture, and coastal and nearshore marine practices.” (para 274)

(REALITY:  Anybody who identifies a specific weather event as evidence of global warming is a fraud.)

• “As of 2021, 66 state-owned facilities have reported flooding from sea level rise and precipitation. These facilities include public housing complexes in Kāneʻohe, the Hulihe‘e Palace historic site, and the Kauaʻi and Oʻahu Community Correctional Centers.” (para 280)

(IQ Test: Did you notice how ‘precipitation’ is slipped into that sentence?  ‘Climate Change’ now makes it rain and causes 66 leaky roofs.)

• “Moreover, 70 percent of the state’s beaches have already experienced erosion, and 13 miles of beach have been lost across the islands. These impacts will continue to worsen as the sea level rises further. By 2050, NOAA predicts that more than 90 percent of the state’s beaches will be receding.” (para 280)

(REALITY:  All of Hawaii’s shorelines have been eroding since the moment they broke through the surface of the ocean.  This process starts with Kauai six million years ago.  Molokai used to be a lot larger, but the northern half fell off.  Anybody who cites shoreline erosion as evidence of sea-level rise is a fraud.  Per NOAA, the sea level rise measured at Honolulu is 1.54mm per year.  That is six inches in a century.)

• “Climate impacts threaten Hawaiʻi water resources. As rainfall levels decline, Hawaiʻi will have decreasing access to freshwater… By 2030, the state may suffer from a freshwater shortfall of 100 million gallons per day.” (para 292)

(KEY WORD: ‘May.’  REALITY:  Anybody who identifies a specific weather event as evidence of global warming is a fraud.)

• “Climate change increases the threat of wildfires for Hawaiʻi. The 2023 Maui wildfires were the deadliest in modern U.S. history and the worst natural disaster in the history of the state. More than 100 lives were lost, and more than 2,200 structures were destroyed, causing $5.5 billion of damage.” (para 294)

(REALITY:  Anybody who identifies a specific weather event as evidence of global warming is a fraud.  The Lahaina fire was caused by two of Hawaii’s most politically-connected old boy institutions: HECO and KSBE.  This lawsuit, and the Hawaii Legislative Resolution urging Lahaina insurers to subrogate by suing big oil, are just shams designed to protect entrenched local interests.)

• “Climate change has, and will continue to have, constant, widespread, and severe impacts to the physical health of Hawaiʻi residents. Rising temperatures and intense heat waves, extreme weather events, related disruptions to health and emergency services, and increased proliferation of vector-borne disease and pathogens will and has already taken its toll.” (para 311)

(CLUE: Environmentalism is a religion.  Just like some other religions, they’ve got plagues of disease and boils, water turning to blood, gnats, locusts and frogs.  The First Amendment says: ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.’)

The lawsuit requests a jury trial and seeks relief in the form of compensatory, punitive, and natural resource damages; civil penalties; disgorgement of profits; and an order enjoining Defendants from engaging in the unfair or deceptive acts or practices described in the lawsuit, among others.

(REALITY:  We’re in State Court because we can win anything against outsiders there.)

A copy of the complaint as filed can be found here.

BACKGROUND: 

2023: Rectenwald Worked With Environmental Group Tied To Oil Plaintiffs’ Lawyers

2025: Hawaii Democrats Talk a Big Game on the ‘Climate Crisis.’ They’re Also Shielding an Oil Company Whose Execs Backed Their Campaigns

2025: SCR198: Screwed out of Subrogation, Insurers Urged to Serve Legislature’s Agenda by Suing Big Oil

EDITORS NOTE: This Hawai’i Free Press column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The post Hawaiʻi Condemns Administration’s Illegal Attemp to Interfere with State Lawsuit Against Big Oil appeared first on Dr. Rich Swier.

Green Energy Fixation Sends Spain Dark thumbnail

Green Energy Fixation Sends Spain Dark

By The Daily Signal

VALENCIA, Spain—Two modern ills converged in Europe on Monday, literally one of the darkest days in decades. An ideological obsession with climate fanaticism left countries without power for hours, while censorship of “disinformation,” often information the powerful don’t like, plunged the population in an informational blackout in subsequent days.

The electrical blackout brought planes, trains, and automobiles to a screeching halt throughout Spain, Portugal, and small parts of southern France. Electricity simply stopped flowing, and with it control towers, rail lines, and traffic lights.

Cellphones became quadrangular black boxes that did nothing and lost their “smartness.”

A political conference I was attending in this sunny Mediterranean port city suddenly became eerie when people started coming in and out and whispering to each other. One person in the seat in front finally turned and enlightened a friend and me: “The electricity is down. We’re cut off from the world.”

We then realized that, yes, sirens had been wailing outside, and it had been a while since we’d gotten emails or texts. A generator in the hotel kept our conference going, but nothing else worked; everyone had to take the stairs and use bathrooms in the dark—though water, too, stopped working.

It wasn’t quite dystopic, but our modern dependence on electricity and its creature comforts suddenly was brought home to us.

Many speculated that it was a cyberattack from Russia or China. Who else had the power to do this? Center-right politicians from across Europe were about to descend on Valencia the next day. Surely, an invitation for bad actors to do their thing.

Well, not so fast. Neither Russia’s Vladimir Putin nor China’s Xi Jinping is above carrying out this type of attack, and cybersecurity is a serious matter. But, to quote Vice President JD Vance at a February conference in Munich, Germany, the threat to worry about the most in Europe “is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor.”

“What I worry about,” went on Vance, “is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its fundamental values.”

Vance mentioned Europe’s need “to enjoy affordable energy,” and the fact that, as he put it, “free speech, I fear, is in retreat.” European officials are still fuming about how “rude” that young Vance was, but it looks like he was on the money.

It is increasingly clear that what caused the blackout was not a cyberattack. Reuters News agency reported that Spain’s grid operator Red Electrica on Tuesday ruled out external sabotage, and said instead that it had identified two “incidents of power generation loss, probably from solar plants,” in southwestern Spain.

That, said the Reuters report, “caused instability in the electric system and led to a breakdown of its connection with France. The electrical system collapsed, affecting both the Spanish and Portuguese systems.”

“There was not enough inertia, or redundancy, in the system to keep it going,” my colleague Diana Furchott-Roth emailed from Washington when I was able to receive communications from the outside world. “The last coal-fired plant was closed on April 12.”

Diana has been warning about this type of thing for decades, and Spain’s socialist prime minister Pedro Sanchez is a poster boy for the things she has warned against. His government has not only closed coal-fired plants, but has been busily destroying nuclear plants as well.

“Net zero,” or zero CO2 emissions, is the name of this new mad delusion, and Spain’s infantile leftists have been posting on social media gleeful workers destroying nuclear power plants. The goal has been 100% “renewable” generation.

Well, they happened to have gotten very close to their holy grail on Monday at 12:30. The Iberian Peninsula’s power grid was getting a disproportionate amount of energy from the renewables loved by the Left: 80% from solar photovoltaic, solar thermal and wind. Nuclear was at a measly 11%.

In a mere five minutes, solar photovoltaic generation plunged by 50%, from 18 gigawatts to eight, according to Reuters. Iberia and adjacent parts of France, including the tiny Pyrenean principality of Andorra, all of which depended on this grid, then descended into darkness at 12:35, from which it was not to recover till late at night.

The hapless Sanchez was still arguing late Tuesday that just because Red Electrica was discounting a cyberattack, it did not mean that one hadn’t happened.

Governments finding themselves in a corner will lie, or at least equivocate, and it’s the job of the opposition to keep asking for answers. “An energy policy that prioritizes the fight against climate change above the security of supply has provoked this general blackout,” said an analysis on the site of the think tank Disenso, which is linked to the opposition Vox Party (full disclosure, I sit on Disenso’s foreign advisory board).

But it is also the job of the media. Yet Spain’s state television stations, and even private ones, were still keeping the truth about the failure of the Left’s renewable dream from getting any airtime as late as Wednesday morning, when I left for the airport. That was left to radio and to some newspapers on the right.

An honest media would be not just informing voters about how a blackout that left at least five dead and stopped a modern economy in its tracks happened. It would also be debating whether such a modern society really does want to stop using comfort creatures and working toilets, all in the name of fighting climate change.

Originally published by the Washington Examiner.

AUTHOR

Mike is the Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow in the Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation. Read his research. Mike on X: .

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‘Cost A Lot Of People Their Jobs’: JD Vance Slams Biden Admin For Deciding Products Would No Longer Be Made In America thumbnail

‘Cost A Lot Of People Their Jobs’: JD Vance Slams Biden Admin For Deciding Products Would No Longer Be Made In America

By The Daily Caller

Vice President JD Vance on Thursday slammed former President Joe Biden’s administration during a speech at Nucor Steel Berkeley for deciding that products would be made overseas instead of in the United States.

Vance said that over the last few decades, political leaders forgot about the “core part of American national identity” by allowing the U.S. to rely on foreign powers for essential goods. The vice president said manufacturing facilities like Nucor immensely struggled over the last four years due to the Biden administration’s “crushing environmental regulations.”

“For a couple decades, though, our leaders forgot about that core part of American national identity. They decided that America would no longer be a manufacturing power,” Vance said. “Instead, we let the rest of the world make the necessary things that we needed for our homes and for our families. And when a nation decides to deindustrialize my friends, you know what else they stop using? The intermediate goods, the things that are essential to manufacturing, like steel that you all make right here in Nucor. So we stopped making the things that we needed.”

WATCH:

Nucor Steel’s leadership told Vance that the company’s facility in West Virginia that “sat idle” under the Biden administration due to its environmental rules. The vice president said that these types of regulations cost hard working Americans their good paying manufacturing jobs and wages.

“So when our leadership decides that Americans don’t want to make anything, you know what we do? We cost great businesses and corporations like Nuccor a lot of money, we cost great workers their wages and we cost a lot of people their jobs. And that was the policy of the last administration that came before us.”

Vance added that President Donald Trump’s administration wants American architecture to be “built with American hands and with great American steel.”

The Biden administration strived to make manufacturing eco-friendly by handing as much as $6 billion to 33 different projects in 20 states in order for them to reduce emissions generated by industrial production in March 2024. In Trump’s second term, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin has repealed dozens of environmental regulations put in place by the Biden administration to lower costs and open up new job opportunities in the country.

The Trump administration placed reciprocal tariffs on other countries, which are currently under a 90-day pause, with the intent of returning manufacturing to the United States. Many union workers in the steel and auto industry have praised the administration’s move, stating that it will bring back jobs and help their industries flourish.

AUTHOR

Nicole Silverio

Media Reporter.

