Earth Matters: 'All Out on Earth Day" protests planned as Outlaw Prez mauls environment for greed's sake

“All Out on Earth Day” Protests Against Trump Authoritarianism 

Climate groups—both national and grassroots—are joining pro-democracy allies for “All Out on Earth Day,” a wave of mobilizations from April 18–30 (centered on April 19) to confront authoritarianism and defend the environment, democracy, and our future.

Major organizations who worked to get the Inflation Reduction Act passed, including the Green New Deal and Sunrise Movement, Climate Power, Third Act, Center for Popular Democracy, the DNC Council on Environment and Climate, Climate Defenders, Unitarian Universalists, NAACP, Dayenu, Evergreen Action, the United to End Polluter Handouts Coalition, Climate Hawks Vote and the Center of Biological Diversity have all signed on to the mobilization.

The focus: • Defend Workers. Defend  Democracy • Lower Costs for Communities — Stop Handouts for Corporations • Make Polluters Pay. End the Welfare for Big Oil and Billionaires. Organizers note:

While families struggle to scrape by, corporate polluters and their paid-for politicians are trying to raise our energy bills by killing clean energy tax credits. That’s backwards. We should be slashing costs and cutting climate pollution by flooding the grid with affordable, homegrown clean energy.  We deserve fast and reliable trains, electric school buses, solar for renters, and local, healthy food in every neighborhood. Starting from the Black, Brown, and poor people who suffer most. Stand with the people, not the profiteers.

Said Denis Hayes, founder of the first Earth Day in 1970 (and my boss at the Solar Energy Research Institute from 1978 to 1981): “The Americans who voted for Trump because of the price of eggs did not think they were choosing a future of fires, floods, hurricanes, and rising seas. The vast majority want a solar future, not a return to ‘beautiful’ coal. Earth Day will make that clear.” (Here’s my interview with him on the 45th Earth Day in 2015.)

Aru Shiney-Ajay, the executive director of the youth-led Sunrise Movement, said: “Donald Trump is giving oil and gas billionaires the green light to wreck our planet and put millions of lives at risk, all so they can pad their bottom line. Just three months into the Trump presidency, the damage has already been catastrophic. Trump is dismantling critical environmental safeguards, putting lives at risk and leaving working people to suffer the devastating consequences. This Earth Day, we stand united in defiance of their greed and fight for a future that prioritizes people and the planet over profits.”

Find out more here, including where to find a protest event somewhere on your turf.

—Meteor Blades

WEEKLY ECO-VIDEO

RESOURCES & ACTION

• Which home energy upgrades will save you money? We did the math
  

GREEN BRIEF

Clean Power Edged Out Fossil Fuels on US Grid in March 

Twenty-five years ago, fossil fuels generated 72% of U.S. electricity—with coal alone generating 52%. Nuclear generated 20%, with renewables, mostly hydroelectric. generating the rest. Ten years ago, there had only been a slight improvement, with fossil fuels still generating 66% of total electricity, most of it via natural gas, with renewables having risen to 13%. However, after a decade of building solar, wind, and, most recently, battery storage, there is a growing shift. Coal in 2024 generated just under 16% of U.S. electricity, with natural gas generating 42%, nuclear 19%, and renewables 23%. 

And last month, in a good omen for the future, renewables generated slightly more U.S. electricity than fossil fuels did.

Dan McCarthy at Canary Media pointed out a caveat that this milestone was reached in spring ​“shoulder season,” a March-May “sort of stars-aligning time for clean energy performance.” That’s because the season’s milder temperatures means less need for energy to heat and cool dwellings, and because wind production peaks in the spring and the stronger spring sunlight means solar generates more energy, too.

But the advantages of springtime for renewables aren’t new. It’s always been this way, yet clean energy generation has never before exceeded output from fossil fuels, regardless of season, McCarthy writes.

What’s more, the Department of Energy reported this week in the Energy Information Administration’s Annual Energy Outlook 2025 that not only will U.S. renewables installations continue to take market share from other energy sources over the next quarter century, but energy consumption in 2050 will be lower than in 2024 in most of the EIA’s modeled scenarios, although actual outcomes will vary widely depending on underlying conditions. Some of that has to do with the efficiency associated with going all-electric.

However, in a statement Tuesday, DOE spokesperson Andrea Woods dinged the conclusions: “Today’s report from EIA reflects the disastrous path for American energy production under the Biden administration — a path that was soundly rejected by the American people last November. By unleashing energy that is affordable, reliable, and secure, this administration is ensuring America’s future is marked by energy growth and abundance — not scarcity.” 

Just one more example of how the administration really, really hates data.

