You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
King Charles III has been called “the real deal” — and also a climate fraud.
At the very least, you’ve got to admit — the “Green King” has a nice ring to it.
This Saturday, for the first time in 70 years, Britain will formally crown a new sovereign, setting off a three-day weekend of celebrations that will cost taxpayers a rumored $125 million. But while King Charles III is tied with his wife, Camilla, as Americans’ second-least-favorite royal — behind only the notorious Prince Andrew — his ascension has also drawn praise from climate activists and historians worldwide, who’ve dubbed him Britain’s “environmentalist king-in-waiting.”
Charles’ more than a half-century of environmental activism will undoubtedly be tempered by what The New Yorker calls the monarchical “convention to not publicly register his own views on matters of political policy, and, indeed, to accept the policies of the government.” But his credentials as the once and future Green King of the United Kingdom are also mixed; for every illegally fished Patagonian toothfish he’d defended in the name of “the poor old albatross,” there’s also a wind turbine he’s blasted as a “blot.”
Here’s an overview of Charles’ mixed green bona fides, in passages from 10 helpful articles from around the web.
It may be tempting to think of the new King, with his bespoke Savile Row suits, Edwardian manners, and royal retinue, as an icon of a previous age. But his speeches, books, and projects do suggest a man ahead of his time. He was advocating concepts such as the circular economy and natural capital years before they captured the public’s imagination, and he’s clearly followed his own principles, converting his farm to organic practices more than 30 years ago.
“Some of these ideas were radical and literally decades ahead of their time. Some you could reprint today and they would be very much of the moment. It’s hard to overstate the role he played in putting these subjects on the agenda,” says Tony Juniper, chair of Natural England, a fellow with the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, and former executive director of Friends of the Earth and president of the Wildlife Trusts.
From “Prince Charles Was an Environment Radical. What Happens Now He’s King?” by Jonathan Manning for National Geographic, Sept. 23, 2022
[...The] 73-year-old monarch has dedicated a large part of his life to doing something about the environmental issues that, as a youth, so occupied his mind. He has been an outspoken supporter of sustainability, organic farming, renewable energy, and biodiversity. He’s encouraged others to rethink urban design and corporate production. He skips meat a few days a week. His vintage Aston Martin runs on surplus wine and excess cheese whey. Clarence House, where he lived in London as the Prince of Wales, has solar panels. Balmoral, the summer home of the Royal Family in Aberdeenshire in Scotland, features hydroelectric turbines and biomass boilers. And at last year’s COP26, the king warned world leaders that “after billions of years of evolution, nature is our best teacher” when it comes to reducing emissions and capturing carbon, noting that “restoring natural capital, accelerating nature-based solutions, and leveraging the circular bioeconomy will be vital to our efforts.”
[...Unlike] other world figureheads touting climate issues, when it comes to actually believing in the need to tackle climate change, King Charles is the real deal, argues Piers Forster, professor of climate physics at the University of Leeds and a trustee of the United Bank of Carbon.
From “What Charles the ‘Activist King’ Means for the Climate” by Tom Ward for Wired, Sept. 14, 2022
Charles — like his father, Prince Philip, before him — has at times waded into the sticky morass of population growth. In a speech given at the Sheldonian Theater at Oxford University in 2010, then-Prince Charles noted: “When I was born in 1948, a city like Lagos in Nigeria had a population of just 300,000; today, just over 60 years later, it is home to 20 million.”
With population increasing rapidly in Mumbai, Cairo, Mexico City, and cities in other developing countries around the world, Charles said Earth cannot “sustain us all, when the pressures on her bounty are so great.”
[…] There may seem to be a simple logic in laying the blame for climate change on global population, which is now inching toward 8 billion. But there is a long and fraught history of thinkers in developed countries critiquing population growth in developing ones. Betsy Hartman, a professor emerita of development studies at Hampshire College, has said, “In this ideology of ‘too many people,’ it’s always certain people who are ‘too many.’”
