“The Environmental Protection Agency on Friday proposed to weaken limits on emissions of ethylene oxide, a cancer-causing gas, from manufacturing facilities that use it to sterilize medical devices,” the New York Times reports.

“The move revived a long-running debate about the paradoxical effects of ethylene oxide on public health. While it plays a crucial role in sterilizing lifesaving medical devices like pacemakers and syringes, long-term exposure can cause leukemia and other types of cancer among people who work in or live near medical sterilization facilities.”

“The momentous end to the federal government’s legal authority to fight climate change makes it official,” the New York Times reports.

“The United States will essentially have no laws on the books that enforce how efficient America’s passenger cars and trucks should be.”

“That’s the practical result of the Trump administration’s yearlong parade of regulatory rollbacks, capped on Thursday by its killing of the ‘endangerment finding,’ the scientific determination that required the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases because of the threat to human health.”

“Nearly 17 years after the Environmental Protection Agency declared that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threaten the public’s health and welfare, the agency on Thursday rescinded the landmark legal opinion underpinning a wave of federal policies aimed at climate change,” the Washington Post reports.

“The Trump administration is planning this week to repeal the Obama-era scientific finding that serves as the legal basis for federal greenhouse-gas regulation, in the most far-reaching rollback of U.S. climate policy to date,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The finding provided the legal underpinning for the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate rules, which limited emissions from power plants and tightened fuel-economy standards for vehicles under the Clean Air Act.”

The Trump administration is cancelling $30 billion in green loans and revising another $53 billion, NewsNation reports.

“Six years after the financial industry pledged to use trillions to fight climate change and reshape finance, its efforts have largely collapsed,” the New York Times reports.

“By pulling the United States out of the main international climate treaty, seizing Venezuelan crude oil and using government power to resuscitate the domestic coal industry while choking off clean energy, the Trump administration is not just ignoring climate change, it is likely making the problem worse,” the New York Times reports.

In recent days Trump has slammed the door on every possible avenue of global cooperation on the environment. At the same time, it is sending the message that it wants the world to be awash in fossil fuels sold by America, no matter the consequences.”

New York Times: “Under President Trump, the EPA plans to stop tallying gains from the health benefits caused by curbing two of the most widespread deadly air pollutants, fine particulate matter and ozone, when regulating industry.”

“It’s a seismic shift that runs counter to the EPA’s mission statement, which says the agency’s core responsibility is to protect human health and the environment.”

“President Trump said on Wednesday that the United States would withdraw from the bedrock international agreement that forms the basis for countries to rein in climate change,” the New York Times reports.

“The agreement, which has been in place for 34 years, counts all of the other nations of the world as members.”

New York Times: “The environmental rollbacks came one after the next this week, potentially affecting everything from the survival of rare whales to the health of the Hudson River…”

“If the Trump administration’s proposals [to narrow the Clean Water Act, change the Endangered Species Act and expand offshore oil and gas drilling] are finalized and upheld in court, they could reshape U.S. environmental policy for years to come, environmental lawyers and activists said.”

“Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva called late Wednesday for a global winding-down of fossil fuels — and said he hoped to someday get the U.S. behind it,” Politico reports.

Said Lula: “We must reduce greenhouse gas emissions. If fossil fuels emit too much, we must begin thinking about how to live without them.”

He said he hoped “one day to convince the president of the United States that the climate crisis is serious, that green development is necessary.”

“The Trump administration on Thursday announced a plan to allow oil and gas drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one of the largest remaining tracts of pristine wilderness in the United States,” the New York Times reports.

“The decision was the latest twist in a long-running fight over the fate of the refuge’s coastal plain, an unspoiled expanse of 1.56 million acres that is believed to sit atop billions of barrels of oil but is also a critical habitat for polar bears, caribou, migratory birds and other wildlife.”

Floodlight News: “For decades, the Pentagon viewed climate change as a national security threat — not for environmental reasons, but because it undermined operations and readiness… Now the Trump administration is dismantling that approach. Pentagon leaders have cut climate research funding and abandoned adaptation plans.”

Said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth: “The Department of Defense does not do climate change crap.”

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) said that his party needed to change the way it talked about climate change if Democrats hoped to win over new voters, the New York Times reports.

Said Schatz: “You could talk about the planetary emergency and mitigation and adaptation, and you could throw in some environmental justice rhetoric, and by the time you’re done talking, people think you don’t care about them.”

Instead, he said, policymakers who care about climate change need to be “recapturing momentum with regular people who are watching their utility bills spike like a hockey stick.”

“China, the world’s largest carbon polluter, announced at the United Nations on Wednesday that it intended to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 7 percent to 10 percent over the next 10 years, the first time Beijing has made such a strong commitment to halt global warming,” the New York Times reports.

Chinese president Xi Jinping made the announcement by video, saying: “Green and low carbon transition is the trend of our time.”

In an apparent reference to the United States, Xi added: “Some countries are against it.”

“The Department of Defense has quietly delayed its cleanup of harmful ‘forever chemicals’ at nearly 140 military installations across the country,” the New York Times reports.

“The Pentagon has been one of the most intensive users of these chemicals, which are also known as PFAS and are a key ingredient in firefighting foam. For decades, crews at U.S. military bases would train to battle flames by lighting jet-fuel fires, then putting them out with large amounts of foam, which would leach into the soil and groundwater.”