2026-03-03 03:21:09
Donald Trump used a Medal of Honor ceremony on Monday, meant to honor three Army soldiers, to gush about the drapes he will add to his new ballroom in the White House’s East Wing.
“I picked those drapes in my first term—I always liked gold,” Trump said. “I believe it’s going to be the most beautiful ballroom anywhere in the world.”
He later joked about the constant loud hammering, which apparently runs from 6am to 11:30pm: “When I hear that beautiful sound behind me, it means money, so I like it,” the president said. “But my wife isn’t thrilled.”
As John Jay College art historian Erin Thompson told my colleagues at Reveal, Trump’s renovations are “a way to make it seem like things are changing and like Trump is keeping his promises when he’s actually not.”
“The style choices that he’s making are very congruent with his political message, in that he’s appealing to a vision of the past” as “greater than the present,” Thompson continued.
In the remainder of Trump’s opening remarks, he gave his first public comments on US and Israeli strikes on Iran—bombings that reportedly killed over 100 schoolchildren in Minab, a city in southern Iran. The fighting has resulted in the deaths of four US service members, following Iran’s initial attacks in response to the strikes on Saturday. The president mentioned again during the ceremony that military operations were projected to last four to five weeks but sounded open to a “far longer” conflict.
Trump justified the illegal strikes with old talking points, many of which contradict the federal government’s official assessments and those of nuclear policy experts, including the idea that Iran could soon develop nuclear weapons that threaten allies and could soon reach the US itself—at odds with the administration’s own claims, including a June White House release titled “Iran’s Nuclear Facilities Have Been Obliterated—and Suggestions Otherwise are Fake News.”
2026-03-02 22:10:46
If you ask a bunch of James Talarico supporters when they first heard about the 36-year-old Democratic candidate for US Senate, more often than not they will begin to describe a video. It was on TikTok or YouTube or Instagram. It was sent to them by a friend, or a family member—maybe even someone from out of state.
When I dropped by a rally last December, at a shopping center wedding venue on the north side of San Antonio, voter after voter told me a variation of the same story. Fred Spartz heard about Talarico from his son in Spokane, who told him to “get on the internet and look at this guy.” Cindy Padilla found out about him from her daughter, Julie, who saw a speech on TikTok about keeping religion out of schools. Roy Johnson saw a clip of Talarico talking to Joe Rogan, who had invited the state representative and aspiring pastor on his podcast after a sermon about Christian nationalism on a phone in the green room of his Austin comedy club. Almost everyone I talked to, at a certain point, would refer me to one clip in particular. It was an exchange he had with a Republican colleague two years ago. You’ve probably seen it too.
“They were trying to pass this Ten Commandments rule here in Texas,” explained a retired financial advisor named Ron Smith, referring to a new law that requires all public-school classrooms to display Moses’ divine tablets. “But they were doing it on the Sabbath day.”
Rebekah Cessna, the daughter of a Baptist minister from Tennessee, recalled Talarico’s response almost verbatim: “He said, ‘Would you be willing to postpone this so we can respect the Lord’s Day?”” she recalled. She started sending his sermons to her family back home.
“I said, ‘That’s the man I’ve been looking for.’”
In a party grasping for attention and ideas, Talarico has broken through like few others of his stature, by denouncing billionaires and theocrats in the overtly Christian language of a social-justice seminarian. He’s received a shout-out from Barack Obama, and charmed everyone from Ezra Klein to Rogan to the hosts of The View. CBS, fearing the wrath of Trump’s FCC, recently banned his interview with Stephen Colbert from the airwaves. Their straight-to-YouTube sit-down picked up nine million views. The race in Texas represents one of the party’s best pickup opportunities on a difficult Senate map. With President Donald Trump’s approval ratings cratering, Sen. John Cornyn on the ropes, and the scandal-plagued attorney general Ken Paxton waiting in the wings, polls suggest the former public school teacher has as good of a chance of winning a statewide office as almost any Texas Democrat this century—if he can make it to November.
Talarico’s precociousness can also seem like a familiar type. He’s shared advisors with Pete Buttigieg, the polyglot Episcopalian from South Bend who charmed voters twice his age while positioning himself as a champion of the “religious left.” In lieu of business Norwegian, Talarico peppers his sermons and interviews with an eclectic mix of thinkers—Jenny Odell, Dorothy Sayers, the Sufi mystic Hafez. He worked a hard job for a short time, went to Harvard, and ran for office at an alarmingly young age. Talarico’s high school theater teacher asked him for a letter of recommendation. He is humble and polite and talks reverently about his mom. James Talarico is a nice young man.
