In 2025, President Donald Trump's makeover of the White House has taken on two different forms: (1) tearing down the historic East Wing to make way for a lavish new ballroom, and (2) redecorating parts of the West Wing in a distinctly Trumpian fashion.

The New York Times' Sam Sifton, in a newsletter published on Christmas Eve Day 2025, describes Trump's Oval Office makeover — which, the reporter notes, is so extensive that "he's almost out of wall space."

"He has made it an extravagant room," Sifton observes. "Gold is everywhere: on picture frames and gilded carvings, on seals and antiques and finials. The metal covers about a third of the walls…. Flags are abundant. There are five times as many as most other presidents displayed. A gold-framed copy of the Declaration of Independence hangs to the right of the Resolute Desk."

Sifton's newsletter is accompanied by two photos from the Times' Doug Mills — one showing Joe Biden in the Oval Office during his presidency, the other showing the Oval Office since Trump's return to the White House. And the latter has a lot more gold, which Sifton notes, is "a metaphor the president uses to telegraph his success."

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told the Times, "He's a maximalist."

Some Trump critics, however, are alleging that the gold in the Oval Office may not be real gold.

Sifton explains, "All the gold — on those mirrors, on the frames of the portraits beside them, in the inlaid seal on the coffee table — has led to rumors that they're just cheap plastic, painted gold. Trump denies it, and a White House official told The Times that while the underlying materials are made of plaster or metal, they are covered in real gold leaf. I dug this detail: A craftsman from Florida regularly travels to the White House to gild parts of the Oval Office by hand, often when the president is away on weekends."

Read Sam Sifton's full New York Times newsletter is available at this link (subscription required).

A report published Wednesday by Greenpeace exposes the plastics industry as “merchants of myth” still peddling the false promise of recycling as a solution to the global pollution crisis, even as the vast bulk of commonly produced plastics remain unrecyclable.

“After decades of meager investments accompanied by misleading claims and a very well-funded industry public relations campaign aimed at persuading people that recycling can make plastic use sustainable, plastic recycling remains a failed enterprise that is economically and technically unviable and environmentally unjustifiable,” the report begins.

“The latest US government data indicates that just 5% of US plastic waste is recycled annually, down from a high of 9.5% in 2014,” the publication continues. “Meanwhile, the amount of single-use plastics produced every year continues to grow, driving the generation of ever greater amounts of plastic waste and pollution.”

Among the report’s findings:

• Only a fifth of the 8.8 million tons of the most commonly produced types of plastics—found in items like bottles, jugs, food containers, and caps—are actually recyclable;
• Major brands like Coca-Cola, Unilever, and Nestlé have been quietly retracting sustainability commitments while continuing to rely on single-use plastic packaging; and
• The US plastic industry is undermining meaningful plastic regulation by making false claims about the recyclability of their products to avoid bans and reduce public backlash.

“Recycling is a toxic lie pushed by the plastics industry that is now being propped up by a pro-plastic narrative emanating from the White House,” Greenpeace USA oceans campaign director John Hocevar said in a statement. “These corporations and their partners continue to sell the public a comforting lie to hide the hard truth: that we simply have to stop producing so much plastic.”

“Instead of investing in real solutions, they’ve poured billions into public relations campaigns that keep us hooked on single-use plastic while our communities, oceans, and bodies pay the price,” he added.

Greenpeace is among the many climate and environmental groups supporting a global plastics treaty, an accord that remains elusive after six rounds of talks due to opposition from the United States, Saudi Arabia, and other nations that produce the petroleum products from which almost all plastics are made.

Honed from decades of funding and promoting dubious research aimed at casting doubts about the climate crisis caused by its products, the petrochemical industry has sent a small army of lobbyists to influence global treaty negotiations.

In addition to environmental and climate harms, plastics—whose chemicals often leach into the food and water people eat and drink—are linked to a wide range of health risks, including infertility, developmental issues, metabolic disorders, and certain cancers.

Plastics also break down into tiny particles found almost everywhere on Earth—including in human bodies—called microplastics, which cause ailments such as inflammation, immune dysfunction, and possibly cardiovascular disease and gut biome imbalance.

A study published earlier this year in the British medical journal The Lancet estimated that plastics are responsible for more than $1.5 trillion in health-related economic losses worldwide annually—impacts that disproportionately affect low-income and at-risk populations.

