Dismantling the Environment

The Environmental Protection Agency was founded with bipartisan support not all that long ago—in 1970. As Jonathan Mingle writes this month in the NYR Online, and as many Americans who lived through it remember, prior to the advent of the EPA and the Clean Air Act, “With rivers in Ohio catching fire and urban skylines barely visible through choking smog, the nation’s pollution problem had become impossible to ignore.” Antipollution legislation and regulation saves hundreds of thousands of lives every year. 

But, Mingle notes, it has become easy to take for granted the absence of smog or invisible chemicals in our water. This may no longer be the case now that the EPA is administered by Trump appointee Lee Zeldin, a man seemingly determined to dismantle the agency. “We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion,” he said in a speech announcing that the EPA would reconsider regulations on power plant emissions, wastewater from oil and gas development, and “mercury and air toxics standards,” among other things. 

A reporter and writer, Mingle is a regular contributor to the Review as well as The New York Times, Undark, and Yale Environment 360. He often writes about highly technical subjects with major ramifications, like home insurance or the regulation of utility companies, as well as more elemental matters: exploding phosphorus, fire, and ice. Mingle is the author of two books, Fire and Ice: Soot, Solidarity, and Survival on the Roof of the World (2015) and Gaslight: The Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Fight for America’s Energy Future (2024), and he is currently a McGraw Fellow at CUNY’s Craig Newmark School of Journalism. I e-mailed him this week to ask about heavy industry’s incentives, disaster preparedness, and climate adaptation in the Himalayas.

Willa Glickman: In your latest essay for the Review, you write that there is some daylight opening up between Trump administrators and energy industry lobbyists, who might prefer a more stable regulatory environment. How serious do you think the rift is, and what do you think is driving the extremity of these cuts, if not the wishes of industry? 

Jonathan Mingle: I don’t want to overstate the extent of the daylight. No doubt many oil and gas CEOs who bankrolled Trump’s campaign are thrilled with the ongoing effort to effectively repeal the Inflation Reduction Act by hook (clawing back billions in grants already awarded by the EPA) or by crook (snuffing out the act’s clean energy tax credits via the House’s recently passed tax bill). Those steps will likely slow down the transition to clean energy, which means prolonging our dependence on fossil fuels. Similarly, the chemical industry seems pleased with the Trump EPA’s recent decision to repeal Biden-era rules limiting PFAS “forever chemicals” in drinking water. 

That said, there are signs that some industry actors are uneasy about other extreme steps that the administration is taking. The Chamber of Commerce and several major manufacturers lobbied the EPA not to end the popular Energy Star labeling program for energy efficient appliances. The agency is doing it anyway. And when EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced plans to rescind the “endangerment finding”—which underpins all EPA regulations of greenhouse gas pollution under the Clean Air Act—the largest trade association for the nation’s electric utilities told me that they opposed the step. They are worried that revoking the federal government’s authority to regulate climate-warming pollution would expose power providers to common lawsuits and a patchwork of regulations across all fifty states. And that adds up to more costs, more liabilities.

Obviously, most of these companies, generally speaking, favor less regulation because that means lower costs. But we’re also seeing them offer pointed reminders about the need for a “stable regulatory environment.” That’s because they must make investment decisions on long time scales. Trump 2.0 seems intent on having a more permanent deregulatory legacy than Trump 1.0 did. Industry representatives seem okay with a certain amount of chaos in service of deregulation. But too much chaos, as I note in the essay, is bad for business. 

Tariffs are the Trump policy that is perhaps most threatening to his industry supporters. The tariffs will destabilize supply chains, undercut consumers’ buying power, dampen demand for energy. They are already sinking oil futures and making it less profitable to produce oil and gas.

What impacts will there be if the endangerment finding, which classifies greenhouse gases as a danger to public health, is revoked, as Lee Zeldin is threatening to do? What regulation of greenhouses gases is currently in place? 

There will certainly be legal challenges if the EPA revokes the endangerment finding. This step has been long sought by right-wing groups like the Heritage Foundation, but during the first Trump administration, officials decided it would be a waste of time because it’s unlikely to survive judicial scrutiny. Legal experts seem to agree that any frontal assault on the science behind it will fail. The evidence supporting the conclusion that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health and welfare was ironclad back in 2009, when it was issued; the evidence is even more overwhelming now. But experts can’t rule out the possibility, however slim, that this Supreme Court might rule in Trump’s favor and toss it out on a technical argument. 