Many of his fellow Democrats consider Talarico’s faith-based appeal to unity a not-so-secret weapon: Kill them with kindness, and secure a Senate majority that can stop Donald Trump in his tracks. But Talarico is not the only Democrat in Tuesday’s primary with a knack for attention, and his is not the only vision of what it takes to win. A few hours after Talarico finished smiling for photos in San Antonio, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a Dallas Democrat famous for her own, more Old Testament exchanges with Republican colleagues, entered the race with a radically different message. Talarico’s style of politics could change the direction of the Democratic Party. But first, the peacemaker will have to prove that he can throw a punch.
Talarico was born in Round Rock, a city of about 100,000 north of Austin, but it would be just as fair to say that he grew up at St. Andrew’s. He has described his biological father as a “21-year-old high school dropout whose drinking problem sometimes led to violence.” After one such episode, when Talarico was an infant, his mother took him to live in a spare room at the hotel where she worked, until they found a home for themselves—a cramped apartment where the only spot for a nursery was a closet.
St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin was a place where the family could start anew. His mother served as a deacon and married Mark Talarico, a church elder. Young James was baptised there, and played Nintendo with the pastor, Dr. Jim Rigby. As he grew older, Talarico taught Vacation Bible School and put on Biblically-themed shows with puppets he made with a friend. (“Jimmy’s Puppets,” or “Juppets” for short.) In a 2018 speech at St. Andrew’s, Talarico described “leaning against my mother as she sang her favorite hymn, ‘Morning has broken,’” and “drifting in and out of sleep, gazing up at the refracted sunlight in the stained glass of the roof.” Of Rigby, he said simply: “He was my dad’s old drinking buddy, he was my mother’s favorite person, and he was my personal hero.”
Rigby was also a rebel, and the St. Andrew’s of Talarico’s youth was ruptured by a series of controversies over the pastor’s social-justice vision. In 2004, he was put on trial by a church governing body for performing dozens of same-sex marriages at the University of Texas. About 150 members quit when Rigby flouted the denomination’s rules and hired LGBT ministers. The church has evolved with the times; when Talarico gave that 2018 speech, an undocumented family whose asylum claim had been rejected was living down the hall.
This knack for challenging authority stemmed from a belief that Christianity had strayed from the teachings of the early church, and been corrupted by moralizers, literalists, and nationalists. People were judging others “by the flesh,” Rigby told me, instead of recognizing their “humanness” as Paul counseled.
“When I heard him preach the first time,” Rigby told me, “I felt I could die—like the torch had been passed and that at least one person understood what I’ve been trying to do.”
Talarico’s sermons and podcast clips are littered with the flotsam of a seminary course catalogue, but they’re suffused as well with what he learned in the pews. His home church is the kind of place where you might think of Jesus as a feminist, and the splitting of the loaves as a parable of wealth—where power is something you’re taught not to crave but to share. Talarico once told an interviewer he had banned the word “troll” in his office because it was “just another way of stripping away each other’s humanness.” Above all, you can hear its influence in how Talarico talks about the relationship between his religion and his politics.
“The powers that be have been taming Christianity, domesticating it, diluting it into something more palatable—pro-war, pro-wealth, pro-white supremacy,” he argued two years ago, in a sermon that’s been viewed nearly two million times. What started as a “countercultural movement” became a “tranquilized, privatized, weaponized religion.”
“When I heard him preach the first time,” Rigby told me, “I felt I could die—like the torch had been passed and that at least one person understood what I’ve been trying to do.”
Talarico has always been the kind of young person, earnest and ambitious, who makes older people melt. In high school, he excelled at debate (“looks good on a college resume,” he wrote in his yearbook) and played Aslan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. At the University of Texas, he was the model of a particular kind of Obama-era idealism. The second tweet he ever sent was about watching the West Wing. He worked on voter registration drives, managed the student body president’s campaign, testified at the legislature about higher-education funding, and put law school on hold for a two-year stint teaching sixth grade with Teach for America.
“A lot of different folks have different opinions about it, and there’s certainly some problematic aspects of the organization,” Talarico said on a podcast in 2022, about the Peace Corps-style program that sends recent college graduates into poor school districts. But the dynamics that make TFA problematic also made it formative: Dropping a white kid from Round Rock into a Mexican-American neighborhood in San Antonio without any relevant teaching experience will not save the world—but he might learn some things about how it works.
