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'This Would Be a Nuclear Genocide': Global Outrage Grows Over Trump's UNGA Threat Against Iran
"We must stop this madman," said US Sen. Ed Markey.
Sep 23, 2026
President Donald Trump is facing global condemnation for his threat to "annihilate" Iran during a Tuesday speech at the United Nations General Assembly.
Dr. Tara Drozdenko, director of the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), said on Tuesday that the president's speech "clearly constitutes an implied threat to use overwhelming nuclear force against Iran and the Iranian people broadly."
"This would be a nuclear genocide," Drozdenko emphasized. "Any threat to use nuclear weapons is unacceptable, and his decision to do so should be strongly condemned by government, military, and civil society leaders."
Drozdenko acknowledged that Trump's long history of unhinged rhetoric might make his statements easy to dismiss, but warned even empty threats involving nuclear weapons can have serious real-world ramifications.
"President Trump’s nuclear threats against Iran reinforce a counterproductive lesson also imparted by President Vladimir Putin’s nuclear threats against Ukraine," she said. "Specifically, these threats encourage other countries to conclude that protecting and securing themselves from authoritarians with nuclear weapons requires obtaining their own nuclear arsenal."
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) also said that Trump's menacing rhetoric toward Iran must be taken seriously.
"Trump threatened to 'annihilate' Iran," Markey wrote in a social media post. "His 'October surprise' must not be a mushroom cloud from a nuclear attack. With these threats and assistance to Saudi Arabia, Trump is inferring mass slaughter and escalating an arms race in the Middle East. We must stop this madman."
Robert Tait, US correspondent for The Guardian, wrote an analysis on Tuesday arguing that Trump's threat against Iran was "stunning, even for him."
Tait noted that it has been decades since the UN General Assembly has "witnessed such a display of bellicosity from a superpower leader," especially since it was delivered in a "forum created in the aftermath of the Second World War, with the explicit aim of preventing future conflicts."
"Whether or not the latest threat should be taken literally," Tait added, "little of what he said about Iran seemed reassuring."
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'Deaths Will Continue to Mount,' Scientist Warns After August and Summer 2026 Set US Heat Records
"It's unconscionable that the federal government is putting specific industry interests, including fossil fuel companies’ profits, ahead of people’s health and safety."
Sep 09, 2026
Under US President Donald Trump's predecessor, government scientists used the release of data about record-breaking temperatures to warn that "we are facing a climate crisis," but with the Republican climate denier back in the White House, that commentary now comes from outside experts.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced Wednesday that 2026 had the warmest August ever recorded in the contiguous United States. Following a July that broke a Dust Bowl record, August averaged 75.6°F—which was 3.5°F above the 20th-century average—with daytime maximum temperatures averaging 88.6°F.
This year also featured the hottest meteorological summer—June to August—in the 132-year record, with an average temperature of 74.4°F, or 3°F above average, according to NOAA. As CNN reported, "The Dust Bowl summer of 1936 has... long been regarded as the benchmark of hottest summers in the US, but has now been equaled or eclipsed twice in the past five years thanks to the influence of human-caused climate change," both in 2026 and 2021.
Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, told Agence France-Presse that "it is now time to stop acting surprised that our warming planet keeps getting warmer."
"This is occurring exactly as forecast by scientists literally decades ago," he stressed. "The interesting question is not whether we will keep breaking heat records (we will), but whether we're going to do anything about it or just stand there while the climate train runs us over."
NOAA said that "record-breaking warmth was widespread across the West, Southwest, southern Rockies, and southwestern Plains, as well as the southern Florida Peninsula. California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado each set records for their warmest August average temperature. California and New Mexico also recorded their warmest average daytime maximum temperatures on record, while average nighttime minimum temperatures were record warm in California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado."
Beyond the Lower 48, "Alaska's average temperature during August was 52.4°F, 2.9°F above the 1925-2000 average, ranking in the warmest third of the 102-year record. Alaska's June-August average temperature was 51.6°F, 1.1°F above average and ranking in the warmest third of the record," the agency detailed.
"Hawaii's average temperature during August was 70.8°F, 1.4°F above the 1991-2020 average, ranking as the third-warmest August in the 36-year record," the agency added. "Hawaii's June-August average temperature was 69.4°F, 0.8°F above average and ranking in the warmest third of the record. Hawaii's average temperature during August was 70.8°F, 1.4°F above the 1991-2020 average."
Marc Alessi, a climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a statement that "we now live in a completely different climate than the one that existed 50 years ago. Heat records were shattered in all parts of the globe this summer, from the United States to Europe to Asia."
Alessi pointed to El Niño, the warm phase of a key pattern in the Pacific Ocean. Recent research suggests fossil fuel-driven global heating has intensified El Niños, and experts have said that the currently developing event "may be stronger than anything since our monitoring began" and make 2027 the hottest year humanity has ever endured.
"While the developing super El Niño undoubtedly impacted the summer's global temperature and heat records, we must recognize that this El Niño is occurring on top of a changed climate from the burning of fossil fuels," Alessi said. "In other words, we can expect record-breaking summers for generations to come if nations fail to sharply curtail heat-trapping emissions."