From “The Many Paradoxes of Charles III as ‘Climate King’” by Shannon Osaka for The Washington Post, Sept. 13, 2022
[...There] has long been respect for Charles among Indigenous people stretching back more than two decades to April 2001, when the prince traveled to Saskatchewan for a Cree ceremony that bestowed upon him the name Kīsikāwipīsimwa miyo ōhcikanawāpamik, or, “The Sun Watches Over Him in a Good Way.”
Our new monarch has made efforts to visit with Canadian Indigenous leaders in subsequent trips. In 2019, he invited [Perry Bellegarde, former national chief of the Assembly of First Nations] to London and [asked] him to be a part of the Sustainable Markets Initiative, which attempts to push the private sector to make the transition to low-carbon operations.
Charles even consulted with First Nations elders over Zoom during the pandemic to talk about elders’ traditional knowledge.
“He’s got it in terms of sustainable development — that we’re all connected to the land and to the water, and that what affects the animals affects us, and what affects the plants affects us, and what affects the water affects us as human beings,” Bellegarde said.
“I teased him one time in a meeting: ‘I swear to goodness, your Majesty, that you were First Nations in another life.’”
From “Call Him the Green King. Charles Will Have an Environmental Agenda. How Far Can He Push It?” by Allan Woods for The Toronto Star, April 30, 2023
Charles has never acknowledged the monarchy’s full responsibility for the climate crisis. Asked by the BBC last year if the U.K. was doing enough to combat climate change, he replied: ”I couldn’t possibly comment.” And while Charles has acknowledged the general injustice of the monarchy’s colonial legacy, he has not connected that legacy to growing climate injustice around the world.
Climate justice activists from colonized nations say this connection is important, because the very institution that gives Charles a powerful platform to speak on climate change is responsible for creating global crisis conditions in the first place. To truly be considered a “climate king,” they say, Charles would have to not only acknowledge the climate harm done by the monarchy, but take steps to repair it.
From “Stop Calling Charles the ‘Climate King’” by Emily Atkin for Heated, Sept. 14, 2022
The Sustainable Markets Initiative (SMI), which Charles launched in 2020 when he was Prince of Wales, granted BP a “Terra Carta Seal” even though the oil and gas giant had failed to achieve a top score from the sustainability ranking company assessing applicants for the awards.
[…] Clive Russell, a spokesperson for Ocean Rebellion, an activist group that spun out of Extinction Rebellion, said giving BP a seal undermined SMI’s credibility: “How can an initiative co-founded by a world-renowned polluter like BP – a company currently investing £300m in renewables and £3.8bn in new oil and gas – be taken seriously? The SMI should be disbanded. Those involved should hang their heads in shame. This is blatant greenwashing.”
From “King Charles Accused of Helping BP ‘Greenwash’ Its Image With Royal Seal” by Dimitris Dimitraidis and Ben Webster for OpenDemocracy, Nov. 4, 2022
On the eve of today’s Countryside Alliance march in London, it was revealed that the heir to the throne wrote to Tony Blair expressing anger at the government for pursuing plans to outlaw the bloodsport in England.
It is understood the Prince, a passionate hunt supporter, told Blair that he “would not dare attack an ethnic minority in the way that supporters of fox hunting were being persecuted.”
From “Prince: I’ll Leave Britain Over Fox Hunt Ban,” by The Scotsman, Sept. 22, 2002
Addressing a conference of conservationists at St James’s Palace in London, the Prince of Wales announced a meeting of heads of state to take place this autumn in London under government auspices to combat what he described as an emerging, militarised crisis.
“We face one of the most serious threats to wildlife ever, and we must treat it as a battle — because it is precisely that,” said Charles. “Organised bands of criminals are stealing and slaughtering elephants, rhinoceros, and tigers, as well as large numbers of other species, in a way that has never been seen before. They are taking these animals, sometimes in unimaginably high numbers, using the weapons of war — assault rifles, silencers, night-vision equipment, and helicopters.”