On the Facebook page for his language arts class—“Mr. Talarico’s Freedom Zone”—you can catch a glimpse of an energetic and overworked twentysomething, trying to engage his kids. He used the song “Firework” by Katy Perry to show how to diagram sentences, and coached students on how to fill out a red-and-blue map on election night.
“Happy Spring Break, Free Thinkers! I’m going to spend my week relaxing and reading ‘All The King’s Men’ by Robert Penn Warren,” Talarico wrote that April. “The book is about an idealistic politician who becomes greedy and corrupted by success. Comment on this post and let me know what you’re reading over Spring Break!”
Rhodes Elementary has offered, in Talarico’s campaigns, a sort of secular foundation to go with his religious one. He has talked of encountering 12-year-olds “in the 21st Century in the state of Texas who couldn’t read,” and of juggling 47 kids in one class. It was a “radicalizing experience,” he told Rogan, that nudged him toward a career where he could do better by his kids.
After the 2016 election, as he weighed a run for the Texas legislature, Talarico sought Rigby’s advice. He wanted to know if it was possible to be an ethical politician. “He was very concerned that he could still be prophetic,” he told me. “There are compromises that have to take place at that level. He could be prophetic in his speeches, but whenever you’re talking about real power, you don’t get the pure abstractions of good and evil. It’s like you’re negotiating and balancing and trying to do the best of the good and minimize the evil.”
Not long after, when Talarico launched his campaign, he talked about his experience as a teacher and the inspiration he’d drawn from his mother. But he also extended an olive branch. Talarico promised to vote for a Republican speaker, Joe Straus, who had resisted his party’s Christian nationalist faction—a pledge, he noted, that had drawn criticism from one of his opponents.
“He said I was compromising my values,” Talarico said. “Well I’ve got news for him: Compromise is one of my values.”
The essential appeal of Talarico, then and now, is that people see in him something they believe is missing: morality in an age of malice; humility at a time of hubris; an old direction in a new form. “Is it just me or does he have Barack’s smile?” someone asked on Twitter, not long after he launched his first campaign—to which Talarico replied with a .gif of Obama. State Rep. Diego Bernal told the room in San Antonio that his first reaction to meeting his colleague was, “Who is this baby JFK?’” His first floor speech quoted John Steinbeck. “The sense I got was not necessarily that the people of this district wanted something new,” Talarico told a reporter during a live-streamed 25-mile walk across the district in 2019—a replay of an earlier walk that resulted in him throwing up five times, and slipping into a near-comatose state from diabetic ketoacidosis. “I think they wanted something a little old-fashioned.”
“Something is happening in Texas,” the campaign’s social media posts say—calibrated just so, right down to the filters and the stagecraft and the uplifting piano. The vibe feels both undeniably real and deliberate: It’s Morning-has-broken in America. In 2016, Talarico wrote that he was thinking about Robert F. Kennedy’s remarks in Indianapolis in 1968, when the Democratic senator announced the death of Martin Luther King Jr.: “What we need in the United States is not division, what we need in the United States is not violence…but love and compassion towards one another.”
“Earlier today, Republican activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed,” Talarico informed a crowd last October. “Charlie Kirk was a child of God; he was our sibling, our brother.” He urged “a politics of love…that can heal what’s broken in this country.”
Talarico’s precociousness can also seem like a familiar type. He shares advisors with Pete Buttigieg, the polyglot Episcopalian from South Bend who charmed voters twice his age while positioning himself as a champion of the “religious left.”
Talarico won that first race by 2,500 votes in a district that Trump previously carried—one of 12 Democrats to flip seats in the lower chamber that fall, as a blue wave smashed through an overly aggressive Republican gerrymander. Early in his first term, Rigby invited him to speak at St. Andrew’s. Talarico, who would soon begin taking classes at a local seminary, zeroed in on how Trumpism corrodes the soul. But he also challenged how Democrats’ response to it.
Talarico confessed to making “morally compromised decisions” in a “dirty and noble” job. Democratic leaders, he said, had “routinely danced with the Devil”—from Bill Clinton’s mass incarceration and bank deregulation, to Obama’s mass deportations and drone strikes. “Our most progressive candidates still use the same violent and bullying rhetoric that we claim to be against,” he continued. “In a 20-minute interview last year, Sen. Elizabeth Warren used the word ‘fight’ once a minute. Our progressive leaders and activists use gun metaphors, war imagery, and dehumanizing language about our opponents all the time.”
