Climate and Environment

We urged a more aggressive and justifiably confrontational approach in our recommended questions for Doug Burgum, Chris Wright, Russell Vought, Pam Bondi, and Scott Bessent, which you can read here and here. Today we’ll get into questions for Lee Zeldin, nominee for the Environmental Protection Agency, and Scott Turner, nominee for the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Trump’s nominees need to be asked hard questions about their records of harming the public. So we did the work ourselves and wrote some!

The U.S. Forest Service is already underfunded and understaffed. Slashing its resources further is likely to unleash more severe wildfires.

Trump has spent the month since the election firing off a rapid torrent of Cabinet picks. His nominees generally fall into two types: obviously whacko (see Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, RFK Jr.) and superficially normal (think Marco Rubio, Doug Burgum, Pam Bondi). While the headline-grabbing scandals and general trumpery of the first group easily draw scorn, it’s important that we not grade the second group on a credulous curve, overlooking the economic interests behind their soothingly conventional manner.

The new centrist push to regain control of the Democratic Party, with corporate money

The right’s climate denial means higher prices.

A group funded by fracking firms and pipeline companies is ramping up its efforts to cozy up to key Democratic constituencies in service of a pro-polluter agenda, including a bipartisan bill packed with fossil-fuel giveaways that could be considered in Congress in the coming weeks, according to a new report released today by the Revolving Door Project and Public Citizen.

The deeply intertwined crises of climate change, insurance rate hikes and cancellations, and housing injustice are escalating. State insurance regulators cannot tackle these problems on their own, but their role in aggravating or ameliorating them deserves greater scrutiny.

Climate disasters, what to do about them, and why the Fed needs to step up

Kamala Harris should speak plainly about climate change—and then talk about the many things she could do as president to fix the home insurance crisis.

The FEMA director has been elevated to a cabinet-level post once before: under President Clinton in 1996. Even that relatively small step could make a huge difference.