"What's equally clear is that policymakers—especially in richer, high-emitting countries like the United States—must act urgently to limit climate change impacts and hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for its role in the crisis," he continued. "Extreme heat and back-to-back heatwaves have taken a deadly toll this summer in the United States and across the world. Without action to reduce global warming emissions and invest in climate resilience measures, heat-related illnesses and deaths will continue to mount."
Despite the threats currently posed by the global crisis, and expectations that they will only get worse as the world blows past the Paris Agreement's goal of limiting temperature rise this century to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, "the Trump administration has attacked and dismantled policies to limit heat-trapping emissions and to prepare for climate disasters," Alessi noted.
After openly courting Big Oil on the campaign trail, Trump has served fossil fuel industry interests in a range of ways since returning to the White House last year, including by declaring a national energy emergency, waging a war on renewable power projects, and ditching the Paris Agreement, again.
"Failure of the administration and Congress to act has also left workers exposed to killer heat without comprehensive, enforceable heat-health protections," Alessi said. "It's unconscionable that the federal government is putting specific industry interests, including fossil fuel companies' profits, ahead of people's health and safety."
NOAA's new data was released less than two months away from the midterm elections—which which Democrats hope to win back majorities in Congress from Trump's Republican Party—and as firefighters in Türkiye, host of the next United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP31), battled deadly blazes.
"It is not enough merely to respond to the consequences of the climate crisis. We must eliminate the causes that exacerbate it," Efe Baysal, Türkiye manager at the global advocacy group 350.org, said Wednesday, calling for a phaseout of fossil fuels. "COP31 is an opportunity for Türkiye to demonstrate true leadership in this direction."
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'Like Putting a Flat Earther in Charge of NASA': Trump Appoints Climate Denier to Key Climate Post
Putting an "utterly unqualified" person like Matthew Wielicki in charge of the National Climate Assessment, said one critic, “would jeopardize the integrity of one of the nation’s most important climate science resources.”
Jul 09, 2026
The Trump White House has quietly reconstituted the US Global Change Research Program—but that doesn't mean the administration has turned over a new leaf on combating the climate crisis.
According to a Thursday report from Politico, the administration decided to bring the USGCRP, which tracks the impact of manmade climate change and produces the country's National Climate Assessment report, back to life just a little more than a year after terminating its funding.
But there's a twist: A source has confirmed to Politico that the USGCRP is now being headed by Matthew Wielicki, a former University of Alabama geochemist and self-described "professor in exile" who frequently attacks climate science in social media posts.
In his role, Wielicki will be in charge of writing the National Climate Assessment, a congressionally mandated report outlining the impacts that climate change is having on US infrastructure and the economy.
In an interview with Politico, Wielicki revealed that he's been soliciting ideas for what to include in the next National Climate Assessment from X, the social media website owned by Elon Musk that is notorious for being awash in right-wing propaganda and scientific misinformation.
In the past, noted Politico, Wielicki dismissed climate research entirely, arguing that a "significant portion of the climate science literature is nothing more than stamp collecting," while suggesting that scientists are fabricating data to give a false impression of a warming planet.
Dr. Carlos Martinez, senior climate scientist for the Climate and Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, wasted no time blasting Wielicki's appointment.
"Reconstituting the UCSGCRP only to place the National Climate Assessment under the auspices of an utterly unqualified climate science denier," Martinez said, "would jeopardize the integrity of one of the nation’s most important climate science resources."
Martinez emphasized that the National Climate Assessment "is not a political document" and is "supposed to be developed through a rigorous, transparent, multi-agency scientific process involving federal experts, external scientists, extensive review—including by the National Academies—and public input."
Ryan Katz-Rosene, professor at the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa, said Wielicki's appointment "sadly... is not a joke," and that it was "like putting a Flat Earther in charge of NASA."
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New El Niño Warning Compounded by Trump’s Attacks on Climate, Disaster Preparedness
"If and when a hurricane unleashes widespread death and destruction... Democrats should make Trump and his Republican accomplices pay a steep political price for deliberately putting people in harm's way."
Jun 02, 2026
The World Meteorological Organization on Tuesday issued a warning about an El Niño event forming that is expected to "increase the risk of extreme weather over the coming months."
El Niño refers to a climate pattern that features warmer than average temperatures in the Pacific Ocean. WMO said its latest forecast estimates an 80% likelihood of an event occurring this summer, with most of its models suggesting “it will be at least moderate—and possibly strong.”
WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo warned that a strong El Niño this summer "will exacerbate drought and heavy rainfall and increase the risk of heatwaves both on land and in the ocean," and said WMO scientists will be "carefully monitoring conditions in the coming months to inform decision-making by governments, humanitarian agencies, and climate-sensitive sectors."
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said the latest WMO projections must spur global action to address the climate crisis.