RELATED ARTICLE: ‘Don’t You All Have Jobs?’: JD Vance Calls On Protesters Demonstrating Against His Event To Get ‘Back To Work’

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.


All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

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Trump’s First 100 Days: Executive Sprint, Legislative Snooze thumbnail

Trump’s First 100 Days: Executive Sprint, Legislative Snooze

By Family Research Council

President Donald Trump has begun his second term with “a barnstorm of a first 100 days,” as FRC Action Director Matt Carpenter put it on “Washington Watch.” The president himself has issued 143 executive orders, while his administration has moved in so many directions “at such an incredible pace that it’s almost hard to keep up with,” marveled Rep. Addison McDowell (R-N.C.). “He’s got his eye on the history books,” Carpenter declared. The real test will be whether the Trump administration can match its historically quick opening with long-term staying power.

“Historically, a president’s first 100 days in office … acts as a marker,” explained guest host and former Congressman Jody Hice, “to determine how successful, how effective that president has been.” Presidents usually begin with a sort of “honeymoon period,” in which Congress remembers their recent electoral triumph, and voters still give them the benefit of the doubt. The 100-day mark serves as a sort of artificial milestone for analyzing how much a presidential administration achieved over this period.

“Really out of the gate, the president took initiative to address the major concerns of the American people, the issues that were center to the electorate at large — things like immigration, securing the border … addressing the cost of living crisis,” Carpenter reflected.

In addition, he added, Trump has “not neglected some of the commitments he’s made to the more socially conservative elements of the Republican Party. He’s reinstated the Mexico City policy, he’s overturned the Department of Defense’s policy to reimburse for travel related to performing abortions … and then [he is] also enforcing the Hyde Amendment.”

In a mere 100 days, the Trump administration has deported 100,000 illegal immigrants, shut down the border, defined male and female correctly, banished DEI from the federal government, shut down or restructured ineffective agencies like USAID or the Department of Education, audited executive departments for waste, fraud, and abuse, and taken the world on a tariff roller coaster.

“The simple, four-word phrase that I think describes this perfectly is ‘promises made, promises kept,’” McDowell declared. “It’s a crazy concept in Washington to do what you say you’re going to do. That’s exactly what the president is doing.” According to an FRC Action tracker of 52 specific policy promises Trump made during the campaign, the president has completed 32 items, four are in progress, and only 16 are still pending.

The Trump administration’s personnel reforms are proceeding nearly as rapidly as its policy agenda. “There are thousands of political appointees [who] are made by each successive administration, Republican or Democrat. And the speed of getting good people into those seats is important, but so is the quality,” explained Quena Gonzalez, FRC’s senior director of Government Affairs, on “Outstanding.” “Judging by the personnel that I have seen so far, vacuumed up by the administration, I’m greatly encouraged.”

Gonzalez noted the Trump administration’s labors to purge the federal bureaucracy of left-wing ideologues and functionaries who were simply poor workers. He noted that even sympathetic reporting in The Washington Post “let slip … that many of these people” fired from the federal workforce “did not share Trump’s worldview and the worldview of the people that elected him.”

The moment they heard the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) showed up to investigate USAID, for example, many employees “pulled down all the trans and pride flags on their desk … all the left-wing paraphernalia.”

Gonzalez argued that Trump’s rapid and radical reforms were necessary because “this is really a battle of worldviews.” For 23 years, he has watched Republican presidents begin to make “incremental changes,” which then fizzle out when the media finds or manufactures scandals. When a Democratic administration succeeds the Republican, the media then pretends that “everything’s back to normal,” when it most certainly is not.

“The Overton window” — the range of what positions are considered acceptable — “is shifting way to the left,” he said. “If the Right is unwilling to push back, then you lose ultimately.” So, he concluded, “for a correction to be successful, it has to be pretty drastic.”

Based on his previous experience with bureaucratic insubordination, Trump entered office with greater awareness of the bureaucratic war he would have to wage. “Trump’s been here before. He was stymied in some ways by the entrenched interests here in Washington, and he came back wanting results.” Whereas last time Trump campaigned on the slogan, “Drain the Swamp,” suggested Gonzalez, “this time he came and blew up whatever dam it was that held that swamp together.”

On issues like the border, Trump’s swift and successful actions demonstrate that solving the problem “didn’t take new laws, it just took a new president,” McDowell mused. But therein lies the glaring weakness amid his whirlwind of reform: what one administration ushers in, the next can drive out. “I don’t think speed is the issue. I’m really pleased with the speed and vigor of the administration,” said Gonzalez, but an executive order only lasts “as long as the executive.”

What happens after Trump leaves office, the next time a Democratic candidate wins a presidential election?

This is where Congress must step up to the plate. In all the time that Trump has issued 143 executive orders, Congress has passed a grand total of five laws. Only one of those laws (the Laken Riley Act) represented a significant policy change; one was a stopgap funding measure that simply punted a government shutdown into the near future, and the other three were resolutions that disapproved agency rules that the Biden administration tried to slip under the radar on its way out the door.

Congress is “having to play the most catch-up right now … because they’ve ceded so much authority” to the executive branch, Gonzalez explained. “Congress has been happy, for upwards of 50 years, to cede more and more control to what we call the administrative state.” Their task is made more difficult in the current Congress by “the very slim majorities of Republicans in the House and the Senate.”

“Trump had the initiative coming in, as the new president, to act unilaterally in some ways. … And he’s even tested the boundaries of what it’s possible for a president to do,” granted Gonzalez. “But really, the hard work of making those changes permanent … will be up to Congress.”

“We can focus on the first 100 days of the president. But Congress has a huge role to play. And, increasingly after the first 100 days, their role is going to become very important,” he continued.

Unfortunately, after 100 days, passing legislation through Congress also becomes more difficult because members of Congress will already begin thinking about the next election. “The first 100 days is kind of like this nice incubator period where you get your cabinet, you get your political appointees done, and then after that, it’s like, ‘Okay, who’s running for Congress?’” said Gonzalez.

Midterm elections are “typically when you see the party in power lose seats, so I think from here on out there’s going to be some volatility in the political environment in D.C.,” he explained. For “members in the House who are vulnerable … if it’s advantageous for them to throw an elbow at the Trump administration, they might do that.”

If Congress could not pass any more legislation during Trump’s first 100 days, how can they hope to achieve more for the rest of the term? As swing-district members begin to contemplate their electoral vulnerabilities, enacting conservative legislation will become harder, not easier.

Historically, presidents have expended considerable political capital negotiating with Congress to win legislative victories. This time around, President Trump has been so preoccupied with unilateral executive action that he has hardly bothered to herd Congress along. If he wants to make his agenda permanent, Trump will eventually have to turn his attention to Congress. But it remains uncertain whether he has waited too long, or whether he will even try.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

The post Trump’s First 100 Days: Executive Sprint, Legislative Snooze appeared first on Dr. Rich Swier.

Earth Day Reminder: Green Groups Linked To World’s Top Polluter thumbnail

Earth Day Reminder: Green Groups Linked To World’s Top Polluter

By The Daily Caller

Some prominent green groups — including ones that play up Earth Day — also happen to have financial connections to the government of China, the nation that pollutes the planet more than any other.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Energy Foundation China (EFC), Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) and other entities that fund climate initiatives in the U.S. have direct or indirect relationships with the Chinese state, according to The Washington Examiner. Many environmental organizations celebrated Earth Day on Tuesday, even while some of the leading groups in the green movement have cozied up to China, the world’s leading emitter and a prolific polluter of the oceans.

For example, NRDC maintains an office in Beijing that is registered with the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau and operates under the supervision of China’s National Forestry and Grassland Administration, the Examiner reported. Several senior staff members working for NRDC’s China office formerly worked for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), including one adviser who worked for a Chinese agency suspected of targeting American corporations for intellectual property theft.

NRDC advised its followers to “let Earth Day be a reminder that we have a future to win” in a Tuesday social media post, lamenting in a separate post that it’s “not quite the case anymore” that “people [stand] together across party lines for cleaner air, water and a healthier future.”

“The NRDC is an independent, non-profit, public-interest group working to protect public health and the environment. We work in China for one reason: there’s not a single global environmental problem that the world can confront, unless China is part of the fix,” NRDC spokesman Bob Deans said in a statement shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation. “We work alongside the people and institutions in China that are searching for solutions and progress. That’s what our work there is all about. When developing our institutional positions—in the United States or anywhere else in the world—we rely on our U.S.-based senior leadership and board of independent trustees, and no one else. We do the bidding of no government, in this country, or any other.”

Additionally, NRDC has been a major grantee of the Energy Foundation China (EFC), a now-independent group that was once a part of the Energy Foundation, according to the Examiner. Zou Ji, the president and CEO of EFC, used to be a top official for China’s National Center for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation, a state-run organization that helps the Chinese government participate in global climate change initiatives.

EFC is directly involved in efforts to help the Chinese government execute its climate agenda, according to the Examiner.

EFC has also routed hundreds of thousands of dollars to RMI, a U.S. outfit that works “with the U.S. Congress and federal agencies to develop and follow through on ambitious and beneficial electrification policies,” according to its website. RMI teamed up with the Chinese government to publish a 2013 report addressing a global energy transition to favor intermittent renewables like solar and wind, the supply chains for which China happens to dominate globally.

Wei Ding, a Chinese businessman, served on RMI’s board as of at least 2022, according to RMI’s tax filings for that year and the Examiner. Ding formerly chaired an investment bank owned in part by the Chinese government, and a number of other RMI staff members have worked for the Chinese state in various capacities in the past as well, according to the Examiner. Like NRDC, RMI has a presence in China to complement its U.S. operations.

“RMI works in China because reducing emissions there is critical,” a RMI spokesperson said in a statement to the DCNF. “RMI shares its independent research and analysis with governments, policymakers, corporations and fellow nonprofits to accelerate the adoption of market-based solutions for clean energy.”

Notably, RMI received a $750,000 grant from the Biden administration in 2023 to advance its electric vehicle (EV) agenda, and RMI also provided partial funding for a 2022 study purporting to demonstrate that gas stove use and childhood asthma are linked. Several media outlets promoted the study, and the Biden administration indicated it may move to crack down on gas stoves in January 2023 before nominally retreating from the idea.

Additionally, several major left-of-center U.S. grantmakers that support climate advocacy also have financial relationships with China, such as the Ford Foundation, which believes that natural resource extraction will “dispossess and marginalize land-connected communities, driving inequality and injustice,” according to the Examiner and the foundation’s website. The Ford Foundation has poured millions of dollars into China’s “Belt and Road Initiative,” a global infrastructure development effort that critics have characterized as a thinly-disguised instrument of debt trap diplomacy.

