SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
climate denial
Sanders Says Trump Is Prioritizing Profits for 'Fossil Fuel Executive Friends' by Gutting Climate Office
"He just fired the last remaining State Department employees who work on climate change, which is undoubtedly one of the greatest threats to our national security," said Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Jul 14, 2025
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Sunday condemned President Donald Trump's decision to terminate all remaining federal employees at the State Department office that works on international climate policy, a move that came as the administration hired prominent climate denialists and continued to boost the industry primarily responsible for the planetary crisis.
In a statement, Sanders (I-Vt.) accused Trump of "putting the planet and future generations at risk for the short-term profits of his fossil fuel executive friends." The president has repeatedly described climate change as a "hoax" and a "scam" and has moved aggressively to silence researchers and suppress data that contradict his false position.
Grist's Kate Yoder wrote Monday that "this isn't climate denial in the traditional sense."
"The days of loudly debating the science have mostly given way to something quieter and more insidious: a campaign to withhold the raw information itself," Yoder added.
Sanders' statement came days after the U.S. State Department fired all employees still at the Office of Global Change, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio is moving to eliminate at Trump's behest. Most of the office's staffers, who were tasked with engaging in international climate negotiations, had already departed voluntarily amid Trump's sweeping withdrawal from global climate initiatives and talks.
From May 2024 to May 2025, 4 billion people (half of the world’s population) experienced at least one extra month of extreme heat due to climate change.
And what is Trump’s response? He just fired the last remaining State Department employees who work on climate change. pic.twitter.com/IOlH9MImHU
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) July 13, 2025
Sanders highlighted the context of Trump's assault on climate science and diplomacy, pointing to "flooding in Texas this past week and in Vermont and Brazil last summer, recent wildfires in Canada and Los Angeles, and heatwaves in the United States, Europe, India, and Pakistan"—extreme weather made more intense by fossil fuel-driven climate change.
"The past 10 years have been the warmest 10 years on record," the senator noted. "2024 was the warmest year in recorded history. January 2025 was the hottest January on record. Western Europe just had its hottest June on record. The recent heatwave in the United States put nearly 190 million Americans under heat advisories and broke heat records in more than 280 locations. Over the past 60 years, the frequency of heatwaves in the United States has tripled. According to a new study from Yale University, 64% of Americans think global warming is affecting the weather in the U.S. and almost half say they have personally experienced its effects."
"And what is President Trump's response? He just fired the last remaining State Department employees who work on climate change, which is undoubtedly one of the greatest threats to our national security," said Sanders.
While removing federal climate staffers and experts en masse, Trump's administration has hired prominent climate denialists and moved to expand planet-warming oil and gas drilling—a gift to the fossil fuel giants that poured nearly $20 million into the president's inaugural fund and helped bankroll his White House campaign.
"Every month that Donald Trump has been in power, we've seen a raft of anti-climate measures come out which are music to the fossil fuel industry's ears," said Nicu Calcea, senior data investigator at Global Witness. "From plans to steamroll through dirty new coal plants, to the attempted quashing of 'polluter pays' laws that would hold oil giants accountable, it's clear where his political priorities lie."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump's NOAA Will Stop Tracking Costliest Climate Disasters
"Their philosophy is, if we ignore it, it's not a problem," said one meteorologist.
May 08, 2025
On the heels of the news that higher-than-average temperatures continued globally in April, one of the United States' top science agencies announced Thursday that it will no longer update a database that tracks climate disasters that cause billions of dollars in damage.
As of Thursday, the Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) website was replaced with a message saying there have been no such events in 2025 through April 8.
That flies in the face of an analysis by the National Centers for Environmental Information, which has maintained the database and said before it was taken down that six to eight billion-dollar climate disasters have happened so far this year, including the wildfires that devastated parts of Los Angeles in January and caused an estimated $150 billion in damage.
The World Weather Attribution said in late January that planetary heating, fueled by greenhouse gas emissions, caused weather conditions in Southern California that made the fires 35% more likely.
Hundreds of people have been laid off from NOAA in recent weeks as the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, led by billionaire tech CEO Elon Musk, has pushed to slash government spending, and those who have lost their jobs include scientists who helped maintain the database.
NOAA spokesperson Kim Doster told The Washington Post that in addition to staff changes, "evolving priorities" were also partially behind the retiring of the database, which will now show disasters that occurred only between 1980-2024.
Between 2020-24, the number of billion-dollar disasters averaged 23 per year, compared to just a few per year in the 1980s.
"This Trump administration move is the dumbest magic trick possible: covering their eyes and pretending the problem will go away if they just stop counting the costs. Households across the country already have to count these costs at their kitchen table as they budget for higher insurance costs and home repairs. Families and retirees dipping into their savings or going bankrupt to recover from wildfires and hurricanes know what disasters cost," said Carly Fabian, senior insurance policy advocate with Public Citizen's Climate Program. "Hiding the national tallies will only undermine our ability to prepare and respond to the climate crisis. Deleting the data will exacerbate the devastating delays in acting to slow climate change, and the impacts it is having on property insurance and housing costs."
NOAA's "evolving priorities" have also included decommissioning other datasets, including one tracking marine environments and one tracking ocean currents.
