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Russ Vought could jeopardize the next decade of climate science. But who is he?
It is my sincere belief that, as with many aspects of governance, thinking about climate policy bores former President Donald Trump. He is not without his hobbyhorses — wind turbines are ugly bird-killers; it’s freezing in New York, so where the hell is global warming? — but on the whole, I tend to agree with the assessment that he basically believes “nothing” on climate change. Trump simply isn’t all that interested. He prefers to let the others do the thinking for him.
This isn’t a knock on Trump, per se; part of leading a bureaucracy as big and as complicated as the United States government is surrounding yourself with people who can offload some of that thinking for you. But the crucial question then becomes: Who is doing that thinking?
The answer, to a large extent, is Russ Vought.
The name might not immediately ring a bell. Biographical details of the 48-year-old career bureaucrat can be hard to find (“a native of Trumbull, Connecticut,” “the youngest of seven children,” “a die-hard Yankees fan”), giving the impression that Vought came out of nowhere. In a sense, he did: For years, Vought dealt mainly with spreadsheets as he worked first as a budget staffer for Texas Republican Sen. Phil Gramm and Rep. Jeb Hensarling, then later for then-Rep. Mike Pence, and eventually the Heritage Foundation. It was Gramm, though, who gave Vought his outlook on the world: “If you do budget, you do everything.”
After a stint with the Trump transition team, Vought became deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget in 2018, and took over entirely in 2019. At OMB, he famously held up military aid to Ukraine in what became the subject of Trump’s first impeachment. Described as “ideological in the extreme,” “adversarial” with his colleagues, and having an “aggressive personal style” — incongruous, perhaps, with his somewhat nerdy, bespectacled appearance — Vought would reportedly go too far in proposed budget cuts sometimes even for his boss.
After Biden’s win in 2020, Vought launched the Center for American Restoration, a pro-Trump think tank with the mission of renewing “a consensus of America as a nation under God,” and has otherwise kept busy with appearances on conservative-friendly talk shows on One America News Network and Fox News. Steve Bannon has approvingly dubbed him “MAGA’s bulldog,” though he rarely speaks to the mainstream press. (I received a failed delivery message in response to an email to the address listed on the website for the Center for American Restoration; other attempts to contact Vought went unanswered.)
Vought is all but assured to take up a powerful position in a potential incoming Trump cabinet. He “trained up during the first Trump administration, and he is looking to apply those skills that he learned in a second,” said Alex Witt, the senior advisor for oil and gas at Climate Power, a strategic communications group that shared its research on Vought with me.
Vought may not be the most obvious architect for the project of dismantling climate progress, however. In Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s roadmap for the next Republican president, Vought authored the chapter on the Office of the President of the United States — hardly the most climate-y section, given that there are also chapters on reforming the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and the Department of the Interior. A flurry of new articles about Vought describe him as a Christian nationalist crusader preoccupied with fending off big government and orchestrating an expansion of presidential powers.
But just as Trump advisor Stephen Miller shaped far-right immigration policies from behind the scenes, Vought would be a hidden hand in a future administration dismantling climate progress. In his chapter in Project 2025, for example, Vought proposes moving the National Defense Strategy from under the purview of the Defense Department to the White House and its National Security Council — normal “expansion of presidential powers” stuff. But Vought goes even further, directing the NSC then to “rigorously review” the staff with an eye for “climate change … and other polarizing policies that weaken our armed force.”
Erin Sikorsky, the director of the Center for Climate and Security, told me that such a proposal indicates “a misunderstanding of how connected climate hazards are to the core duties of what the military is focused on.” It could also put the U.S. armed forces on the back foot in conflicts around the world if it’s followed through. As just one example, if the military isn’t engaging with its Indo-Pacific partners “and helping those countries build resilience to climate change, then China is more than happy to step in and address that,” Sikorsky warned. At home, NSC analyses of the domestic impacts of climate change will likely come to a halt, scuttling future coordination between the military and local governments after disasters and hampering mitigation efforts around the country.
The most significant blow on the climate front, however, would come from Vought’s proposal to reinstate Schedule F, a job classification that aims to convert at least 50,000 career civil servants to “at-will” political employees. (Trump used an executive order to implement Schedule F at the very end of his term; President Biden unimplemented it soon after taking office.) The employment classification ostensibly aims to make it easier to replace “rogue” or “woke” civil servants and would-be whistleblowers, a.k.a. “the deep state,” with party-line faithful. But in the words of Vought himself, Schedule F is also necessary because Biden’s “climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding.”
The effects of such a decision, experts told me, could range from very bad to disastrous self-sabotage. Schedule F is “designed to be a tool to purge federal agencies of nonpartisan experts” and replace them with “partisan loyalists who would willingly follow any order without question, regardless of whether it was legal, constitutional, or the right thing to do for the people,” Joe Spielberger, the policy counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, an independent and nonpartisan watchdog group, told me. In practice, that might mean firing longtime civil servants perceived as not loyal enough, or even just “creating and perpetuating a climate of fear and intimidation where people are not able or willing to speak out when they see abuse of power and other corruption happening.”
Such a scenario is concerning for employees at agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who work on climate modeling. But the expertise of the U.S. civil service is broad and deep; Schedule F could impact everyone from the economists, lawyers, and engineers who work on something like the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards to the people who sit on the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee.
“Civil service positions are not classified as political appointees for a reason, which is so that staff, especially scientists, can do work that spans administrations because it is so fundamental to public health and welfare,” Chitra Kumar, the Union of Concerned Scientists’ managing director for climate and energy, told me in an email. The people made fireable under Schedule F, in other words, are the ones who actually know what is going on, whereas “elected officials come and go, often taking a year or more to understand the latest underlying science.”
