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center for biological diversity
'Absolute Joke': Big Ag Lobby Wins Again as Trump Admin 'Doubles Down' on Atrazine
"Hiding behind the rhetoric of MAHA, a poison that's likely to keep Americans sick for generations is moving forward full steam," said one leader at the Center for Biological Diversity.
Oct 08, 2025
A leading US conservation organization blasted the Trump administration on Wednesday for an announcement that "doubles down" on the alleged safety of atrazine, a pesticide widely used in the United States but banned in dozens of other countries due to concerns including birth defects, infertility, and cancer.
During President Donald Trump's first administration, the Center for Biological Diversity was among the groups sounding the alarm after the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reauthorized the use of atrazine in 2020. This past March, as part of a case brought by CBD, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to conduct biological opinions on how five pesticides, including atrazine, harm protected species.
The draft opinion for atrazine was released Tuesday by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which concluded that the herbicide often used on corn, sugarcane, and sorghum "does not pose an extinction risk to a single protected animal or plant, despite widespread contamination of the nation's rivers, lakes, and streams," as CBD summarized.
Ripping the announcement as "an absolute joke," Nathan Donley, CBD's environmental health science director, said that "you'd have an easier time convincing me that the government isn't really shut down than persuading me that atrazine isn't putting a single endangered species at risk of extinction."
"Despite rhetoric to the contrary, there is no better friend of atrazine than the Trump administration."
Donley's comments come as Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. face mounting criticism for promising to "Make America Healthy Again" and then releasing a series of reports that critics say offered "half-baked finger-pointing that blames the sick" and "the pesticide industry's talking points."
As The Washington Post reported earlier this week:
In May, the Trump administration's MAHA commission released a report raising questions about the health effects of two commonly used pesticides, glyphosate and atrazine. The report's rhetoric frustrated powerful agriculture groups such as CropLife America and the American Soybean Association, prompting them to launch a concerted lobbying blitz to promote the chemicals farmers rely on to produce large crops, according to interviews with industry officials.
Major trade groups scrambled to meet with White House officials. They urged the commission in a coordinated social media campaign to take a "fact-based approach," and sent letters to key federal departments. A top industry group helped coordinate a visit of Trump officials to a Maryland farm to see farming techniques in action. And in June, an industry lobbyist was appointed to a key position at the Environmental Protection Agency.
Their efforts seemingly paid off. The Trump administration's MAHA strategy document released last month did not call for restrictions on pesticides and instead said the EPA would work to ensure the public is aware of its "robust" review procedures, a marked shift from Kennedy’s past criticism of chemicals as contaminating the nation’s food supply.
"We were heard," Alexandra Dunn, the CEO of pesticide trade group CropLife America, told the Post. "They listened very carefully to a lot of the input that they received over the past months."
The commission's children-focused September report "notably avoids proposing restrictions on commonly used products such as glyphosate and atrazine," the newspaper noted. "The report pledges that the EPA will work with the food and agriculture industries to ensure the public has 'awareness and confidence' in the agency's 'robust review procedures.'"
Real Trump MAHA agenda: performative in face of corporate money:How Big Agriculture got its way in the latest MAHA report. Alarmed by the 1st MAHA commission report, agriculture industry mobilized to shape next installment. Those efforts seemingly paid off. www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi...
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— John Walke (@johndwalke.bsky.social) October 6, 2025 at 9:31 AM
Lori Ann Burd, CBD's environmental health director, said last month that "the commission's directive for the EPA and Big Ag to coordinate on a PR campaign aimed at convincing Americans that our pesticide regulatory process is robust is frankly insulting."
"The reality is that our pesticide regulatory process is as full of holes as Swiss cheese, and a slick PR campaign can't change that. The US uses a billion pounds of pesticides a year, and about a quarter of that total is pesticides banned in China, Brazil, and the EU," she continued. "If the EPA wants to convince us that our pesticide regulatory process is robust, they should make it robust."
"They should start by actually evaluating whole pesticide formulas and not just active ingredients and not routinely waiving the child safety factor for dangerous pesticides," she added. "And they should immediately ban the worst pesticides, like atrazine and paraquat, that are already banned in dozens of other countries and are imperiling the health of Americans right now."
After the Wednesday announcement, Donley declared that "despite rhetoric to the contrary, there is no better friend of atrazine than the Trump administration."
"Hiding behind the rhetoric of MAHA," he added, "a poison that's likely to keep Americans sick for generations is moving forward full steam."
The Trump administration's atrazine opinion came just a few weeks before the World Health Organization's next review of it. The last review from WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer was in 1999, and at the time IARC said that atrazine was "not classifiable as to its carcinogenicity to humans." The meeting is scheduled for October 28-November 4.