From “Prince Charles Calls for a War on Animal Poachers” by Fiona Harvey for The Guardian, May 21, 2013
“[Charles] is understood to be strongly opposed to onshore wind turbines that rise higher than 100 metres because of their visual impact, and none have been erected on land owned by the Duchy of Cornwall, the £700m estate that provides him with a private income. He has lobbied government officials to subsidize other renewable energy sources and is reported to believe that if windfarms should be built at all, they should be far out at sea.
[...] In the past few years, the crown estate has signed a 25-year lease with the renewable energy company RWE for turbines at Little Cheyne Court windfarm in Kent and has agreed lease options with Renewable Energy Systems, which wants to erect 15 turbines in Carmarthenshire, with RWE npower for four turbines in Powys, and with E.ON for 17 turbines on the Billingborough estate in Lincolnshire
[...] “It is hypocrisy,” said Leanne Wood, a candidate for the Plaid Cymru leadership who is campaigning for Welsh energy independence. “[The prince] stands to benefit from wind projects on land in Wales, but opposes them himself. If that is his position there shouldn’t be windfarms on crown estate land.”
From “Prince Charles To Get Funding From ‘Blot on the Landscape’ Windfarms” by Robert Booth for The Guardian, Feb. 28, 2012
From now on, what the King says is less important than what he is seen to do. He now runs a multibillion-pound private corporation and has one of the world’s greatest personal fortunes. How our billionaire king spends his money and what he does with his vast properties and land holdings may fundamentally change the way Britain sees itself – and how the world regards us.
[... He] could start his green reforms of the monarchy by publicly divesting the institution of all fossil fuel interests [...] He could [offer] to the state or the National Trust most of his cold, largely empty, useless castles, palaces and mansions, such as Balmoral and Sandringham. He could then slash the estimated £90,000-a-month heating bills of any that are left – Windsor or Sandringham, for example – by investing heavily in heat pumps, solar power and insulation and then switching his bills to renewable energy providers such as Ecotricity or Good Energy.
[...He could] clear out the old rollers and Bentleys, go entirely electric, and take to bicycles and rail like other modern monarchies [...] If he was brave and fair-minded he could offer the 16 private hectares (39 acres) of Buckingham Palace to London as a new public park [...]
[...] Charles could happily dispose of most of the many thousands of great diamonds, rubies, and other jewels that have been handed personally to royalty over 200 years without anyone caring. The billions of pounds raised from such a sale could be used to establish academies of sustainable farming or permaculture in the Commonwealth countries from which most jewels were looted in colonial times and many of which are still struggling to feed themselves.
Aside from shedding most of his relations, abandoning archaic British empire medals, and generally living less lavishly, he could start hosting vegetarian banquets and end hunting on all royal lands.
At which point, he could do the decent thing and abolish himself.
From “Here’s a Plan for Green King Charles: Sell the Family Silver and Use the Cash to Save the Planet” by John Vidal for The Guardian, Oct. 6, 2022
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Current conditions: Bosnia’s capital of Sarajevo is blanketed in a layer of toxic smog • Temperatures in Perth, in Western Australia, could hit 106 degrees Fahrenheit this weekend • It is cloudy in Washington, D.C., where lawmakers are scrambling to prevent a government shutdown.
The weather has gotten so weird that the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is holding internal talks about how to adjust its models to produce more accurate forecasts, the Financial Timesreported. Current models are based on temperature swings observed over one part of the Pacific Ocean that have for years correlated consistently with specific weather phenomena across the globe, but climate change seems to be disrupting that cause and effect pattern, making it harder to predict things like La Niña and El Niño. Many forecasters had expected La Niña to appear by now and help cool things down, but that has yet to happen. “It’s concerning when this region we’ve studied and written all these papers on is not related to all the impacts you’d see with [La Niña],” NOAA’s Michelle L’Heureux told the FT. “That’s when you start going ‘uh-oh’ there may be an issue here we need to resolve.”
There is quite a lot of news coming out of the Department of Energy as the year (and the Biden administration) comes to an end. A few recent updates:
Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, does not expect to meet its 2025 or 2030 emissions targets, and is putting the blame on policy, infrastructure, and technology limitations. The company previously pledged to cut its emissions by 35% by next year, and 65% by the end of the decade. Emissions in 2023 were up 4% year-over-year.