As Jo Banner, executive director of the Descendants Project—a Louisiana advocacy group dedicated to fighting environmental racism in frontline communities—said in response to the new Greenpeace report, “It’s the same story everywhere: poor, Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities turned into sacrifice zones so oil companies and big brands can keep making money.”

“They call it development—but it’s exploitation, plain and simple,” Banner added. “There’s nothing acceptable about poisoning our air, water, and food to sell more throwaway plastic. Our communities are not sacrifice zones, and we are not disposable people.”

Writing for Time this week, Judith Enck, a former regional administrator at the US Environmental Protection Agency and current president of the environmental justice group Beyond Plastics, said that “throwing your plastic bottles in the recycling bin may make you feel good about yourself, or ease your guilt about your climate impact. But recycling plastic will not address the plastic pollution crisis—and it is time we stop pretending as such.”

“So what can we do?” Enck continued. “First, companies need to stop producing so much plastic and shift to reusable and refillable systems. If reducing packaging or using reusable packaging is not possible, companies should at least shift to paper, cardboard, glass, or metal.”

“Companies are not going to do this on their own, which is why policymakers—the officials we elected to protect us—need to require them to do so,” she added.

Although lawmakers in the 119th US Congress have introduced a handful of bills aimed at tackling plastic pollution, such proposals are all but sure to fail given Republican control of both the House of Representatives and Senate and the Trump administration’s pro-petroleum policies.

The community of “involuntary celibate" men that trend toward President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement have had a difficult year.

Salon columnist Amanda Marcotte noted Wednesday that the biggest loser of 2025 appears to be the incel movement, which seems to have reached its peak.

Marcotte began with popular MAGA influencer Sólionath, who "[defended] white supremacist murderers, [tried] to get people fired for not mourning Charlie Kirk ... and [concocted] lies about the [Jeffrey] Epstein files."

Sólionath ended his year by bashing the 99 percent of the world that has had sex at some point in their life, claiming that few people have actually ever done it.

Mocking "Nazi apologist" Nick Fuentes, Marcotte recalled the Piers Morgan interview asking if he's ever had sex.

“No, absolutely not,” Fuentes said. He then admitted he finds it "very difficult to be around” women. Any man who does manage to score will end up “henpecked.”

"You think you’re an expert on women, given you never got laid?" Morgan asked.

After a year in office, Trump's MAGA movement is faltering, young white men are bailing in droves and the "incel" world has stumbled into a marketing problem, Marcotte wrote.

“Trumpist leaders love pointing the finger at LGBTQ+ people and liberals, calling them ‘groomers’ and suggesting they’re violent perverts," she continued. "But in 2025, the nation really saw how much that behavior is old-fashioned psychological projection.”

The best example of that comes from the investigation files around sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, according to Marcotte. Trump has spent the past six months frantically trying to stop the release of the "the 5.2 million pages of documents" the government has on the federal investigation into Epstein

"The nation got a glimpse of the sexual world the president apparently inhabited, or at least stood in close proximity to, one which wasn’t glamorous but simply gross," said Marcotte.

“In 2025, ‘Mar-a-Lago face’ entered the lexicon, a term used to describe the combination of plastered-on makeup and aggressive plastic surgery that makes women look like inflatable sex dolls, as Trump’s apparent sexual tastes have morphed MAGA aesthetics into something inhuman," Marcotte continued.

Allthewhile, the world's richest man, Elon Musk, and self-appointed "First Buddy," was exposed for having "a fetish for impregnating women."

"It may not initially seem obvious why Mar-a-Lago face, incels, Elon's pregnancy fetish or the Epstein files are linked," wrote Salon's Amanda Marcotte. "But this is a year in which MAGA showed they are very weird about sex. And it's hurting them."

Ultimately, the right wing populates the internet with "sexually dysfunctional straight men who argue that their romantic woes aren’t due to their own failures, but because feminism has ‘ruined’ women," Marcotte closed. “Either way, there’s one thing I can predict with confidence: We’ll get another round of articles handwringing about why it’s so hard for Republicans to find a date, which will show no understanding that the answer was always obvious.”

Read the full column here.

Actor Jeff Bridges slammed lawmakers for using the feeding of children as a weapon during the government shutdown Thursday on Jake Tapper's CNN show "The Lead."

