“Green groups stunned by the Trump administration’s rapid-fire dismantling of their environmental victories are still debating how to fight back — and torn between two contrasting strategies,” Politico reports.

“One set of activists is urging the environmental movement to join a broader anti-billionaire campaign led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), which accuses the Trump administration of attacking democracy to benefit the very wealthiest Americans.”

“Others want to double down on the Biden administration’s portrayal of climate action as a pocketbook issue — contending that Republican attacks on investments in electric vehicles, wind farms and other clean energy technologies will wipe out jobs and burden consumers with higher costs.”

New York Times: “The most conspicuous retreat, of course, has been the United States under President Trump, who first announced his intention to withdraw from Paris way back in 2017 with a ceremony in the Rose Garden. Trump has celebrated his return to office by utterly dismantling his predecessor’s signature climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, and vowing to stop all approvals for new renewable projects (not to mention paving over that same garden). But this is not just a story about Trump. When Paris was forged, the United States was a trivial exporter of natural gas, and it was still illegal to ship American oil abroad. Even before Trump’s second inauguration, the country had become the world’s largest producer and exporter of refined oil and liquid natural gas.”

“And neither is it a story particular to America. The retreat from climate politics has been widespread, even in the midst of a global green-energy boom. From 2019 to 2021, governments around the world added more than 300 climate-adaptation and mitigation policies each year, according to the energy analyst Nat Bullard. In 2023, the number dropped under 200. In 2024, it was only 50 or so. In many places — like in South America and in Europe — existing laws have already been weakened or are under pressure from shifting political coalitions now pushing to undermine them.”

“A federal appeals court is allowing the Trump administration to terminate $16 billion in grants awarded by the Biden administration to combat greenhouse gas emissions,” ABC News reports.

“The Trump administration has fired at least seven Environmental Protection Agency employees for signing a letter nearly two months ago criticizing the agency’s leadership,” the Washington Post reports.

“The move to terminate several staffers marks an escalation in the administration’s effort to clamp down on dissent within the federal bureaucracy.”

“In the Biden administration, the American environmental movement reached what many of its supporters considered an apex. Congress passed the largest ever federal law to combat climate change. Coal-burning power plants were shutting down. Hundreds of billions of dollars of federal investment in renewable energy, batteries and electric vehicles was beginning to flow,” the New York Times reports.

“But in just months, President Trump has attacked much of that work.”

“The Biden-era climate law, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, is in tatters. The White House is trying to revive coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, while boosting oil and gas and hindering solar and wind power. And it is weakening or trying to scrap environmental policies and regulations, some dating to 1970.”

“The abrupt reversal in fortunes has led to a moment of crisis for the environmental community.”

“NASA is planning to decommission premier satellite missions that gather information on planet-warming pollution and other climate vital signs beginning as soon as October,” CNN reports.

“The destruction of the satellites — which will be abandoned and allowed to eventually burn up in a fiery descent into Earth’s atmosphere — marks the latest step by the Trump administration to scale back federal climate science.”

NPR: Why a NASA satellite that scientists and farmers rely on may be destroyed on purpose.

“As the planet gets hotter and its reservoirs shrink and its glaciers melt, people have increasingly drilled into a largely ungoverned, invisible cache of fresh water: the vast, hidden pools found deep underground,” ProPublica reports.

“Now, a new study that examines the world’s total supply of fresh water — accounting for its rivers and rain, ice and aquifers together — warns that Earth’s most essential resource is quickly disappearing, signaling what the paper’s authors describe as ‘a critical, emerging threat to humanity.’”

“President Trump’s first term provoked the movement for a Green New Deal. His second term may have killed it,” Axios reports.

“Democrats aren’t explicitly disavowing the Green New Deal, but they’ve abruptly stopped talking about it as they scramble to find new ways to talk about climate change.”

“President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday proposed revoking a scientific finding that has long been the central basis for U.S. action to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and fight climate change,” the AP reports.

“The proposed Environmental Protection Agency rule would rescind a 2009 declaration that determined that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare.”

“For years, outlandish theories about the U.S. government’s using airplanes to spray harmful chemicals over U.S. homes or powerful elites controlling the weather were relegated to the fringes of society,” NBC News reports.

“As the internet has provided rocket fuel for such claims, Republican lawmakers across the country are introducing, passing and enacting laws to ban ‘weather modification’ and environmental geoengineering and allude to the use of ‘chemtrails,’ a longtime theory that planes are spreading chemical agents on an unsuspecting public. As more people are exposed to dangerous flooding, the GOP lawmakers have pointed to the fringe theories as potential explanations for extreme weather, pushing them further into the political mainstream.”

“More than 132 million people across the central and eastern US are facing blistering temperatures to start the week, with rising humidity making it feel even worse and putting a strain on the energy grid as air conditioners and fans get a workout,” Bloomberg reports.

“The Trump administration has drafted a plan to repeal a fundamental scientific finding that gives the United States government its authority to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions and fight climate change,” the New York Times reports.

“The proposed Environmental Protection Agency rule rescinds a 2009 declaration known as the ‘endangerment finding,’ which scientifically established that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane endanger human lives.”

“Western Europe officially experienced its hottest June on record, as scientists warned such an “exceptional heatwave” was likely to become more frequent and intense because of climate change exacerbating extremes of heat, dryness, cold and wet around the world,” the Financial Times reports.

“California leaders on Monday rolled back a landmark law that was a national symbol of environmental protection before it came to be vilified as a primary reason for the state’s severe housing shortage and homelessness crisis,” the New York Times reports.

“For more than half a century, the law, the California Environmental Quality Act, has allowed environmentalists to slow suburban growth as well as given neighbors and disaffected parties a powerful tool to stop projects they found objectionable.”

Wall Street Journal: “Some environmentalists and other defenders of the longstanding law were furious, and warned that developers will now go unchecked.”

“The Trump administration has moved from outright denying the science of global warming to simply dismissing it,” Bloomberg reports.

“In the high glare of a summer evening in Fairbanks, Alaska, Ciara Santiago watched the mercury climb. A meteorologist at the National Weather Service office, she had the dubious honor of issuing the state’s first-ever official heat advisory as temperatures were expected to hit the mid-80s,” Grist reports.

“Trump administration officials have concluded that President Donald Trump has the authority to entirely abolish protected areas set aside as national monuments by past presidents, according to a legal opinion released Tuesday by the Department of Justice,” the Washington Post reports.

Reuters: “The risk of a public backlash against Trump if conditions at the national parks prove unpleasant for visitors this summer is significant. While Americans are increasingly divided on a range of key issues, the vast majority cherish the parks as national treasures and beloved, affordable vacation getaways.”

“And they are visiting them in record numbers. Last year, national parks welcomed more than 331 million visitors, a new high, up 6 million from 2023.”