Walmart
“While we continue to work toward our aspirational target of zero operational emissions by 2040, progress will not be linear … and depends not only on our own initiatives but also on factors beyond our control,” Walmart’s statement said. “These factors include energy policy and infrastructure in Walmart markets around the world, availability of more cost-effective low-GWP refrigeration and HVAC solutions, and timely emergence of cost-effective technologies for low-carbon heavy tractor transportation (which does not appear likely until the 2030s).”
BlackRock yesterday said it is writing down the value of its Global Renewable Power Fund III following the failure of Northvolt and SolarZero, two companies the fund had invested in. Its net internal rate of return was -0.3% at the end of the third quarter, way down from 11.5% in the second quarter, according toBloomberg. Sectors like EV charging, transmission, and renewable energy generation and storage have been “particularly challenged,” executives said, and some other renewables companies in the portfolio have yet to get in the black, meaning their valuations may be “more subjective and sensitive to evolving dynamics in the industry.”
Flies may be more vulnerable to climate change than bees are, according to a new study published in the Journal of Melittology. The fly haters among us might shrug at the finding, but the researchers insist flies are essential pollinators that help bolster ecosystem biodiversity and agriculture. “It’s time we gave flies some more recognition for their role as pollinators,” said lead author Margarita López-Uribe, who is the Lorenzo Langstroth Early Career Associate Professor of Entomology at Penn State. The study found bees can tolerate higher temperatures than flies, so flies are at greater risk of decline as global temperatures rise. “In alpine and subarctic environments, flies are the primary pollinator,” López-Uribe said. “This study shows us that we have entire regions that could lose their primary pollinator as the climate warms, which could be catastrophic for those ecosystems.”
“No one goes to the movies because they want to be scolded.” –Heatmap’s Jeva Lange writes about the challenges facing climate cinema, and why 2024 might be the year the climate movie grew up.
Whether you agree probably depends on how you define “climate movie” to begin with.
Climate change is the greatest story of our time — but our time doesn’t seem to invent many great stories about climate change. Maybe it’s due to the enormity and urgency of the subject matter: Climate is “important,” and therefore conscripted to the humorless realms of journalism and documentary. Or maybe it’s because of a misunderstanding on the part of producers and storytellers, rooted in an outdated belief that climate change still needs to be explained to an audience, when in reality they don’t need convincing. Maybe there’s just not a great way to have a character mention climate change and not have it feel super cringe.
Whatever the reason, between 2016 and 2020, less than 3% of film and TV scripts used climate-related keywords during their runtime, according to an analysis by media researchers at the University of Southern California. (The situation isn’t as bad in literature, where cli-fi has been going strong since at least 2013.) At least on the surface, this on-screen avoidance of climate change continued in 2024. One of the biggest movies of the summer, Twisters, had an extreme weather angle sitting right there, but its director, Lee Isaac Chung, went out of his way to ensure the film didn’t have a climate change “message.”
I have a slightly different take on the situation, though — that 2024 was actuallyfull of climate movies, and, I’d argue, that they’re getting much closer to the kinds of stories a climate-concerned individual should want on screen.
That’s because for the most part, when movies and TV shows have tackled the topic of climate change in the past, it’s been with the sort of “simplistic anger-stoking and pathos-wringing” that The New Yorker’s Richard Brody identified in 2022’s Don’t Look Up, the Adam McKay satire that became the primary touchpoint for scripted climate stories. At least it was kind of funny: More overt climate stories like last year’s Foe, starring Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal, and Extrapolations, the Apple TV+ show in which Meryl Streep voices a whale, are so self-righteous as to be unwatchable (not to mention, no fun).
But what if we widened our lens and weren’t so prescriptive? Then maybe Furiosa, this spring’s Mad Max prequel, becomes a climate change movie. The film is set during a “near future” ecological collapse, and it certainly makes you think about water scarcity and our overreliance on a finite extracted resource — but it also makes you think about how badass the Octoboss’ kite is. The same goes for Dune: Part Two, which made over $82 million in its opening weekend and is also a recognizable environmental allegory featuring some cool worms. Even Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, a flop that most people have already memory-holed, revisitedThe Day After Tomorrow’s question of, “What if New York City got really, really, really cold?”