"The Big Lebowski" star is an activist primarily known for his work to end childhood hunger and combat plastic pollution. He is a notable member of the Plastic Pollution Coalition and the national spokesperson for Share Our Strength's No Kid Hungry campaign since 2010.

"It's so bizarre here in the wealthiest country in the world. We have enough food, we have enough money, we have enough programs to end childhood hunger. To use feeding kids as a weapon going back and forth doesn't make any sense," he said.

An estimated 7.3 million households with children will lose their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits on Saturday. Other federal nutrition programs that serve children are also being affected, such as the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program and Head Start, which provides early education and development for children.

Bridges is outraged and speaking out No Kid Hungry's national spokesman.

"Billy (Shore, the founder of Share Our Strength) and I have been traveling all over the country talking to governors and mayors in the states themselves, Republicans, Democrats and independents all agree, we should feed our kids," he told Tapper.

"There's no reason not to do that. And to have the feds getting in the way of this thing, talk about bizarre," he added.

A woman who voted for President Donald Trump three times is now leading the challenge to his sweeping tariffs, saying Trump has exceeded his authority, according to The New York Times.

Sara Albrecht heads the Liberty Justice Center, a right-leaning legal organization representing an "ideologically diverse" coalition of businesses that has sued over the legality of Trump's tarriff policy.

"The role of her group, the Liberty Justice Center, underscores just how much the tariff issue has divided conservatives," the Times reports.

In 2018, the group brought a case to the Supreme Court that resulted in the justices’ ruling "that public sector workers could not be required to pay collective bargaining fees. The case was a major blow to labor unions that had raised millions from the fees," according to the Times.

The group has filed close to 140 lawsuits since 2011, and "the group has also fought policies that prohibit schools from sharing information with parents about their child’s gender identity," the Times explains.

Albrecht told the Times that her group had already been "exploring filing cases that challenged what it considered executive branch overreach" in February when Trump first invoked an emergency statute from the 1970s to unilaterally impose the taxes on imported goods.

Liberty Justice Center then joined forces with a law professor to recruit five small businesses as plaintiffs in the case, which will be heard by the Supreme Court on Wednesday.

“We knew the businesses were going to have to represent all of America’s small businesses,” Albrecht told the Times, “and we really needed an easy story to tell.”

The businesses include a wine importer, educational electronic kit manufacturer, a women’s biking apparel business, a plastic pipe maker and a specialty fishing tackle company.

Arguing the case are two prominent attorneys, one conservative and one liberal—Michael W. McConnell, a former federal appeals court judge nominated by President George W. Bush and Neal Katyal, a former acting solicitor general during President Barack Obama’s terms.

“I thought the Republicans were against tariffs. It never really occurred to me that this would be an issue that I would be fighting a Republican president on," said Jeffrey M. Schwab, the group’s senior counsel.

Albrecht added that it's not as much about Trump as it is about the rule of law.

“It’s about the presidency, not about the president, and it’s about the Constitution,” she said. “We’ve made it about the separation of powers, and that applies to everybody, whether you voted for him or not.”

I’ve been a vegetarian for over a decade. It’s not because of my health, or because I dislike the taste of chicken or beef: It’s a lifestyle choice I made because I wanted to reduce my impact on the planet. And yet, twice a day, every day, I lovingly scoop a cup of meat-based kibble into a bowl and set it down for my 50-pound rescue dog, a husky mix named Loki.

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here.

Until recently, I hadn’t devoted a huge amount of thought to that paradox. Then I read an article in the Associated Press headlined “People often miscalculate climate choices, a study says. One surprise is owning a dog.”

The study, led by environmental psychology researcher Danielle Goldwert and published in the journal PNAS Nexus, examined how people perceive the climate impact of various behaviors — options like “adopt a vegan diet for at least one year,” or “shift from fossil fuel car to renewable public transport.” The team found that participants generally overestimated a number of low-impact actions like recycling and using efficient appliances, and they vastly underestimated the impact of other personal decisions, including the decision to “not purchase or adopt a dog.”

The real objective of the study was to see whether certain types of climate information could help people commit to more effective actions. But mere hours after the AP published its article, its aim had been recast as something else entirely: an attack on people’s furry family members. “Climate change is actually your fault because you have a dog,” one Reddit user wrote. Others in the community chimed in with ire, ridiculing the idea that a pet Chihuahua could be driving the climate crisis and calling on researchers and the media to stop pointing fingers at everyday individuals.