“Every time we return hate for hate, bullying for bullying, brutality for brutality, we all become less human,” he said. In his office, Talarico explained, staff were instructed “to avoid violent words or dehumanizing rhetoric”—including “fight, battle, or troll.”
Over the course of four terms in the minority, Talarico has attached his name to a handful of key initiatives, and helped push through a law, inspired by his near-death experience, that capped the cost of insulin. Texas Monthly named him to its list of best legislators during his second term. (It also compared him to “Encyclopedia Brown.”) But his defining influence may be the one you’ve seen—a seemingly endless succession of moments, in which he calmly deconstructs Republican talking points. There was the run-in with Pete Hegseth. The debate about furries. And most famously, l’affaire d’10 Commandments.
Scott Braddock, editor of the Quorum Report, an authoritative source on the doings in the Texas legislature, invited me to think of the caucus’ different members as pieces of a chess board. “Some of the pieces are doers, some of the pieces are talkers, some of them are more to the left, some of them are more to the center,” he said. “Talarico has started as a left-wing talker and he has moved to a more moderate talker.”
This knack for the spotlight has at times grated some of his Democratic colleagues. Perhaps the clearest source of tension has centered on his handling of the caucus’ decision to break quorum. In the first 24 hours of quorum-break last August, Talarico boasted that he’d done 25 interviews from his Illinois hotel room. When I reached out for a story of my own, I found myself talking to a former Buttigieg advisor—hardly the norm for a state representative. Talarico ultimately stayed away longer than almost anyone else. But the quorum-break in 2021, when Democrats tried to block voter suppression laws, was a different story.
In an op-ed he later published in the Texas Signal, Talarico wrote that he spent his days in DC walking around the Lincoln Memorial, contemplating the American idea. The protest, and the exchange he which he asked Hegseth to acknowledge that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election, helped make Talarico a star. But a few hours after taking part in a caucus-wide meeting in DC, Talarico and three Democrats stunned some of their colleagues by returning to the state capitol. Republicans gaveled-in later that day. They “sold us out,” state Rep. Ana-Maria Ramos said at the time. “JUST WOW!” tweeted her colleague, then-state Rep. Jasmine Crockett. Talarico argued that they’d accomplished what they’d left the state to do by raising the salience of voting rights in DC. Drawn out of his competitive old district in the ensuing redistricting process, he moved to a new safely blue district that was majority non-white. The website Talarico Facts, a repository of opposition research frequently cited by Crockett allies, accused the legislator of taking a seat that could have gone to a Black candidate.
It’s a race that can’t be won with mere civility and that Talarico will not advance out of without some adjustments of his own… Democratic voters aren’t feeling so pastoral right now.
Ramos told me that before Crockett entered the Senate race, she’d actually been supporting Talarico. But the manner in which the quorum break ended caused a rift at the time. Afterwards, Crockett—whose media hits during the DC sojourn helped make her a rising star, too—co-founded the Texas House Progressive Caucus with a few dozen other quorum-breakers to offer a more aggressive posture in the legislature.
The dispute gets at a dynamic that Talarico can’t talk himself out of. The talking, in fact, only makes it worse. It is the sense in some corners that there is something a little too neat about his rise. That he is a young man in a hurry, recycling other people’s message. After a digital creator alleged that Talarico had called former Rep. Colin Allred, the party’s 2024 Senate nominee, a “mediocre Black man”—Talarico said he called Allred a mediocre candidate—Allred, accused Talarico of stealing valor from Black Democrats, such as Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, who have been modeling progressive Christianity for far longer. Crockett, who said last year she feared the party would close ranks in 2028 around “the safest white boy,” recently attacked Talarico for “running from” his ties to Lis Smith—a former Buttigieg advisor. (Smith has said she has “done some work” for Talarico but is not actively involved in the Senate race.)
There is a familiar bait and switch with a lot of buzzy Democratic candidates—that something about their identity will unlock a prodigal base that has strayed and needs merely to be shown the way in a language they understand. These candidates, as Crockett alluded to, are invariably white and male. They come from not just hometowns but symbols—a Braddock, Pennsylvania; a South Bend, Indiana; a place called Hope. They sing lamentations about lost direction, and then win or lose with the same coalition as everyone else. It’s reasonable to ask whether someone like this has the answers—and why someone like this is always the answer.