Two 2024 animated films with climate themes could even compete against each other at the Academy Awards next year. Dreamworks Animation’s The Wild Robot, one of the centerpiece films at this fall’s inaugural Climate Film Festival, is set in a world where sea levels have risen to submerge the Golden Gate Bridge, and it impresses on its audience the importance of protecting the natural world. And in Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow, one of my favorite films of the year, a cat must band together with other animals to survive a flood.
Flow also raises the question of whether a project can unintentionally be a climate movie. Zilbalodis told me that making a point about environmental catastrophe wasn’t his intention — “I can’t really start with the message, I have to start with the character,” he said — and to him, the water is a visual metaphor in an allegory about overcoming your fears.
But watching the movie in a year when more than a thousand people worldwide have died in floods, and with images of inundated towns in North Carolina still fresh in mind, it’s actually climate change itself that makes one watch Flow as a movie about climate change. (I’m not the only one with this interpretation, either: Zilbalodis told me he’d been asked by one young audience member if the flood depicted in his film is “the future.”)
Perhaps this is how we should also consider Chung’s comments about Twisters. While nobody in the film says the words “climate change” or “global warming,” the characters note that storms are becoming exceptional — “we've never seen tornadoes like this before,” one says. Despite the director’s stated intention not to make the movie “about” climate change, it becomes a climate movie by virtue of what its audiences have experienced in their own lives.
Still, there’s that niggling question: Do movies like these, which approach climate themes slant-wise, really count? To help me decide, I turned to Sam Read, the executive director of the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance, an advocacy consortium that encourages environmental awareness both on set and on screen. He told me that to qualify something as a “climate” movie or TV show, some research groups look to see if climate change exists in the world of the story or whether the characters acknowledge it. Other groups consider climate in tiers, such as whether a project has a climate premise, theme, or simply a moment.
The Sustainable Entertainment Alliance, however, has no hard rules. “We want to make sure that we support creatives in integrating these stories in whatever way works for them,” Read told me.
Read also confirmed my belief that there seemed to be an uptick in movies this year that were “not about climate change but still deal with things that feel very climate-related, like resource extraction.” There was even more progress on this front in television, he pointed out: True Detective: Night Country wove in themes of environmentalism, pollution, mining, and Indigenous stewardship; the Max comedy Hacks featured an episode about climate change this season; and Industry involved a storyline about taking a clean energy company public, with some of the characters even attending COP. Even Doctor Odyssey, a cruise ship medical drama that airs on USA, worked climate change into its script, albeit in ridiculous ways. (Also worth mentioning: The Netflix dating show Love is Blind cast Taylor Krause, who works on decarbonizing heavy industry at RMI.)
We can certainly do more. As many critics before me have written, it’s still important to draw a connection between things like environmental catastrophes and the real-world human causes of global warming. But the difference between something being “a climate movie” and propaganda — however true its message, or however well-intentioned — is thin. Besides, no one goes to the movies because they want to be scolded; we want to be moved and distracted and entertained.
I’ve done my fair share of complaining over the past few years about how climate storytelling needs to grow up. But lately I’ve been coming around to the idea that it’s not the words “climate change” appearing in a script that we need to be so focused on. As 2024’s slate of films has proven to me — or, perhaps, as this year’s extreme weather events have thrown into relief — there are climate movies everywhere.
Keep ‘em coming.
They might not be worried now, but Democrats made the same mistake earlier this year.
Permitting reform is dead in the 118th Congress.
It died earlier this week, although you could be forgiven for missing it. On Tuesday, bipartisan talks among lawmakers fell apart over a bid to rewrite parts of the National Environmental Policy Act. The changes — pushed for by Representative Bruce Westerman, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee — would have made it harder for outside groups to sue to block energy projects under NEPA, a 1970 law that governs the country’s process for environmental decisionmaking.