—Meteor Blades

RESEARCH & STUDIES

• Tackling Climate Crisis Will Boost Economic Growth, While Inaction Could Cause ‘Permanent Recession. Published by the OCED, a new report says that, contrary to critics who say bold action and investment on reaching “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions to address the climate crisis will damage the economy, such action will increase GDP, modestly at first, then do so at an accelerated pace. 
• Meat or veg? Plant-based protein is linked to a longer life. Published in Nature Communications, this global study of food supply and demographic data from 1010 countries found that that in countries where people eat more plant-based proteins they have longer adult life expectancies. But for children under 5, higher levels of animal-based protein were associated with lower rates of mortality.
• Climate crisis has tripled length of deadly ocean heatwaves. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study concludes that half of marine heatwaves since 2000 would not have happened without global warming. This has supercharged deadly storms and destroyed critical ecosystems, including kelp forests and coral reefs.
• Studying past sea level change is key to understanding ongoing and future sea level rise, Published by Nature Communications, the focus of this collection of articles from Nature Geoscience, Communications Earth and Environment, and Scientific Reports is the current state of the science of past sea level change.  
• Extreme heat poses threat to mental health. Published in Nature Climate Change, the University of Adelaide study shows that high temperatures rising temperatures across Australia could increase the burden of mental and behavioral disorders by almost 50% by 2050.
• Archaeologists discover historical link between inequality and sustainability. The research—part of a Special Feature of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences—is titled "Global Dynamics of Wealth Inequality." It found that over 10,000 years, more unequal distribution of wealth correlated with longer-term human settlement. But the team emphasized that one is not causally dependent on the other, giving hope that humankind's survival is not linked to ever-increasing inequality.

HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ (OR LISTEN TO)

France’s new high-speed train design has Americans asking: Why can’t we have that? by Claire Elise Thompson at Grist. Last month, France’s national railway operator released a glimpse of the designs for its upcoming fifth-generation high-speed train, the TGV Inoui. (TGV stands for train à grande vitesse, or “train of great speed.”) The glossy, well-lit photos show brightly colored interiors, cushiony seats, and sleek tables with rounded edges — even an eye-catching new table lamp, which has been described as adding “a touch of humor” to the space — as well as new accessibility features, like a platform for wheelchair users that will enable them to board without assistance. As for the train’s exterior, a press release from the operator claimed its aerodynamic design will make it 20% more energy efficient than its predecessors. The new trains will begin service in 2026 on the Paris-Lyon-Marseille route. But the designs have already turned quite a lot of heads, both at home in France and abroad. And one common sentiment from onlookers in the U.S. has been: Why can’t we have that?

Federal judge orders immediate thaw of climate, infrastructure funds by Alex Guillén at E&E News (No paywall for this article). A federal judge ruled Tuesday that EPA, the Interior and Energy departments and other agencies unlawfully froze funds under Democrats’ climate and infrastructure spending laws, ordering the agencies to immediately resume disbursing the money. The ruling from Judge Mary McElroy comes on the eve of an expected decision from another judge in Washington on whether EPA lawfully terminated $20 billion in climate grants. That case and other litigation are part of a complex web of lawsuits over frozen funds and terminated grants playing out in multiple courts. McElroy said she wanted to be “crystal clear” that the president is entitled to enact his agenda. However, “agencies do not have unlimited authority to further a president’s agenda, nor do they have unfettered power to hamstring in perpetuity two statutes passed by Congress during the previous administration.”

Environmental Groups Sue the Trump Administration to Restore Web Tools Critical for Gauging Climate and Pollution Impacts by Georgina Gustin at Inside Climate News. Environmental and science groups are suing the Trump administration for removing public information concerning climate and the environment from federal agency websites. The Sierra Club, the Environmental Integrity Project, California Communities Against Toxics and Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) filed a complaint on Monday.

Inside the fight to save California’s dying sea lions from toxic algae: ‘We’re like 911 operators’ by Amanda Ulrich at The Guardian. It was just after 8 a.m. on Tuesday, a thick morning fog still clinging to the California coastline, and SeaWorld’s animal rescue team had already made their first save of the day: a hefty, sick-looking sea lion that had been waddling dangerously close to a four-lane highway in downtown San Diego. Now, in a private area of SeaWorld that few of the theme park’s thousands of daily visitors ever get to see, the rescue team was in full “triage” mode. Half a dozen staff members maneuvered the caged sea lion off the bed of a truck, and grabbed IV bags full of fluids and vitamins. Periodically, the animal slumped down, lethargic, and then bit at the bars of its transport cart. The high-pitched barks of other sea lions echoed through the complex. But this sea lion wasn’t any average malnourished or stranded animal. It had fled its natural habitat and was acting uncharacteristically sluggish, or “down and out,” as Jeni Smith, the head of the rescue unit, put it — both potential signs of poisoning from domoic acid, a neurotoxin currently being produced by a harmful algae bloom off the coast of southern California. “We’re like the 911 operators and we also respond to the calls,” Smith said, looking on as her team tended to the new arrival. “We’re also the ambulance, or the animal ambulance, and then we’re the caretakers once they’re here, so we’re like the nurses, too.”