Similarly, the Gates Foundation — the charitable organization of billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates — pumped nearly $12 million into various parts of the Chinese government in 2023, according to the Examiner. The foundation works around the world to “help people in the world’s poorest countries thrive in a climate where droughts, floods, and heat waves are becoming more severe and more frequent” in light of climate change, according to Gates’ website.

EFC, the Ford Foundation and the Gates Foundation did not respond to requests for comment.

AUTHOR

Nick Pope

Contributor.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.


All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

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On Earth Day, We Finally Have a President Who Follows Science thumbnail

On Earth Day, We Finally Have a President Who Follows Science

By The White House

Under President Donald J. Trump, America is back — leveraging environmental policies rooted in reality to promote economic growth while maintaining the standards that have afforded Americans the cleanest air and water in the world for generations.

Unlike the previous administration, which wasted billions of taxpayer dollars on virtue signaling and ineffective grifts, the Trump Administration’s policies are rooted in the belief that Americans are the best stewards of our vast natural resources — no “Green New Scam” required.

President Trump is promoting energy innovation for a healthier future.

  • By supporting cutting-edge technologies like carbon capture and storage, nuclear energy, and next-generation geothermal, the Trump Administration is ensuring America leads in both energy production and environmental innovation — producing the cleanest energy in the world.

  • Moreover, by ending the Biden-era pause on liquefied natural gas export approvals, the U.S. is sharing cleaner energy with allies, reducing global emissions, and creating American jobs — building on President Trump’s first-term successes, where the U.S. led the world in greenhouse gas emission reductions.

President Trump is championing sound forest management.

  • The Trump Administration’s proactive forest management policies protect America’s forests, reduce catastrophic wildfires, and promote sustainable land use.

  • By streamlining regulations and expanding responsible logging, President Trump is safeguarding millions of acres of forestland, improving wildlife habitats, and supporting rural economies at the same time.

President Trump is ending the forced use of paper straws. 

  • Not only are paper straw mandates flawed in their alleged scientific backing, they’re also bad for humans and the environment. According to a new report, paper straws contain dangerous PFAS chemicals — “forever chemicals” linked to significant long-term health conditions — that infiltrate the water supply.

  • Moreover, studies have found producing paper straws can have a larger carbon footprint and require more water than plastic straws for “approximately zero environmental impact.”

President Trump is cutting wasteful regulations that stifle innovation and raise costs.

  • Actions like pausing restrictive emissions rules for coal plants and revising the National Environmental Policy Act implementation have accelerated responsible energy and infrastructure projects while maintaining rigorous environmental standards — saving American families thousands annually on energy bills and proving that a strong economy and a healthy environment go hand-in-hand.

President Trump is protecting public lands.

  • The Trump Administration has prioritized access to federal lands for energy development while ensuring responsible management.

  • By opening more federal lands and waters for oil, gas, and critical mineral extraction, the U.S. is strengthening energy security and reducing reliance on foreign resources.

  • Simultaneously, investments in conservation, such as $38 billion in clean water infrastructure during President Trump’s first term, continue to safeguard America’s natural heritage for future generations.

President Trump is pushing back on unfair trade practices that harm the environment and undercut U.S. producers and exporters.

  • For years, foreign countries have taken advantage of our generosity at the expense of American workers and the environment.

  • Deforestation in Brazil is at a 15-year high, China’s unfair, harmful fishing practices flood the global market with illegal fish and deplete stocks, and Mexico fails to deter illegal fishing — all while enjoying massive trade deficits with the U.S. and contributing to global environmental degradation.

President Trump is cracking down on China — the most prolific polluter in the world. 

  • According to Reuters, China is “responsible for the most ocean plastic pollution per year with an estimated 2.4 million tons, about 30 percent of the global total.”

  • By imposing tough trade measures and promoting American manufacturing, the Administration is reducing reliance on China’s high-pollution industries, ensuring the U.S. leads by example with cleaner production and responsible global stewardship.

President Trump is protecting wildlife. 

  • By pausing certain wind projects, President Trump is recognizing wind turbines’ detrimental environmental impact, particularly on wildlife, which often outweighs their benefits.

Copyright (C) 2025 The White House. All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: Earth Day Reminder: Green Groups Linked To World’s Top Polluter

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Crichton: Environmentalism is the ‘Religion of Choice for Urban Atheists’ thumbnail

Crichton: Environmentalism is the ‘Religion of Choice for Urban Atheists’

By Hawaii Free Press

REMARKS TO THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB

by Michael Crichton — San Francisco — September 15, 2003

I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.

We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we’re told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears.

As an example of this challenge, I want to talk today about environmentalism. And in order not to be misunderstood, I want it perfectly clear that I believe it is incumbent on us to conduct our lives in a way that takes into account all the consequences of our actions, including the consequences to other people, and the consequences to the environment. I believe it is important to act in ways that are sympathetic to the environment, and I believe this will always be a need, carrying into the future. I believe the world has genuine problems and I believe it can and should be improved. But I also think that deciding what constitutes responsible action is immensely difficult, and the consequences of our actions are often difficult to know in advance. I think our past record of environmental action is discouraging, to put it mildly, because even our best intended efforts often go awry. But I think we do not recognize our past failures, and face them squarely. And I think I know why.

I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can’t be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people—the best people, the most enlightened people—do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday—these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don’t want to talk anybody out of them, as I don’t want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don’t want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can’t talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.

And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren’t necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It’s about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.

Am I exaggerating to make a point? I am afraid not. Because we know a lot more about the world than we did forty or fifty years ago. And what we know now is not so supportive of certain core environmental myths, yet the myths do not die. Let’s examine some of those beliefs.

There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago. When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden?

And what about indigenous peoples, living in a state of harmony with the Eden-like environment? Well, they never did. On this continent, the newly arrived people who crossed the land bridge almost immediately set about wiping out hundreds of species of large animals, and they did this several thousand years before the white man showed up, to accelerate the process. And what was the condition of life? Loving, peaceful, harmonious? Hardly: the early peoples of the New World lived in a state of constant warfare. Generations of hatred, tribal hatreds, constant battles. The warlike tribes of this continent are famous: the Comanche, Sioux, Apache, Mohawk, Aztecs, Toltec, Incas. Some of them practiced infanticide, and human sacrifice. And those tribes that were not fiercely warlike were exterminated, or learned to build their villages high in the cliffs to attain some measure of safety.

How about the human condition in the rest of the world? The Maori of New Zealand committed massacres regularly. The dyaks of Borneo were headhunters. The Polynesians, living in an environment as close to paradise as one can imagine, fought constantly, and created a society so hideously restrictive that you could lose your life if you stepped in the footprint of a chief. It was the Polynesians who gave us the very concept of taboo, as well as the word itself. The noble savage is a fantasy, and it was never true. That anyone still believes it, 200 years after Rousseau, shows the tenacity of religious myths, their ability to hang on in the face of centuries of factual contradiction.

There was even an academic movement, during the latter 20th century, that claimed that cannibalism was a white man’s invention to demonize the indigenous peoples. (Only academics could fight such a battle.) It was some thirty years before professors finally agreed that yes, cannibalism does indeed occur among human beings. Meanwhile, all during this time New Guinea highlanders in the 20th century continued to eat the brains of their enemies until they were finally made to understand that they risked kuru, a fatal neurological disease, when they did so.

More recently still the gentle Tasaday of the Philippines turned out to be a publicity stunt, a nonexistent tribe. And African pygmies have one of the highest murder rates on the planet.

In short, the romantic view of the natural world as a blissful Eden is only held by people who have no actual experience of nature. People who live in nature are not romantic about it at all. They may hold spiritual beliefs about the world around them, they may have a sense of the unity of nature or the aliveness of all things, but they still kill the animals and uproot the plants in order to eat, to live. If they don’t, they will die.

And if you, even now, put yourself in nature even for a matter of days, you will quickly be disabused of all your romantic fantasies. Take a trek through the jungles of Borneo, and in short order you will have festering sores on your skin, you’ll have bugs all over your body, biting in your hair, crawling up your nose and into your ears, you’ll have infections and sickness and if you’re not with somebody who knows what they’re doing, you’ll quickly starve to death. But chances are that even in the jungles of Borneo you won’t experience nature so directly, because you will have covered your entire body with DEET and you will be doing everything you can to keep those bugs off you.

The truth is, almost nobody wants to experience real nature. What people want is to spend a week or two in a cabin in the woods, with screens on the windows. They want a simplified life for a while, without all their stuff. Or a nice river rafting trip for a few days, with somebody else doing the cooking. Nobody wants to go back to nature in any real way, and nobody does. It’s all talk-and as the years go on, and the world population grows increasingly urban, it’s uninformed talk. Farmers know what they’re talking about. City people don’t. It’s all fantasy.

One way to measure the prevalence of fantasy is to note the number of people who die because they haven’t the least knowledge of how nature really is. They stand beside wild animals, like buffalo, for a picture and get trampled to death; they climb a mountain in dicey weather without proper gear, and freeze to death. They drown in the surf on holiday because they can’t conceive the real power of what we blithely call “the force of nature.” They have seen the ocean. But they haven’t been in it.

The television generation expects nature to act the way they want it to be. They think all life experiences can be tivo-ed. The notion that the natural world obeys its own rules and doesn’t give a damn about your expectations comes as a massive shock. Well-to-do, educated people in an urban environment experience the ability to fashion their daily lives as they wish. They buy clothes that suit their taste, and decorate their apartments as they wish. Within limits, they can contrive a daily urban world that pleases them.

But the natural world is not so malleable. On the contrary, it will demand that you adapt to it-and if you don’t, you die. It is a harsh, powerful, and unforgiving world, that most urban westerners have never experienced.

Many years ago I was trekking in the Karakorum mountains of northern Pakistan, when my group came to a river that we had to cross. It was a glacial river, freezing cold, and it was running very fast, but it wasn’t deep—maybe three feet at most. My guide set out ropes for people to hold as they crossed the river, and everybody proceeded, one at a time, with extreme care. I asked the guide what was the big deal about crossing a three-foot river. He said, well, supposing you fell and suffered a compound fracture. We were now four days trek from the last big town, where there was a radio. Even if the guide went back double time to get help, it’d still be at least three days before he could return with a helicopter. If a helicopter were available at all. And in three days, I’d probably be dead from my injuries. So that was why everybody was crossing carefully. Because out in nature a little slip could be deadly.