Conservative Texas Christians, after all, are familiar with the kinds of teachings you hear in Austin at St. Andrew’s. They do not go to St. Andrew’s, and many of them seem to loathe Austin. The recent evidence suggests many of them would rather dance with the Devil than a church-going Democrat, let alone a seminarian who says “God is non-binary.” Trump does not have the temerity to tell them they are wrong. Talarico, one Republican state representative said on X last fall, “twists [Christianity] to sound sweet to the ears for his own glorification and contorts Jesus to fit a nuanced feel-good justification for sin.”
But if the yearning Talarico taps into wasn’t real, your relatives would not have sent you his videos. For decades, Democrats have longed for messengers, real and imaginary, who can defuse the power of the Christian right. At the apex of the Moral Majority, Aaron Sorkin wrote the West Wing’s Jeb Bartlett as a spiritual foil who quoted Leviticus chapter-and-verse to hypocritical Bible-thumpers. George W. Bush’s real-life successor wrote a bestselling memoir named for the sermon that changed his life. The West Wing, for its part, ended with the only fantasy more persistent than beating a bunch of theocrats at Bible Bonkers—a Democrat rising from obscurity and turning Texas blue.
What’s notable about the wrangling over Talarico’s record is that policy and job performance are largely disconnected from the primary, in a way that feels both new and foreboding. The Democratic Party’s conflicts in 2018 and 2020 were shaped by differences over health care. In more recent years they have been proxy battles over Israel. The state of play in Texas is more visceral: Talarico and Crockett are two candidates, separated by a common algorithm, clashing over what kind of authenticity voters really want.
If Talarico represents a West Wing-style fantasy, Crockett’s style is a bit more, well—you’ve seen those clips, too. Her version of the Ten Commandments clip came in 2024, when she called Marjorie Taylor Greene a “bleach blonde, bad built, butch body.” (That is not in the Paulian Epistles.) Crockett told Vanity Fair after Kamala Harris’ loss that Latino immigrant voters suffered from “almost like a slave mentality” that she considered “insane,” while comparing them to other demographics. (“I’ve not run into that with the Asian community.”) Talarico launched his campaign by standing on top of an old pickup truck in front of a church; Crockett launched hers by smiling at the camera over audio of Trump calling her names.
Republicans have a clear preference. NOTUS reported that the National Republican Senatorial Committee helped nudge Crockett into the race last year by commissioning polls that showed her leading prospective primary opponents. In February, desperate to save Cornyn, the NRSC released polling that showed Paxton trailing Talarico head-to-head. Crockett was underwater against both; against Cornyn, it wasn’t all that close. The congresswoman has argued that attempting to peel off Republicans, in a state that has not elected a Democrat statewide since the release of Netscape, is unnecessary: “All we’ve ever needed to do was increase voter participation and voter turnout on our side.” (Texas Monthly calls this idea “the biggest lie in Texas politics.”)
But Crockett’s style resonates with a base tired of going high when they go low—that wants a party that will stand up for itself and stick it to ‘em. The Democratic frontrunner, Ramos recently stated, is a “street fighter who will punch the system in the face.” One of the most recent surveys of the primary, from the University of Texas, showed her leading Talarico by double digits.
It’s a race that can’t be won with mere civility and that Talarico will not advance out of without some adjustments of his own. Talarico has been described as a “choir boy” too often to count. He “was always a peacemaker in preschool,” Rigby told me. “This is not a time for sheep, it’s a time for shepherds,” the legislator said in that first race. Democratic voters aren’t feeling so pastoral right now. In San Antonio, he hit upon the themes that shapes his politics: His mother’s strength and his students’ light; corrupt billionaires and false prophets. But if you listened closely, you could detect a slight concession to the kind of politics he once decried—another compromise in a dirty and noble trade.
“They’re comfortable on the coasts and comfortable with the status quo, but there’s something about living in a red state that makes you scrappy,” he said of Democratic leaders.
“We know how to fight.”
2026-03-02 20:30:00
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Almost all coal-fired power plants in the US had the ability to comply with rules limiting their emission of dangerous pollutants such as mercury that can cause brain damage in children. Despite this, Donald Trump’s administration decided to demolish the standards anyway.
Last week, the Trump administration said it is loosening restrictions on air toxins from mercury, lead, and other heavy metals that are released by coal plants. Such pollution is known to be neurotoxic and has been linked to irreversible brain damage in children and infants, as well as heart disease and cancer in adults.