Trump Just Escalated His War on Coal Miners. Their Unions Are Fighting Back by Kim Kelly at In These Times. The very same day as Trump’s big coal announcement, the Mine Safety and Health Administration published a notice on its website informing stakeholders that the agency would be pausing the enforcement of its rule titled, ​“Lowering Miners’ Exposure to Respirable Crystalline Silica and Improving Respiratory Protection.” The rule would have cut the allowable exposure level of deadly silica dust—20 times more toxic than coal dust and a major cause of black lung disease among coal miners — in half. The agency tasked with protecting miners’ health and safety is “losing the stomach” to fight for its own rule. The rule was planned to take effect on April 14 after decades of lobbying from coal miners, public health experts and worker advocates. When it was published in 2024, the Department of Labor estimated the new rule would result in more than 1,000 fewer deaths and 3,746 fewer cases of silica-related illnesses.

At These Grocery Stores, No One Pays by Sam Delgado at Civil Eats. The combination of slapping tariffs on food trade partners and cutting aid programs seems like a perfect way to exacerbate an ongoing hunger problem in the U.S. In 2023, one in seven households faced food insecurity at some point in the year. For Baltimore residents, 28% reported experiencing food insecurity last year—twice the national average. Bangura described a time when a group of nurses came to Pratt Free Market on their lunch break, looking to pick up some food. She says that other working people have done the same. On a recent Friday, the Pratt Free Market was stocked with radishes, apples, onions, eggs, salad mix, and other grocery items. Free grocery stores, like food pantries and community fridges, offer food at no cost to community members. But unlike other food charity models, free grocery stores often put more emphasis on the physical environment and service. Just like regular markets, these dedicated spaces are bright, open, and filled with shelves and fridges holding a mix of food and household items, and customers choose what they want. A traditional food pantry may not have an appealing atmosphere, and community refrigerators have limited space and choices. By simulating the grocery store shopping experience, the free stores offer more than just food; they create space for dignity, too. Pratt Free Market isn’t alone in this model.

WEEKLY BLUESKY SKEET

ECOPINION

Poof! There Goes America’s Competitive Advantage in a Warming World by Robinson Meyer at The New York Times. Mr. Trump has also weakened American companies’ ability to discover such technologies on their own. Some climate technologies can be developed in government and university labs, but others can emerge only from tinkering and finding process improvements on the factory floor. By imposing his eye-watering tariffs on manufacturing and mining inputs, he has hurt domestic manufacturers and strangled a nascent U.S. mining boom. This will hurt high-end manufacturers [...] which help make up America’s industrial base and are a major reason the United States is the world’s second-biggest manufacturer. In his pursuit of an 1890s economic fantasy, Mr. Trump is at risk of killing the real comparative advantages that we have in 2025. These changes mean that some technologies could be invented in China and Europe instead, others will be delayed and others may never be discovered. Either way, America — and the world — will have fewer resources to help the world navigate decarbonization.

We Need To Save Earth’s Soil — Changing Our Food Choices Can Help by Carolyn Fortuna at CleanTechnica. Changing food choice patterns has the power to reduce carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions. It can also make a huge impact on sustaining Earth’s soil, which is an essential key to a successful future food system. By replacing meat with plant-based sources of protein, we can help to increase soil moisture, which hasn’t been replenished for decades. [...] If we don’t reinvigorate soil moisture, its current trajectory points to the Earth’s soil drying even more, which will jeopardize crucial food stocks. While soil is technically a renewable resource, it can take between 100 and 1,000 years to develop, depending on the surrounding climate. [...] Soil is not static: its composition is changeable, based on the weather, which organisms constitute it, which plants grow in it, and other variables. It’s a complex living ecosystem teeming with microbes, nutrients, and other organisms. Healthy soil contains everything necessary for plants to thrive. Sustainable and regenerative agriculture is a method to ameliorate soil health while also sequestering carbon, storing water, and building healthier ecosystems along the way.