"The world must treat it as the urgent climate warning it is," Guterres said. "El Niño conditions will pour fuel on the fire of a warming world. Impacts will hit even harder, travel even farther, and cross borders with devastating speed. The only effective response is climate action equal to the crisis—ending the addiction to fossil fuels, accelerating the shift to renewables, protecting the most vulnerable, and delivering early warning systems for all."
An El Niño event could pose particular problems in the United States, as critics are warning that President Donald Trump's attacks on climate research and federal disaster preparedness are leaving Americans particularly vulnerable to extreme weather.
Revolving Door Project senior researcher Kenny Stancil on Tuesday published an analysis breaking down the ways the Trump administration "has relentlessly undermined disaster readiness and response capacity" by taking a hatchet to key institutions such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the National Weather Service (NWS).
Among other things, Stancil documented how the Trump administration has ousted "thousands of NOAA workers, including hundreds of NWS employees"; gutted FEMA's staff by "pushing out thousands of rank-and-file workers and dozens of veteran leaders"; and is "thwarting investments in disaster risk reduction, from slashing emissions to pursuing just and sustainable urban development."
Stancil added that while Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has reversed some of the cuts made by former DHS chief Kristi Noem, these "last-minute reversals can't undo" the "severe damage" caused by the initial actions.
"If and when a hurricane unleashes widespread death and destruction (if not in 2026, it could be in 2027 or 2028)," Stancil wrote, "Democrats should make Trump and his Republican accomplices pay a steep political price for deliberately putting people in harm's way."
Stancil's concerns about US preparedness for extreme weather events were echoed by Shana Udvardy, senior climate resilience policy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, who on Monday published an analysis outlining the current state of FEMA ahead of hurricane season.
Although Udvardy offered some qualified praise for Mullin for undoing some of Noem's worst policy decisions, she said FEMA still faces potentially catastrophic vacancies at key positions.
"Roughly half of FEMA’s leadership, 18 out of 38 of top-level positions, have yet to be filled as of today, at the start of the Atlantic hurricane season," she explained, adding that "it can take six months to a year to recruit and onboard a senior executive and a year to hire full-time staff."
The administration this week also announced plans to dismantle the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a deep-sea monitoring system that can provide crucial storm forecasting data while also tracking the health of coastal habitats.
Chris Robbins, associate director of scientific initiatives at Ocean Conservatory, said on Tuesday that the administration's effort to dismantle the system heading into a projected El Niño event "doesn't make any sense."
"Walking away from a $368 million investment in a state-of-the-art system, a feat of engineering already paid for by the American people, is absolutely myopic," Robbins said. "This system is a vital scientific asset that quietly protects American lives, communities, and the economy through unfettered access to world-class scientific data. Its loss would create an irreparable blind spot for our country in predicting earthquakes, fishery health, storm forecasting, coastal flooding, and more."
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Climate Defenders Warn GOP Immunity Bill Puts 'Big Oil Above the Law'
“Such corporate impunity would twist the knife of the climate crisis that is already directly harming people across the country," said one campaigner.
Apr 17, 2026
Green groups warned Friday that Big Oil-backed Republican legislation would give fossil fuel companies immunity from laws or lawsuits aimed at holding them accountable for their role in causing the climate emergency.
On Thursday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) introduced a bill co-sponsored by Sens. Ted Budd (R-NC), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), and Mike Lee (R-Utah) that, if passed, would "prohibit liability against those engaged in the mining, extraction, production, refinement, transportation, distribution, marketing, manufacture, or sale of energy for damages or injunctive or other relief from the use of their products, and for other purposes."
Congresswoman Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) on Friday introduced the House version of the legislation, dubbed the Stop Climate Shakedowns Act of 2026, "to protect American energy from leftist legal crusades punishing lawful activity," as her office put it.
🚨After months of fossil fuel industry lobbying, Republican lawmakers have introduced federal legislation that would give oil and gas companies immunity from any laws or lawsuits that aim to hold them accountable for their role in the climate crisis. Time to get loud: 📣 NO IMMUNITY FOR BIG OIL 📣
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— Center for Climate Integrity (@climateintegrity.org) April 17, 2026 at 12:30 PM
If passed, the legislation would ban retroactive climate liability lawsuits, dismiss any such litigation pending upon the law's enactment, void all state energy penalty laws, and affirm that the federal government maintains exclusive authority and jurisdiction over the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions and other interstate environmental standards.
Other Republican-controlled states including Tennesseee and Utah have recently passed such legislation, and others—including Iowa, Louisiana, and Oklahoma—have introduced similar bills.
“This blatant championing of some of the world’s largest polluters shows how far certain elected officials will go to undermine democratic policymaking and deny people and communities access to justice," Kathy Mulvey, climate accountability campaign director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said Friday.
"No company should be above the law, especially those that planned, funded, and continue to engage in a coordinated decadeslong campaign to protect their profits by deceiving the public and blocking climate action," Mulvey continued.
"Such corporate impunity would twist the knife of the climate crisis that is already directly harming people across the country," she added. "Congress must not capitulate to wealthy special interests. Communities deserve the right to hold polluters accountable for the deadly and costly harms they are causing.”