Stricter limits were placed on mercury, lead, and arsenic pollution in 2024 under Joe Biden’s administration, updating the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) first enacted in 2012, but have now been ditched by Trump. The pollution cuts “would have destroyed reliable American energy,” said Lee Zeldin, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.
“The president just did a blanket exemption…It was just: Send an email to the EPA and get a free pass to pollute.”
However, the EPA’s own previous analysis shows that only 27 coal plants across the US, out of around 219 total coal facilities, would have to adopt any sort of technological upgrade, such as filters in their smokestacks, to meet the stronger standards.
This means that the safeguards have been entirely reversed by the Trump administration in order to allow a minority of the US’s dirtiest, most unhealthy coal plants, located in states including Wyoming, Texas, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, to continue as they are.
“It’s infuriating that this rollback is happening given that only a small number of coal plants would have to make upgrades,” said Surbhi Sarang, senior attorney at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). “This decision is completely ridiculous and not based on any reality. We can easily have a reliable grid and cleaner air at the same time, we have the technology to do so.
“These MATS rules have been incredibly successful in reducing mercury pollution that we know is a risk to children’s brains and can cause cardiovascular and kidney disease. The health impacts of this rollback will be felt in communities living near these coal plants.”
The Trump administration has gone to extraordinary lengths to reverse coal’s long decline in the US, forcing coal plants to remain open beyond their planned retirement dates, incurring large costs for residents, and requiring the department of defense to purchase electricity sourced from coal, the most carbon-dense fuel that is a key driver of the climate crisis.
This month the president was crowned the “undisputed champion of beautiful clean coal” at an unusual ceremony held at the White House. “Under our leadership, we’re becoming a massive energy exporter,” said Trump, surrounded by coal miners wearing helmets. “We’re lifting up our hard-working American miners like nobody has ever done before.”
Last year, the administration even told coal plant operators to simply send an email to the president to ask for emergency exemptions from air pollution rules. None of these subsequent requests were denied by Trump.
In total, 71 coal plants across 24 states were allowed to opt out of the mercury pollution rules that the administration is now formally unwinding, according to records obtained by the EDF.
Trump lied during his State of the Union speech when he said his energy policies have lowered costs for households.
Not only did Trump agree to every single request for an exemption, for up to two years, these exemptions were provided for longer periods than many of the coal plant operators asked for and handed out even when operators said they had the technology to comply with the limits.
Major coal plants across the US received a waiver from pollution rules, including the huge James H Miller coal facility in Alabama, which in recent years has been cited as the largest single greenhouse gas emitter in the US, according to EPA data. (Alabama Power has described it as a ‘key part’ of its supply to customers.)
“The president just did a blanket exemption without looking at the facilities or tailoring the requests in any way,” said EDF’s Sarang. “There was none of that—it was just: Send an email to the EPA and get a free pass to pollute.”
An EPA spokesperson did not address questions on the capability of coal plants to meet the Biden’s 2024 MARS regulation but added the rule ‘“imposed massive costs and red tape on coal-and oil-fired power plants, driving up the cost of living for American families, jeopardizing our grid reliability and national security and limiting American energy and manufacturing dominance.”
“The Trump EPA’s repeal of the Biden 2024 MATS amendments ensures the continuation of the highly effective and robust 2012 MATS requirements, which have protected of public health and the environment for years.”
As well as rolling back a host of air and water pollution rules, the Trump administration recently scrapped a key finding that greenhouse gases harm human health, a determination that underpins all climate laws in the US. This rollback, as well as the MATS reversal, is being challenged by environmental groups in court.
The president has called clean energy a “scam” and praised coal as “beautiful” and “clean” despite its unequivocal role in causing severe illnesses and deaths and worsening the climate crisis.
On Tuesday, Trump said during his State of the Union speech to Congress that his energy policies have lowered costs for households when, in fact, electricity prices rose for Americans in the past year.
“Nobody can believe when they see the kind of numbers, especially energy,” Trump said. “When they see energy going down to numbers like that. They cannot believe it.”
2026-03-02 02:40:29
Just one in four Americans supports the Trump administration’s ongoing strikes on Iran, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Sunday.
The disapproval rating was 43 percent, while 29 percent said they were not sure.
About half of respondents—including one in four Republicans—said the president was too open to using military force. The poll surveyed 1,282 US adults starting on Saturday, following news breaking of the strikes.