The EPA’s regulations are the only federal game in town when it comes to curbing climate-warming pollution. (The IRA, whose clean energy tax credits are about to be eviscerated by Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” was all carrots and no sticks.) Without the endangerment finding, those rules will have the legal rug pulled out from under them. The Clean Power Plan 2.0, the rule promulgated by Biden that limits carbon emissions from existing coal and new gas-fired power plants, will go away. (It is being challenged by power companies in federal court and Trump’s EPA has said they will repeal it, but it remains in effect for the time being.) Ditto for rules limiting carbon dioxide emissions from refineries and steel, cement, and chemical plants and methane emissions from oil and gas operations. Carbon emissions standards for cars, trucks, and heavy vehicles will be suddenly nullified, too.

All of this will be litigated. As that process drags on—as rules are repealed, reissued, revised, challenged again—many lawyers will log many billable hours. And the amount of carbon dioxide and methane dumped into the atmosphere from transportation, energy production, and heavy industry will keep on accumulating. That will be the practical effect of the federal government’s abdication of any responsibility for climate mitigation. 

And then, of course, there’s the corrosive symbolic impact of having the Environmental Protection Agency declare, against every piece of scientific research to the contrary, that greenhouse gases are not a threat to public health and welfare. By eliminating the entire Climate Change Division and its Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, the EPA is now telling industries not to bother tallying up how much climate-warming pollution they emit anymore, because they’re not interested. The words “climate change” have been erased from government websites. These are all examples of the thickening “epistemic fog” I worried about in “Planet 2025,” my pre-election essay for the NYR Online. That fog is getting thicker by the day. 

You wrote a sobering piece in 2023 about the impacts of climate change on home insurance, and the prospect of a looming crash in the housing market. Has there been any progress on that issue since then?

In a word, no. As far as I can tell, it’s only gotten worse. And the amount of policy attention devoted to this brewing crisis has arguably decreased, since the Biden-era Treasury Department initiatives to track these risks and devise policy responses have been nixed by Trump. Likewise, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is ending its billion-dollar disaster data-gathering program, which insurers rely upon for their own planning.

When State Farm announced it would no longer write new home insurance policies in California back in May 2023, I remember thinking: Whoa, this is a seismic event. Why isn’t everyone talking about this? (Of course, that’s a thought that surfaces frequently on the climate beat.) It seemed like such an ominous sign of what’s to come: a major company starting to retreat from the biggest housing market largely due to increasing climate risks. 

But since that essay came out, there has been much excellent reporting and commentary on the issue. The Los Angeles wildfires generated more discussion about the precarity of underfunded, oversubscribed state-run insurers of last resort. Likewise, recent reports from groups like the First Street Foundation revealed that many US zip codes, even outside of coastal or wildfire-prone areas, are on their way to becoming uninsurable. There are mounting claims from thunderstorms and wind and hail damage, on top of enormously expensive flooding and wildfire events like Hurricane Helene and the LA fires. 

Insurers see what’s happening clearly. They are in the business of assessing risk. They are trying to preserve their profit margins and not go bankrupt. So they are not renewing policies and raising premiums pretty much everywhere. Without insurance, you can’t get a mortgage. The housing affordability crisis will be exacerbated as insurers continue to price climate risk into the market. This will also depress property values in certain disaster-prone areas, cutting into the tax base for many municipalities, making it harder to fund basic services like education, water, trash pickup—let alone financing much-needed infrastructure upgrades to weather heatwaves and rising seas.

This spiral poses a systemic threat to the financial system. And yet, outside of hearings convened by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse to highlight the risks and some modest state-level efforts to keep insurers from fleeing, there’s very little evidence that policymakers are doing much about it. (I recommend Susan Crawford’s newsletter Moving Day to anyone who wants to read incisive analysis about what this all means for the housing market, the municipal bond market, and the wider financial system.)

There have been cuts at FEMA and plans to dismantle the NOAA. How do you see the next big disaster playing out?

Thanks to DOGE, National Weather Service offices don’t have enough staff to send up weather balloons and track storms—even in Tornado Alley. Meanwhile, Trump plans to dismantle FEMA or at least offload most of its core functions onto states (even though FEMA was created precisely because state and federal leaders realized back in the 1970s that states couldn’t handle the coordination of disaster response on their own). The burden of recovering from wildfires, hurricanes, and other climate-fueled disasters will be borne by states and local communities.

The result? People dying who otherwise would have survived the next big disaster, and more suffering for those rebuilding their homes and lives in the absence of federal aid. To anyone who lives through one of this season’s coming hurricanes or wildfires, the text of the message to Americans from their government is clear: You’re on your own. But the subtext is: You’re also in the dark. Because the administration’s cuts to climate and weather monitoring programs at agencies like NOAA, NASA, and the US Geological Survey are damaging our ability to even anticipate or monitor these risks—to know what dangers will be coming our way. 

You spent many years reporting from northern India and wrote a book about villagers in the arid Ladakh region adapting to drought. How are they doing? Have there been important climate stories in that area that you’ve been following?

