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While nearly 7 million Americans marched in “No Kings” protests on Saturday to protest Trump’s lawlessness, the president reposted an AI-generated video of himself in a fighter jet wearing a crown and dumping massive quantities of feces on protestors below. 

Methane makes up a small portion of greenhouse gas emissions in terms of quantity, but it is one of the most important drivers of climate change, as it’s over 80 times more powerful at trapping heat than carbon dioxide in its first 20 years in the atmosphere. A significant amount of the extreme warming that we will experience in our lifetimes, and the planetary tipping points that we breach, will be propelled by methane—and emissions are rising faster than ever.

This report sets out to excavate the proposed policy prescriptions of the broader abundance movement, and thoroughly address their flaws.

“We’ve lost the culture war on climate,” Harvard law professor and former Obama administration adviser Jody Freeman told Politico last Wednesday. The article amounts to a dry eulogy for efforts to combat climate change, with Freeman’s refrain that the climate movement failed to go mainstream in the background. What goes unmentioned: Freeman’s extracurricular work as oil industry whisperer.

In the months before the re-election of Donald Trump precipitated our rapid descent into authoritarianism, two books were being written about the idea that progressivism went astray in the 1960s and 1970s. In Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson describe a drift into a “politics of scarcity,” and in Why Nothing Works, Marc Dunkelman calls it a “cultural aversion to power.” Both books ask a pertinent question: Why doesn’t the government do big, bold things, quickly, to address the pressing issues of our time? We have an abundance of viewpoints and veto points, they argue, but a shortage of affordable housing and transmission lines. Something’s got to give. The unstated question, of course, is who must give.

“We’re not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think.” 

These were the words of Trump’s Border Czar Tom Homan after the Trump administration violated multiple court orders and deported people without due process. Are we in a constitutional crisis yet? (Yes, and this is not the first time Trump officials have refused to obey the courts; we are tracking these violations here.)

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is the backbone of climate and weather research and information in the United States. Its annual budget is under $7 billion, and the value of the weather information that it shares with the public is estimated to be over $100 billion annually. That means the American taxpayer gets a more than fourteen-fold return on investment. (Now that’s government efficiency, contrary to the claims of DOGE and its sympathizers about eliminating government bloat.)

There’s a lot of back-and-forth right now about whether Congressional Democrats should, effectively, negotiate with terrorists. It goes like this: Congress has until March 14 to pass a bill funding the government to avoid a government shutdown. Republicans need some Democrats to vote in favor of the bill in order to get it past the 60-vote threshold in the Senate. Democrats don’t want to see millions of federal workers furloughed. But supporting the Republicans’ bill amounts to agreeing that business as usual can continue despite the coup; despite the illegal shutdown of agencies and unconstitutional impoundment of appropriated money and the flaunting of court orders. Despite, in other words, the five-alarm-fire that is our political reality.

Oil Man Tapped for “Energy Czar”