Former Democratic Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said in a statement that “every elected official who cares about the interests of their constituents more than those of corporate polluters should oppose this disgraceful proposal."
"Juries are a fundamental bastion of democracy, and it’s beyond dangerous to allow powerful and wealthy corporations to shield themselves from ever having to face jurors’ judgment," he added.
The Center for Climate Integrity said the bill "would put Big Oil above the law."
“Big Oil companies have raked in massive profits at the pump while lying to the American people about the catastrophic harm of their products, and now they want to deny Americans their rightful day in court and stick taxpayers with the bill for the mess they made," Center for Climate Integrity president Richard Wiles said Friday. "If fossil fuel companies have done nothing wrong, why do they need immunity?”
While these and other climate advocates denounced the bill, their congressional sponsors—and those lawmakers' fossil fuel industry campaign donors—applauded its introduction.
“Energy security is national security, and we will not self-sabotage our critical industries with a cascade of costly lawsuits and extreme penalties that jeopardize American drilling,” Hageman said in a statement. “America’s energy producers should be protected from the dangerous legal precedent that would be set by the retroactive punishment of lawful activity.”
American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers president and CEO Chet Thompson and American Petroleum Institute president and CEO Mike Sommers said in a joint statement, "We thank Sen. Cruz and Rep. Hageman for introducing legislation to stop a growing patchwork of state laws and lawsuits that threaten American energy and risk raising costs for consumers.”
“These efforts to retroactively penalize companies for lawfully meeting consumer demand are misguided and counterproductive," the lobbyists added. "Congress should act decisively to reaffirm federal authority over national energy policy and end this activist-driven state overreach.”
Eleven states—California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont—along with the District of Columbia and dozens of city, county, and tribal governments have ongoing lawsuits seeking to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for lying to the public about their products’ role in causing and worsening climate change.
On Friday, the right-wing US Supreme Court unanimously issued an important procedural ruling that certain environmental damage lawsuits—in this case, one challenging Chevron's destruction of coastal wetlands in Louisiana—can be moved from state to generally friendlier federal courts. This, after a jury in Plaquemines Parish ordered Chevron and two other companies to pay $744 million in damages for harming coastal wetlands, a verdict that was appealed.
The US Supreme Court's decision came as its justices prepare to hear Suncor Energy Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, a case in which the plaintiffs—three Suncor entities and ExxonMobil—are seeking to relocate a climate damages lawsuit from Colorado to federal court.
Big Oil-backed efforts to relocate cases to friendlier forums come amid wins for climate defenders, most notably Held v. Montana, a historic 2024 state court ruling in favor of youth-led plaintiffs based on the Montana Constitution's right to "a clean and healthful environment."
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'Game Over Zeldin': 160+ Climate and Health Groups Say EPA Chief Must Go
"The wreckage of Lee Zeldin's EPA will be measured in lives lost, jobs destroyed, the costs of illnesses that could have been prevented, and communities devastated."
Mar 24, 2026
A month after President Donald Trump and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced what they celebrated as the "single largest deregulatory action in US history," a coalition of over 160 civil rights, environmental, faith, health, and labor groups came together Tuesday to call for the EPA chief's ouster.
Zeldin was confirmed by Senate Republicans and a trio of Democrats just over a week after Trump returned to power in January 2025. The "Game Over Zeldin" coalition, led by the Climate Action Campaign (CAC) and Moms Clean Air Force, argued in an open letter that no other EPA administrator "in history—Democratic or Republican—has so brazenly betrayed the agency's core mission" to "protect human health and the environment."
"Zeldin has dismantled protections that keep our kids, families, and climate safe, and our air and water clean," the letter notes. "He slashed vital funding, gutted agency staff, and has rigged the system to put corporate polluters first, at the expense of our health. Zeldin's EPA has rejected science and health data—and is refusing to count the value of human lives and health—in order to erode commonsense public health safeguards. He has decimated environmental justice programs and hard-fought progress—entirely eliminating the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights."
Dominique Browning, director and co-founder of Moms Clean Air Force, pointed out in a Tuesday statement that "in just the past few months, he has supported the Trump administration in using taxpayer money to prop up the coal industry; he has made it easier for polluters to spew mercury—a potent neurotoxin that damages the developing brains of babies—into our air and waterways; and he has rolled back the endangerment finding in an attempt to sabotage EPA's ability to cut climate pollution."
The 2009 endangerment finding underpins all federal climate policy. David Arkush of the watchdog Public Citizen—which is also part of the diverse coalition behind the new letter—warned at the time that if allowed to stand, the repeal "will hamstring the government's ability to combat the most terrible environmental threat in human history, harming Americans and the world for decades to come."
Young Americans and a coalition of environmental and public health organizations swiftly filed a pair of lawsuits over the rollback. Another group of 24 states, joined by various US cities and counties, sued last week. The most recent filing is expected to be consolidated with the first coalition's case, according to The New York Times, "making for one of the largest legal challenges to date against the Trump administration's unraveling of federal climate policy."