When those talks died, they also killed a separate deal over permitting struck earlier this year between Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming. That deal, as I detailed last week, would have loosened some federal rules around oil and gas drilling in exchange for a new, quasi-mandatory scheme to build huge amounts of long-distance transmission.
Rest in peace, I suppose. Even if lawmakers could not agree on NEPA changes, I think Republicans made a mistake by not moving forward with the Manchin-Barrasso deal. (I still believe that the standalone deal could have passed the Senate and the House if put to a vote.) At this point, I do not think we will see another shot at bipartisan permitting reform until at least late 2026, when the federal highway law will need fresh funding.
But it is difficult to get too upset about this failure because larger mistakes have since compounded the initial one. On Wednesday, Republican Speaker Mike Johnson’s bipartisan deal to fund the government — which is, after all, a much more fundamental task of governance than rewriting some federal permitting laws — fell apart, seemingly because Donald Trump and Elon Musk decided they didn’t like it. If I can indulge in the subjunctive for a moment: That breakdown might have likely killed any potential permitting deal, too. So even in a world where lawmakers somehow did strike a deal earlier this week, it might already be dead. (As I write this, the House GOP has reportedly reached a new deal to fund the government through March, which has weakened or removed provisions governing pharmacy benefit managers and limiting American investments in China.)
The facile reading of this situation is that Republicans now hold the advantage. The Trump administration will soon be able to implement some of the fossil fuel provisions in the Manchin-Barrasso deal through the administrative state. Trump will likely expand onshore and offshore drilling, will lease the government’s best acreage to oil and gas companies, and will approve as many liquified natural gas export terminals as possible. His administration will do so, however, without the enhanced legal protection that the deal would have provided — and while those protections are not a must-have, especially with a friendly Supreme Court, their absence will still allow environmental groups to try to run down the clock on some of Trump’s more ambitious initiatives.
Republicans believe that they will be able to get parts of permitting reform done in a partisan reconciliation bill next year. These efforts seem quite likely to run aground, at least as long as something like the current rules governing reconciliation bills hold. I have heard some crazy proposals on this topic — what if skipping a permitting fight somehow became a revenue-raiser for the federal government? — but even they do not touch the deep structure of NEPA in the way a bipartisan compromise could. As Westerman toldPolitico’s Josh Siegel: “We need 60 votes in the Senate to get real permitting reform … People are just going to have to come to an agreement on what permitting reform is.” In any case, Manchin and the Democrats already tried to reform the permitting system via a partisan reconciliation bill and found it essentially impossible.
Even if reconciliation fails, Republicans say, they will still be in a better negotiating position next year than this year because the party will control a few more Senate votes. But will they? The GOP will just have come off a difficult fight over tax reform. Twelve or 24 months from now, demands on the country’s electricity grid are likely to be higher than they are today, and the risk of blackouts will be higher than before. The lack of a robust transmission network will hinder the ability to build a massive new AI infrastructure, as some of Trump’s tech industry backers hope. But 12 or 24 months from now, too, Democrats — furious at Trump — are not going to be in a dealmaking mood, and Republicans have relatively few ways to bring them to the table.
In any case, savvy Republicans should have realized that it is important to get supply-side economic reforms done as early in a president’s four-year term as possible. Such changes take time to filter through the system and turn into real projects and real economic activity; passing the law as early as possible means that the president’s party can enjoy them and campaign on them.
All of it starts to seem more and more familiar. When Manchin and Barrasso unveiled their compromise earlier this year, Democrats didn’t act quickly on it. They felt confident that the window for a deal wouldn’t close — and they looked forward to a potential trifecta, when they would be able to get even more done (and reject some of Manchin’s fossil fuel-friendly compromises).
Democrats, I think, wound up regretting the cavalier attitude that they brought to permitting reform before Trump’s win. But now the GOP is acting the same way: It is rejecting compromises, believing that it will be able to strike a better deal on permitting issues during its forthcoming trifecta. That was a mistake when Democrats did it. I think it will be a mistake for Republicans, too.