But let’s return to religion. If Eden is a fantasy that never existed, and mankind wasn’t ever noble and kind and loving, if we didn’t fall from grace, then what about the rest of the religious tenets? What about salvation, sustainability, and judgment day? What about the coming environmental doom from fossil fuels and global warming, if we all don’t get down on our knees and conserve every day?

Well, it’s interesting. You may have noticed that something has been left off the doomsday list, lately. Although the preachers of environmentalism have been yelling about population for fifty years, over the last decade world population seems to be taking an unexpected turn. Fertility rates are falling almost everywhere. As a result, over the course of my lifetime the thoughtful predictions for total world population have gone from a high of 20 billion, to 15 billion, to 11 billion (which was the UN estimate around 1990) to now 9 billion, and soon, perhaps less. There are some who think that world population will peak in 2050 and then start to decline. There are some who predict we will have fewer people in 2100 than we do today. Is this a reason to rejoice, to say halleluiah? Certainly not. Without a pause, we now hear about the coming crisis of world economy from a shrinking population. We hear about the impending crisis of an aging population. Nobody anywhere will say that the core fears expressed for most of my life have turned out not to be true. As we have moved into the future, these doomsday visions vanished, like a mirage in the desert. They were never there—though they still appear, in the future. As mirages do.

Okay, so, the preachers made a mistake. They got one prediction wrong; they’re human. So what. Unfortunately, it’s not just one prediction. It’s a whole slew of them. We are running out of oil. We are running out of all natural resources. Paul Ehrlich: 60 million Americans will die of starvation in the 1980s. Forty thousand species become extinct every year. Half of all species on the planet will be extinct by 2000. And on and on and on.

With so many past failures, you might think that environmental predictions would become more cautious. But not if it’s a religion. Remember, the nut on the sidewalk carrying the placard that predicts the end of the world doesn’t quit when the world doesn’t end on the day he expects. He just changes his placard, sets a new doomsday date, and goes back to walking the streets. One of the defining features of religion is that your beliefs are not troubled by facts, because they have nothing to do with facts.

So I can tell you some facts. I know you haven’t read any of what I am about to tell you in the newspaper, because newspapers literally don’t report them. I can tell you that DDT is not a carcinogen and did not cause birds to die and should never have been banned. I can tell you that the people who banned it knew that it wasn’t carcinogenic and banned it anyway. I can tell you that the DDT ban has caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, whose deaths are directly attributable to a callous, technologically advanced western society that promoted the new cause of environmentalism by pushing a fantasy about a pesticide, and thus irrevocably harmed the third world. Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history of America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die and didn’t give a damn.

I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it. I can tell you that the evidence for global warming is far weaker than its proponents would ever admit. I can tell you the percentage the US land area that is taken by urbanization, including cities and roads, is 5%. I can tell you that the Sahara desert is shrinking, and the total ice of Antarctica is increasing. I can tell you that a blue-ribbon panel in Science magazine concluded that there is no known technology that will enable us to halt the rise of carbon dioxide in the 21st century. Not wind, not solar, not even nuclear. The panel concluded a totally new technology-like nuclear fusion-was necessary, otherwise nothing could be done and in the meantime all efforts would be a waste of time. They said that when the UN IPCC reports stated alternative technologies existed that could control greenhouse gases, the UN was wrong.

I can, with a lot of time, give you the factual basis for these views, and I can cite the appropriate journal articles not in whacko magazines, but in the most prestigeous science journals, such as Science and Nature. But such references probably won’t impact more than a handful of you, because the beliefs of a religion are not dependant on facts, but rather are matters of faith. Unshakeable belief.

Most of us have had some experience interacting with religious fundamentalists, and we understand that one of the problems with fundamentalists is that they have no perspective on themselves. They never recognize that their way of thinking is just one of many other possible ways of thinking, which may be equally useful or good. On the contrary, they believe their way is the right way, everyone else is wrong; they are in the business of salvation, and they want to help you to see things the right way. They want to help you be saved. They are totally rigid and totally uninterested in opposing points of view. In our modern complex world, fundamentalism is dangerous because of its rigidity and its imperviousness to other ideas.

I want to argue that it is now time for us to make a major shift in our thinking about the environment, similar to the shift that occurred around the first Earth Day in 1970, when this awareness was first heightened. But this time around, we need to get environmentalism out of the sphere of religion. We need to stop the mythic fantasies, and we need to stop the doomsday predictions. We need to start doing hard science instead.

There are two reasons why I think we all need to get rid of the religion of environmentalism.

First, we need an environmental movement, and such a movement is not very effective if it is conducted as a religion. We know from history that religions tend to kill people, and environmentalism has already killed somewhere between 10-30 million people since the 1970s. It’s not a good record. Environmentalism needs to be absolutely based in objective and verifiable science, it needs to be rational, and it needs to be flexible. And it needs to be apolitical. To mix environmental concerns with the frantic fantasies that people have about one political party or another is to miss the cold truth—that there is very little difference between the parties, except a difference in pandering rhetoric. The effort to promote effective legislation for the environment is not helped by thinking that the Democrats will save us and the Republicans won’t. Political history is more complicated than that. Never forget which president started the EPA: Richard Nixon. And never forget which president sold federal oil leases, allowing oil drilling in Santa Barbara: Lyndon Johnson. So get politics out of your thinking about the environment.

The second reason to abandon environmental religion is more pressing. Religions think they know it all, but the unhappy truth of the environment is that we are dealing with incredibly complex, evolving systems, and we usually are not certain how best to proceed. Those who are certain are demonstrating their personality type, or their belief system, not the state of their knowledge. Our record in the past, for example managing national parks, is humiliating. Our fifty-year effort at forest-fire suppression is a well-intentioned disaster from which our forests will never recover. We need to be humble, deeply humble, in the face of what we are trying to accomplish. We need to be trying various methods of accomplishing things. We need to be open-minded about assessing results of our efforts, and we need to be flexible about balancing needs. Religions are good at none of these things.

How will we manage to get environmentalism out of the clutches of religion, and back to a scientific discipline? There’s a simple answer: we must institute far more stringent requirements for what constitutes knowledge in the environmental realm. I am thoroughly sick of politicized so-called facts that simply aren’t true. It isn’t that these “facts” are exaggerations of an underlying truth. Nor is it that certain organizations are spinning their case to present it in the strongest way. Not at all—what more and more groups are doing is putting out is lies, pure and simple. Falsehoods that they know to be false.

This trend began with the DDT campaign, and it persists to this day. At this moment, the EPA is hopelessly politicized. In the wake of Carol Browner, it is probably better to shut it down and start over. What we need is a new organization much closer to the FDA. We need an organization that will be ruthless about acquiring verifiable results, that will fund identical research projects to more than one group, and that will make everybody in this field get honest fast.

Because in the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost. We will enter the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don’t know any better. That’s not a good future for the human race. That’s our past. So it’s time to abandon the religion of environmentalism, and return to the science of environmentalism, and base our public policy decisions firmly on that.

Thank you very much.

EDITORS NOTE: This Hawai′i Free Press column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The post Crichton: Environmentalism is the ‘Religion of Choice for Urban Atheists’ appeared first on Dr. Rich Swier.

Why Do “Green” Groups Oppose Nuclear Energy? thumbnail

Why Do “Green” Groups Oppose Nuclear Energy?

By Capital Research Center

Biden Administration Approved $485 Million for Anti-Nuclear Nonprofits. 

During the last half of the Biden administration, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm began talking up the virtues of reliable, safe, and carbon-free nuclear energy. In August 2024 she called for constructing 98 more of our largest nuclear reactors—enough to power 50 million additional American homes.

But as she said this, Granholm’s own department and others within the Biden administration were putting the last touches on $485 million in combined grant awards for 20 opponents of nuclear power.

This help wasn’t needed. The known opponents of nuclear energy collectively rake in at least $2.5 billion every year.

To put this in perspective, the Nuclear Energy Institute, the main trade association promoting American nuclear power, reported a mere $57.3 million annual revenue in its last publicly available IRS filing. At least seven strident anti-nuclear nonprofits, such as the Sierra Club, reported double or even triple that amount.

But elections have consequences. The Biden-era grant awards were approved grants, and the recent work of the Department of Government Efficiency has in many cases clawed back or blocked the total awarded spending.

Big Winners

With $313.8 million in total Biden-era grant awards, Grid Alternatives was set to become the biggest of the anti-nuclear winners.

This would have been a nearly 100-fold increase over all federal funding approved for Grid Alternatives from 2008 through 2020. This is typical of the Biden-era anti-nuclear grants. Most of the other 19 awardees had received comparably little or even zero federal funding prior to 2021.

As covered in a previous report, most of the approved funding for Grid Alternatives was to come from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), to be used for hanging solar panels in low-income communities.

Grid Alternatives advertised its hatred of nuclear power long before the first grant was approved. The nonprofit cosigned a 2019 letter to Congress that referred to nuclear power as “dirty” and opposed its inclusion in any carbon-cutting energy policy.

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) was approved for $55.5 million in grants from several different agencies and departments during the Biden administration, more than half of it from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The WWF denounced a 2019 proposal from the European Union to include nuclear energy as a carbon-reduction tool, saying in a 2021 news release that doing so would be “greenwashing.”

The World Resources Institute (WRI) was approved for $43.6 million during the Biden years, most of it from USAID and the State Department. Impeding energy progress in developing nations is part of this nonprofit’s mission. In April 2018, WRI gave an “environmental prize” to a pair of South African activists for their work in blocking a $76 billion nuclear power investment in their homeland.

In 2023, the Department of Agriculture approved a $25 million grant for GreenLatinos. This sum was more than double the combined revenue raised by GreenLatinos from 2010 through 2023.

GreenLatinos consigned a May 2021 letter to Congress that opposed nuclear power and referred to it as a “dirty” energy source.

Other Anti-Nuclear Nonprofits

Here are the 16 other known anti-nuclear nonprofits that were approved for Biden administration grants, along with the approved cumulative total funding:

In addition to the federal departments and agencies already listed, the Biden-era anti-nuclear grants were also awarded by the Department of Interior, the Department Health and Human Services, the Federal Communications Commission, the Appalachian Regional Commission, the Department of CommerceNASA, and the Denali Commission.

Opponents of Civilization

The 20 anti-nuclear groups winning those awards also oppose the use of hydrocarbon fuels: oil, natural gas, and coal. This means they oppose 88 percent of all the energy used in America. As energy is the life blood of prosperity, it’s not an exaggeration to say these groups are implicitly opponents of industrial civilization itself.

