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Climate

Trump’s Gift to the Timber Industry

On logging in national forests, fires in the Carolinas, and fusion

Trump’s Gift to the Timber Industry
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Firefighters in Japan are battling the country’s largest wildfire in 30 years • Tropical Cyclone Alfred is hurtling toward Australia’s Queensland coast • Some 170 million Americans are in the path of a storm system that will bring severe thunderstorms and tornadoes to the South and Mid-Atlantic regions through Wednesday.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Wildfires break out across North and South Carolina

More than 175 wildfires erupted across parts of North and South Carolina over the weekend, fueled by dry, windy conditions. About 4,200 acres have burned so far. The largest blaze, known as the Carolina Forest fire, spans about 1,600 acres and is located west of Myrtle Beach in South Carolina. It was about 30% contained as of last night. A state of emergency was declared in South Carolina on Sunday. Parts of the region are under fire danger warnings through the rest of today.

X/WBTWNews13

2. Trump aims to ramp up logging

President Trump signed an executive order over the weekend directing the Departments of Interior and Agriculture, as well as the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service, to investigate ways to boost timber production across national forests and other public lands. The order slams “onerous” policies that have “prevented full utilization” of U.S. timber resources, likely referring to environmental regulations such as the Endangered Species Act. Last week Trump tapped Tom Schultz, a former Idaho timber executive, to lead the Forest Service, a move seen as a win for the timber industry. The administration is considering tariffs on timber imports, which could raise construction costs. “Taken together with massive staff cuts to the Forest Service that included reductions in wildland firefighters and support personnel, this order may offer a boost to timber industry profits — but carries heavy implications for the climate and for wildfire season in 2025 and beyond,” said Blaine Miller-McFeeley, representing environmental legal group Earthjustice.

3. China sets sights on commercial nuclear fusion by 2050

China wants to use nuclear fusion for clean power generation at scale by 2050, the country’s state-owned atomic company, China National Nuclear Corp., said on Friday. China’s experimental fusion reactors have been making progress in testing. In January, China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak reportedly maintained a loop of plasma for more than 1,000 seconds, which was “a step towards maintaining prolonged, confined plasma loops that future reactors will need to generate electricity,” as LiveScienceexplained. China is planning for a demonstration phase in 2045, before going commercial by 2050. It also plans to build more fission reactors and small modular reactors in the near-term. “China is set to leapfrog the U.S. and France as the owner of the world’s biggest [nuclear] reactor fleet by 2030,” according toBloomberg.

4. Watershed invites proposals from carbon removal suppliers

Climate software company Watershed is issuing its first-ever request for proposals from carbon removal suppliers to fulfill an anticipated demand from its customers for 1 megaton of carbon removal credits over the next 18 months. Watershed is a sustainability platform that helps companies manage and reduce emissions. It claims to currently manage over 2 gigatons of emissions for customers including Walmart, Visa, Airbnb, General Motors, and six U.S. banks. “We are seeking carbon project partners to build a supply pipeline for our customers,” the company said. “We are excited to grow our partner ecosystem with a small group of providers whom we plan to highlight in future buyer cohort announcements.” The company said its new callout is “the first RFP in the market to procure both nature-based and engineered removals together.” Applications are due by March 31.

5. Vineyard Wind set for completion in 2025

The Vineyard Wind project is scheduled for completion this year, according to Spanish power company Iberdrola, whose subsidiary Avangrid is developing the wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts. As E&E Newsreported, Iberdrola’s executive chair Ignacio Galán told investors last week he was confident the company’s renewables investments would go ahead under President Trump. The comments “mark a vote of confidence in U.S. offshore wind at a time when the industry has been rocked by Trump's decision to freeze new wind permits and review existing ones.” Vineyard resumed sending power to the grid in January after a six-month pause following a very public problem with one of its turbine blades.

THE KICKER

“The energy transition is a one-way ticket.”

–Economists Eric Beinhocker and J. Doyne Farmer explain in The Wall Street Journal why the clean energy revolution is unstoppable.

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Economy

AM Briefing: Liberation Day

On trade turbulence, special election results, and HHS cuts

Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ Tariffs Loom
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: A rare wildfire alert has been issued for London this week due to strong winds and unseasonably high temperatures • Schools are closed on the Greek islands of Mykonos and Paros after a storm caused intense flooding • Nearly 50 million people in the central U.S. are at risk of tornadoes, hail, and historic levels of rain today as a severe weather system barrels across the country.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump to roll out broad new tariffs

President Trump today will outline sweeping new tariffs on foreign imports during a “Liberation Day” speech in the White House Rose Garden scheduled for 4 p.m. EST. Details on the levies remain scarce. Trump has floated the idea that they will be “reciprocal” against countries that impose fees on U.S. goods, though the predominant rumor is that he could impose an across-the-board 20% tariff. The tariffs will be in addition to those already announced on Chinese goods, steel and aluminum, energy imports from Canada, and a 25% fee on imported vehicles, the latter of which comes into effect Thursday. “The tariffs are expected to disrupt the global trade in clean technologies, from electric cars to the materials used to build wind turbines,” explained Josh Gabbatiss at Carbon Brief. “And as clean technology becomes more expensive to manufacture in the U.S., other nations – particularly China – are likely to step up to fill in any gaps.” The trade turbulence will also disrupt the U.S. natural gas market, with domestic supply expected to tighten, and utility prices to rise. This could “accelerate the uptake of coal instead of gas, and result in a swell in U.S. power emissions that could accelerate climate change,” Reutersreported.

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Podcast

The Least-Noticed Climate Scandal of the Trump Administration

Rob and Jesse catch up on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund with former White House official Kristina Costa.

Lee Zeldin.
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The Inflation Reduction Act dedicated $27 billion to build a new kind of climate institution in America — a network of national green banks that could lend money to companies, states, schools, churches, and housing developers to build more clean energy and deploy more next-generation energy technology around the country.

It was an innovative and untested program. And the Trump administration is desperately trying to block it. Since February, Trump’s criminal justice appointees — led by Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia — have tried to use criminal law to undo the program. After failing to get the FBI and Justice Department to block the flow of funds, Trump officials have successfully gotten the program’s bank partner to freeze relevant money. The new green banks have sued to gain access to the money.

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Funding Cuts Are Killing Small Farmers’ Trust in Climate Policy

That trust was hard won — and it won’t be easily regained.

A barn.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Spring — as even children know — is the season for planting. But across the country, tens of thousands of farmers who bought seeds with the help of Department of Agriculture grants are hesitating over whether or not to put them in the ground. Their contractually owed payments, processed through programs created under the Biden administration, have been put on pause by the Trump administration, leaving the farmers anxious about how to proceed.

Also anxious are staff at the sustainability and conservation-focused nonprofits that provided technical support and enrollment assistance for these grants, many of whom worry that the USDA grant pause could undermine the trust they’ve carefully built with farmers over years of outreach. Though enrollment in the programs was voluntary, the grants were formulated to serve the Biden administration’s Justice40 priority of investing in underserved and minority communities. Those same communities tend to be wary of collaborating with the USDA due to its history of overlooking small and family farms, which make up 90% of the farms in the U.S. and are more likely to be women- or minority-owned, in favor of large operations, as well as its pattern of disproportionately denying loans to Black farmers. The Biden administration had counted on nonprofits to leverage their relationships with farmers in order to bring them onto the projects.

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