The new letter stresses the consequences of that unraveling, stating that "because of Zeldin's directives, we will suffer more health-damaging air pollution and be exposed to more toxic chemicals in our homes, in our food, in our products, and in our water. Zeldin's rollbacks will lead to more carbon dioxide and methane pollution that will contribute to worsening climate disasters."
"Families across the country, whether rural or urban, are already struggling with the consequences of Zeldin's actions," the letter adds. "The damage he is doing will span generations. Zeldin is deepening environmental injustices and will leave a terrible legacy for our children and grandchildren."
We refuse to stay silent while Lee Zeldin treats our lives like a line item to be deleted. The EPA is for the people, not polluters. His time is up; Lee Zeldin must go. #GameOverZeldin www.gameoverzeldin.com
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— Physicians for Social Responsibility - National (@psr.org) March 24, 2026 at 12:12 PM
CAC director Margie Alt declared Tuesday that "the wreckage of Lee Zeldin's EPA will be measured in lives lost, jobs destroyed, the costs of illnesses that could have been prevented, and communities devastated. We will be paying the price for decades to come."
"Zeldin ignored science as well as the legal and moral precedent," she said. "Instead, he looked at the numbers and made a choice: He decided that corporate bottom lines matter more than our lives. He decided you and your family are expendable. After a year on the job, it is clear that Zeldin is either unable or unwilling to uphold his oath of office or the EPA's fundamental mission. So let us be clear: Our lives are not expendable. Our health is not expendable. Our climate is not expendable. Lee Zeldin must go."
Other organizations that signed on to the letter include Beyond Plastics, Cherokee Concerned Citizens, Clean Air Council, Clean Water Action, Climate Hawks Vote, Earthjustice, Environmental Working Group, Environmental Protection Network, GreenLatinos, Indivisible Action Coalition, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Service Employees International Union, Sierra Club, Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), and more.
"Administrator Zeldin's established pattern of placing polluter profits above the health and safety of people across the country cannot stand," said UCS president and CEO Gretchen Goldman. "The science establishing harm to human health and the environment from global warming emissions is undeniable. The unprecedented, climate-fueled heatwave a large swath of the United States has been experiencing is only the latest example."
"The public deserves an EPA administrator who will face the challenge of the climate crisis and fossil fuel and toxics pollution head on with proven policy solutions," she argued, "not actively serve as an agent of destruction beholden to the whims of oil, gas, and chemical industry executives and an authoritarian, anti-science US president."
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Trump EPA Risks Health of Millions With Giveaway to Corporate Polluters That Use Cancer-Causing Gas
"Walking back key regulations for ethylene oxide sterilizer facilities is essentially giving a highly polluting industry a get-out-of-jail-free card," said one campaigner.
Mar 13, 2026
While US Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin on Friday presented a proposed policy change as a demonstration of the Trump administration's commitment to "ensuring lifesaving medical devices remain available," public health advocates warned that relaxing rules on emissions of the cancer-causing gas ethylene oxide puts millions of Americans at risk.
As The New York Times explained: "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 EPA proposal would amend the Biden administration's 2024 National Emissions Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants for facilities that use ethylene oxide, which the agency estimated would have eliminated over 90% of dangerous pollution from the gas. The previous policy was cheered by organizations including Earthjustice, which sounded the alarm on Friday.
"The 2024 standards would have delivered enormous public health benefits. EPA knows that ethylene oxide is carcinogenic and determined that sterilizers can install effective and affordable pollution controls," said Earthjustice senior attorney Deena Tumeh. "EPA has no basis to repeal this well-supported rule. By rolling back the rule, the Trump EPA is bending the knee to the sterilizer industry at the expense of millions of people's health."
Darya Minovi, a senior analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists' (UCS) Center for Science and Democracy, similarly stressed that "this dangerous decision puts people across the United States and in Puerto Rico at a higher risk of breathing dangerous fumes known to cause respiratory irritation, nausea, blurred vision, headaches, and various cancers. Children are especially vulnerable to the cancer-causing harms of ethylene oxide exposure."
As Minovi detailed:
According to UCS analysis, nearly 14 million people in the United States live within five miles of at least one commercial sterilization facility, and more than 10,000 schools and childcare facilities fall within those areas. These communities are disproportionately made up of people of color or those who do not speak English as a first language...
This decision is a reckless and self-serving handout to big industry, which asked for this rule to be rolled back. This process sidestepped community input from the start and is an affront to communities that have unknowingly lived with ethylene oxide exposure for decades. These actions show, yet again, that this administration has little to no regard for the health and welfare of working people or any interest in protecting children from exposure to toxic chemicals.
Minovi declared that "ethylene oxide emissions controls need to be strengthened—not dismantled," an argument echoed by Jane Williams, executive director of California Communities Against Toxics and chair of the Sierra Club National Clean Air Team.