Without NOAA's Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database, Jeremy Porter, co-founder of the climate risk financial modeling firm First Street, told CNN that "replicating or extending damage trend analyses, especially at regional scales or across hazard types, is nearly impossible without significant funding or institutional access to commercial catastrophe models."
"What makes this resource uniquely valuable is not just its standardized methodology across decades, but the fact that it draws from proprietary and nonpublic data sources (such as reinsurance loss estimates, localized government reports, and private claims databases) that are otherwise inaccessible to most researchers," he said.
Chris Gloninger, a meteorologist who resigned from an Iowa news station after receiving threats for his frank, science-based coverage of climate disasters, said the retiring of the database suggests the Trump administration is "okay with spending billions of dollars on disasters."
"Every dollar that we spend on mitigation or adaptation saves $13 in recovery costs," said Gloninger. "But their philosophy is, if we ignore it, it's not a problem."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Toyota Exposed for Funding Climate Denialism Designed to Slow EV Transition
"Instead of innovating, Toyota has bankrolled lobbyists and climate-hostile lawmakers to help it defeat EVs," according to Public Citizen.
Jan 14, 2025
Nearly three decades after its introduction, the hybrid Toyota Prius is still associated with environmental action and the scientific consensus that fossil fuel emissions, including those from vehicles, must be reduced to avoid the worst effects of planetary heating.
But a Tuesday report from watchdog group Public Citizen reveals how Toyota has spent recent years becoming the largest funder of U.S. lawmakers who deny the existence of the climate emergency, and a major opponent to the expansion of electric vehicles.
In the report, titled Driving Denial, senior clean vehicles campaigner Adam Zuckerman explains how Toyota has emerged over the last three election cycles as the auto industry's top financial backer of climate deniers in Congress—donating to 207 of their campaigners.
Top climate-denying beneficiaries of Toyota include U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who received $10,000 from Toyota in during the 2024 cycle—the maximum amount allowed—and Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), who received $7,000 after he called for the end of EV tax credits and demanded the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) be eliminated.
Between 2020-24, Toyota's political action committee (PAC) has contributed tens of thousands of dollars to right-wing lawmakers including Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), David Schweikert (R-Ariz.) and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.)—giving a total of "$808,500 to the campaigns of congressional candidates that deny or question the existence of climate change," according to Public Citizen.
Despite Toyota's reputation as a hybrid car innovator, said Zuckerman, "the world's largest automaker has quietly spent the past several years building a powerful U.S. influence operation in an effort to delay the transition to electric vehicles."
"Funding a small army of climate-denying lawmakers, while lobbying aggressively against stronger emissions and fuel economy standards, is a volatile combination intended to roll back policies that protect our communities and planet," he said.
In addition to financing the campaigns of lawmakers who deny that fossil fuel emissions are heating the planet and contributing to more extreme wildfires, hurricanes, and other disasters, Toyota has also directly pushed back against climate regulations.
Three days after President-elect Donald Trump won the November election, Toyota Motor North America executive Jack Hollis falsely called tailpipe emissions standards introduced by California and the EPA "EV mandates" and claimed they will "remove consumer choice."
"Funding a small army of climate-denying lawmakers, while lobbying aggressively against stronger emissions and fuel economy standards, is a volatile combination intended to roll back policies that protect our communities and planet."
Hollis also wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed called on the incoming Trump administration to dismantle Biden-era policies that push automakers to reduce emissions, and in December, Toyota announced it was donating $1 million to Trump's inauguration
"Instead of embracing a green energy future, Toyota has aggressively lobbied to delay and weaken climate action," Public Citizen's report reads.
Toyota's advocacy "has borne results," notes the report. "During the Biden administration, lobbying from Toyota and others forced the EPA to weaken an ambitious EPA plan to limit vehicle emissions. The changes slow the adoption of more stringent vehicle pollution limits, making it easier for EV laggards like Toyota to meet regulations without building electric vehicles."
While billing itself as a global climate leader in recent decades, Toyota was named by InfluenceMap as the third-worst company in the world for anti-climate lobbying, after only fossil fuel giants Chevron and ExxonMobil.
InfluenceMap's 2024 scorecard "highlights Toyota's lobbying efforts against emissions standards in the U.S. and Australia and against EV mandates in Canada and the United Kingdom, as well as Toyota's success in weakening emissions stands in the U.S. and fuel efficiency standards in Australia," reads the Public Citizen report.
While ramping up its lobbying efforts Toyota has invested in carbon-intensive hydrogen-powered vehicles such as the Mirai, a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle (HFCV) introduced in 2014. The Mirai has sold fewer than 25,000 units and has failed to provide consumers with the infrastructure needed for HFCVs, with just 60 hydrogen refueling stations in the U.S. and Canada—leading to a class action lawsuit against the automaker.
The company has pursued "a risky strategy that has left Toyota vulnerable to an influx of competitors who have leapfrogged the auto giant to build the next generation of vehicles," reads the report. "Instead of innovating, Toyota has bankrolled lobbyists and climate-hostile lawmakers to help it defeat EVs."
According to the report, the automaker's abandonment of EV innovation and embrace of climate denial begs the question: "In 20 years, how will the world think of Toyota?"
EVs, said Zuckerman, "are the future of the automotive industry, and if it fails to evolve, Toyota risks becoming the next Kodak or Blockbuster, corporate giants that fought innovation and paid the price for it."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular