Earlier this month, after a series of stops and starts, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced changes to a long-running program that is supposed to help farmers and rural small businesses stand up renewable energy projects.

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The new rules, set to go into effect today, October 16, effectively make any solar power development ineligible for funding through the Rural Energy for America Program, or REAP. It’s the latest of multiple rollbacks by the second Trump administration that advocates say are essentially making the program unusable.

Installing solar systems on farmland can cost tens of thousands of dollars upfront, which many agricultural producers may not have or may be reluctant to spend, given their low profit margins. REAP has long provided financial support to farmers to build out renewable energy systems on their land.

These projects often provide multiple benefits to participants. First, they can help lower utility bills for agricultural producers and rural businesses by providing their operations with additional power. But farmers and business owners are also able to sell excess energy back to the grid. By cutting costs or padding revenue, these systems can be a lifeline at a time when farmers are facing escalating costs for things like fertilizer, fuel, labor, and seeds, making it difficult to make ends meet.

Research shows investing in renewable energy can also be an economic driver in rural parts of the country. “All of these things lined up,” said Matt Russell, the executive director of the Iowa Farmers Union, an independent organization representing family farmers. So for the Trump administration to “shift away from those kinds of win-win-win investments is very disappointing,” he added.

The Iowa Farmers Union is one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed last month against the USDA, alleging that previous changes to REAP were already harming rural communities by severely restricting solar development under the program. (The lawsuit was filed on September 28, just days before the agriculture department published its new rules.)

The lawsuit takes aim at changes made to REAP in August 2025, following an executive order by President Donald Trump the previous month stating that taxpayers would no longer “subsidize expensive and unreliable energy sources like wind and solar.” Although the executive order did not instruct the USDA to do anything in particular, the office within the agriculture department that administers REAP changed the criteria for applicants such that most solar projects would become ineligible for grants or loan guarantees.

Part of the plaintiffs’ argument is that such a move violates the REAP statute. Lawmakers created REAP in 2008 as part of that year’s farm bill by combining two existing programs that sought to develop renewable energy and increase energy efficiency. “Rather than complying” with this mandate, “the agency has decided to completely ignore what Congress told them to do,” said Michael Youhana, an attorney at Earthjustice, the nonprofit environmental law group representing the plaintiffs. “In fact,” he added, the USDA is doing “the opposite of what Congress told them to do” by promoting the use of fossil fuels over renewables.

The lawsuit also alleges that these anti-solar moves from the USDA violate the Administrative Procedure Act, which essentially requires agencies to show that regulatory decisions were made through careful consideration. The USDA says “that they’re taking this action to protect farmland from being gobbled up by solar systems,” said Youhana. “But farmers are voluntarily applying for REAP, and they’re doing it because solar gives them all kinds of really great financial benefits that the agency has completely ignored.”

The USDA didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment in time for publication. In an email to energy news site Utility Dive, a representative for the USDA said that under the Biden administration, “fertile farmland that should be feeding America” was used instead to produce solar power. “Those days are over. USDA will not actively participate in repurposing farmland historically used to sustain this country’s abundant food supply.”

Grist has previously reported on how the USDA’s abrupt freeze of REAP grants in the early days of Trump’s second term created confusion and chaos for small farmers who had already spent tens of thousands of dollars on energy upgrades. In March 2025, the agency released that grant money but asked participants to voluntarily revise and resubmit their applications without any mention of climate change. That summer, the USDA announced the anti-solar policy over which Earthjustice, along with the Environmental Law and Policy Center, are suing.

But the switch-ups didn’t stop there. A year later, in March 2026, the USDA effectively paused REAP as a whole, announcing it would suspend further grant awards until the program rules were rewritten to comply with Trump’s executive order from the year before.

This month, on October 1, the department published its final rule changes. They state that solar or wind projects on cropland involving “any component made in a country named as a foreign adversary” are no longer eligible for funding through REAP. Because so many parts of solar power systems are manufactured in China, this effectively means an end to any new solar development on farms through the once-popular USDA program.

Another change drags out the timeline for receiving funding; applicants must now have energy systems up and running for one year in order to be considered eligible for reimbursement.

These changes “more deeply entrench the anti-solar policy we’ve challenged in our lawsuit,” said Youhana. While “federal investments in renewable energy projects could help to offset rising energy costs, making life more affordable for farmers and the broader American public alike,” he added, the USDA seems to be moving in the opposite direction.

Russell argued that further restricting funding sources like REAP will only lead to the further consolidation of the agricultural industry, where only the biggest, wealthiest operations can survive, and the little guys suffer without adequate public support.

“It’s like stacking the deck against family farms, and entrepreneurial businesses in small towns that are trying to bootstrap themselves,” he said. “It’s picking winners and losers, and the losers are the very kinds of farms and businesses and communities that I think the vast majority of American taxpayers think that they’re investing in.”

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When President Donald Trump talks about climate change, he often recycles one well-known, shaky argument: that doing anything about it will be a financial disaster. After pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, he said it was costing the U.S. “trillions of dollars that other countries were not paying.” He’s also said that President Joe Biden’s plan to boost electric vehicles threatened the auto industry with “economic destruction” (before Trump “saved” the industry by reversing it, of course). Trump has tried to scare other countries into following suit, telling world leaders last year, “If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.”

If you look at the Trump administration’s justification for scrapping environmental protections, it always comes back to money. Officials justify these moves with estimates that almost always avoid or downplay the stunning costs of letting climate change continue unchecked, even as extreme weather brings the risk into focus. A record-breaking spring heat wave scorched the Western U.S. at the end of March, worsening wildfire forecasts and threatening the snowpack that’s crucial for the region’s water supplies. The costs are already hitting home: An analysis from the Brookings Institution in September found that the effects of climate change, from rising insurance rates to the health threats from wildfire smoke, are costing the average American household between $219 and $571 a year, depending on how much bad weather you attribute directly to climate change. For some households, the costs exceeded $1,000 a year.

It’s clear that taking action to prevent such disasters doesn’t hurt the economy as a whole, said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School, but it does hurt some industries — namely, oil companies. For decades, the fossil fuel industry has been promoting the story that taking action on climate change is too costly. “There is this prevailing narrative out there, and I guess what I would say is that this is not by accident,” Wagner said. In the early 1990s, the American Petroleum Institute began commissioning economists to produce research that made any effort to rein in greenhouse gases appear prohibitively expensive. One industry-funded study in 1991 calculated that imposing a carbon tax of $200 a ton would shrink the U.S. economy by 1.7 percent by 2020. It ignored the cost of failing to act on climate change.

The tradition continues today through the Trump administration’s cost-benefit calculations for repealing environmental regulations. For decades, the Environmental Protection Agency accounted for the health benefits of cutting air pollution — such as avoided asthma attacks and premature deaths — when it created cost-benefit analysis for approving clean air rules. That changed in recent months, when the Trump administration’s EPA revamped the practice so that it now effectively treats the value of saving human lives at $0. It has also thrown out the “social cost of carbon,” a metric that estimates the economic damage from floods, droughts, and other effects of global warming, which the Biden administration had set at $190 a ton. Last June, an investigation by The Associated Press found that Trump’s EPA consistently emphasized the costs of pollution rules while omitting their benefits — even though for 17 of the 20 rules AP examined, the benefits outweighed the costs, sometimes by a lot.

When the agency rescinded its fuel efficiency standards for vehicles in February, along with its own ability to regulate climate change, it promised that the new fuel standards would save Americans $1.3 trillion in car payments by 2055. But a chart buried in the EPA’s regulatory impact analysis found that fuel purchases, vehicle repair, insurance, and other costs would add up to $1.5 trillion over that same time period, outpacing any savings from the repeal. Another problem became clear after the U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran caused average gas prices in the U.S. to surge above $4 a gallon: The administration’s savings estimate had assumed that gasoline prices would stay around $3 per gallon over the next 30 years.

Though you wouldn’t know it from the Trump administration’s projections, protecting the environment can provide a boost for the economy. The Clean Air Act, passed in 1970, not only succeeded in reducing pollution, it also helped economic growth and productivity. Research has shown that the United States’ gross domestic product was 1.5 percent higher in 2010 than it would have been without the legislation, because exposing kids to less air pollution made for more productive workers later.

And if buying clean technology costs you money — well, that’s a boost for the economy, too. “If the government forced you to cut your gas line and install an induction stove and a heat pump, OK, you might hate it because you are forced to pay money for it, but somebody is going to benefit,” Wagner said. “The economy benefits.” He spent $100,000 to renovate his 200-year-old, 750-square-foot loft in Manhattan, installing energy-saving appliances — including a heat pump, an induction stove, and a more efficient fridge — switching to LED light bulbs, and improving insulation, among other measures. “So we spent a lot of money,” Wagner said. “That added $100,000 to the economy.” Eventually, it should save his family money too: The changes cut their utility bill down to about $100 a month, from a high point of $450, though it could take decades for them to recoup the upfront costs.

Of course, it’s one thing for countries with a lot of resources, like the U.S., to invest in technologies to cut emissions and prepare for the impacts of climate change. It’s another thing for cash-strapped countries around the world, who are facing historically high debt levels, to do so. But a recent study looked at decades of data from 172 countries and found that there’s “no inherent trade-off” between adapting to climate change and keeping government finances stable. “There are ways to invest in better preparation for climate change that not only do not endanger fiscal stability, but over the long term can actually contribute towards it,” said Jorge M. Uribe, an author of the study and a professor of economics and business at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Spain. The study, published in the European Journal of Political Economy, found that measures to improve people’s shelter, protection, and comfort can improve public finances.

Uribe hopes that his research can counter the entrenched idea that there’s no common ground between protecting people from climate change and protecting the economy. The frame is so persistent, it often goes unnoticed. For decades, Pew Research has been asking people to pick which of these two statements they agree with: “Stricter environmental laws and regulations cost too many jobs and hurt the economy,” or “Stricter environmental laws and regulations are worth the cost.”

Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, says he’s always hated that question. “It’s a forced trade-off, when we know that environmental protection often has positive economic benefits, yet the framing of that question forces people to choose one or the other,” Leiserowitz said. The Yale program’s surveys have found that most U.S. voters say that protecting the environment is actually good for the economy, with 59 percent agreeing it improves economic growth and provides new jobs. Only a small minority, 18 percent, say that it hurts growth and jobs.

“Look, there are some hard choices that we need to make, right? There are,” Wagner said. “At the same time, I think it’s pretty darn clear that when most people say that there are trade-offs — when most people say it’s the climate versus the economy — they’re wrong.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/economics/trump-administration-climate-economy-government-budget/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

As the year comes to a close, 2025 looks like a turning point in the world’s fight against climate change. Most conspicuously, it was the year the U.S. abandoned the effort. The Trump administration pulled out of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which unites virtually all the world’s countries in a voluntary commitment to halt climate change. And for the first time in the 30-year history of the U.N.’s international climate talks, the U.S. did not send a delegation to the annual conference, COP30, which took place in Belém, Brazil.

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The Trump administration’s assault on climate action has been far from symbolic. Over the summer, the president pressed his Republican majority in Congress to gut a Biden-era law that was projected to cut U.S. emissions by roughly a third compared to their peak, putting the country within reach of its Paris Agreement commitments. In the fall, Trump officials used hardball negotiating tactics to stall, if not outright derail, a relatively uncontroversial international plan to decarbonize the heavily polluting global shipping industry. And even though no other country has played a larger role in causing climate change, the U.S. under Trump has cut the vast majority of global climate aid funding, which is intended to help countries that are in the crosshairs of climate change despite doing virtually nothing to cause it.

It may come as no surprise, then, that other world leaders took barely veiled swipes at Trump at the COP30 climate talks last month. Christiana Figueres, a key architect of the 2015 Paris Agreement and a longtime Costa Rican diplomat, summed up a common sentiment.

“Ciao, bambino! You want to leave, leave,” she said before a crowd of reporters, using an Italian phrase that translates “bye-bye, little boy.”

These stark shifts in the U.S. position on climate change, which President Donald Trump has called a “hoax” and “con job,” are only the latest and most visible signs of a deeper shift underway. Historically, the U.S. and other wealthy, high-emitting nations have been cast as the primary drivers of climate action, both because of their outsize responsibility for the crisis and because of the greater resources at their disposal. Over the past decade, however, the hopes that developed countries will prioritize financing both the global energy transition and adaptation measures to protect the world’s most vulnerable countries have been dashed — in part by rightward lurches in domestic politics, external crises like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and revolts by wealthy-country voters over cost-of-living concerns.

The resulting message to developing countries has been unmistakable: Help is not on the way.

In the vacuum left behind, a different engine of global climate action has emerged, one not political or diplomatic but industrial. A growing marketplace of green technologies — primarily solar, wind, and batteries — has made the adoption of renewable energy far faster and more cost-effective than almost anyone predicted. The world has dramatically exceeded expectations for solar power generation in particular, producing roughly 8 times more last year than in 2015, when the Paris Agreement was signed.

China is largely responsible for the breakneck pace of clean energy growth. It now produces about 60 percent of the world’s wind turbines and 80 percent of solar panels. In the first half of 2025, the country added more than twice as much new solar capacity as the rest of the world combined. As a result of these Chinese-led global energy market changes and other countries’ Paris Agreement pledges, the world is now on a path to see 2.3 to 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.1 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by 2100, compared to preindustrial temperatures, far lower than the roughly 5 degrees C (9 degrees F) projections expected just 10 years ago.

These policies can be viewed as a symbol of global cooperation on climate change, but for Chinese leadership, the motivation is primarily economic. That, experts say, may be why they’re working. China’s policies are driving much of the rest of the world’s renewable energy growth. As the cost of solar panels and wind turbines drops year over year, it is enabling other countries, especially in the Global South, to choose cleaner sources of electricity over fossil fuels — and also to purchase some of the world’s cheapest mass-produced electric vehicles. Pakistan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and Malaysia are all expected to see massive increases in solar deployment in the next few years, thanks to their partnerships with Chinese firms.

“China is going to, over time, create a new narrative and be a much more important driver for global climate action,” said Li Shuo, director of the China climate hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute. Shuo said that the politics-and-rhetoric-driven approach to solving climate change favored by wealthy countries has proved unreliable and largely failed. In its place, a Chinese-style approach that aligns countries’ economic agendas with decarbonization will prove to be more successful, he predicted.

Meanwhile, many countries have begun reorganizing their diplomatic and economic relationships in ways that no longer assume American leadership. That shift accelerated this year in part due to Trump’s decisions to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, to impose tariffs on U.S. allies, and more broadly, to slink away into self-imposed isolation. European countries facing punishing tariffs have looked to deepen trade relationships with China, Japan, and other Asian countries. The EU’s new carbon border tax, which applies levies to imports from outside the bloc, will take effect in January. The move was once expected to trigger conflict between the EU and U.S., but is now proceeding without outright support — or strong opposition — from the Trump administration.

African countries, too, are asserting leadership. The continent hosted its own climate summit earlier this year, pledging to raise $50 billion to promote at least 1,000 locally led solutions in energy, agriculture, water, transport, and resilience by 2030. “The continent has moved the conversation from crisis to opportunity, from aid to investment, and from external prescription to African-led,” said Mahamoud Ali Youssouf, chairperson of the African Union Commission. “We have embraced the powerful truth [that] Africa is not a passive recipient of climate solutions, but the actor and architect of these solutions.”

The U.S. void has also allowed China to throw more weight around in international climate negotiations. Although Chinese leadership remained cautious and reserved in the negotiation halls in Belém, the country pushed its agenda on one issue in particular: trade. Since China has invested heavily in renewable energy technology, tariffs on its products could hinder not only its own economic growth but also the world’s energy transition. As a result the final agreement at COP30, which like all other United Nations climate agreements is ultimately non-binding, included language stipulating that unilateral trade measures like tariffs “should not constitute a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination or a disguised restriction on international trade.”

Calling out tariffs on the first page of the final decision at COP30 would not have been possible if negotiators for the United States had been present, according to Shuo. “China was able to force this issue on the agenda,” he said.

But Shuo added that other countries are still feeling the gravitational pull of U.S. policies, even as the Trump administration sat out climate talks this year. In Belém last month, the United States’ opposition to the International Maritime Organization’s carbon framework influenced conversations about structuring rules for decarbonizing the shipping industry. And knowing that the U.S. wouldn’t contribute to aid funds shaped climate finance agreements.

In the years to come, though, those pressures may very well fade. As the world pivots in response to a U.S. absence, it may find it has more to gain than expected.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/international/2025-trump-climate-change-paris-agreement-china/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

The push to ban gas-powered leaf blowers has gained an unlikely figurehead: Cate Blanchett, the Australian actress. “Leaf blowers need to be eradicated from the face of the Earth,” she said in an interview in March. Her complaints have gone viral on TikTok and other social media platforms. “It’s a metaphor for what’s wrong with us as a species,” Blanchett said. “We blow s--- from one side of our lawn to the other side, and then the wind is just going to blow it back!”

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Her complaints about leaf blowers — equal parts entertaining and earnest — stretch back nearly 20 years, and now the mood has caught up with her. Today, more than 200 local governments in the U.S. have restricted gas-powered lawn equipment or provided incentives to switch to quieter, less-polluting electric tools. The first bans date back to the 1970s, but the trend picked up after the pandemic lockdowns in 2020, when newly homebound workers discovered just how inescapable the whine of their neighbor’s leaf blower can be.

“With every year that passes, more and more communities across the country are taking action to address the shocking amount of pollution and noise from gas lawn equipment,” said Kirsten Schatz, clean air advocate at the Colorado Public Interest Research Group, called CoPIRG.

Gas-powered leaf blowers aren’t just annoying; they’re bad for public health. Closing the windows can’t shut out their low-frequency roar, which can be louder than the World Health Organization’s recommended limit of 55 decibels up to 800 feet away. The unwanted sound can lead to high levels of stress, along with disturbing people’s sleep and potentially damaging hearing over time.

Leaf blowers’ two-stroke engines also churn out a noxious blend of exhaust: fine particulate matter, smog-forming gases, and cancer-causing chemicals like benzene and formaldehyde. By one estimate, running a gas-powered leaf blower for an hour emits as much smog-forming pollution as driving a car from Los Angeles to Denver.

And while lawn and garden equipment is only a small slice of global carbon emissions, leaf blowers and other gas-powered tools “pack a big punch for the amount that they create based on the size of their engines,” said Dan Mabe, the founder of the American Green Zone Alliance, a group that works with cities and landscapers to shift to electric equipment. In 2020, fossil-fueled lawn and garden equipment in the U.S. released more than 30 million tons of CO2, more than the emissions of the city of L.A.

Cities and states across the country have taken different approaches to dealing with the problem. California’s law banning the sale of new gas-powered blowers took effect last January, while cities like Portland and Baltimore are phasing out their use. Some places, like Wilmette, Illinois, have enacted seasonal limits, either permanently or until a full ban takes effect. Others, like Colorado, attempt to sweeten the deal of buying electric lawn care equipment, offering a 30 percent discount.

But implementing the bans is proving more challenging than many expected. Many communities are frustrated that the new rules are not being properly enforced, said Jamie Banks, the founder and president of Quiet Communities, a nonprofit working to reduce noise pollution.

Westport, Connecticut, fought for years to get a seasonal restriction on gas-powered blowers, only to find that local officials were not enforcing it, Banks said. Noise complaints are not exactly at the top of police officers’ priority lists, and sometimes ordinances are written in a way that’s hard to carry out — police aren’t usually expected to go around town taking noise readings, for example. Some communities are taking a deliberate approach to the problem: Banks pointed to a group of towns in the greater Chicago area, including Wilmette, that are trying to create consistent policies across the region and working with the local police.

Then there’s the matter that swapping gas blowers for ones powered by electricity isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. While the costs are comparable for homeowners — you can get electric blowers at a big-box store like Home Depot for around $200 or less, cheaper than most gas ones — electric blowers are more expensive for commercial landscapers. They require multiple batteries for workers to get through the day. While a typical professional gas-powered blower runs for $550, a comparable electric one costs $700 and requires thousands of dollars worth of batteries. Landscapers also have to buy hundreds of dollars worth of charging equipment and find ways to charge safely on the go.

Plus, it can be difficult to meet the standards customers expect with electric leaf blowers, which are less powerful than gas ones. “If you have customers that are demanding that you get everything off the ground, and you better do it quickly, and you’d better not charge me too much money, it’s really tough,” Banks said.

Bans have already generated a political backlash in some Republican-led states. Texas and Georgia have passed laws prohibiting local governments from regulating gas-powered leaf blowers. The Western States Petroleum Association, an oil industry group, launched a Latino-focused messaging campaign in California that pushes back against laws to electrify vehicles and leaf blowers. But leaf blowers aren’t just a culture-war lightning rod; in some places, they’re leading to personal conflict. In Evanston, Illinois, a suburb north of Chicago, several landscape workers allege they’ve been harassed by people reporting violations of the local ban.

The American Green Zone Alliance noted in a recent statement that “heavy-handed bans on gas-powered leaf blowers can unintentionally create stress and hardship for workers who often labor for low wages, with limited benefits or control over their working conditions.”

Although there remain a lot of details to work out, the organization is still pushing lawn care to go electric. “We are trying to convince our industry, ‘Look, we need to accelerate this,’” Mabe said.

The alliance is advocating for incentives that are sufficient to make the new equipment affordable for landscaping businesses operating on razor-thin margins. (In the end, lower fuel and maintenance costs for electric blowers can save companies money if the equipment is properly cared for, Mabe said.) Seasonal bans on gas-powered leaf blowers may be more feasible in some places than year-round ones, because they leave short windows for using the fossil-fueled devices in the spring and fall to take care of heavy cleanup jobs.

Another solution: Customers could loosen their expectations and accept a scattering of leaves, instead of demanding a perfectly manicured lawn. “Now, if that aesthetic was more relaxed, that could help change things,” Banks said. “Maybe they wouldn’t need to carry so many batteries.” Leaving some leaves on the ground is, at least ecologically speaking, a good thing — decaying leaves fertilize the soil and form a protective layer that provides shelter for snails, bees, and butterflies.

And of course, in many cases, a leaf blower isn’t needed at all: You can do as Blanchett advises and take matters into your own hands with a good-old fashioned rake.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/solutions/gas-powered-leaf-blowers-bans-challenges/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

The phrase that has come to define the Trump administration’s message on climate change was born in Durham, New Hampshire, on December 16, 2023.

Flanked by flannel-clad supporters holding “Live free or die” signs, then-candidate Donald Trump wished the crowd a Merry Christmas before launching into what he saw as the biggest faults of the current administration. He swung at President Biden himself (“crooked Joe”) and the state of the economy (“Bidenomics”). About 10 minutes in, he arrived at Biden’s climate policies, which he said were “wasting trillions of dollars on Green New Deal nonsense.”

But Trump wasn’t satisfied with his choice of insult, perhaps recognizing that echoing “Green New Deal” served to amplify his opponents’ pro-climate action rallying cry. So in front of the crowd, he began riffing on ways to undermine it in real time.

“They don’t know what they’re doing, but you’re going to be in the poorhouse to fund his big government Green New Deal, which is a socialist scam. And you know what? You have to be careful. It’s going to put us all in big trouble,” he said. “The Green New Deal that doesn’t work. It’s a Green New Scam. Let’s call it, from now on, the ‘Green New Scam.'”

The crowd roared, shaking their signs in approval. “I do like that term, and I just came up with that one,” Trump said. “The Green New Scam. It will forever be known as the Green New Scam.”

There’s been plenty of attention on Trump’s purge of climate change language, and for good reason: Government workers are tiptoeing around vocabulary they once used freely. “Clean energy,” “climate science,” and “pollution” are on the list of “woke” words federal agencies have told employees to avoid. Recently, a memo circulated at the Department of Energy’s renewable energy office advised employees to remove or rephrase basic terms including “climate change,” “emissions,” and “green.” But the administration is doing more than making these phrases disappear. It’s also introducing new language designed to undermine the foundations upon which trust in climate science and policy is built.

In the nine months since Trump began his second presidency, the phrase “Green New Scam” — always capitalized — has appeared in White House fact sheets and press statements, echoed across federal agencies and by Republicans in Congress.

“He’s quite effective at creating sticky phrases and using repetition to amplify them,” said Renee Hobbs, a communications professor at the University of Rhode Island who wrote a book on modern propaganda. “That’s the classic propaganda strategy, right? You repeat the phrases that you want to stick, and you downplay, ignore, minimize, or censor the concepts that don’t meet your agenda.”

It’s part of a broader effort to erase information about how the planet is changing. In recent months, the administration has axed entire pages about climate change and how to adapt to it, said Gretchen Gehrke, who monitors federal websites with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. The 400 experts working on the government’s next official climate report were dismissed, then all the past reports vanished, too. The administration has proposed stopping long-running projects that monitor carbon dioxide levels, and the Environmental Protection Agency is no longer collecting greenhouse gas emissions data from polluting companies.

You could see it as a three-pronged strategy. First, erase language related to climate change. Second, dismantle the scientific foundation supporting it. Third, fill the void with a message that matches Trump’s political priorities — like the “Green New Scam.”

“We’ve always understood language shapes reality, and language can create unreal realities,” Hobbs said. “And I think that’s what Trump is doing with his language of climate change.”

In Trump’s growing arsenal of anti-climate catchphrases, “Green New Scam” remains a go-to weapon. The Green New Deal concept was a ripe target for Trump because it serves as a catch-all for progressive positions, said Josh Freed, senior vice president for climate and energy at the think tank Third Way. “That was the target that I think Trump honed in on and flipped the script on, and turned it into a vulnerability and catchphrase for what he felt the public would see as positions that were extreme,” he said.

Trump has taken the idea to an international audience. In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly last month, he spent a full 10 minutes ranting off-script about climate policy, deriding renewables and international efforts to address climate change. “If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail,” he told the world leaders in attendance.

In the same speech, he went on to call climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” He also claimed that “the carbon footprint is a hoax made up by people with evil intentions.”

Conspiracy theories are a common tool in propaganda, according to Hobbs. “Conspiracy theories are catnip because they postulate this malevolent actor who’s doing something secretly to hurt people, and humans are hardwired to pay attention to stuff like that,” she said. Studies have shown that fake news about climate change is more compelling to people than scientific facts.

Still, Trump is fighting an uphill battle trying to paint climate change as fake. About 70 percent of Americans acknowledge that global warming is happening. Meanwhile, recent polling found that most Americans don’t trust Republicans on the environment, with only 23 percent preferring the party’s plan for tackling environmental issues.

But if a phrase gets repeated often enough, it can begin to bend reality, even if it’s inaccurate. It’s a rule that Trump intuitively understands, and a driving force behind his linguistic prescriptions. “I have a little standing order in the White House — never use the word ‘coal,’ only use the words ‘clean, beautiful coal,’” Trump said in his speech to the U.N. “Sounds much better, doesn’t it?”

Coal may be dirty by basically every yardstick people use to decide whether something is clean, but the phrase “clean coal” could still change people’s associations with the fuel. “If you can control vocabulary, you’re controlling thought,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania who has spent decades studying campaign messaging. Once we adopt a new set of terms, those words start doing the thinking for us, she said. People absorb the assumptions that are baked into them, often without even noticing.

Jamieson says it’s part of a broader strategy to boost fossil fuels over renewable energy sources like solar and wind. The Trump administration has canceled billions of funding in clean energy projects while simultaneously fast-tracking permits for new pipelines and other fossil fuel infrastructure. Last month, the Energy Department announced it would pour $625 million into rescuing the coal industry, which has been dying as natural gas and renewables have taken off.

“The administration is trying to align the vocabulary through which we talk about the environment with policies that are consistent with increased drilling,” Jamieson said. “You don’t have to do much work to see the relationship between the policies and the language.”

As for how to respond to propaganda, Hobbs said that turning to facts — like scientists and journalists often do — is not the most effective strategy. Research has long shown that feelings are more important than facts in changing people’s minds. “You fight propaganda with propaganda, right?” she said. Climate advocates are increasingly connecting climate change to inflation and the rising cost of living, in an effort to reach Americans struggling with high electricity bills.

On the micro level, Hobbs said she’s seen success in online experiments where people engaged in genuine, open conversations about different propaganda topics, from free speech rights to the role of social media influencers. The format prompted people to talk about conspiracy theories they’ve encountered, what feelings those stories evoked, and which ones were harmful. Participants were encouraged to open up about their uncertainties and where they were coming from — and in doing so, they often came to their own realization that their beliefs might be influenced by propaganda. Hobbs said that people decreased their fear of others who thought differently and became more critical about the information they were receiving.

“We can’t help but be exposed to propaganda,” Hobbs said, “but how we react to it is up to us.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/language/strategy-behind-trump-climate-catchphrase-green-new-scam/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

John Galgiani has been waiting for this call.

The 79-year-old physician is sitting on a chair in a side office at a health clinic in Phoenix, Arizona, long legs crammed under the table in front of him, hands folded at his stomach, when his cell phone rings. “There’s my guy,” he says.

The man on the other end, a physician who works in Tucson, is a touch less relaxed. One of his patients has been in and out of the hospital with a respiratory infection so severe that at one point she coughed up blood. Her skin is flaking, she’s losing her hair, and now the ventricles in her heart are taking too long to refill with blood between beats. The physician suspects some of these symptoms are being caused not by her underlying condition, but by the medication he has her on. The problem is, her insurance is refusing to cover a more expensive alternative.

Galgiani, the country’s leading expert on the disease they’re talking about, quickly cuts him off. Take the patient off the medication, he says, and see how she does. If she improves, show the insurance company proof and force its hand. “That’s actually a good idea,” the doctor replies.

The conversation is so routine, its conclusion — a change of medication — so anodyne, it’s easy to forget that the patient they’re talking about is battling a deadly and incurable fungus.

Doctors have been searching for a cure for coccidioidomycosis, the disease afflicting the patient, since the 1890s, when an Argentine soldier was hospitalized with skin lesions that returned with a zombie-like vengeance after being scrubbed or cut off. Not long after, an immigrant farmworker landed in a San Francisco hospital with the same mutilating disease. Both patients eventually died.

It would be decades before medical researchers and public health officials connected the dots between those cases and reports of a mysterious disease referred to simply as “desert rheumatism” by the waves of settlers, immigrants, and farmworkers that rippled through the West on the heels of the Gold Rush, the completion of the transcontinental railroad, and the Dust Bowl. In California’s San Joaquin Valley, the disease was known as “San Joaquin Valley Fever,” and “valley fever” became the colloquial name of the infection Galgiani later dedicated his life to studying.

By the 1930s, scientists understood that valley fever and the disease that killed the two immigrant farmworkers were different stages of one illness caused by the same fungal pathogen. They had also begun to grasp the basics of transmission. The fungus that causes the disease, called coccidioides or cocci (pronounced “cox-ee”) for short, grows in the top few inches of undisturbed earth throughout the Western U.S. and flourishes during cool, rainy periods. Then, in the summertime heat of the desert, its delicate fungal threads desiccate. Once they’re dry, any disturbance of the topsoil — a foot kicking up earth, a bulldozer digging a foundation, an earthquake shaking loose clouds of dust — sends infinitesimal spores swirling into the air, where they can be sucked through the nasal passages and into the lungs of passing humans or animals.

Most people who breathe in cocci spores — about 6 in 10 — won’t develop symptoms. But the 40 percent of exposed people whose immune systems can’t or won’t fight off the fungus develop symptoms such as fatigue, muscle aches, coughing, and rash that can last weeks or months. In the 5 to 10 percent of symptomatic cases where the fungus invades the vital organs, the death rate is as high as 25 percent. The pathogen is so powerful the U.S. army weighed whether to develop it into a bioterrorism weapon in the 1960s.

Valley fever is endemic to southern Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Texas, and parts of Central and South America, but nowhere are cases of the disease more common than in Arizona. After Arizona started mandatory laboratory reporting for valley fever in 1997, registered cases ticked up and down. But the number began trending upward dramatically in 2016. Then, in 2024, cases in the state exploded, hitting their second-highest total ever. More than 15,000 infections were reported — a 37 percent increase over 2023. California, which runs just behind Arizona in its annual valley fever caseload, registered a record-breaking 12,637 cases in 2024, representing a 39 percent increase over the previous year, which had already smashed a record set in 2019.

Some portion of the rise in reported cases represents growing awareness among physicians and an associated surge in testing. The pace of new construction in untouched areas also plays a role.

But the recent increase in cases has been so dramatic, Galgiani and other researchers across the West who study the fungus think another factor may be driving the trend: supersoaker winter monsoons followed by scorching summer heat and drought, a cycle made more intense by climate change.

Because warmer air holds more moisture, monsoons and other major rainfall events pull in larger quantities of water vapor and produce heavier downpours as the planet warms. This physical fact has fueled a spate of monster floods across the U.S. and around the world in recent years. But the same warmth can conversely lead to drought by making the atmosphere “thirstier,” or capable of absorbing more water from the land’s surface. Both conditions facilitate the spread of valley fever — the wetter conditions by encouraging growth of the spores, and the drier by facilitating desiccation and soil disturbance.

“The main driver for us is certainly this very clear association for coccidioides between heavy precipitation cycles followed by drought,” said George Thompson, a professor of medicine at the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine who specializes in fungal diseases.

And it’s not just valley fever that may increase its spread thanks to climate change. Peer reviewed research shows that fungal threats of all kinds are poised to emerge and thrive in a warming world.

Since many valley fever cases are asymptomatic or diagnosed as something else, the numbers of infected people reported by states every year are widely considered underestimates. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that the true burden of valley fever in the U.S. is 10 to 18 times higher than reported, meaning tens or hundreds of thousands of people in Arizona and California have been touched by these latest spikes. Cases reported so far this year are surging in both states.

This is the kind of challenge Galgiani has spent the better part of three decades preparing for. Since 1996, Galgiani has served as director of a Tucson-based center he founded at the University of Arizona called the Valley Fever Center for Excellence, where a small army of researchers, doctors, and veterinarians works closely with county and state public health agencies and research universities on developing solutions to the state’s multifaceted valley fever problem. Years of dogged work are finally beginning to yield momentum that could prevent thousands of infections and dozens of deaths every year.

What might become the world’s first-ever fungal vaccine, discovered by Galgiani and a team of researchers at the Center for Excellence in 2013, is nearing the end of the long federal regulatory process for use against valley fever in dogs. A pharmaceutical company has already initiated the process of adapting it for use in humans.

Galgiani and his colleagues also teamed up with researchers at Arizona State University to develop a valley fever surveillance prototype that uses data from National Weather Service weather stations to track the environmental conditions that spur cases of the disease. He designed a clinical education program that trains physicians how to more quickly and accurately diagnose valley fever in their patients. The program was put to use in urgent care clinics in Phoenix and Tucson owned by Banner Health, one of the biggest nonprofit healthcare systems in the U.S.

But these efforts, some of the first homegrown examples of researchers and health professionals collaborating to protect their communities against a climate-driven health threat in the U.S., are on a collision course with the Trump administration’s new policies. In the months since Donald Trump was elected president, his administration has systematically undermined the infrastructure that supports the country’s public health systems, ordering deep cuts to government funding for vaccines, research, and personnel, and even taking aim at the systems that track and publish data on new cases of infectious disease.

For decades, Galgiani thought the work he was doing at the Valley Fever Center for Excellence was building a solid foundation that Arizona would be able to depend on in the hotter years to come. The first nine months of the second Trump administration have made that foundation look more like a Jenga tower. The infrastructure supporting everyone Galgiani works with — the research to develop a vaccine that may one day become widely available for human use, the valley fever surveillance tools that rely on government weather data to operate, and the federal funding that pays for Arizona’s public health initiatives, public universities, and research labs — is starting to wobble.

The quest to free Arizona of its fungal scourge, never closer to bearing fruit, has also never been more at risk.

As Sharon Filip, a healthy woman in her 50s, was preparing to depart Washington state for a two-week vacation in Arizona in 2001, she checked the state’s Department of Health website to find out what she should be aware of before her trip. As a result, she arrived in Tucson prepared to avoid scorpions at all costs. Nothing she read indicated that a deadly fungal disease lurked in the soil.

A week after returning home, Filip could barely lift her head off her pillow. “Every bone in my body, every muscle in my body, every part of my body, my organs — everything hurt,” she said. Her doctors had no idea what was wrong.

Filip’s son, David, took care of her, and her illness resolved on its own over the course of months, as many cases do. There is no cure for the disease, though a round of strong antifungals, which come with their own suite of painful side effects, can provide the immune system with an assist as it tries to destroy the spores. Filip said it took her 10 years to fully “come back to the world of the living.” She and her son formed a group called Valley Fever Survivor, which has served as a meeting place of sorts for people desperate for more information and guidance.

Arizona has accounted for at least two-thirds of all cases reported in the U.S. for decades, although California is beginning to reach parity as the fungus spreads. Maricopa County in particular — Arizona’s most populous and diverse county, housing four of the five biggest cities in the state, including Phoenix — is located on what appears to be a massive fungal reservoir. Half of all of the nation’s cases start in Maricopa. But even in Maricopa County, getting an accurate valley fever diagnosis often depends on whether either the patient or the doctor is aware that such a disease exists.

“I went to a hospital four different times between three different locations before I was taken seriously,” someone wrote in a valley fever support group on Facebook recently. “As a native to Arizona who has only heard of valley fever and does not know anyone who has had this, I find it all incredibly shocking.”

Unlike nearby California, Arizona has passed no workers’ protection legislation aimed at controlling one of its most commonly reported infectious diseases. The state legislature, controlled almost exclusively by a Republican majority since the mid-1960s, approved just $300,000 for valley fever surveillance in 2007. No new funding has been approved by the legislature since, though the Arizona Board of Regents, the state senate-confirmed board that governs Arizona’s university system, used $3.3 million in taxpayer dollars to fund valley fever research across six projects starting in 2022.

Sharon and David Filip are scathing about Arizona’s efforts to contain the disease, which have largely amounted to improving detection of valley fever in people who already have it, rather than preventing those infections from happening in the first place. They think the state has that backward.

“It seems like it’s more important to actually fund the protection of the people than it is to just keep track of how they’re dying and getting sick,” David Filip said. But preventing cases of valley fever — a disease that people contract simply by breathing in the wrong place at the wrong time — is a monumental job for a public health department.

When asked what Arizona is doing to combat valley fever, Irene Ruberto, who manages the Arizona Department of Health Services’ vector-borne and zoonotic disease team, pointed to the department’s efforts to raise awareness about the disease, such as the week the state dedicates to “Valley Fever Awareness” every November, as well as its ongoing work reviewing, counting, and publishing cases reported by counties. Ruberto had no firm answers to questions about the ways that new construction is exposing more residents to the fungus, and what else might be done to reach the demographics most at risk of developing the most severe form of the disease, nodding instead to research being conducted by scientists on those topics at places like the Valley Fever Center for Excellence, which the department supports.

The department of health has a small pot of funding that’s already stretched thin between competing priorities. Arizona, which spent $28 per person on public health funding in 2023, less than half the national average, uses very little of its own money on its health infrastructure. If federal funding were to disappear — county health departments are funded largely by Medicaid — the state’s public health system would functionally collapse.

Those are the conditions in which Galgiani has worked for the past three decades.

“There’s a fungus amongus,” reads a small decal tucked among the various framed awards and pictures hanging on the walls of his office at the Valley Fever Center for Excellence. Galgiani spends most of the week in Tucson, but on Tuesday nights, he and his wife drive two hours north to Phoenix to an apartment they own on the bottom floor of a building a five-minute drive from one of Banner Health’s clinics. On Wednesday mornings, Galgiani goes to the clinic to see patients and train doctors.

Since 2018, Banner Health urgent care facilities in Phoenix and Tucson have been following a new clinical program Galgiani designed that aims to increase the number of people being tested for valley fever. Too often, doctors assume that patients who present with the early symptoms of valley fever have garden-variety pneumonia, and they administer antibiotics without realizing that the patient is suffering from a fungal infection that will only respond to an antifungal medication.

A retrospective study of more than 800 patients in Arizona found that more than 40 percent of them waited more than a month after their first doctor’s visit for an accurate diagnosis; many received useless prescriptions for antibacterial drugs in the interim. The costs associated with the roughly 10,000 cases of the disease that were diagnosed in the state in 2019, including direct healthcare costs and working hours lost, topped $700 million.

After Galgiani’s protocol was implemented, the percentage of Banner Health clinics enrolled in the program ordering 50 or more valley fever blood tests per year rose significantly, from 11 percent in 2018 to 78 percent in 2021 — a strong signal of progress and one that will likely withstand any changes unfolding at the federal level: The program is cheap and doesn’t rely on federal funding to run. But the Banner Health facilities using this new strategy constitute just 4 percent of the health clinics in the Phoenix and Tucson metropolitan areas. The long term goal, one the state of California is currently trying to accomplish via legislation just passed by that state’s senate, is to require doctors to automatically test most patients who present with pneumonia symptoms in an endemic area for the disease.

But getting more hospitals and clinics across the southern part of Arizona, which encompasses most of the state’s fungal hotspots, to implement updated valley fever testing protocols is a constant battle against inertia. “A lot of doctors have learned to treat all pneumonias as bacterial infections,” Galgiani said. “To get them to change, they have to unlearn what they were already told was the right way to go.” He fears that, as the federal government takes a hatchet to the funding it sends to states for a wide array of public health initiatives, the momentum he and others in Arizona have been trying to sustain will lag and efforts to combat valley fever will fall to the wayside.

In late March, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., head of the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, ordered deep cuts to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention grant programs for states across the country. Although Arizona’s attorney general challenged that decision alongside 19 other state attorneys general, the Supreme Court handed down a brief ruling in August permitting the lion’s share of those cuts to go through. The White House’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 would further weaken the state’s public health and research infrastructure: Arizona stands to lose an estimated $135 million annually in funding from the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, for infectious disease research at universities and hospitals, according to an analysis by the Science and Community Impacts Mapping Project.

These cuts won’t affect the Valley Fever Center for Excellence, which is funded primarily by philanthropic dollars and was established by the Arizona Board of Regents, not the federal government. But what’s happening at the federal level is destabilizing the network of people and institutions Galgiani relies on to keep the valley fever solutions machine running, including the public health departments he works with and his collaborators at universities in California, Arizona, and Texas.

“It feels like there’s an ax hanging over our heads and we never know when it’s going to drop,” said Bridget Barker, a professor of biological sciences at Northern Arizona University who runs a valley fever project funded by NIH.

When Thursday morning rolls around, Galgiani is back at his desk in Tucson logging onto a Zoom call with a group of people who meet monthly to discuss valley fever in Arizona. Thomas Williamson, a valley fever epidemiologist at the state’s department of health, starts the meeting with a roll call. Representatives from public health departments across the state — Maricopa, Pinal, and Pima counties — are there to report their monthly valley fever numbers to the group of roughly two dozen. An infectious disease specialist from the Mayo Clinic is listening in. Galgiani is prepared to present the most recent data from his work with Banner Health clinics.

Williamson ticks down his list of invitees. “How about the CDC?” he asks. A long silence follows. Someone jumps in and asks if the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was told about the meeting.

“They were sent the updates and the meeting link,” Williamson replies. “It’s up to them, really.”

It’s unclear if the federal government’s absenteeism is a result of a lack of interest or whether it can be chalked up to disarray and lack of personnel. At least seven staffers and research fellows have left the CDC’s Mycotic Diseases Branch — including the branch chief, Tom Chiller — a small division within the agency that maintains a fungal identification and testing lab and helps states with funding, disease surveillance, and public health communication surrounding fungal pathogens. Either way, Galgiani says later, the absence is unusual.

Also tuning into the Zoom call are Tanner Porter and Dave Engelthaler, two researchers who have been using air filters — initially installed around the Phoenix metropolitan area following the violence of September 11, 2001, to sense a bioterrorism attack — to measure the concentration of cocci in the air. It’s the first-ever effort to forecast where and when the spores are present across a metropolitan area.

Interest is intense among the meeting attendees as Porter and Engelthaler, who both work at a nonprofit medical research group called the Translational Genomics Research Institute, report that their preliminary findings indicate that airborne fungus is most concentrated close to new construction sites. The spores, they say, are present even on days when the wind isn’t blowing and there is no visible dust in the air.

Phoenix and other endemic areas undergoing a lot of landscape changes are a bit like minefields. Construction in places where the fungus is present, particularly when soil moisture is low and wind is blowing, can produce invisible clouds of spores that hang suspended in the air within a 1.5-mile radius. Anyone who walks through them could be at risk. Larger construction sites can send the spores swirling even further afield.

The researchers are in the midst of training a machine-learning algorithm to identify disturbed land in real time and identify where infections are likely to occur. It’s the kind of research that could help the Maricopa County public health department put out warnings in high-risk areas and encourage people to wear N95 masks, which have been shown to help reduce the risks of contracting the disease.

But the work Porter and Engelthaler are doing depends in part on dust storm records kept in a little-known database called the Storm Events Database. That database is run by the National Centers for Environmental Information, housed within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, which also runs an hourly weather data program that the researchers are pulling from to run their modeling. The Trump administration has severely weakened NOAA’s weather forecasting capabilities, which will have knock-on effects for any ongoing efforts to use federal weather data to predict where and when valley fever will emerge.

The biggest unknown in the stack of unknowns is the future of the vaccine Galgiani discovered several years ago — the holy grail of the valley fever world. Without it, there is no long-term protection for Arizonans, Californians, and anyone else exposed to a disease poised to run amok as communities push further into a desert landscape made more hospitable to coccidioides by climate change.

The vaccine has been licensed to a pet healthcare pharmaceutical company called Anivive Lifesciences, which is developing it for use in dogs — animals that are particularly susceptible to the disease because they spend so much time with their noses to the ground. The company counts former Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, who represented much of California’s cocci-rich Central Valley, on its board.

If everything goes exactly right, the vaccine Anivive is developing will be approved by the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, a branch of the United States Department of Agriculture, for use in canines by the middle of next year. In trials, two doses of the live attenuated vaccine, which contains a weakened form of the fungus, gave dogs near-total protection. Adapting the mechanism that makes the dose work in dogs to provide the same protection for humans could take another five years or more. But the federal government appears interested in making that happen — or, at least, it did.

Last year, Anivive received a contract worth up to $33 million from a division of the National Institutes of Health to initiate the process for a human phase 1 clinical trial. Once someone has recovered from valley fever, they’re more or less protected from reinfection for life, making the fungus a good vaccine candidate. The funding from NIH is in the form of a legal contract, not a grant, meaning it theoretically can’t be rescinded the same way billions of dollars worth of grant funding have been cancelled by the federal government. So far, NIH has been meeting its payments to Anivive, though they’ve been slower than usual since Trump took office.

It’s not lost on Edward Robb, chief strategy officer at Anivive and leader of the company’s valley fever vaccine project, that he’s developing a vaccine for a relatively unknown infectious disease at the same time as one of the world’s most prominent opponents of vaccines has begun reshaping America’s immunization policies.

Since taking office as secretary of health and human services, Kennedy has rolled back federal recommendations and endorsements for COVID-19 and some flu vaccines and fired all 17 independent members of a vaccine policy panel at the CDC, replacing many of them with known anti-vaccine campaigners. HHS has little say over vaccines developed for use in animals, but it could derail the regulatory process by which that vaccine is adapted for humans, a process so long and so expensive it’s often referred to as “the valley of death.”

“We’re nervous but we have no data or anything to say that things have changed,” Robb said. “Have I had lost sleep? Have I had anxiety? Have there been weeks when we think we’re doomed? Yeah.”

If NIH continues funding this phase of the project as it’s contracted to and the vaccine shows promise, there’s still the matter of finding the funding to conduct phases 2 and 3 of the approval process, when the vaccine is tested on hundreds and then thousands of people. The estimated cost of such an endeavor, Robb says, is $300 million. Anivive can’t do it alone. A major biopharmaceutical company like Pfizer or Moderna would need to step in to take it over the finish line.

“Will a major step up and say ‘put me in, coach’?” he asked. It’s looking less likely by the day. In early August, Kennedy canceled close to $500 million in mRNA vaccine contracts with more than a dozen vaccine makers including Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca, a move that could further dampen new vaccine research and investment.

For Galgiani, this kind of retreat from vaccine development is irrational. “It makes sense to me that state and federal support for a vaccine would be good for both public health and the economies of endemic regions,” he said.

Whether a vaccine for valley fever moves forward matters not only for the hundreds of thousands of Americans who are likely to get the disease in the coming years, but also for the 6.5 million people who get invasive fungal infections annually around the world. As with valley fever, the overall number of fungal infections is growing as climate change makes the whole Earth warmer on average.

“Unlike humans, many pathogenic fungi are thriving as the Earth’s temperature increases,” the authors of a study published last year in the peer-reviewed British medical journal The Lancet wrote. Fungi that cause disease are “quickly adapting to higher temperatures and becoming more virulent and potent.”

A growing portion of these cases are caused by fungi that have become resistant to antifungal medications. Candida auris, a relatively new yeast that has already infected over 2,800 Americans this year, is multi-drug resistant. Ninety percent of the Candida auris found in the U.S. is resistant to fluconazole, one of the most commonly used antifungals.

“If we can make a fungal vaccine for valley fever, could one of these companies make a vaccine against Candida infections?” asked Thompson, the fungal disease specialist from the University of California, Davis. “It may just be the first example of vaccines in this field, but it really may lead to some big changes and big improvements for our patients down the road.”

But that’s only if the valley fever vaccine survives the Trump administration.

Correction: This story originally misstated Sharon Filip’s age when she contracted valley fever.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/health/valley-fever-arizona-fungus-climate-change/.

When Ted Bundy was a child in the 1950s, he hunted for frogs in the nearby swamps in Tacoma, Washington. The young Gary Ridgway, the future Green River Killer, grew up just a short drive north. Both men went on to become prolific serial killers, raping and mutilating dozens of women, starting in the 1970s and ’80s. These types of sociopaths are exceedingly rare, representing less than a tenth of 1 percent of all murderers by some accounts. Yet in Tacoma, they were surprisingly common — and there were more than just Bundy and Ridgway.

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In her new book Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Caroline Fraser maps the rise of serial killers in the Pacific Northwest to the proliferation of pollution. In this case, the lead- and arsenic-poisoned plume that flowed from Asarco’s metal smelter northwest of Tacoma, which operated for almost a century and polluted more than 1,000 square miles of the Puget Sound area, the source of the famous “aroma of Tacoma.”

Fraser grew up in the 1970s on Mercer Island, connected to Seattle by a floating bridge with a deadly design, not far from a terrifying lineup of serial killers. George Waterfield Russell Jr., who went on to murder three women, lived just down the street, a few years ahead of Fraser at Mercer Island High School. (No surprise, his family once lived in Tacoma.) She had always thought the idea that the Pacific Northwest was a breeding ground for serial killers was “some kind of urban legend,” she told Grist.

But after much time spent staring at pollution maps, and looking up the former addresses of serial killers, she came up with an irresistible hypothesis: What if lead exposure was warping the minds of the country’s most harrowing murderers? In Murderland, Fraser makes a convincing case that these killers were exposed to heavy metal pollution in their youth, often from nearby smelters and the leaded gasoline that was once burned on every road in the country.

Studies have shown that childhood lead exposure is connected to rising crime rates, aggression, and psychopathy. In children, it can lead to behavior that’s been described as cruel, impulsive, and “crazy-like”; by adulthood, it’s been linked to a loss of brain volume, particularly for men. Fraser doesn’t pin sociopathy solely on exposure to lead, though she suggests that it’s a key ingredient.

“Recipes for making a serial killer may vary, including such ingredients as poverty, crude forceps deliveries, poor diet, physical and sexual abuse, brain damage, and neglect,” Fraser writes. “Many horrors play a role in warping these tortured souls, but what happens if we add a light dusting from the periodic table on top of all that trauma?”

Fraser is a fan of true crime, but when writing the book, she tried to correct for what she sees as the genre’s problems, she said. Biographers often zoom in on a killer in isolation, like Ted Bundy or the Zodiac killer, and he comes off as some kind of mastermind. In Fraser’s telling, with all their deprived murders placed side-by-side, these killers seem patterned, almost predictable. “It was also revealing to see that they’re not only not as smart as we may have thought they were after Hollywood got through with them, but that their behavior is so similar,” she said. “Like, they’re almost kind of automatons, where their behavior’s very robotlike.”

Fraser draws a parallel between murderers as we normally understand them and more indirect killers, the book’s true arch-villain: smelting companies and the people profiting off them, like the famous Guggenheim family that acquired Asarco. In 1974, officials at Asarco’s Bunker Hill smelter in Kellogg, Idaho, did a back-of-the-napkin estimate and found that poisoning 500 children with lead had a legal liability of merely $6-7 million, compared to the $10-11 million they’d make by increasing lead production. So the choice was easy.

“The behavior of the people who built these smelters, invested in them, ran them, continued to emit tons of lead and arsenic into the air in populated cities — I mean, it’s beyond astonishing, what they did,” she said. Take Dr. Sherman Pinto, the medical director at the Tacoma smelter, who claimed that the lung cancer deaths among workers were simply because of pneumonia. “It just struck me how much their behavior is comparable to that of serial killers, because they’re constantly lying,” Fraser said.

Beyond the Pacific Northwest, the book follows the depraved behavior of Dennis Rader in Kansas in the 1970s and 1980s, and Richard Ramirez in California in the 1980s — both of whom also grew up near smelting. Even London’s famous Jack the Ripper was probably poisoned by the lead smelting boom in the 19th century, driven by demand for paint. Yet Murderland focuses on Washington state for a reason. When Fraser looked at the Washington Department of Ecology’s map of lead and arsenic contamination, she saw four plumes: The fallout from Asarco’s Tacoma smelter, another smelter plume in Everett, former orchard lands in central Washington that were sprayed with lead arsenate as a pesticide, and a cleanup site on the upper Columbia River.

“Every one of those plumes, including the most remote and least populated site on the Columbia, has hosted the activities of one or more serial rapists or murderers,” Fraser notes. (Israel Keyes, the serial killer and necrophiliac, grew up downriver from the Trail smelter in British Columbia.)

Leaded gas was fully phased out in the United States by 1996, and metal smelters have largely been decommissioned for financial reasons. But the legacy of lead remains with us. A recent experiment found that about 90 percent of toothpastes tested contained lead; a few weeks ago, the supermarket chain Publix recalled baby food pouches after product testing detected lead contamination. Last year, the Biden administration issued a regulation requiring drinking water systems across the country to replace lead pipes within 10 years, but the Trump administration and some Republicans in Congress are trying to roll back these protections.

“Regardless of whether you agree with my connection between lead exposure and serial killers, I do think people really need to be aware that that was a huge part of our history, and it’s still out there,” Fraser said. “I hope that this book does something to help people make connections between where they live, and what they might be exposed to, and what that might mean.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/culture/murderland-caroline-fraser-serial-killers-pacific-northwest-lead-pollution/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

Ellen Stromdahl was at a garden party in coastal Virginia in June 2023 when her friend Albert Duncan stood up from where he was sitting and abruptly fainted. Duncan is an outdoorsman in his mid-80s — still active and healthy for his age. Stromdahl, an entomologist who works for the United States Army Public Health Center, the Army’s public health arm, rushed to his side. As Duncan came to, she noticed that his tanned skin was tinged with yellow. “This man looks jaundiced,” she thought to herself.

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Duncan spent the next several days in and out of the emergency room. His doctors administered countless blood tests and ruled out the usual suspects for an octogenarian — heart disease, diabetes, pneumonia. Finally, on Stromdahl’s recommendation, Duncan’s wife, Nancy, asked his doctors to test him for babesiosis, a rare malaria-like disease caused by microscopic parasites carried by black-legged ticks. The test came back positive not just for babesiosis but also for Lyme disease, another far more common illness caused by the same type of tick.

If Duncan’s doctors had caught the infections sooner, they could have eradicated them with a combination of oral antibiotics and antiparasitic medications. But Duncan, weeks into his illness, needed a procedure called an exchange transfusion. Doctors pumped all of the infected blood out of his body and replaced it with donor blood. About two weeks after the garden party, he was well again.

Babesiosis is rare — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports around 2,000 cases in the United States every year. But what made Duncan’s case even more unusual is that he contracted babesiosis in Virginia, a state that registered just 17 locally acquired cases of the disease between 2016 and 2023.

It got Stromdahl wondering if babesiosis could be becoming more common in Virginia and neighboring states. She spent the following two years working with a team of 21 tick researchers from across the eastern U.S. and South Africa to assess the prevalence of Babesia microti, the parasite that causes babesiosis, in ticks and humans in those states from 2009 to 2024.

The results of the study, published in April in the Journal of Medical Entomology, reveal that the Babesia parasite is rapidly expanding through the mid-Atlantic. This shift, which has coincided with changing weather patterns, could pose a serious threat to people in communities where the disease has long been considered rare.

“Wherever we found positive ticks, there were cases,” Stromdahl said. “They’re small numbers, but that’s why we want to give the early warning before more people get sick.”

One in four cases of babesiosis is asymptomatic. People who do develop symptoms, especially older adults and immunocompromised people, can get quite sick with fever, chills, anemia, fatigue, and jaundice. Untreated, the parasites, which infect and destroy red blood cells, can lead to organ failure and death.

Babesiosis is typically found in the Northeast and the Upper Midwest. Between 2015 and 2022, case counts in the states that regularly report the disease — Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin — rose by 9 percent every year, a development researchers attribute in large part to warmer temperatures caused by climate change, which afford black-legged ticks more opportunities to bite people in a given year and more habitat to spread into.

Climatic conditions in the southern mid-Atlantic have always been welcoming for ticks, but warmer-than-average winters that have been occurring with grim regularity in recent years are turning some states in the region into year-round breeding sites for ticks and small rodents like mice, chipmunks, and shrews — the critters that carry Lyme bacteria and the Babesia parasite in their blood. Above-normal annual rainfall, which saturates the soil and adds to overall humidity in the region, also encourages the proliferation of ticks. The 2023 to 2024 winter season across much of the mid-Atlantic was 4 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal, and many states had some of their wettest Decembers and Januaries on record.

Stromdahl has been studying the movement of ticks and the diseases they carry for decades. She’s seen it all — including the northward spread of the Lone Star tick, which can impart a lifelong, sometimes deadly reaction to red meat. But even she was shocked to discover how far the Babesia parasite had spread.

She and her co-authors collected 1,310 ticks in Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware and found the B. microti parasite in all three states, indicating that there is potential for more human cases across the southern mid-Atlantic. None of those states had ever found the parasite in ticks before.

Many of the ticks the authors looked at were also infected with the bacteria that causes Lyme disease. The Lyme-babesiosis connection is an active area of research. Experts suspect ticks infected with one of the diseases are more predisposed to be infected with the other, but they still don’t know why exactly. What they do know is that Lyme is a harbinger of babesiosis. Previous studies on tick-borne illness found that areas that saw rising cases of Lyme disease from the 1980s to the early 2000s reported more babesiosis cases one to two decades later.

“The findings in the Stromdahl paper are consistent with what we’ve seen in the Northeast: Babesia infection seems to spread where Lyme infection is already present,” said Shannon LaDeau, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies who was not involved in the study.

The authors also examined where human cases of babesiosis were clustered. Of particular concern were two hot spots: the five counties surrounding and encompassing the city of Baltimore and the Delmarva Peninsula — an 180-mile-long coastal landmass comprising parts of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. Fifty-five percent of Maryland’s cases were from the Baltimore area, and some 38 percent of cases from Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia combined were from the Delmarva Peninsula.

Experts believe babesiosis cases are severely underreported due to a lack of physician awareness. Stromdahl and her colleagues hope their findings will inspire health departments in the mid-Atlantic to recognize that babesiosis is a growing concern, conduct surveillance for infected ticks, and put out public health warnings. If doctors in the region know to test for babesiosis, severe cases like Duncan’s can be avoided.

“Jurisdictions in the southern mid-Atlantic region should expect babesiosis cases,” the authors warn. “Tick range expansion is occurring at such a precipitous rate that public health guidance regarding tick-borne disease prevention and treatment can be rapidly rendered obsolete.”

Climate change isn’t the only environmental factor driving the rising density and expansion of tick populations. Efforts over the past few decades to reforest barren areas have encouraged herds of white-tailed deer, animals that pick up ticks and carry them miles before the arachnids drop off into the leaf litter, to proliferate. Declining rates of recreational and subsistence hunting are adding to deer overpopulations. At the same time, an ongoing expansion of suburban development into forested zones is putting more people in contact with ticks and the diseases they carry.

“The most important take-home is that tick-borne disease is a growing risk,” LaDeau said. The big question as tick populations increase, she added, is to figure out where and when infected ticks overlap with people. “There is still a huge need for data to understand how often these infected ticks come into contact with humans.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/health/babesiosis-mid-atlantic-delaware-maryland-virginia-tick-borne-disease-lyme-research/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

“I know nothing about Project 2025,” President Donald Trump said in a social media post last summer, four months before he defeated former vice president Kamala Harris and made a triumphant return to power.

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He was referring to a 900-page document written by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has been influencing Republican presidential policy since the 1980s, and other conservative groups. At least 140 members of Trump’s own former administration worked on the roadmap, which laid out the ways a second Trump term could fundamentally transform the federal government’s role in society.

As the public learned about radical proposals like replacing thousands of federal workers with conservative loyalists and commercializing government weather forecasts, Project 2025 became a political inconvenience for Republicans on the campaign trail. Last fall, only 13 percent of Americans said they supported the plan.

“I have no idea who is behind it,” Trump said in July as he tried to distance himself from the controversy.

If the notion that Trump was completely unaware of the origins or the contents of Project 2025 didn’t pass the straight-face test then, it’s ludicrous now.

Fewer than four months in, the Trump administration has accomplished policies that mirror about a third of the more than 300 policy objectives outlined in the blueprint, according to a crowdsourced website called Project 2025 Tracker. They include scrubbing mentions of diversity, equity, and inclusion from government documents and agencies; dismantling the Department of Education; and freezing federal science grants across the government. More than 60 measures recommended by the document are currently in progress.

“It’s actually way beyond my wildest dreams,” Paul Dans, the former director of Project 2025, told Politico last month.

About a fifth of the climate and environment measures proposed by the architects of Project 2025 have been implemented, according to another Project 2025 tracker run jointly by the policy think tanks Governing for Impact and the Center for Progressive Reform. Those measures include boosting fossil fuel drilling on public lands, rolling back grants for green programs, and reforming climate statutes.

All of these actions have something in common: they’ve flowed directly from the executive branch of government. Most of them have been decreed by Trump himself or have come from his cabinet secretaries.

James Goodwin, who runs the Project 2025 tracker at the Center for Progressive Reform, calls these executive measures “the stuff that doesn’t require much process” — in contrast to legislation, which requires negotiation with both houses of Congress. Trump has signed just five laws so far, the lowest count since Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected in 1953. He’s barreled ahead with an agenda that effectively ignores Congress, with little apparent concern for whether his actions are even legal. That means that, even as the Trump administration makes rapid headway on the Project 2025 agenda, the methods the administration has used to achieve those goals are being challenged in court — especially when they seek to unravel prior legislation.

“In Trump 1.0 they compiled a miserable, long loss record in court because they were so procedurally sloppy,” said Michael Gerrard, faculty director of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “So far they may be doing even worse.”

On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order called “Unleashing American Energy” that bundled multiple recommendations that echo Project 2025 objectives. Among these was a suggestion to update an Environmental Protection Agency rule called the endangerment finding. The policy requires the EPA to curb greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, vehicles, and other sources of pollution under the Clean Air Act. In March, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin said he aims to formally reconsider the rule and all regulations that rely on it — including most major U.S. climate regulations. Legal experts say weakening the rule or reversing it won’t be a cakewalk by any means — the finding is rooted in laws passed by Congress and has already withstood a barrage of legal challenges.

Project 2025 suggested freezing grants for green initiatives such as recycling education programs and eliminating the EPA Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights. Trump is in the process of accomplishing those goals, which fall under the purview of the EPA. Some of these changes, such as eliminating funding to a “green bank” program established by Congress, are already being litigated, and judges ordered agencies to unfreeze a portion of the funds last week.

At the Department of the Interior, or DOI, similar Project 2025-inspired attacks on climate and environmental regulations are underway. Trump’s “Unleashing American Energy” order directed the DOI to assess and expand drilling and mining opportunities on public lands and expand energy extraction in Alaska under the guise of an “energy emergency” independent analysts say does not exist.

Last week, the DOI made good on that directive by announcing it would shrink down the time it takes to review the environmental and social impact of oil and gas projects on public lands — a process required by federal law — from one to two years to as little as 14 days. Truncated environmental review processes are sure to be challenged in court, and the administration’s efforts to boost drilling on public lands could also run into a 2024 rule that balances conservation with other public lands uses such as energy development and herd grazing.

At the Department of Energy, Secretary Chris Wright is overseeing Trump directives to quickly approve new liquefied natural gas exports and freeze funding from the largest climate-spending bill in American history, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The natural gas exports will be litigated, Gerrard said, on the basis of whether emissions from those exports violate the National Environmental Policy Act, the same law the administration is trying to sidestep in order to expedite reviews of oil and gas drilling on public lands. Efforts to claw back Inflation Reduction Act funding have already been the subject of many legal challenges.

The text of Project 2025 encourages a future conservative president to use every executive power at their disposal, but it doesn’t recommend blatantly breaking the law. “One might imagine that the policy experts that worked on the Project 2025 plan assumed that the Trump administration would do things legally,” said David Willett, senior vice president of communications for the environmental advocacy group the League of Conservation Voters.

The blueprint’s authors write that White House lawyers should do as much as they can to promote the president’s agenda “within the bounds of the law.” It’s one of many places where the document references legal limits established by Congress and the Supreme Court and encourages a future administration to “look to the legislative branch for decisive action.”

“Their assumption was that actors on their side would be rational,” Willett said. “That has not been the case.”

Since taking office, Trump has ignored judicial orders, staging a constitutional showdown between the executive and judicial branches — a matchup that exceedingly few presidents in American history have sought to force.

After a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to restore federal funding, he soon found that the administration was not fully complying with his order. This month, a federal judge ruled that the administration violated a court order in its rush to halt Federal Emergency Management Administration grant funding to states. There’s also a high-profile clash playing out between the chief judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the Supreme Court, and the Trump administration over the deportation of a Maryland man to El Salvador.

These battles, the rapid firing and, in some cases, rehiring of federal workers, and a wider agenda that appears to hinge on the ever-changing whims of the president, have the makings of what Rachel Cleetus, a senior policy director at the nonprofit science advocacy group the Union of Concerned Scientists, calls an “authoritarian regime.”

“They’re just breaking things and then they’re going to have to put it back together again,” said Elaine Karmack, who served as senior policy adviser to former vice president Al Gore beginning in 1993. President Bill Clinton, who was inaugurated that year, sought to modernize the federal government in service of a government that “works better and costs less.” The Clinton administration did this legally — abiding by congressional statues and legal precedent as it sought to trim fat and balance the federal budget. In the end, Karmack helped Gore cut 426,000 federal jobs, slash 16,000 pages of federal regulation, reengineer the Internal Revenue Service and other government agencies, and otherwise accomplish a version of the kind of downsizing Project 2025 calls for.

“Everything they’ve done is basically illegal,” Kamarck added. “There will be consequences to the chaos.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/accountability/project-2025-tracker-trump-environmental-policy-legal-constitutional-crisis/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

The Trump administration’s freeze on funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate law from the Biden era, has left farmers and rural businesses across the country on the hook for costly energy efficiency upgrades and renewable energy installations.

The grants are part of the Rural Energy for America Program, or REAP, originally created in the 2008 farm bill and supercharged by funding from the IRA. It provides farmers and other businesses in rural areas with relatively small grants and loans to help lower their energy bills by investing, say, in more energy-efficient farming equipment or installing small solar arrays.

By November 2024, the IRA had awarded more than $1 billion for nearly 7,000 REAP projects, which help rural businesses in low-income communities reduce the up-front costs of clean energy and save thousands on utility costs each year.

But now, that funding is in limbo. Under the current freeze, some farmers have already spent tens of thousands of dollars on projects and are waiting for the promised reimbursement. Others have had to delay work they were counting on to support their businesses, unsure when their funding will come through — or if it will.

REAP is administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Secretary Brooke Rollins said the agency is “coming to the tail end of the review process” of evaluating grants awarded under the Biden administration.

“If our farmers and ranchers especially have already spent money under a commitment that was made, the goal is to make sure they are made whole,” Rollins told reporters in Atlanta last week.

But it’s not clear when the funds might be released, or whether all the farmers and business owners awaiting their money will receive it.

For Joshua Snedden, a REAP grant was the key to making his 10-acre farm in Monee, Illinois, more affordable and environmentally sustainable. But months after installing a pricey solar array, he’s still waiting on a reimbursement from the federal government — and the delay is threatening his bottom line.

“I’m holding out hope,” said Snedden, a first-generation farmer in northeast Illinois. “I’m trying to do everything within my power to make sure the funding is released.”

In December, his five-year old operation, Fox at the Fork, began sourcing its power from a new 18.48 kilowatt solar array which cost Snedden $86,364. The system currently offsets all the farm’s electricity use and then some.

REAP offers grants for up to half of a project like this, and loan guarantees for up to 75 percent of the cost. For Snedden, a $19,784 REAP reimbursement grant made this solar array possible. But the reimbursement, critical to Snedden’s cash flow, was frozen by Trump as part of a broader review of the USDA’s Biden-era commitments.

Snedden grows the produce he takes to market — everything from tomatoes to garlic to potatoes — on about an acre of his farm. He also plans to transform the rest of his land into a perennial crop system, which would include fruit trees like pears, plums, and apples planted alongside native flowers and grasses to support wildlife.

A solar array was always part of his plans, “but seemed like a pie in the sky” kind of project, he said, adding he thought it might take him a decade to afford such an investment.

The REAP program has been a lifeline for Illinois communities struggling with aging infrastructure and growing energy costs, according to Amanda Pankau with the Prairie Rivers Network, an organization advocating for environmental protection and climate change mitigation across Illinois.

“By lowering their electricity costs, rural small businesses and agricultural producers can put that money back into their business,” said Pankau.

That’s exactly what Snedden envisioned from his investment in the solar power system. The new solar array wouldn’t just make his farm more resilient to climate change, but also more financially viable, “because we could shift expenses from paying for energy to paying for more impactful inputs for the farm,” he said.

He anticipates that by switching to solar, Fox at the Fork will save close to $3,200 dollars a year on electric bills.

Now, Snedden is waiting for the USDA to hold up their end of the deal.

“The financial strain hurts,” said Snedden. “But I’m still planning to move forward growing crops and fighting for these funds.”

At the start of the year, Jon and Brittany Klimstra were nearly ready to install a solar array on their Polk County, North Carolina farm after being awarded a REAP grant in 2024.

As two former scientists who had moved back to western North Carolina 10 years ago to grow apples and be close to their families, it felt like a chance to both save money and live their values.

“We’ve certainly been interested in wanting to do something like this, whether it be for our personal home or for our farm buildings for a while,” said Jon. “It just was cost prohibitive up to this point without some type of funding.”

That funding came when they were awarded $12,590 from REAP for the installation. But, after the Trump administration’s funding freeze, the money never came.

“We were several site visits in, several engineering conversations. We’ve had electricians, the solar company,” said Brittany . “It’s been a very involved process.”

Since the grant is reimbursement-based, the Klimstras have already paid out-of-pocket for some costs related to the project. Plus, the farm had been banking on saving $1,300 in utilities expenses per year. In a given month, their electricity bill is $300-$400.

Across Appalachia, historically high energy costs have made the difference between survival and failure for many local businesses, said Heather Ransom, who works with Solar Holler, a solar company that serves parts of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio.

“We have seen incredible rate increases across the region in electricity over the past 10, even 20 years,” she said.

Through Solar Holler, REAP grants also passed into the hands of rural library systems and schools; the company installed 10,000 solar panels throughout the Wayne County, West Virginia school system. About $6 million worth of projects supported by Solar Holler are currently on hold.

In other parts of the region, community development financial institutions like the Mountain Association in eastern Kentucky combatted food deserts through helping local grocery stores apply for REAP.

Solar Holler also works in coal-producing parts of the region, where climate change discussions have been fraught with the realities of declining jobs and revenue from the coal industry. The program helped make the case for communities to veer away from coal and gas-fired energy.

“What REAP has helped us do is show people that it’s not just a decision that’s driven by environmental motives or whatever, it actually makes good business sense to go solar,” Ransom said. In her experience, saving money appeals to people of all political persuasions. “At the end of the day, we’ve installed just as much solar on red roofs as we do blue roofs, as we do rainbow roofs or whatever.”

The Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in northern Michigan draws over 1.5 million visitors every year. Jim Lively hopes some of those people will camp RVs at a nearby site he’s planning to open next to his family’s local food market. He wants to use solar panels to help power the campsite and offset electric bills for the market, where local farmers bring produce directly to the store.

Lively helped promote REAP during his time at an environmental nonprofit, where he’d worked for over two decades. So the program was on his mind when it came time to replace the market’s big, south-facing roof.

“We put on a metal roof, and worked with a contractor who was also familiar with the REAP program, and we said, ‘Let’s make sure we’re setting this up for solar,’” he said. “So it was kind of a no-brainer for us.”

They were told they had been approved for a REAP grant of $39,696 last summer — half of the project’s total cost — but didn’t feel the need to rush the solar installation. Then, at the end of January, Lively was notified that the funding had been paused.

The property runs on electricity, rather than natural gas, and Lively wants to keep it that way. But those electric bills have been expensive — about $2,000 a month last summer, he said. When they get the RV site up and running, he expects those bills to approach $3,000.

Selling local food means operating within tight margins. Lively said saving on energy would help, but they won’t be able to move ahead with the rooftop solar unless the REAP funding is guaranteed.

Continuing to power the property with electricity rather than fossil fuels is a kind of personal commitment for Lively. “Boy, solar is also the right thing to do,” he said. “And it’s going to be difficult to do that without that funding.”

The grants aren’t only for solar arrays and other renewable energy systems. Many are for energy efficiency improvements to help farmers save on utility bills, and in some cases cut emissions. In Georgia, for instance, one farm was awarded just under $233,000 for a more efficient grain dryer, an upgrade projected to save the farm more than $16,000 per year. Several farms were awarded funding to convert diesel-powered irrigation pumps to electric.

The USDA did not directly answer Grist’s emailed questions about the specific timeline for REAP funds, the amount of money under review, or the future of the program. Instead, an emailed statement criticized the Biden administration’s “misuse of hundreds of billions” of IRA and bipartisan infrastructure law (BIL) funds “all at the expense of the American taxpayer.”

“USDA has a solemn responsibility to be good stewards of the American people’s hard-earned taxpayer dollars and to ensure that every dollar spent goes to serve the people, not the bureaucracy. As part of this effort, Secretary Rollins is carefully reviewing this funding and will provide updates as soon as they are made available,” the email said.

Two federal judges have already ordered the Trump administration to release the impounded IRA and BIL funds. Earthjustice, a national environmental law organization, filed a lawsuit last week challenging the freeze of USDA funds on behalf of farmers and nonprofits.

“The administration is causing harm that can’t be fixed, and fairness requires that the funds continue to flow,” said Jill Tauber, vice president of litigation for climate and energy at Earthjustice.

Rollins released the first tranche of funding February 20 and announced the release of additional program funds earlier this month. That did not include the REAP funding.

The USDA announced Wednesday it would expedite funding for farmers under a different program in honor of National Agriculture Day, but as of March 20 had not made an announcement about REAP.

Rahul Bali of WABE contributed reporting to this story.