Goldwert and her fellow researchers watched the reactions unfold with dismay. “If I saw a headline that said, ‘Climate scientists want to take your dogs away,’ I would also feel upset,” she said. “They definitely don’t,” she added. “You can quote me on that.”

The study set out to understand how to shift behavior by communicating climate truths. Instead, its media coverage revealed a troubling psychological trade-off: When climate-related messaging strikes a nerve, it may actually turn people off from the work of shifting societal norms.

It’s an instinct I understand on some level. I love Loki, and my knee-jerk reaction is to defend the very personal choice of sharing one’s life with a dog. I also sympathize with redirecting the blame toward the biggest polluters: billionaires and fossil fuel companies (not Bon-Bon, the pet Chihuahua in question). But is it irresponsible to shrug off any conversation about the environmental impact of our pets — something far more within our control than, say, the overthrow of capitalism?

Is there a way to have a frank discussion about the climate impact of our personal lives without it going to the dogs?

Oftentimes, when I’m questioning how a particular climate behavior might fit into my life, I try to imagine how it looks in my vision of a sustainable future. It’s why, for instance, I don’t own a car and am dedicated to riding public transit, even though it isn’t always super convenient. I’m keen to be an early adopter of systems I believe in. But I struggle to imagine a future without companion animals, even knowing about their environmental impact — which is admittedly substantial.

Dogs and cats eat meat-heavy diets, which is where the bulk of their carbon pawprint comes from. A 2017 study from UCLA found that dogs and cats are responsible for about 25 to 30 percent of the environmental impact of meat consumption in the United States. That’s equivalent to a year’s worth of driving by 13.6 million cars. For pets that eat traditional kibble or wet food, that protein may come from meat byproducts — otherwise-wasted animal parts, such as organs and bones, not approved for human consumption. But an increasing number of pet owners are opting to feed their fur babies “human-grade” meat products, which requires additional resources and generates extra emissions.

After they eat, of course, they poop. A lot. At least for dogs, that poop typically gets bagged in plastic and sent to the landfill. And it turns out all the biodegradable poop bags I’ve diligently bought over the years don’t help matters much; they also release greenhouse gases in landfills, and most composting programs don’t accept pet waste.

With more dogs around than ever before — the U.S. dog population has steadily increased from 52.9 million in 1996 to a new peak of 89.7 million in 2024 — their overall climate toll is more than a Chihuahua-sized issue. But pets are also more than just sources of carbon pollution. According to a 2023 Pew Research poll, 97 percent of owners say they consider their pets to be part of their families, with 51 percent of respondents saying they are on the same level as a human family member. So whenever their climate impact crops up in the discourse, as it has periodically, it makes sense that people tend to get defensive.

For some climate advocates, the solution has been to shift messaging away from individual responsibility and focus instead on big, systemic changes like overhauling our electricity and transit systems through governmental investment in clean energy. In her essay “I work in the environmental movement. I don’t care if you recycle,” author and podcaster Mary Annaïse Heglar wrote: “The belief that this enormous, existential problem could have been fixed if all of us had just tweaked our consumptive habits is not only preposterous; it’s dangerous … It’s victim blaming, plain and simple.”

Heglar and others have taken a strong stance against environmental purity — the idea that you can’t care about or advocate for systems-level change if you aren’t first changing your own habits. But not everyone agrees that individual actions should be completely deemphasized in the climate conversation. Kimberly Nicholas, a climate scientist and author of the popular book Under the Sky We Make, has argued that wealthy people living in wealthy countries — and globally, “wealthy” is a lower bar than you might think — do have a responsibility to slash their outsize carbon emissions. And particularly for those of us living in democracies, personal action isn’t just about the choices we make as consumers.

“There’s still an ongoing tension between personal and system change, or individual and collective action,” Nicholas said. “It’s really hard to get that right — to get the right balance there that acknowledges the role and the importance of both, and to talk about and study and describe both in a way that motivates people to take high-impact actions.”