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Public and Planet to 'Pay the Price' as Trump Props Up Coal With $625 Million Bailout
One campaigner called it "nothing more than a wealth transfer from the American people to Trump's billionaire friends sitting atop a failing industry."
Sep 29, 2025
On the heels of reporting that the US Department of Energy banned staff from using "climate change" and related terms, the DOE on Monday announced a $625 million investment "to expand and reinvigorate America's coal industry," which was swiftly panned by climate and public health advocates.
While US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright claimed that "beautiful, clean coal will be essential to powering America's reindustrialization and winning the AI race," referring to the rapidly rising energy needs of artificial intelligence, critics pointed to the dangers posed by fossil fuels.
"Rather than investing in affordable and clean energy, Chris Wright is taking taxpayers' hard-earned dollars and giving it to wealthy executives in the coal industry," said Sierra Club Beyond Coal campaign director Laurie Williams in a statement. "This is a transparent wealth transfer from everyday Americans, who are already making tough decisions at the kitchen table, to the millionaires that run the fossil fuel industry."
Specifically, in response to President Donald Trump's coal-focused executive orders from earlier this year, DOE is committing $350 million to recommissioning and retrofitting, $175 million for projects in rural communities, $50 million to wastewater management systems to expand plant lifelines, $25 million for dual firing retrofits, and $25 million for gas cofiring systems.
"If Chris Wright, or anyone in Donald Trump's administration, truly cared about bringing down the cost of electricity, they would be investing in affordable clean energy instead of taking a sledgehammer to the progress our country has made," said Williams. "By handing out millions to the coal industry, the Trump administration is divesting from Americans' health, from our environment, and from our path forward to a cleaner, healthier future."
David Arkush, director of Public Citizen’s climate program, similarly said that "President Trump's coal giveaway is exactly the wrong direction for the country. It is clear that solar, wind, and battery storage will provide nearly all affordable, clean energy in the near future, and expensive, dirty coal will be a relic of the past."
"Trump's effort to block renewables and keep fossil fuels on life support only hurts Americans," Arkush continued. "It forces us to pay for unduly expensive energy and wasteful corporate subsidies, harms our health by polluting our air and water, and neglects to build up domestic manufacturing and supply chains for the energy technologies of the future while China races ahead."
"Other forms of energy are simply far less expensive than coal—as well as cleaner, cheaper, and safer for a climate habitable for humans," he added. "This bailout is nothing more than a wealth transfer from the American people to Trump's billionaire friends sitting atop a failing industry."
Idiot orange moron continues to destroy America. www.energy.gov/articles/ene... #trump #Epstein #GOP #MAGA #FossilFuel #ClimateEmergency #Renewables #Energy
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— plugpower.bsky.social (@plugpower.bsky.social) September 29, 2025 at 2:04 PM
Camden Weber, climate and energy policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity, also highlighted how Trump serves the superrich, particularly the fossil fuel executives who poured money into his 2024 campaign as he pledged to "drill, baby, drill."
"The guy with a golden, life-size statue of himself holding a bitcoin outside the US Capitol is prioritizing data center profits over Americans’ access to clean air, water, and affordable energy? Shocker," said Weber.
"Trump's order fabricates yet another 'energy emergency' to keep filthy coal plants online and fueling massive, energy-sucking data centers," she added. "He and his ultrarich friends will cash in while the public and our planet pay the price. The damage to our climate will be immense and unforgivable."
Separately on Monday, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum announced the opening of 13.1 million acres of federal land for coal leasing, triple the benchmarks set by the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act that congressional Republicans passed and Trump signed this summer.
"Expanding mining and spending taxpayer money on burning coal, while rolling back vital health protections, will only exacerbate the deadly pollution and rising electricity bills that communities are facing across the country," said Jill Tauber, vice president of litigation for climate and energy at Earthjustice.
"Clean energy and other climate solutions are driving significant growth in our economy, but this administration is choosing to throw its weight behind fossil fuel industries and stymie progress," she added. "Earthjustice will continue to take the administration to court to oppose unlawful actions to prop up coal at the expense of the American people."
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‘Reckless’ Countries to Extract More Than Double the Fossil Fuels Consistent With 1.5°C
“It’s astonishing that in the two years since countries agreed in Dubai to transition off fossil fuels, the US is leading the abandonment of affordable renewables for deadly oil and gas," said one advocate.