Approval of these grants was in effect an attempt to force federal taxpayers to fund their own economic destruction. Going forward, perhaps federal grant seekers should be required to answer a rigorous set of questions regarding whether they have a position in opposition to the sources of American wealth and civilization that they are hoping to tap.

Editor’s Note: This article is part of the DOGE Files, a series of CRC investigations into federal grants to nonprofits. This article explores grants made to opponents of nuclear power.

AUTHOR

Ken Braun

Ken Braun is CRC’s senior investigative researcher and authors profiles for InfluenceWatch.org and the Capital Research magazine.

He previously worked for several free market policy organizations, spent six years as a chief of staff in the Michigan Legislature, and also wrote political columns for MLive Media Group, a consortium including the Grand Rapids Press and seven other mid-sized Michigan newspapers. He is an alumni of Michigan State University.

EDITORS NOTE: This Capital Research Center column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The post Why Do “Green” Groups Oppose Nuclear Energy? appeared first on Dr. Rich Swier.

Solar Picnic Tables? How The Federal Government Has Treated Your Tax Dollars With Utter Disdain thumbnail

Solar Picnic Tables? How The Federal Government Has Treated Your Tax Dollars With Utter Disdain

By The Daily Caller

The House Oversight Committee’s subpanel on government efficiency held a hearing Tuesday exposing billions of taxpayer dollars wasted annually on outdated federal buildings.

Republican Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who leads the Subcommittee on Delivering Government Efficiency (DOGE), opened the hearing by slamming federal agencies for maintaining a bloated real estate footprint. She pledged to continue pushing to “right-size” the federal government’s real estate portfolio.

“Here in D.C., [the Government Accountability Office] found in 2023 that the vast majority of federal agency headquarters buildings were less than 25% occupied — some much less,” Greene said. “Meanwhile, from 2022 to 2024, the backlog of deferred maintenance on the aging buildings the government owns grew from $216 billion to $370 billion. That’s more than one-third of a trillion dollars it will cost to restore them — if we don’t sell them.”

Under Biden, D.C. crumbled—overgrown lots, vacant offices, wasted cash.

By working with @DOGECommittee, we will ensure that the federal government is not impeding growth.

We will slash federal real estate leases, save billions, and rebuild a capital we can be proud of. pic.twitter.com/Q04mT6WYJd

— Congressman William Timmons (@RepTimmons) April 8, 2025

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has flagged federal property management as a “high-risk” area since 2003. Yet despite two decades of warnings, the Biden administration allowed billions to be spent not only to maintain vacant offices but also on lavish furniture purchases, according to the subcommittee’s review.

Greene highlighted early Trump administration moves, including canceling nearly 700 federal leases totaling 7.9 million square feet of space — moves she said saved taxpayers around $400 million. One such canceled lease was a 15-year, quarter-billion-dollar agreement for luxury office space on Pennsylvania Avenue, signed by the Biden administration to house Voice of America and the U.S. Agency for Global Media. The building, Greene said, had zero broadcasting capabilities, and taxpayers would have been on the hook for another $130 million in renovations.

John Hart, CEO of the watchdog group OpenTheBooks, framed the issue in visceral terms.

“Today’s expansive, excessive and sometimes opulent federal real estate portfolio is both a monument to the administrative state and a mausoleum of lost dreams, opportunity and freedom for American taxpayers,” Hart said in his opening statement. “Do federal employees need seven figures worth of abstract modern art to make the government run?”

Hart testified that agencies spent $4.6 billion on furniture since FY 2021, including $284,000 on FEMA conference rooms and nearly $120,000 on leather recliners for the U.S. embassy in Islamabad. Hart also cited the $238,000 the CDC spent on solar-powered picnic tables which, by the agency’s own social distancing rules, “should have sat unoccupied,” he said.

David Marroni of the GAO echoed the concern over dysfunction and inertia inside the federal property apparatus.

“The pandemic shined a spotlight on these long-standing problems,” Marroni told lawmakers. “The federal government has held on to too much space and has been too slow in shedding underused properties … Progress has been slow. Agencies were in a wait-and-see mode for too long.”

Marroni said that, for the first time, agencies are being forced to begin tracking actual building utilization data starting this summer.

Democrats on the panel said the Trump administration’s rapid disposal plan was ideologically driven and economically reckless.

“I think it’s very clear that part of the agenda here is really about dismantling the administrative state and using real assets of the federal government to do that,” Democratic New Mexico Rep. Melanie Stansbury, the ranking member of the subcommittee, said in the hearing. “The point here is that things are not always as they appear in Washington, D.C., and I think it’s very clear that this is not about the federal taxpayers and the American people. This is about disposing of federal property and a fire sale to make the wealthy more wealthy. Thanks.”

Republicans fired back. Texas Rep. Pat Fallon cited GAO findings that 17 of the 24 largest federal agencies used less than 25% of their office capacity. Republican South Carolina Rep. William Timmons said the goal was to offload waste and inject new life into dead office space. They cited reforms under the Federal Property Management Act and the Federal Assets Sale and Transfer Act of 2016 as a roadmap for future consolidation.

“I guarantee you that a developer — a big bad developer — is going to come in,” Timmons said. “They’ll build this massive building, put housing in it and pay taxes. That’s the highest and best use.”

Greene said the DOGE subcommittee intends to introduce legislation aimed at streamlining the disposal process for surplus federal property and imposing stricter accountability measures for future real estate acquisitions. She also said the subcommittee would work closely with the White House and the GAO to accelerate selloffs and lease terminations.

AUTHOR

Thomas English

Comtributor.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Senate Continues Dismantling Biden’s Green Energy Agenda By Voting To Repeal Gas Water Heater Ban

‘Do Not Respond’: Trump Press Sec Confirms They Ignore Reporters With Pronouns In Email Signatures

EXCLUSIVE: Possible GOP Senate Candidate’s Bill Takes Aim At ‘Rogue Regulators’

‘The Party Has Been Taken Over’: Doug Schoen Tells Harris Faulkner ‘Far Left’ Made Democratic Party ‘Unrecognizable’

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.


All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Inside the now-shuttered ‘East German-style’ EPA Museum — Gore says goodbye to USA?! thumbnail

Inside the now-shuttered ‘East German-style’ EPA Museum — Gore says goodbye to USA?!

By Marc Morano from Climate Depot

WATCH: Peek inside the now-shuttered EPA Museum that closed because it cost $4mil to build, $600k annually to operate & received less than 2000 visitors

Climate Depot’s Marc Morano: “The now-defunct EPA Museum evokes memories of an old East German government propaganda effort. Future generations will look back on this climate-obsessed era and marvel that a civilization ever took this climate crap seriously.”

Watch Fox News Video: EPA MUSEUM CLOSED: Cost $4 million of taxpayer dollars to build and no visitors!

RELATED ARTICLES:

EPA shuttering museum that cost $315 per visitor to stay open — with barely anyone showing up

‘Climate change may make it harder to spot submarines,’ new NATO study finds – Claim ‘warmer oceans alter how sound travels underwater’

The Climate Change movement might be nearing the end of its political lifespan – ‘Possible that Trump Admin is going to deal the death blows to the long-running climate change hysteria’

Even the EU, the motherlode of climate action, backs away from Climate Plans

Al Gore says goodbye to USA?!
NYT: ‘Gore Is Shifting His Climate Activism Abroad’ – ‘He has watched with alarm’ as Trump guts climate regs – Gore ‘is looking to the developing world for the next generation of climate activism’

UK Guardian: ‘Groundbreaking book argues climate crisis was sparked by colonization’ – Claims ‘climate breakdown is the mutant offspring of European scientific racism & colonialism’

Mag: ‘Bill Gates Gives Up on Climate Change’ – Gates signaling the end of a ‘major chapter in climate giving’ as ‘billionaires are pulling (climate) support at an alarming rate’

‘The Bill Gates Era of Climate Giving Has Ended’ – ‘Closing his (climate) policy & advocacy office and has laid off much of its staff’ – Gates was ‘instrumental to the lobbying effort to pass the IRA’

NYT claims ‘vicious cycle of extreme heat leading to more fossil fuel use’ – 

Realty Check: ‘As planet warms projected decrease in energy demand for heating is ~5x larger than projected increase due to more cooling’

Dogs Could Be Among ‘the First Victims of Climate Change’ – ‘Excessive panting, drooling, & lethargy’ from ‘increased risk of heat stress’

Climate Buzzwords Vanish From Corporate Earnings Calls As Trump Puts Green Energy Industry ‘On Its Heels’

Bill Gates in 2024: ‘My carbon footprint is high, & that’s partly why I’m so avid that we need to get all sources of emissions to zero’

Bill Gates says AI will replace doctors, & teachers within 10 years — & claims humans won’t be needed ‘for most things’

‘Climate Change Is Must-See Theater in London’ – New Play ‘Kyoto’ ‘draws sold-out audiences’ – Produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company, the play ‘dramatizes the first legally binding global pact’

Lomborg: ‘The global evidence is clear: Not a single country that relies heavily on wind & solar power has low average electricity costs’

Rolling Stone mag laments: ‘Trump Wants to Convince the World That Climate Change Is a Good Thing’ – He’s ‘ready to argue that climate change would benefit humans’

Watch: Morano on OAN TV talking DOGE climate cuts & EPA ‘gold bar’ spending

Listen: Morano on Joe Piscopo Show talking Greenpeace, offshore wind & Amazon taking over healthcare

Progress! US Supreme Court will not hear novel youth-led climate change case ‘claiming the U.S. govt’s energy policies violate their rights to be protected from climate change’

Watch: Morano on The First TV talking how Trump’s EPA is taking a blow torch to climate regulations

Watch: Princeton Prof. William Happer: The Climate Crisis Is a Made-Up Scare Story – ‘Saving the planet from one & a half degrees of warming is just crazy’

Climate Craziness Would Eliminate Air Travel – Except for the ‘Privileged’ as Airbus to use ‘sustainable aviation fuel’ which will add an expensive ‘green premium’ to airfares

©2025 . All rights reserved.

EXCLUSIVE: How Small Town America Stopped A Chinese Communist Party Takeover thumbnail

EXCLUSIVE: How Small Town America Stopped A Chinese Communist Party Takeover

By The Daily Caller

A U.S. electric vehicle battery manufacturer with ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has suspended its permit application to build a plant near a Michigan National Guard base following fierce opposition.