"Walking back key regulations for ethylene oxide sterilizer facilities is essentially giving a highly polluting industry a get-out-of-jail-free card. Sterilizers are some of the largest, most toxic chemical manufacturing facilities in the country,” said Williams. "Rather than regressing on key protections, these facilities need even more controls in place to ensure the safety of workers and nearby communities."
People who live near sterilizer facilities also spoke out against the proposed rule, which now faces a 45-day public comment period.
"We understand that industry applied heavy pressure to weaken the previously finalized rule. We also understand that industry remains more concerned with their profits than the lives of those who live near sterilizer facilities, like my community in Laredo," said Tricia Cortez, executive director of Rio Grande International Study Center in Texas.
"Sterilizer facilities like Midwest must be held accountable for their dangerous, cancer-causing emissions," she said. "We need an EPA that works to protect us, the people, not financial interests and corporations that continue to cause so much harm to so many."
Victor Alvarado, founder and coordinator for Comité Diálogo Ambiental, said that "I remember the EPA informing us that Steri-Tech's ethylene oxide emissions in my hometown of Salinas, Puerto Rico, were so high that we had one of the highest rates of toxic air cancer risk in the United States... Eliminating the new protections against ethylene oxide emissions is unjust."
The EPA proposal comes after President Donald Trump in July signed a series of proclamations easing pollution rules for over 100 facilities focused on energy, chemical manufacturing, iron ore processing, and sterile medical equipment. His "regulatory relief," as the Republican called it, applied to dozens of sterilization plants.
The Southern Environmental Law Center and Natural Resources Defense Council responded by filing a federal lawsuit on behalf of CleanAIRE NC, Sustainable Newton, Savannah Riverkeeper, and Virginia Interfaith Power & Light.
"We always knew the presidential exemptions issued last year were part a broader plan to put the interests of corporate polluters above the health and well-being of American families," Sustainable Newton president Maurice Carter said Friday. "But we won't stop fighting to protect our community by demanding commonsense, reasonable measures that even the EPA has said would reduce harmful emissions by 90% and lower cancer risks by 92%."
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Trump Orders Pentagon to Purchase Coal Energy in Latest Move Propping Up Climate-Wrecking, Costly Plants
“Reality doesn’t lie: Coal is a rapidly dwindling relic of the past, not a solution for the future," said one climate action advocate.
Feb 12, 2026
“The 19th century called, and it wants its fuel source back," said the president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council on Wednesday as President Donald Trump announced his latest attempt to prop up the pollution-causing, expensive coal industry with taxpayer funds—this time by ordering the Pentagon to purchase electricity directly from coal-fired power plants.
"While Americans are demanding clean, affordable energy, the Trump administration is using our tax dollars to prop up the nation’s dirtiest, least efficient power plants," said Manish Bapna of the NRDC.
At an event at the White House, Trump directed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to sign long-term, taxpayer-funded contracts with coal plants that would likely have otherwise been retired in the coming years, to purchase energy to power military installations.
"Hard to think of a dumber 21st Century energy and security policy than Trump's insistence that the Pentagon buy more coal power," said the Military Emissions Gap, a UK-based project that monitors military emissions data.
Trump also announced $175 million from the Energy Department to upgrade six coal plants in Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, and West Virginia, and was presented with a trophy naming him the “Undisputed Champion of Beautiful Clean Coal" by the Washington Coal Club.
The Trump administration's persistent efforts to cancel the planned closures of large coal plants have been challenged not only by more than a dozen state governments, but by the owners of at least one of the facilities and two utilities in Colorado.
The utilities, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association and Platte River Power Authority, accused the administration of violating the Takings Clause of the US Constitution's Fifth Amendment, which states that “private property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation.”
They argued in a regulatory filing last month that “the costs of compliance fall directly on their members and customers, who must now pay."
Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program, told the Washington Post that the administration's decision to compel coal plants to continue operating has raised household "energy bills while providing negligible benefits to consumers.”
“Each of the five plants were slated to retire because they are expensive to operate and there are cheaper sources of power available to meet consumers’ needs,” Peskoe told the Post. “Plant owners aren’t just flipping a switch to turn the plants back on—they are spending millions on maintenance, renewing expired coal contracts and rehiring workers.”
“It’s no wonder fossil fuel lobbyists are handing Trump an award today. Trump asked them for campaign cash and promised to return the favor—and now he is."
Bapna said Trump's latest actions on coal were the result of the president's campaign promise to fossil fuel executives, whom he asked for $1 billion in campaign donations and pledged to gut climate regulations in return.
“It’s no wonder fossil fuel lobbyists are handing Trump an award today. Trump asked them for campaign cash and promised to return the favor—and now he is," said Bapna. "The rest of us are left to pay the price: more heart disease and asthma attacks, higher utility bills, and more frequent unnatural disasters. This is a raw deal for our wallets, our health, and our future.”
Julie McNamara, associate policy director of the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, pointed out that Americans will face higher electricity bills and be forced to pay for the new Department of Defense contracts at a time when "people and businesses across the country are struggling with rapidly escalating electricity costs" while other countries around the world expand their use of far cheaper renewable energy sources.