Sep 22, 2025
Climate advocates on Monday said a new report from three climate think tanks reveals how "just how reckless" some of the world's biggest polluters are when it comes to oil, gas, and coal extraction—which they are planning to ramp up in the coming years despite pledging to take steps to avoid catastrophic fossil-fueled planetary heating a decade ago.
Ten years after the Paris agreement on keeping global warming well below 2°C and just two years after the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28), where countries agreed for the first time to transition "away from fossil fuels," the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) joined Climate Analytics and the International Institute for Sustainable Development in releasing its latest Production Gap Report—and revealed that powerful governments are in fact moving in the opposite direction.
"Governments plan to produce 120% the volume of fossil fuels in 2030 than would be consistent with limiting global warming to 1.5°C, and 77% more than would be consistent with 2°C," the report found.
In their last analysis in 2023, the groups found a 110% and 69% gap over the 1.5°C and 2°C limits, respectively.
The groups analyzed the 20 largest producers of fossil fuels around the world—including the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Russia, and Canada—that are responsible for 80% of fossil fuel extraction.
Only three of the countries—Norway, the UK, and Australia—currently have plans to reduce oil and gas production by 2030 compared with 2023 levels. Eleven of them—including the US, Germany, and Saudi Arabia—are planning for higher production of at least one type of fossil fuel.
"Trump is fulfilling his dream of petrostate authoritarianism, backed by oil and gas billionaires. Unless we fight to stop it, the whole world is going to pay the price."
Derik Broekhoff, the lead author of the report and a senior scientist at SEI, said in a statement that "while many countries have committed to a clean energy transition, many others appear to be stuck using a fossil-fuel-dependent playbook, planning even more production than they were two years ago.”
The authors stressed that fossil fuel-producing countries are persisting in oil, gas, and coal extraction even as industries know "fossil fuels are on their last legs."
"Clean energy attracted $2 trillion in investment last year—$800 billion more than fossil fuels, and a 70% increase since the Paris agreement," reads the report. "In 2024, 92% of new global power capacity came from renewables, which undercut fossil fuels on price, efficiency, and emissions—even with subsidies artificially keeping fossil fuel prices down."
Neil Grant, a senior expert at Climate Analytics, noted that less demand for fossil fuels could make them cheaper, which could prolong the transition to renewable energy that the vast majority of the world population supports, according to one poll last year.
"We are in the foothills of an energy transition that is going to reshape fossil fuel demand,” Grant told The Guardian. “But many governments are thinking in terms of a world where the energy transition happens very incrementally. There’s a lot of danger, [including that] the voice of the fossil fuel lobby only gets louder and holds us back from this change to a cleaner, better, greener economy. That would lead to climate chaos or significant negative economic impacts.”
"Governments are blundering backwards towards our fossil past," said Grant in a statement, but "rapid reductions are possible, feasible, and they would make our lives better."
Emily Ghosh, a program director at SEI, warned that to limit planetary heating to 1.5°C, "fossil fuel production should have peaked and started to fall."
"Every year of delay significantly increases the pressure," she told The Guardian, adding that a "course correction" is urgently needed.
Jean Su, director of the Energy Justice program at the Center for Biological Diversity, pointed to US President Donald Trump's climate policy, including his move to end tax credits for solar panels and electric vehicles and to cancel the construction of an offshore wind farm.
"Trump is fulfilling his dream of petrostate authoritarianism, backed by oil and gas billionaires. Unless we fight to stop it, the whole world is going to pay the price," said Su.
“This report shows just how reckless the U.S. and other countries are in doubling down on fossil fuels,” she added. “It’s astonishing that in the two years since countries agreed in Dubai to transition off fossil fuels, the U.S. is leading the abandonment of affordable renewables for deadly oil and gas."
Kelly Trout, research director at Oil Change International, emphasized that "it is not yet too late to act."
"With the US driving the majority of global projected oil and gas expansion over the next decade, governments must resist bowing to the Trump administration’s pro-fossil fuel agenda, and instead seize the chance to rapidly shift course," said Trout. "Countries can still deliver the just energy transition away from fossil fuels they promised us two years ago, with other rich Global North producers taking the lead."
The report was released as Colombia announced at the UN General Assembly its intention to host the First International Conference for the Phaseout of Fossil Fuels, aligning with the International Court of Justice's historic advisory opinion this year recognizing countries' legal obligation to protect the climate.
As advocates called for the Production Gap Report to be "both a warning and a guide," Tzeporah Berman of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative said Colombia had signaled "a bold and necessary step towards climate leadership."
"This conference offers a vital opportunity to translate growing support into concrete action," said Berman, "accelerating our shift towards a more sustainable and just energy future for all."
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