Chuck Thelen, CEO of Gotion Inc. — a “wholly owned and controlled” subsidiary of Chinese company Hefei Gotion High-Tech Power Energy Co. Ltd. (Gotion High-Tech) — said the decision stemmed from the firm’s ongoing breach of contract lawsuit against Green Charter Township, according to the Big Rapids Pioneer. The township soured on the $2.4 billion project in November 2023 after voters recalled numerous officials following a series of reports revealing Gotion and its Chinese parent company’s ties to the CCP.

“I applaud the people of Mecosta County as Gotion pauses their permitting process, but their fight is not over,” Republican Michigan Rep. John Moolenaar, chair of the House Select Committee on the CCP, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Gotion must announce it will finally listen to the people, and end its projects for good.”

“Over the last two years the residents of Green Charter Township, a small town of just 3,200 people, came together to defend American interests and stop Gotion from bullying its way into their community,” Moolenaar said. “The opposition to the CCP-affiliated company attended board meetings to voice their concerns and rallied their neighbors in true grassroots efforts against Gotion.”

‘National Security Risks’

Questions about Gotion’s CCP-ties began to arise around March 2023 when The Midwesterner reported Gotion High-Tech’s “Articles of Association” required the firm to establish a “Party organization and carry out Party activities in accordance with the Constitution of the Communist Party of China.”

Later, in August 2023, the DCNF found Gotion High-Tech’s Chinese-language annual reports from the previous year revealing the firm employed 923 CCP members at that time. The same month, the DCNF also discovered footage on the firm’s Chinese-language website showing employees visiting CCP memorials dressed as Red Army soldiers to pledge their lives to the Party.

Gotion Inc.’s parent firm ran field trips to #CCP sites in China, during which staff wore RED ARMY uniforms & swore CCP OATHS

“…to fight for communism as long as I live…”@DailyCaller recently reported Gotion High-Tech employs 923 CCP members (including its CEO)

WATCH: pic.twitter.com/Tpn2Jwynb9

— Philip Lenczycki 蔡岳 (@LenczyckiPhilip) August 31, 2023

Other Chinese-language announcements on Gotion High-Tech’s website unearthed by the DCNF showed Gotion’s Chief Technology Officer, Steven Cai, at the internal CCP committee meetings of its Chinese parent company.

The House Select Committee on the CCP investigated Gotion High-Tech in 2024 and “found their supply chains are reliant on forced labor as part of the CCP’s ongoing genocide of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang Province,” Mooleenaar told the DCNF.

“The full extent of Gotion’s ties to the CCP were uncovered, with the help of the investigative reporting by the Daily Caller News Foundation, as well as the national security risks posed by companies like Gotion,” Moolenaar said.

‘We Love Our Freedom’

Meanwhile, Michigan residents — like Joseph Cella, the director of the Michigan-China Economic and Security Review Group — engaged in grassroots activism to oppose the CCP-tied company. Cella served as the U.S. Ambassador to Fiji during the first Trump administration.

The former ambassador told the DCNF he blames local leaders for allowing such a company the opportunity to build a base of operations in Michigan.

“[They] refused to follow the directives given to state and local governments on dealings with China-based companies to exercise vigilance, conduct due diligence, and ensure transparency, integrity, and accountability are built into the partnership to guard against potential foreign government exploitation,” Cella said. “It is important that executive branch agencies, Congress, the Michigan Legislature, and citizens continue to scrutinize and investigate this ‘deal.’”

Cella credits other local activists, lawmakers, and journalists for their work in opposing Gotion’s project.

“This was a first-in-the-nation moment where a subnational incursion via a ‘deal’ with a China-based and CCP-tied company led to the recall and defeat of elected officials,” Cella said, referencing the November 2023 Green Charter Township election. “The totality of those activities for nearly two years resulted in this ‘deal’ being in grave trouble and facing a dim future.”

Dr. Ormand Hook, co-strategist for the “No Gotion” movement in Big Rapids, Michigan, told the DCNF that “people who just wanted to live in freedom” are “responsible for our victory.”

“We were motivated by the fact that we love our freedom and are not willing to give up our freedom to America’s number one geopolitical adversary. Plain and simple,” Hook said. “We had to push back at every opportunity because we had no playbook. We found the weaknesses and exploited them as best we could. Our biggest objective was to replace the fraudulent elected officials, which we were successful in doing.”

Among other things, Hook told the DCNF that many in the No Gotion movement were galvanized into action after the Michigan state Senate Appropriations Committee granted Gotion $175 million in taxpayer funding to support their project. The funding allocation passed with a 10-9 vote, despite every committee Republican and three Democrats voting against it.

“We found out most local politicians were in bed with the governor and our enemies,” Hook said.

Lori Brock, another leader of the No Gotion movement, told the DCNF that she was “cautiously optimistic that this disastrous project may finally be coming to an end.”

“We will continue to fight until it is completely gone from our community, and it’s my hope that our political leaders have learned a valuable lesson from this experience: in America, you don’t get to completely upend a community and our way of life without the consent of the people who live here, and American tax dollars should never, ever be used to subsidize anything associated with the CCP,” Brock said.

Thelen and Gotion did not respond to requests for comment.

AUTHOR

Philip Lenczycki

RELATED ARTICLE: EXCLUSIVE: Pentagon, Energy Dept. Nuclear Research Projects Tapped Sanctioned Chinese Communist Party Supercomputers

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.


All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

‘Years of Climate Action Demolished in 52 Days’ By Trump — A ‘Climate Onslaught’ thumbnail

‘Years of Climate Action Demolished in 52 Days’ By Trump — A ‘Climate Onslaught’

By Marc Morano from Climate Depot

WATCH: Morano on Fox & Friends on Amazon rainforest being clear-cut for 4-lane highway for UN climate summit:

‘This is beyond parody. If they really cared about the rainforest or the climate, they would have a Zoom conference’

‘Years of Climate Action Demolished in Days’ By Trump! — A ‘Climate Onslaught’ — Reveals ‘how little anyone ever really cared about global warming’

‘Climate protest group Just Stop Oil says it will stop direct action’

Plus: Warmist turns on ‘sketchy’ LA Wildfire ‘attribution’ study

Former spokeswoman for Extinction Rebellion red-pilled on ‘green groups’ — ‘They have ‘nothing to do with protecting the Earth’

Cheers! Bloomberg columnists: ‘Years of Climate Action Demolished in Days’ By Trump – ’82 actions across 20 govt bodies…in 1st 52 DAYS’ – ‘Climate Onslaught’ –
Unleashed ‘climate demolition’

Morano: ‘This is how it’s done! Thank you, Mr. President!’

NYT’s moment of clarity: Paper shopping bags ‘might not be as green as you think’ – ‘Paper bags tend to require more energy to produce than plastic ones’ & ‘In landfills, paper bags produce methane & CO2’

Warmist Sabine Hossenfelder disgusted with climate scientists over media hyped LA wildfires climate ‘attribution’ study:
‘Many climate scientists know how sketchy the studies are…but they keep their mouth shut’ – ‘They don’t say a word because it’d be politically inconvenient’

WaPo: ‘Growing weed takes more energy than mining bitcoin’ –Uses 1% of all American energy, ‘warms the planet about as much as 10 million cars’

Mag: ‘Email signatures are harming the planet & could cost people their lives — it’s time to stop using them’ – Adding ‘gender pronouns in emails…may contribute to the premature deaths of one person a year’

Watch: Energy Sec. Wright: ‘Net Zero by 2050 is just nonsense. It’s an activist thing, & it’s a top-down, big government justification to do mostly anti-human things’

Think EVs are ‘green’?! 

‘Typical Tesla EV battery weighs 1,000 pounds & includes 26lbs of lithium, 10lbs of cobalt, 110lbs of nickel, 9lbs of manganese, 55lbs of copper, 44lbs of aluminum, 154lbs of graphite, plus, steel, plastic, & other metals’

Watch: Democrat Sen. Angus King grills Tulsi Gabbard: ‘Who decided climate change should be left out of this (threat assessment) report after it’s been in the prior 11?’

Bloomberg News goes all in for China! ‘This Is China’s Chance to Prove It’s a Climate Leader’ – Trump’s rejection of UN climate goals ‘has offered China a rare opportunity to expand its global influence’ – ‘China can produce the kind of change the world actually wants to see’

Lomborg: ‘Hunger keeps declining, even with climate change’ – ‘Over the past century, hunger has declined dramatically’

Study finds Trump Effect in U.S. over belief in ‘climate change’: In 2016, Republicans had ‘a noticeable rise’ of being ‘climate change believers’ after UN Paris pact –
But ‘by 2018, after Trump withdrew from the UN Paris Agreement…belief partially reversed, with more (GOP) individuals returning to higher skepticism’

Whitmer’s Michigan spent $670 million on green energy & EV corporate welfare — ZERO jobs created after three years!

The Climate Scam is Over: Peer-reviewed AI analysis completely debunks all of the ‘man-made’ claims

NYT claims ‘vicious cycle of extreme heat leading to more fossil fuel use’ –
Realty Check: ‘As planet warms projected decrease in energy demand for heating is ~5x larger than projected increase due to more cooling’

The downfall of climate change poster boy Michael Mann:
‘If Mann cannot even be trusted to tell the truth when he’s under oath & in court on pain of perjury, why on earth should any of us take him seriously on the subject of climate change?’

Lomborg: ‘The global evidence is clear: Not a single country that relies heavily on wind & solar power has low average electricity costs’

Morano on WMAL on Trump’s EPA reversing Obama/Biden regs: ‘We are seeing the climate movement collapse before our eyes’

Watch: ‘Germany detonates its most modern coal-fired power plant after just six years’ – Able ‘to power the entire city’ of Hamburg – ‘They demolished it because Greta said so’

Meanwhile:

© 2025 . All rights reserved.

House Republicans Seek To Repeal More Biden Green Energy Regulations thumbnail

House Republicans Seek To Repeal More Biden Green Energy Regulations

By The Daily Caller

The House of Representatives will seek to overturn several Biden administration climate regulations limiting consumer choice later this week.

Speaker Mike Johnson is slated to bring two joint resolutions of disapproval to the House floor to repeal green energy standards for home appliances including refrigerators and freezers. The regulations were issued by the Department of Energy (DOE) during the final weeks of President Joe Biden’s term, allowing congressional Republicans to repeal the Biden regulations using the Congressional Review Act (CRA).

“Republicans are getting the country back on track,” GOP House Conference Chair Lisa McClain said at a leadership press conference Tuesday. “House Republicans are securing the border. We are protecting women, and we are passing legislation to lower costs for American families.”

Congress can rescind recently issued regulations from the prior administration by a simple majority vote under the CRA.

Republican Reps. Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma and Craig Goldman of Texas are the lead sponsors of the joint resolutions of disapproval — H.J. Res. 24 and H.J. Res. 75 — taking aim at the DOE green energy standards for walk-in coolers and freezers and commercial refrigerators and freezers.

This week, the House will vote on H.J.Res.24 and H.J.Res.75. These Congressional Review Act resolutions will reverse two Biden-era regulations that have increased costs and made America less competitive.

House Republicans are keeping our promise to restore common-sense, empower… https://t.co/3H6DUH1ewm

— Chairwoman Lisa McClain (@RepLisaMcClain) March 25, 2025

“The Biden administration has done everything it can to regulate all aspects of our homes and businesses,” Bice told Fox News Digital on Jan. 16. “Walk-in coolers and freezers are used everywhere; from pharmacies, convenience stores, food processing facilities, food banks, restaurants, and more.”

“President Biden’s DOE consistently abused their authority to push a radical energy agenda on American consumers, attempting to implement conservation standards that are neither economically justifiable nor significantly more energy efficient for several household appliances like refrigerators and washing machines,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise wrote in a statement Sunday. “These overreaching rules take away consumer choice, burden American families, and force Americans to use expensive appliances that do not perform as well.”

The House also passed a joint resolution of disapproval repealing the Biden EPA’s tax on the methane emissions of oil and gas operators on Feb. 26. President Donald Trump signed the resolution overturning the methane tax on March 17.

AUTHOR

Adam Pack

Contributor.

RELATED ARTILE: Climate Activists Want To Blame Americans’ Soaring Utility Bills On Anything But Green Energy

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.


All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Burgum Says U.S. Natural Resources Could Equal $100 Trillion as Trump Expands Alaskan Drilling thumbnail

Burgum Says U.S. Natural Resources Could Equal $100 Trillion as Trump Expands Alaskan Drilling

By Family Research Council

In a move to vastly expand energy production within the United States, the Trump administration announced on Thursday that it will reopen over 80% of Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve to oil and gas drilling. The action comes as U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum suggested that the total value of America’s energy natural resources may approach $100 trillion.

According to an agency press release, the plan would reopen 82% of the reserve for oil and natural gas leasing as well as expand “energy development opportunities” inside the 23-million-acre area to encompass previous undeveloped land. In addition, the department will reinstate a program “that makes the entire 1.56-million-acre Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge available for oil and gas leasing.”

A third action named by the department would open up the “Trans-Alaska Pipeline Corridor and Dalton Highway north of the Yukon River” in order to allow the construction of a natural gas pipeline and a mining road. These two projects “stand to increase job opportunities and encourage Alaska’s economic growth,” Burgum noted.

“It’s time for the U.S. to embrace Alaska’s abundant and largely untapped resources as a pathway to prosperity for the nation, including Alaskans,” Burgum summarized. “For far too long, the federal government has created too many barriers to capitalizing on the state’s energy potential. Interior is committed to recognizing the central role the State of Alaska plays in meeting our nation’s energy needs, while providing tremendous economic opportunity for Alaskans.”

The previous administration under former President Joe Biden had “reduced oil and gas drilling to less than half of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska’s Western Arctic, down from 82% during Mr. Trump’s first term.” A year ago, the administration levied new oil and gas leasing restrictions within 13 million acres of federal Alaskan land. Then just before leaving office in January, Biden prohibited oil and gas leasing in the Northern Bering Sea and implemented new constraints on drilling in 1.3 million acres of the Alaskan North Slope.

In contrast, President Donald Trump signed an executive order on the first day of his second term vowing to “unleash America’s affordable and reliable energy and natural resources,” as well as a second EO focused on Alaskan resources, which Thursday’s Department of the Interior (DOI) action was designed to implement.

Alaskan lawmakers welcomed the move. “Today marks a new day for Alaska and American energy security,” Rep. Nick Begich (R) stated. Governor Mike Dunleavy (R) concurred, remarking that the DOI initiative “will provide more investment opportunities, more jobs, and a better future for Alaskans.”

At a Breitbart News event in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, Burgum further detailed how the massive scale of America’s natural resources could help address the U.S.’s spiraling national debt.

“[W]hat’s our debt? $36.5 trillion. What are our assets?” he asked. “… I can tell you, as the head of Interior … we’ve got 500 million acres of surface. Brooke Rollins has another 200 million in the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. grasslands. So 700 million acres of surface. There [are] 700 million acres of subsurface that we have the mineral rights, critical minerals, oil and gas, metallurgical and thermal coal resources. And there’s 2.5 billion acres of offshore, [much] of which have not been even explored, all of which represent huge, huge assets for us.”

He continued, “So if you take our forests, our lands, our grasslands, our lands that are near urban areas, our mineral resources, our offshore resources, I think the number is … double, triple what our national debt is. It could be $100 trillion. … [I]f we had published America’s balance sheet and said, ‘You know, our assets are triple what our debt is,’ just [that] announcement might lower the 10-year rate on interest rates because people say, ‘Wow, these guys got it covered, and they have a plan on how they’re going to be able to pay down this debt. And they’re actually in really good shape.’”

Notably, in the weeks since Trump’s inauguration, prices at the gas pump have fallen, with the average price of gas dropping for the fourth straight week on Monday to $3.078 per gallon.

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Left-wing Activists Ordered to Pay $667 Million for 2016 Demonstrations against Dakota Access Pipeline

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

It Rhymes With ‘Greenies’ thumbnail

It Rhymes With ‘Greenies’

By The Daily Caller

IT RHYMES WITH ‘GREENIES’

It looks like Greenpeace could go kaput.

Nine North Dakotan jurors in a defamation, trespass, nuisance, and civil conspiracy case awarded Dallas-based Energy Transfer a $660 million judgment Wednesday against Greenpeace. The case revolves around the activist group’s actions to prevent the Dakota Access pipeline.

The award, should it stand, would amount to roughly 25 times Greenpeace’s yearly operating budget. In other words, the most renowned lefty environmental activist group in the world would cease to exist.

And the news doesn’t get much better for these weenies.

A leaked UK Government assessment of the left wing’s “Net Zero” commitment details what everyone always said would happen if the West transitions to so-called “green energy”: Economic apocalypse.

Fully 10 percent of the UK’s economy would disappear in 10 years. And who would be the hardest hit, according to this report? Well, the poor obviously, just like every right-of-center energy analyst has said for decades.

They should have known too. The proverbial canary keeled over for the green weenies last year when Bill Gates of all people decided to restart the infamous Three Mile Island. RELATED: Gates’s big green energy group “Breakthrough Energy” literally just shitcanned most of their policy staff.

New York Times frames this as Gates “retooling” for the “Trump era,” but his deal to restart Three Mile Island’s reactors dates well before Trump won in November.

The writing on the wall is clear, but just in case, I’ll spell it out: Serious industry analysts have always known green energy wouldn’t work for big modern cities, burgeoning economies, and third world countries struggling to modernize.

It was a truth we could afford to shove off for years as mega-rich liberals virtue-signalled for decades in places like Paris.

Until now, and not because the polar ice caps are disappearing. No. It’s because the explosion of tech needs real answers and not fake solutions, like thousands of acres of wind turbines that don’t work.

Everyone always knew, for the most part. And the most poetic part is it’ll be to power business advancements, not to achieve some dances with wolves’ fantasy about oneness with nature*.

*(Worth noting here that installation of solar panels or wind turbines utterly annihilates nature in the area. Food for thought.)

The once-reliably “green” tech gods on Earth are all buying into nuclear technology. Zuck, Bezos, Musk, Sam Altman. Not only do they need it to power their burgeoning AI tech but to get ahead of energy costs once cities become truly addicted to robotics and artificial intelligence.

They know full well that also becoming energy companies of the future could be very lucrative, in addition to tech.

Coal and especially oil will be required resources in perpetuity as they’re both required for construction and fabrication. Nuclear will boom to provide cheap, consistent, tidal flows of energy to megacities of the future.

We’ll go “carbon neutral” and not one lick of it will be due to the incessant whining of weenies at Greenpeace or private-jet flying Hollywood dinguses named after Ninja Turtles.

WHAT I’M READING

Carville predicts insurrection in the Democrat Party.

‘I’m Mad’: James Carville Predicts There Could Be ‘Uprising Within The Democratic Party’ In Coming Months

Speaking of weenies, what kind of goofy pretend rebellion was this?

EXCLUSIVE: Inside A Taxpayer-Funded Think Tank’s Aborted Rebellion Against DOGE

OOPSIES

Democrats Entire Theory Of Politics Blown Up By One Poll

AUTHOR

Geoffrey Ingersoll

Editor at Large

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

PODCAST: Trump Dismantling Bogas Climate Policies and COVID, It’s Safe to Tell Truths Now! thumbnail

PODCAST: Trump Dismantling Bogas Climate Policies and COVID, It’s Safe to Tell Truths Now!

By Conservative Commandos Radio Show and AUN-TV

GUESTS AND TOPICS

STEVE GORHAM

Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of four books on energy, climate change, and sustainable development, with over 100,000 copies in print. Steve’s new book, Green Breakdown: The Coming Renewable Energy Failure, came out August last year.

TOPIC: Trump dismantling bogas climate policies

HELEN RALEIGH

Helen Raleigh is an American entrepreneur, writer, and speaker. She’s a senior contributor at The Federalist. Her writings appear in other national media, including The Wall Street Journal and Fox News. Helen is the author of several books, including “Confucius Never Said” and “Backlash: How Communist China’s Aggression Has Backfired.” Her latest book is the 2nd edition of “The Broken Welcome Mat: America’s UnAmerican immigration policy, and how we should fix it.”

TOPIC: COVID, It’s Safe to Tell Truths Now!

©2025 . All rights reserved.

EPA Slashes Climate Change Red Tape, Claws Back $20B Climate Slush Fund thumbnail

EPA Slashes Climate Change Red Tape, Claws Back $20B Climate Slush Fund

By Family Research Council

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has initiated a vast reversal of the regulatory-heavy, climate change fear-based policies of the Biden administration, announcing Wednesday that it is taking 31 actions to remove red tape for the energy and automotive industries and lower the cost of living for Americans. The agency also announced the termination of a $20 billion fund parked in a commercial bank by the Biden administration to avoid government oversight that was used to award money to climate activist groups.

Characterizing Wednesday’s initiative as “the greatest and most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin remarked that the effort “driv[es] a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion” by “roll[ing] back trillions in regulatory costs and hidden ‘taxes’ on U.S. families.” The EPA further declared that the venture will “unleash American energy” by reconsidering regulations on power plants, the oil and gas industry, coal-fired power plants, the steam electric power industry, wastewater, and other measures.

The plan would also address “lowering the cost of living for American families” by reconsidering electric car mandates, grocery store regulations, environmental regulations that “shut down opportunities for American manufacturing and small businesses,” and terminating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) arms of the agency, among other actions.

On Tuesday, the EPA also announced that it was shutting down a Biden administration program that it described as a “‘gold bar’ scheme,” in which an eye-popping $20 billion was released in the final week of former President Joe Biden’s term to award to various pop-up climate activist groups via a program known as the National Clean Investment Fund and Clean Communities Investment Accelerator. In a hidden video, a former Biden administration official described the program as “throwing gold bars off the edge” of the Titanic.

Since President Trump assumed office on January 20, the funds have been held in a Citibank account in order to avoid federal scrutiny. Zeldin described how the funds were moved through eight “pass-through, politically connected, unqualified and in some cases brand-new NGOs.” The EPA and the Department of the Treasury ordered that the funds be frozen, and the Department of Justice and FBI have opened a criminal investigation into the matter.

Lawmakers such as Senator Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.) welcomed news of the EPA cutting red tape and cracking down on wasteful taxpayer spending.

“[C]ommon sense is finally back at the EPA,” he declared during Thursday’s “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins.” “… For example, … I remember starting that fight back in the Obama administration back in 2015, and both Obama and Biden tried to stretch the rule to expand EPA’s authority to things like roadside ditches or farm ditches or farm ponds, things that were clearly not navigable waters. The Clean Water Act of 1972 says ‘navigable waters’ 50 times, and they totally tried to get rid of that meaning. … [W]e’re also going to be rolling back the Clean Power Plan, which was going to do things such as shut down our very clean burning coal plant in Nebraska. They’re going to get rid of the greenhouse gas reporting rule, which would be an attack on our natural gas facilities, which again, is a big source of power for Nebraska and many states. And frankly, natural gas is one of the reasons why we are the only industrialized country that’s actually reducing our greenhouse gases.”

Ricketts went on to note the EPA’s rolling back of the electric vehicle (EV) mandate. “This is one that I’ve been fighting because EVs don’t make sense in big rural states with cold weather. The adoption rate in Nebraska is 2%, and under the Biden administration, they wanted two-thirds of all new vehicles being sold in 2032 to be EVs. That just wasn’t going to happen.”

Ricketts further emphasized the cost that the Biden-era regulations imposed on American families and businesses. “[T]he Biden administration rolled out 5,000 regulations. … [T]he average cost of that to the American family was $3,300 a year. And not just once. It’s $3,300 every year until those regulations are rolled back … so this is going to be a good start in rolling those regulations back and saving American households money. But when you put this layer of regulation on, you put a wet blanket on innovation and small businesses who create most of our jobs in this country.

Ricketts concluded by expressing confidence that the EPA’s actions will be part of a revitalized economy that will thrive under the second Trump administration.

“[T]his will be part of how the Trump administration unleashes the economy again,” he predicted. “I mean, we saw some of the best economy we’ve ever seen under the first Trump administration. You go look at the job participation rate by Americans. … We saw great unleashing of our economic power here, and it’s because, in part, the Trump administration took off a bunch of regulations that were preventing our innovators, our small businesses, and our families from being able to invest or spend the money that they otherwise would have.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Is Efficiency a Biblical Idea?

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

EPA Announces 31 ‘Historic Actions’ to Unleash American Energy thumbnail

EPA Announces 31 ‘Historic Actions’ to Unleash American Energy

By The Geller Report

Sweeping Deregulation, Cancels Over 400 Grants Saving Taxpayers $1.7 Billion. 

“Today is the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen. We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S. and more,” said EPA Administrator Zeldin.

“Alongside President Trump, we are living up to our promises to unleash American energy, lower costs for Americans, revitalize the American auto industry, and work hand-in-hand with our state partners to advance our shared mission,” added EPA Administrator Zeldin. 

“The greatest day of deregulation in American history.”


U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the agency will undertake 31 historic actions in the greatest and most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history, to advance President Trump’s Day One executive orders and Power the Great American Comeback. Combined, these announcements represent the most momentous day in the history of the EPA. While accomplishing EPA’s core mission of protecting the environment, the agency is committed to fulfilling President Trump’s promise to unleash American energy, lower cost of living for Americans, revitalize the American auto industry, restore the rule of law, and give power back to states to make their own decisions.

These historic actions will roll back trillions in regulatory costs and hidden “taxes” on U.S. families. As a result of these announcements, the cost of living for American families will decrease. It will be more affordable to purchase a car, heat homes, and operate a business. It will be more affordable to bring manufacturing into local communities while individuals widely benefit from the tangible economic impacts.

These actions will create American jobs, including incredible progress to bring back American auto jobs. The Biden and Obama era regulations being reconsidered have suffocated nearly every single sector of the American economy.

Today, EPA Administrator Zeldin announced the following actions:

UNLEASHING AMERICAN ENERGY 

  • Reconsideration of regulations on power plants (Clean Power Plan 2.0)
  • Reconsideration of regulations throttling the oil and gas industry (OOOO b/c)
  • Reconsideration of Mercury and Air Toxics Standards that improperly targeted coal-fired power plants (MATS)
  • Reconsideration of mandatory Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program that imposed significant costs on the American energy supply (GHG Reporting Program)
  • Reconsideration of limitations, guidelines and standards (ELG) for the Steam Electric Power Generating Industry to ensure low-cost electricity while protecting water resources (Steam Electric ELG)
  • Reconsideration of wastewater regulations for coal power plants to help unleash American energy (Oil and Gas ELG)
  • Reconsideration of Biden-Harris Administration Risk Management Program rule that made America’s oil and natural gas refineries and chemical facilities less safe (Risk Management Program Rule)

LOWERING THE COST OF LIVING FOR AMERICAN FAMILIES

  • Reconsideration of light-duty, medium-duty, and heavy-duty vehicle regulations that provided the foundation for the Biden-Harris electric vehicle mandate (Car GHG Rules)
  • Reconsideration of the 2009 Endangerment Finding and regulations and actions that rely on that Finding (Endangerment Finding)
  • Reconsideration of technology transition rule that forces companies to use certain technologies that increased costs on food at grocery stores and semiconductor manufacturing (Technology Transition Rule)
  • Reconsideration of Particulate Matter National Ambient Air Quality Standards that shut down opportunities for American manufacturing and small businesses (PM 2.5 NAAQS)
  • Reconsideration of multiple National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants for American energy and manufacturing sectors (NESHAPs)
  • Restructuring the Regional Haze Program that threatened the supply of affordable energy for American families (Regional Haze)
  • Overhauling Biden-Harris Administration’s “Social Cost of Carbon”
  • Redirecting enforcement resources to EPA’s core mission to relieve the economy of unnecessary bureaucratic burdens that drive up costs for American consumers (Enforcement Discretion)
  • Terminating Biden’s Environmental Justice and DEI arms of the agency (EJ/DEI)

ADVANCING COOPERATIVE FEDERALISM 

  • Ending so-called “Good Neighbor Plan” which the Biden-Harris Administration used to expand federal rules to more states and sectors beyond the program’s traditional focus and led to the rejection of nearly all State Implementation Plans
  • Working with states and tribes to resolve massive backlog with State Implementation Plans and Tribal Implementation Plans that the Biden-Harris Administration refused to resolve (SIPs/TIPs)
  • Reconsideration of exceptional events rulemaking to work with states to prioritize the allowance of prescribed fires within State and Tribal Implementation Plans (Exceptional Events)
  • Reconstituting Science Advisory Board and Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (SAB/CASAC)
  • Prioritizing coal ash program to expedite state permit reviews and update coal ash regulations (CCR Rule)
  • Utilizing enforcement discretion to further North Carolina’s recovery from Hurricane Helene

Just the News: Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced Wednesday that the agency will take 31 “historic actions” to roll back the Biden administration’s climate agenda in line with President Donald Trump’s executive order to “Unleash American Energy.” Zeldin said the actions will lower costs for things like purchasing a car, heating homes and operating businesses. Among the regulations Zeldin said the EPA would reconsider are the “illegal” Clean Power Plan 2.0., the endangerment finding, the electric vehicle mandate, and rules regarding particulate matter (Just the News).

Lee Zeldin: EPA is initiating 31 historic actions to Power the Great American Comeback in the greatest day of deregulation in American history (X)!

EPA Cancels Over 400 Grants Saving Taxpayers $1.7 Billion

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin, with the assistance of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), identified and cancelled more than 400 additional grants across nine unnecessary programs totaling $1.7 billion in savings for the American people. This marks the fourth round of EPA-DOGE partnered cancellations as the Administrator oversees a line-by-line review of spending, bringing the total taxpayer dollars saved to more than $2 billion since being sworn in (EPA).

Daily Wire: The agency is working to claw back $20 billion in funds that the Biden administration doled out under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The funds were turned over to Citibank in the months leading up to the election and held under the names of eight nonprofits. Those nonprofits intended to disperse the funds to other groups and programs. Citibank has frozen the funds while the Department of Justice probes the issue (Daily Wire).

Zeldin moves to undo Biden ‘Green New Deal’ and EV rules with sweeping deregulation

By: Callie Patteson and Maydeen Merino, Washington Examiner, March 12, 2025:

he Environmental Protection Agency initiated over two dozen actions overhauling numerous green and climate-related regulations implemented by the Biden administration in what Administrator Lee Zeldin described as an effort to “end the Green New Deal.”

The EPA announced 31 actions Wednesday afternoon, with Zeldin describing it as the “greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen.”

Through these actions, the agency is overhauling, walking back, and reconsidering dozens of Biden administration environmental standards, such as the Clean Power Plan 2.0, Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, vehicle emissions rules, the Good Neighbor Plan, air quality standards, water regulations, and more.

“By overhauling massive rules on the endangerment finding, the social cost of carbon and similar issues, we are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age,” Zeldin wrote in an opinion article published in the Wall Street Journal.

He said deregulation would lower the cost of living, including for vehicles, heating, and other business operations.

“Today marks the death of the Green New Scam. The EPA recognizes that environmental protection and economic prosperity aren’t mutually exclusive goals,” Zeldin said. “Under President Trump’s leadership, we are recommitting to the core American values of innovation, growth, exceptionalism and opportunity.”
Continue reading.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED ARTICLE: “Everything Was Destroyed”: Tens of Thousands of Amazon Rainforest Cut Down To Build Highway For UN CLIMATE Summit

RELATED VIDEO: Marc Morano from Climate Depot explaining the rot that has festered in the EPA since 2009

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.