"The country has real solutions at hand—yet instead of pushing ahead with investments in the fastest, cheapest, cleanest resources available, the Trump administration is actively doing everything it can to stop the deployment of new solar and wind projects, to stop investments in energy efficiency, and to stop the buildout of modern grid infrastructure," said McNamara.
“Reality doesn’t lie: Coal is a rapidly dwindling relic of the past, not a solution for the future," she added. "The Trump administration’s flailings come with real consequences. Forcing the use of increasingly unreliable and relentlessly uneconomic coal plants will risk outages and send high electricity costs higher. Recklessly slashing health, safety, and environmental standards will harm people’s health and the environment. And opting for hollow statements and short-term bailouts fails to meaningfully deliver for the coal-dependent communities requiring actual, durable transition solutions."
Margie Alt, director of the Climate Action Campaign, suggested that Trump's latest handouts to coal firms "ignores basic economics" while also proving that "coal can't compete without a taxpayer-funded bailout."
"Our military is one of the largest consumers of energy in the world," said Alt. "Instead of improving the efficiency of our military and the quality of life for those serving our country, this order saddles taxpayers with inflated energy costs while exposing millions of Americans to more toxic pollution from old, inefficient plants."
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'Making America Unsafe Again': Alarm Over Environmental Review Exemption for Nuclear Reactors
"I think the DOE's attempts to cut corners on safety, security, and environmental protections are posing a grave risk to public health, safety, and our natural environment," said one expert.
Feb 03, 2026
Less than a week after NPR revealed that "the Trump administration has overhauled a set of nuclear safety directives and shared them with the companies it is charged with regulating, without making the new rules available to the public," the US Department of Energy announced Monday that it is allowing firms building experimental nuclear reactors to seek exemptions from legally required environmental reviews.
Citing executive orders signed by President Donald Trump in May, a notice published in the Federal Register states that the DOE "is establishing a categorical exclusion for authorization, siting, construction, operation, reauthorization, and decommissioning of advanced nuclear reactors for inclusion in its National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) implementing procedures."
NEPA has long been a target of energy industries and Republican elected officials, including Trump. The exemption policy has been expected since Trump's May orders—which also launched a DOE pilot program to rapidly build the experimental reactors—and the department said in a statement that even the exempted reactors will face some reviews.
"The US Department of Energy is establishing the potential option to obtain a streamlined approach for advanced nuclear reactors as part of the environmental review performed under NEPA," the DOE said. "The analysis on each reactor being considered will be informed by previously completed environmental reviews for similar advanced nuclear technologies."
"The fact is that any nuclear reactor, no matter how small, no matter how safe it looks on paper, is potentially subject to severe accidents."
However, the DOE announcement alarmed various experts, including Daniel P. Aldrich, director of the Resilience Studies Program at Northeastern University, who wrote on social media: "Making America unsafe again: Trump created an exclusion for new experimental reactors from disclosing how their construction and operation might harm the environment, and from a written, public assessment of the possible consequences of a nuclear accident."
Foreign policy reporter Laura Rozen described the policy as "terrifying," while Paul Dorfman, chair of the Nuclear Consulting Group and a scholar at the University of Sussex's Bennett Institute for Innovation and Policy Acceleration, called it "truly crazy."
As NPR reported Monday:
Until now, the test reactor designs currently under construction have primarily existed on paper, according to Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group. He believes the lack of real-world experience with the reactors means that they should be subject to more rigorous safety and environmental reviews before they're built.
"The fact is that any nuclear reactor, no matter how small, no matter how safe it looks on paper, is potentially subject to severe accidents," Lyman said.
"I think the DOE's attempts to cut corners on safety, security, and environmental protections are posing a grave risk to public health, safety, and our natural environment here in the United States," he added.
Lyman was also among the experts who criticized changes that NPR exposed last week, after senior editor and correspondent Geoff Brumfiel obtained documents detailing updates to "departmental orders, which dictate requirements for almost every aspect of the reactors' operations—including safety systems, environmental protections, site security, and accident investigations."
While the DOE said that it shared early versions of the rules with companies, "the reduction of unnecessary regulations will increase innovation in the industry without jeopardizing safety," and "the department anticipates publicly posting the directives later this year," Brumfiel noted that the orders he saw weren't labeled as drafts and had the word "approved" on their cover pages.
In a lengthy statement about last week's reporting, Lyman said on the Union of Concerned Scientists website that "this deeply troubling development confirms my worst fears about the dire state of nuclear power safety and security oversight under the Trump administration. Such a brazen rewriting of hundreds of crucial safeguards for the public underscores why preservation of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) as an independent, transparent nuclear regulator is so critical."
"The Energy Department has not only taken a sledgehammer to the basic principles that underlie effective nuclear regulation, but it has also done so in the shadows, keeping the public in the dark," he continued. "These long-standing principles were developed over the course of many decades and consider lessons learned from painful events such as the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters. This is a massive experiment in the deregulation of novel, untested nuclear facilities that could pose grave threats to public health and safety."
