Jessica McKenzie

Bulletin: A former EPA assistant administrator on US environmental policy in the age of Musk and Trump

Last Monday, Elon Musk bragged that he “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” Is the United States Environmental Protection Agency next?

A three-prong assault by the Trump administration is already taking shape, aimed at staffing, funding, and regulations.

According to a ProPublica analysis, more than 300 career employees at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have already left the agency since the election. This includes lawyers, engineers, biologists, toxicologists, emergency workers, and water and air quality experts. Last week, nearly 170 employees in the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights were placed on paid administrative leave. Many others are being encouraged to resign or threatened with dismissals.

President Trump signed an executive order in his first week in office pausing funding disbursements awarded through the Inflation Reduction Act or Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and although courts have intervened to stop the spending freeze, funding for EPA projects has still not been released.

And by all accounts, Lee Zeldin, the new EPA administrator, is poised to begin rolling back a suite of environmental regulations, touching on everything from meatpacking plant pollution and fertilizer chemicals to coal ash contamination and greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

To better understand everything going on at the agency and how these actions will reverberate over the next four years (and beyond), the Bulletin reached out to Mary Nichols, a former EPA assistant administrator and current professor at the UCLA Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.

Bulletin: Memo to Trump: Five reasons to act on climate

Mr. President:

Where to begin? As soon as you regained the highest political office in the United States, you began the process to withdraw the country from the Paris Agreement, joining the exalted ranks of Iran, Libya, and Yemen—the only other countries not party to the agreement.

You proclaimed Alaska “open for business” for all kinds of resource extraction, from mining to timber, with special attention paid to liquified natural gas and other energy projects.

You declared a national energy emergency, even though the United States currently produces more oil and gas than any other country. You commanded federal agencies to “exercise any lawful emergency authorities available to them” to facilitate the production of domestic energy resources—but not wind! “We aren’t going to do the wind thing,” you said.

The editorial brief for this memo was “advice for the incoming president that he might actually take.” Does such a thing exist within the climate arena, Mr. President? I polled some Bulletin contributors to see what they would suggest.

Bulletin: ‘Not enough firefighters’: Historic wildfires rage unabated in Southern California

Two people have died and more than 1,000 structures have been destroyed in wildfires raging in the Los Angeles area, according to Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone. Approximately 80,000 people have been ordered to evacuate, and thousands of structures are at risk.

The Palisades Fire has burned over 11,800 acres in the upscale Pacific Palisades neighborhood and is continuing to grow, with zero percent containment. The Eaton Fire, burning in the Angeles National Forest and in Pasadena, is now over 10,000 acres and continuing to grow, with zero percent containment. The Hurst and Woodley fires have burned over 500 and 30 acres, respectively.

Although the hurricane-force winds (which reached up to 100 mph) were expected to die down by midday, even the moderately high winds expected to continue through Wednesday evening will continue to make containment a challenge.

In a press conference Wednesday morning, Los Angeles Fire Chief Marrone bluntly stated that the region’s firefighting forces were not prepared for numerous wildfires of this magnitude: “No, L.A. County and all 29 fire departments in our county, are not prepared for this kind of widespread disaster. There are not enough firefighters in L.A. County to address four separate fires of this magnitude. The L.A. County fire department was prepared for one or two major brush fires, but not four, especially given these sustained winds and low humidities.”

Audubon: This Bar-tailed Godwit Decoy Delivers Folk Art with a Contemporary Feel

By the time artist David Personius was growing up in the 1950s, carved wooden bird decoys were largely a thing of the past—collector’s items for folk art aficionados like his dad. European settlers, inspired by Native Americans creating avian replicas out of natural materials to attract live birds, picked up the practice of carving fake fowl. Those decoys became a vital tool for commercial hunting in the 1800s, a trade that slashed migratory bird populations and helped drive the Passenger Pigeon to extinction before the practice was banned. Eventually, the invention of plastic decoys for sport hunting in the 20th century made the handmade versions obsolete. But folk artists like Personius have kept the tradition alive.

Personius carved his first few decoys for personal use when he went duck hunting with his dad. He turned the hobby into a career after graduating from college in the 1980s, and spent a decade selling meticulously crafted shorebirds at art fairs and waterfowl shows across the country. “I feel fortunate that I was at it long enough and had enough experience and talent to create my own little style,” he says. Unfortunately, it was also a hard way to pay the bills—so Personius set his carving tools aside to work in publishing, then in horticulture. He finally returned to the craft 14 years ago, now living in Fairbanks, Alaska.

Bulletin: Murder, mayhem, and minerals: The price of the renewable energy revolution

It’s not as if the human and environmental toll of mining is a particularly well-kept secret. But the full extent of the damage from mining for the rare earth elements and other metals that go into electronic devices, electric vehicles, solar panels, and countless additional components of modern life can be hard to wrap one’s mind around—unless the mountain of evidence is laid out end-to-end, as in Vince Beiser’s new book Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future. The book begins with an overview of what Beiser calls “critical metals,” where they come from, and the history of their discovery and extraction, before moving on to the current state of mining and processing critical metals today.

Demand for these substances has soared in the Information Age and is projected to keep climbing. (One factoid that stood out: “Just one Tesla Model S can contain as much lithium as ten thousand mobile phones.”) The environmental damage caused by the production of critical metals is continuing to mount—and could grow in unexpected ways if, for example, companies begin mining the sea floor.

Still, humans need these substances, especially for the renewable energy technologies needed to stem climate change. There is no Cinderella-shoe solution. There are always trade-offs. As Beiser writes, “When it comes to mining, the choice is never between bad and good but only bad and less bad.”

Beiser’s question is, in the end, how can the world mine better? How can the damage—to people, to places—be minimized? He also examines the various ways to limit mining by increasing recycling (itself a dirty and dangerous business that could stand to be improved) and reducing demand for metals in the first place.