Even before the attacks, Trump’s handling of Iran was unpopular. Back in January, a Reuters/Ipsos found that only 33 percent of Americans approved of the president’s policy with Iran, while 43 percent disapproved.
For comparison, in the seven months prior to the US invasion of Iraq, a Gallup poll found that somewhere between 52 and 63 percent of Americans favored an invasion. And in the days following the beginning of the war, Gallup found that 72 percent supported the military action. Although these numbers are based on Gallup polling, the both surveys come from samples of over 1,000 US adults and, similarly, note a margin of error of 3 percentage points.
As my colleague Katie Herchenroeder noted on Saturday, there have been massive demonstrations around the world against the US and Israeli strikes against Iran, and United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres condemned the attacks at a UN Security Council meeting. Congress is expected to vote on a war powers resolution this week in an attempt to stop the strikes.
2026-03-02 01:10:53
Key members of Congress are calling for a vote on a war powers resolution on Monday to stop the Trump administration from continuing its illegal military assault against Iran without congressional authorization.
The strikes, which began early Saturday, have been widespread, reportedly killed over 100 schoolchildren in Minab, a city in southern Iran, as well as Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iran has retaliated, targeting US bases and allies in the region. Three US service members were killed in action on Sunday morning.
The White House reportedly notified some members of the House and Senate Armed Service committees only after the strikes had already begun. Article 1 of the Constitution grants Congress, not the president, the power to declare war, and the War Powers Act all0ws Congress to halt unauthorized military action by requiring troop withdrawal within 60 to 90 days.
The House of Representatives’ bipartisan resolution, led by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), would require Trump “to terminate the use of United States Armed Forces from hostilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran…unless explicitly authorized by a declaration of war or specific authorization for use of military force against Iran.”
But in practice, Congress’s power is limited to halt Trump’s military actions, given that any resolution could be vetoed by the president and would require a two-thirds congressional majority to overturn. Even if the resolution on Iran does pass, it will likely be by a narrow margin, since Republican leadership, including Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), have backed the US and Israeli strikes. In January, Senate Republicans blocked a similar war powers resolution after Trump’s attacks on Venezuela.
As a result, any vote on a war powers resolution would be largely symbolic. But members of Congress say the vote is important anyway to make clear their stance on the war. “The Constitution requires a vote, and your Representative needs to be on record as opposing or supporting this war,” Massie wrote on X on Saturday.
2026-03-01 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Ritidian Point, at the northern tip of Guam, is home to an ancient limestone forest with panoramic vistas of warm Pacific waters. Stand here in early spring and you might just be lucky enough to witness a breaching humpback whale as they migrate past. But listen and you’ll be struck by the cacophony of the island’s live-fire testing range.
Widely referred to as the “tip of the spear” in the American arsenal, Guam—which is smaller than New York City but home to a military community of nearly 23,000—is a dichotomy of majestic nature and military might.
The real powerhouse of the Pacific exists not on land but just below the water’s surface in its biological resilience, which is now threatened by the Pentagon’s quest for strategic deterrence. The weapons that miss their target on the testing range will soon find a different one, sinking down to the most diverse coral reef of any U.S. jurisdiction. A battle between the two is now emerging.
The U.S. government is accelerating coral reef collapse around Guam, alleges a team of international researchers in a letter released this month in Science. They warn administration pressures to prioritize national security—through dredging projects, increased military infrastructure and live firing ranges—will cause harm to endangered habitats.
In 2023, a marine heatwave in Florida resulted in a roughly 98 percent mortality rate of elkhorn and staghorn colonies.
Additionally, a fundamental misunderstanding of coral taxonomy in the Endangered Species Act (ESA) is exacerbating the ecological harm to fisheries and reefs. Without intervention, these Pacific habitats now risk the same “functional extinction” experienced in Florida.
“The United States government seems to be softening conservation policies in ways that allow companies and the military to avoid regulation,” said Colin Anthony, a doctoral fellow at the University of Tokyo and the paper’s lead author.
For a time last summer, conservation seemed ascendant. In July, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) rejected a Navy request to expand exempt military zones in northern Guam, citing conservation benefits outweighing national security concerns at Ritidian Point. On the same day, NOAA finalized a rule designating critical habitat for five threatened coral species across 92 square miles of the Pacific, including in Guam and American Samoa.