"These drastic changes may extend beyond the Reactor Pilot Program, which was created by President Trump last year to circumvent the more rigorous licensing rules employed by the NRC," Lyman warned. "While the DOE created a legally dubious framework to designate these reactors as 'test' reactors to bypass the NRC's statutory authority, these dramatic alterations may further weaken standards used in the broader DOE authorization process and propagate across the entire fleet of commercial nuclear facilities, severely degrading nuclear safety throughout the United States."
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Scientists Say Clean Energy-Powered Data Centers Could Save Trillions in Climate, Health Costs
"In a future with immense data center growth, ratepayers shouldn't be forced to subsidize Big Tech's profits at the expense of their own health, climate, and pocketbooks," said a Union of Concerned Scientists analyst.
Jan 21, 2026
As ratepayers and environmentalists continue sounding the alarm over a push to rapidly build data centers to support artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency across the United States, scientists stressed Wednesday that powering such facilities with clean energy could save trillions of dollars in climate and health costs over the coming decades.
"US electricity demand could increase by 60% to 80% between 2025 and 2050, with data centers accounting for more than half of the increase by 2030," according to the new Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) report, Data Center Power Play. "Estimates of the cumulative electricity costs attributable to data centers from 2026 to 2050 range from $886 billion to $978 billion."
"Without stronger clean energy policies, the additional fossil fuel generation used to power data centers results in an increase in annual US power plant emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) of 19% to 29% (229 to 342 million metric tons—MMT) by 2035," the document warns. "Restoring federal clean energy tax credits would reduce total US power plant emissions of CO2 by 33% between 2026 and 2035, even if data center demand more than doubles."
Reviving those tax credits is just one of the "forward-looking policies" for which the report advocates. It also calls for "establishing binding emission reduction targets and carbon-free electricity standards, adopting strong power plant carbon standards, and providing incentives to increase transmission capacity."
💡It's the smartest, quickest way to meet growing electricity demand while protecting people’s health, wallets and the climate. 🏛️$248 billion in wholesale electricity costs could be avoided by 2050 by restoring federal clean energy tax credits slashed by the Trump administration.
— Union of Concerned Scientists (@ucs.org) January 21, 2026 at 10:47 AM
The report further pushes for making large electricity customers, including data centers, cover additional costs and requiring utilities to not only conduct long-term planning for data center load growth but also meet that growth with new low-carbon or zero-carbon generation.
"State and federal policymakers should require data center companies and utilities to negotiate power purchase agreements and grid interconnection terms in public proceedings rather than behind closed doors and nondisclosure agreements," the publication argues. "Policymakers should also require data center companies and utilities to publicly report power needs, onsite and induced emissions, water use, and other data—and to do so with enough advance notice for communities to make informed decisions."
In a statement, Mike Jacobs, senior energy analyst at UCS and author of a recent report about costs being pushed onto the public, highlighted that "data centers are already secretly increasing peoples' electricity bills."
"While some utility companies and data center developers are intentionally misdirecting scrutiny, others are willfully ignorant about their roles in passing costs onto consumers," he explained. "In a future with immense data center growth, ratepayers shouldn't be forced to subsidize Big Tech's profits at the expense of their own health, climate, and pocketbooks. State utility regulators have clear authority to assign costs to those that cause them—it's time they require data center developers to pay their fair share for energy needs that can dwarf that of entire cities."
The new report emphasizes that "additional policies to nearly decarbonize the power sector by 2050 would help limit future damages from extreme heat, drought, wildfires, flooding, and other climate impacts. These policies would also deeply cut harmful air pollutants that contribute to respiratory ailments, heart attacks, other illnesses, and mortalities."
Reducing US power sector CO2 emissions 70% by 2035 would result in...🌎 More than $1.6 trillion in avoided global climate damages🌱 Reduce air pollution from fossil fuels, resulting in $40 billion in avoided health costs nationally
— Union of Concerned Scientists (@ucs.org) January 21, 2026 at 10:47 AM
UCS found that "the cumulative global climate benefits from reducing US heat-trapping emissions total $1.3 trillion to $1.6 trillion between 2026 and 2035, growing to $8 trillion to $13 trillion by 2050. Cumulative health benefits from reducing local air pollution range from $120 billion to $220 billion by 2050."
The report's lead author, UCS director of energy research Steve Clemmer, said Wednesday that "the climate and health benefits and net cost savings of building clean energy to meet future electricity needs are obvious and enormous, but they will not materialize without political support and responsible management of data center load growth."
Julie McNamara, associate policy director for the Climate and Energy Program at UCS, took aim at Big Oil-backed President Donald Trump, whose administration "has repeatedly worked to derail clean energy deployment precisely when we need it most."
"With surging demand from data centers, the need for plentiful, affordable power has never been higher," she said. "Yet instead of clearing the path for the fastest, cheapest, cleanest resources to deploy, President Trump is sidelining renewables just to boost the interests of the fossil fuel industry. People will pay the price: in higher bills, in dirtier air, in lost local investments, and in worsened climate impacts."
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