Goldwert saw that tension play out in her maligned climate communications study. In the experiment, participants reviewed 21 individual climate actions (like eating less meat) and five systemic actions (like voting) and rated their commitments to taking each action. Two test groups then received clarifying information about the relative impact of the 21 individual actions — one group was asked to estimate their ranking before learning how they actually ranked, the other group received the information straight-up. But participants didn’t receive any data about the carbon-mitigation potential of the five collective actions, which would be far more difficult to quantify.

What Goldwert’s team found surprised them: The teachings did nudge people toward higher-impact personal actions, but their stated likelihood of engaging in collective ones actually went down — a backfire effect that hints at the perils of focusing too much on personal lifestyle choices.

“It might be kind of like a mental substitution,” Goldwert said. “People feel like, ‘OK, I’ve done my part individually. I kind of checked the box on climate action.’”

Participants were also asked to rate the “plasticity” of each of the actions, or how easy it would be to adopt. And those measurements revealed another nuance in how people view different forms of climate action. For the individual-focused options, participants were more likely to commit to actions they saw as requiring little effort. For the systemic actions, they were more interested in whether it would have an impact — something researchers are still working on quantifying.

“If you think voting or marching is just symbolic or ineffective, you’re not going to engage,” Goldwert said. “We have to show people evidence that their voice or their vote can shift policy, corporate practices, or social norms.”

I, for one, was surprised to see that participants rated the commitment to “not purchase or adopt a dog” as easy. When I asked Goldwert what might be behind that, she noted that dog ownership is a decision people don’t make very often. It also doesn’t require any action at all for people who already don’t own dogs. The results surely would have been different if the listed action was “get rid of your existing dog.” (Which it was not — a point that readers seemed to miss, based on Reddit comments about the study and the “crazy emails” Goldwert said she received.)

Still, for an animal lover like me, the idea of never adopting another dog doesn’t feel easy to commit to at all. It feels like an immense sacrifice. The sadness I feel at the thought of a future without dogs points me to another important factor when it comes to motivation for climate action: joy.

Actions we take to try and mitigate the climate crisis may be partially driven by how easy they are for us or how effective we believe them to be — but any choice we make is also driven by what we find joy in. It’s an essential part of staying committed and resilient in the fight for a better future. In this way, carbon-intensive activities like dog ownership have value beyond their weight in emissions.

“People have an emotional attachment to the people and animals and creatures that we love,” Nicholas said. “And that is actually, I think, very powerful. We’re not only going to solve climate change by lining up all the numbers — we certainly need to do that, but we have to tap into what people really care about and realize all those things are on the line and threatened by the amount of climate change we’re heading for with current policies.”

Would I fight to ensure that dogs, like my beloved Loki, can continue wagging happily on this planet? Heck yes, I would. I’ve always felt that being a pet person goes hand-in-hand with a sense of altruism and responsibility. And if not giving up our pets means fighting climate change by voting, marching, donating, advocating, and consuming like our pets’ lives depend on it, I think we can all get on board.

That might also mean adjusting our pets’ diets. While making my dog a full vegetarian seems challenging (though technically possible), just cutting out beef has a significant impact — shifting to “lower-carbon meats” was even one of the high-impact actions included in Goldwert’s study. That’s one Loki can easily commit to. And we already buy insect-based treats, which leave a pungent odor in my pockets but seem to please his taste buds.

There are also ways that dog ownership intersects with other climate-related behaviors. Anecdotally, I would say I travel less because I have a dog whose care I need to think about. Walking him every day has also made me vastly more connected to my local environment, the goings-on in my neighborhood, and my neighbors themselves — all of which are important aspects of building climate resilience. Some dogs have even been trained to sniff out invasive species and help identify environmental contaminants. (Not Loki, who has never worked a day in his life.)

Though I’d never thought about it quite this way before I read Goldwert’s study, the climate actions I take have a lot to do with the love I feel for Loki. Not because I want to leave a better world for him — I recognize the reality that I will almost certainly outlive him — but because my feelings for him bring me closer to the love I feel for all living things on this planet. This “ice age predator” who shares my home, as the anthropologist and comedian David Ian Howe puts it, is a living reminder of the relationship humans have with other species, going back many thousands of years.

As the saying goes, “Be the person your dog thinks you are.” And next time you get a little worked up about the realities of the climate crisis and your accountability within it, consider taking yourself on a walk.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/culture/the-climate-paradox-of-having-a-dog/.

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