I live in Flint, Michigan. Shuttering environmental justice at EPA hurts communities like mine by Benjamin Pauli at Environmental Health News. In 2020, the last year of the first Trump administration, I began my own service on the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council. That year, former EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler conducted a review of all advisory committees to EPA and, in his words, “reaffirmed the importance” of NEJAC’s “critical role” in helping the agency “make measurable progress improving the health and welfare of overburdened communities.”The difference between then and now is striking. Current EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has suggested that environmental justice work amounts to discrimination and has been purging EPA of all traces of its environmental justice commitments. Notably, NEJAC has been removed from EPA’s official list of advisory committees, and the fate of the council is unclear. As (presumptive) NEJAC vice-chair, I and other members of the NEJAC leadership team sent a letter to Administrator Zeldin on February 28 asking him to meet with us, as is customary for a new administrator. He has not responded. Meanwhile, like other marginalized communities, Flint waits to see whether our plight will be taken seriously by this administration. Flint remains under the EPA emergency order issued in January 2016, a reflection of our water system’s lingering issues. While significant strides have been made in getting lead out of our water, residents are awaiting the completion of lead pipe removal, and we still face many challenges in rebuilding the relationship between residents and our water utility.

What If China's BYD Is The Real Winner In The Tariff Wars? by Patrick George at InsideEVs. America's renewed love of tariffs seems predicated on the idea that the rest of the world wants—needs, even—the kinds of goods we make. And cars are certainly a big part of that plan. But what if the rest of the world turns to someone else for that instead? Maybe, say, a certain Chinese automaker that keeps hitting one home run after another lately? On this week's episode of the Plugged-In Podcast, we're talking tariffs again, even though we wish we didn't have to. But we're specifically looking at the potential winners and losers in the tariff fight. And my theory is that BYD, which has already made tremendous inroads into Europe, Latin America and Africa could take advantage of the chaos and grow even more quickly.

Saving America’s National Parks and Forests Means Shaking Off the Rust of Inaction by Alice Henderson at The Revelator. During the first Trump presidency, the United States experienced the longest government shutdown in its history. Anyone visiting national parks during those weeks in the winter of 2018-2019 may remember overflowing bathrooms, vandalism, limited or nonexistent rescue and emergency services, closed visitor centers, and other obstacles. Some parks had to shut down entirely. We could very well be headed for these conditions as a norm, if not an even worse situation, where parks could be permanently closed or damaged beyond the ability for tiny, reduced staffs to fix. And it’s not just the federal workers keeping our parks safe who are getting the axe. Trump has ordered 280 million acres of our national forests to be cut down, with orders to circumvent the Endangered Species Act by using unspecified emergency powers to ignore protections. This will not only eliminate habitat for imperiled species like wolverines, grizzly bears, spotted owls, salmon, and many others, but harm people as well. Intensive deforestation, for example, can pollute the drinking water of local communities.

Trump and RFK Jr. Want to Make America Poisoned Again by Heather Souvaine Horn at The New Republic. For those who have been following the administration closely, [a recent] Guardian report is absolutely not the first or only sign that it may not actually be serious about chronic disease and environmental health. The EPA earlier withdrew a Biden-era plan to limit the release of PFAS [“forever chemicals”] into drinking water. Under RFK Jr.’s leadership, HHS has canceled vital grants that were working to address some of the chronic diseases he claims to be interested in. And as TNR contributing editor Liza Featherstone recently pointed out, Kennedy seems to have completely abandoned his former bête noire, microplastics, in recent months—even as new, troubling research has emerged suggesting the threat they pose is far greater than previously realized. Yet there’s perhaps a special drama and dissonance in the administration’s PFAS position. PFAS, which get their nickname from their astonishing persistence in the environment and the human body, have been linked to cardiovascular disease, kidney and testicular cancer, type 2 diabetes, childhood obesity, hormonal disruption, and reduced immune system function—you know, chronic disease and bodily fitness–type stuff. There’s some evidence they also disrupt fertility, a fixation of Vice President JD Vance and prolific babymaker Elon Musk. In a particularly grim twist noted previously in this newsletter, research suggests women who’ve borne multiple children may have lower levels of PFAS solely because they pass some of their PFAS load into their children’s bodies during pregnancy. 

OTHER GREEN STUFF

Beyond anxiety: Teens’ mental health suffers on Africa’s climate frontlines • ”Landmark” Global Shipping Agreement Reached After Nearly 10 Years of Talks • Republicans Asked For an Offshore Wind Exposé. They Got a Letdown Instead • Thousands of US water systems show dangerous levels of cancer-causing chemicals • Tiny Homes Could Be a Big Help for California’s Unhoused • Wall Street Will Frustrate Trump’s Push to ‘Drill, Baby, Drill,’ Shale Bosses Predict • Logging doesn’t prevent wildfires, but Trump is trying it anyway