However, the victories were short-lived. Following President Trump’s issuance of Executive Order 14154—“Unleashing American Energy”—on his first day in office in January 2025, federal agencies were pressured to remove any “undue burdens” on energy production and security. In November 2025, NOAA followed up by proposing expanded authority to bypass critical habitat regulations.
The provisions sought to remove language that required decision-making to be made “without reference to possible economic or other impacts.” Researchers have warned this prioritizes short-term economic interests over science and opens up vulnerable marine preserves to deep-sea mining, fishing and military expansion.
NOAA’s proposed changes also look to reclassify the “environmental baseline,” meaning the Navy could treat a degraded reef not as a problem to be addressed but as the fixed starting point. Baking in decades of ecological harm effectively insulates activity from ESA scrutiny and allows the Navy to cite “national security” as a blanket justification for any new projects, even if they fall in endangered marine habitats.
Additionally, owing to a “conservation gap” in ESA policy, reef-building corals are disappearing faster than scientists can identify them. Guidelines require clear categorization of species to determine their endangered status, however, corals are “phenotypically plastic,” meaning they change their features depending on light, water flow or depth.
Unlike land animals, it is difficult for researchers to neatly categorize species based on reproduction compatibility. Scientists must instead acquire genetic material and decide on a set of identifiable traits for a species that can sometimes span the entirety of the Pacific Ocean.
“Many of the corals in the Indo-Pacific, such as those in Guam, have not been taxonomically verified via DNA barcoding,” said Laurie Raymundo, a biology professor and director of the University of Guam Marine Laboratory. Although DNA analysis is now the norm, it is costly and time-consuming, meaning endemic species could disappear before ever being documented.
“Unlike Florida, for the Pacific, it’s not too late. We still have corals. They’re recoverable, especially if appropriate policy is implemented.”
Chief among them are Acropora corals, a foundation species that build the structural framework of many reefs. Though all arborescent Acropora corals—those with tree-like branches—from Guam and the wider Pacific are classified as “Endangered” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List, many remain unprotected under the ESA.
Guam lost between 34 percent and 37 percent of its live coral between 2013 and 2017 due to repeated heatwaves, low tides and infectious diseases. While the island has escaped bleaching episodes since, future heatwaves could prove similarly fatal. “Each year, we brace ourselves for the next one,” said Raymundo, who highlighted how difficult a time it is to be a conservation biologist in the region.
Staghorn Acropora corals also tend to grow in massive thickets hundreds of meters in diameter. Often composed of a single genotype, these corals are unable to self-fertilize and therefore have very little chance of new settlements.
The researchers’ urgency stems from the recent collapse of similar corals in Florida. In 2023, a marine heatwave resulted in a roughly 98 percent mortality rate of elkhorn and staghorn colonies. Now declared “functionally extinct,” these corals do not exist in sufficient numbers in the state’s waters to provide effective coastal protection or thriving habitats for marine life.
“The problem is, if you’re the US military, anything you do can be cited as being for national security,” said Anthony. “Even if the appropriate process would just be an extra round of ecological surveys to make sure everything is done with the best intention to avoid unnecessary harm.”
Indigenous Chamorro people on Guam—who can trace their roots back over 3,000 years—have also not forgotten the environmental harm caused by the military’s past use of PCBs, PFAS and dieldrin.
“I do see signs of anger and frustration among communities impacted by the need of a few to make money,” said Raymundo, highlighting how small island nations contribute little to climate change but are at the forefront of the impacts. “Too often we see that economic gain does not translate into food, health and education security for the majority of people.”
Some outer-lying islands in the region have already lost homes and can no longer grow crops due to salt water intrusion. Meanwhile, in January 2026, NOAA launched a survey to map over 30,000 square miles of waters off American Samoa for critical mineral reserves. A move described as the federal agency “shifting from science to prospecting,” by the New York Times.
Researchers are calling for NOAA to reverse its ESA proposals and extend protections to the Acropora genus, regardless of specific species. They argue this would bypass taxonomic uncertainty, simplify surveys and ensure increased levels of protection.
They note that the ESA already allows for the inclusion of specific populations or sub-species—like the Cook Inlet beluga whale or the southern resident killer whale—and so call for the same logic to be applied before Guam’s rich marine ecosystem goes the way of Florida’s.
“Florida has become a glimpse into the future for the Pacific Ocean,” said Anthony. “Unlike Florida, for the Pacific, it’s not too late. We still have corals. They’re recoverable, especially if appropriate policy is implemented.”