Nearly all the water that Ladakhis use for drinking, irrigation, or any other purpose comes from snow and ice. In my first book, Fire and Ice, I wrote about the people of Kumik, forced to abandon their thousand-year-old village due to chronic drought as glaciers and snowfields vanished, and their efforts to build a new village from scratch. Most of them have since relocated to the new village site a few miles away, near a river. But it’s been a long struggle to build new homes and dig new irrigation canals, as they’ve had very limited help from the local and state governments. Since I reported from there over a decade ago, I have read many stories of villages across the Himalayan region suffering the same twin threats posed by receding glaciers: water scarcity during the growing season and dangerous floods from glacial lake outbursts. 

The big (yet under-reported) story from that region is that glacier retreat is accelerating. Recent studies project that Himalayan glaciers could lose 75 percent of their volume by 2100 at current rates of warming. Roughly two billion people depend on that water. The loss of those water towers is also a geopolitical ticking time bomb. During the conflict between India and Pakistan a few weeks ago, India took the unprecedented step of suspending the Indus Waters Treaty, a water-sharing agreement that the two countries signed in 1960. Back in 2011, I wrote about the risks that ratcheting climate stress posed to the IWT, as the glaciers that feed the Indus River decline. This treaty has always remained in effect through every past war between India and Pakistan. I find it extremely ominous that India is taking this step. When scholars warn that climate change left unabated will lead to more authoritarian, zero-sum politics, resource-hoarding, and conflict, the fragility of the IWT is Exhibit A for me. 

But there are other overlooked threats, too. I recently wrote in my intermittent newsletter about Langtang, a village I visited in 2011. That community was virtually annihilated a few years later by an avalanche triggered by an earthquake in Nepal. In the ten years since that tragedy, researchers have found that climate change made the avalanche that buried Langtang much more destructive. There’s permafrost in alpine areas that holds mountain slopes together, too. As it melts, we can expect to see more reports of villages, from the Alps to the Andes, experiencing ice-rock avalanches and dangerous debris flows. Climate change is literally ungluing the mountains themselves.

But there is some hope coming from this region, too. In my first book I dedicated a full chapter to the remarkable renewable energy and education work of Sonam Wangchuk—a Ladakhi inventor and one of India’s most prominent climate activists. Since it came out, Wangchuk and his colleagues have devised an ingenious system to help farmers adapt to these changes: artificial glaciers known as “ice stupas.” Named for the ubiquitous Buddhist memorial structures that dot the landscape, these pyramids of ice reach several stories of height in winter, then slowly melt to irrigate crops during spring and early summer—when farmers need it most, before glacial runoff peaks in late summer. Today more than two dozen sprout each winter across Ladakh, all built and maintained by local farmers. These elegant creations have captured not just water but imaginations. Wangchuk’s team has even partnered with groups in Peru, Chile, and Switzerland to build similar ice storage structures in the shadows of other dwindling glaciers. 

You’ve also written extensively about utility companies, including in your latest book, Gaslight, which describes the fight against a gas pipeline in Appalachia. What tools do utilities use to exercise power, and contributed to some of these developments under the Trump administration?

My sense is that utilities, like everyone else, are trying to make sense of all the chaos coming from the White House’s executive orders and the DOGE-led layoffs. That’s not to say they aren’t going to continue “participating in the regulatory process” (aka lobbying), as they do in every administration. But they have been planning for a world in which the endangerment finding persists and requires EPA to regulate carbon streaming from their smokestacks. And if that’s gone, that scrambles their plans in all kinds of ways.

Utilities are a strange beast in American capitalism. Most (though not all) of us get our electricity and/or gas from monopoly utilities owned by parent holding companies traded on Wall Street. So there’s always this fundamental tension between the interests of their shareholders and their captive customers. (Guess whose interests usually win out.) The federal government’s wholesale destruction of clean energy programs and tax credits will certainly skew many utilities’ incentives toward fossil fuels. It will weaken their investment case for renewable alternatives and drive up electricity prices for most customers—and at a moment when many of these companies are proposing to build new methane gas power plants to supply the fast-proliferating data centers being thrown up by AI companies around the country. 

But utilities’ incentives are mostly shaped by decisions at the state and local levels. Many utilities invest heavily in shaping how they are regulated by state public utility commissions (PUCs, in the lingo). This process is boring, technical, and largely invisible to most Americans. But if you pay a utility bill, you are affected by the decisions of those regulators. And anyone can show up and testify at their proceedings (or at city council meetings for municipal utilities), where utilities have to justify their plans for new power plants or explain why they aren’t investing more in solar and battery storage or energy efficiency. All the ongoing federal turmoil has little bearing on those outcomes—and citizens who care about those issues can have an outsized impact just by showing up and speaking out. Our future energy trajectory will hinge to a surprising extent, I think, on whether they do. It’s one of the great overlooked climate action levers, just waiting for more people to notice it.