Reimplementing and expanding Schedule F, however, is apparently one of Vought’s greatest ambitions. Earlier this year, the National Treasury Employees Union obtained documents via a Freedom of Information Act request that showed Vought’s intent to apply the status to much of OMB’s workforce in 2020. As justification for taking an implicit machete to his staff, Vought writes in Project 2025 that “it is the president’s agenda that should matter to the departments and agencies that operate under his constitutional authority,” but that instead, the U.S. civil service is “all too often … carrying out its own policy plans and preferences — or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction of the country.”
Ann Carlson, the former acting administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and a professor of environmental law at UCLA, strongly refutes Vought’s claim. For one thing, she told me that the great irony of the Schedule F proposal is that it would make it more difficult for the Trump administration to carry out its goals in the long run.
“Part of the problem for a conservative administration is, if you want to roll back policies that are in place, you need people who know how to do that,” Carlson pointed out. She also bristled at the suggestion that civil servants are unable to check their biases at the door: Carlson’s team at NHTSA helped put together the Biden administration’s rules to strengthen fuel economy standards, but it also worked to roll back the Obama administration’s regulations and replaced them with the SAFE standards under Trump. “I don’t actually know, for most of them, which one they preferred,” Carlson said.
Carlson wasn’t the only former political appointee I spoke with who fiercely defended the integrity of her staff. Ron Sanders, a three-year Trump appointee, so vehemently opposed Schedule F when it was briefly implemented in 2020 that he resigned as chairman of the Federal Salary Council. Today, he represents a group of Republican former national security officials who are imploring Congress to find a middle ground between the current status quo and the extreme political loyalty demanded by Schedule F.
When I read Sanders the part of Vought’s Project 2025 chapter that calls for weeding out the “radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction of the country,” he told me that such thinking is “myopic.” “This is potentially a Republican administration coming in and finding ‘Democrats’ in place,” Sanders said. “You could say the same thing about the Biden administration, but they knew better — they knew that senior career officials appointed in the Trump administration are still politically neutral. It just happened to be a matter of timing.”
It likewise struck me as curious that Vought would push so hard for a policy that would not only hamstring the Trump administration but might also allow future Democratic presidents to carry out purges of perceived conservative government operatives.
The Biden administration has made moves to prevent Schedule F from potentially returning under a different president. Still, Spielberger from the Project on Government Oversight told me that short of a legislative fix by Congress, such actions will only delay reimplementation of the policy by “a matter of months” should Trump be reelected. The damage to climate science from four years of Schedule F, however, could be drastic.
“What we’re going to end up with is an executive branch that’s just uninformed,” Daniel Farber, the director of the Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment at the University of California, Berkeley, stressed to me. Farber’s fear is not just that “a bunch of uninformed ideologues” would be running the show, but also that once government experts are kicked out, it will be difficult to replace them or entice them to return.
“Even after we go back to a Democratic president, you can’t wave a wand and get all those people back,” Farber said. In the first nine months of the Trump administration, for example, the EPA lost more than 700 employees — and that was due to poor morale and high turnover even without the threat of Schedule F.
Schedule F doesn’t just chase out climate-related experts from the government. It also accelerates the revolving door that allows anti-climate zealots actors in. Both the Heritage Foundation and Vought’s think tank, the Center for American Restoration, have taken money from Big Oil groups and executives. Trump has already made his own transactional assurances to the industry if it funds his return to the White House. Schedule F, meanwhile, would open up hundreds if not thousands of positions for unqualified political operatives — essentially creating a “spoils system” where the lines between government and private industry would blur more than they already do.
“Russ Vought is not the problem,” Witt, of Climate Power, told me. “The problem is Donald Trump: Donald and the GOP are bought out by Big Oil, and Vought and other bad actors are a cog in that machine.”
It’s a metaphor that works well for the federal government, too: What happens when you have 50,000 cogs, but the person you’ve deferred to run the machine has fired all the mechanics?
“You take out all that expertise, all the people who understand how the system works?” Carlson, the former NHTSA director, said. “Good luck to you.”
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That means big, bad things for disaster relief — and for climate policy in general.
When Hurricanes Helene and Milton swept through the Southeast, small-government conservatives demanded fast and effective government service, in the form of relief operations organized by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Yet even as the agency was scrambling to meet the need, it found itself targeted by far-right militias, who prevented it from doing its job because they had been led by cynical politicians to believe it wasn't doing its job.
It’s almost a law of nature, or at least of politics, that when government does its job, few people notice — only when it screws up does everyone pay attention. While this is nothing new in itself, it has increasingly profound implications for the future of government-driven climate action. While that action comes in many forms and can be sold to the public in many ways, it depends on people having faith that when government steps in — whether to create new regulations, invest in new technologies, or provide benefits for climate-friendly choices — it knows what it’s doing and can accomplish its goals.
As the climate crisis grows more urgent, restoring faith in government will be more important than ever. Unfortunately, simply doing the right things — like responding competently to disasters — won’t be enough to convince people that the next climate initiative will do what it’s supposed to.
The number of people expressing faith in government today is nearly as low as it has been in the half-century pollsters have been asking the question. That trust has bounced up and down a bit — it rose after September 11, then fell again during the disastrous Iraq War — but for the last decade and half, only around 20% of Americans say they trust the government most of the time.
It’s partisan, of course: People express more trust when their party controls the White House. And the decline of trust reaches beyond the government. Faith in most of the key institutions of American life — business, education, religion, news media — has fallen in recent decades, sometimes for good reason. The net result is a public skeptical that those in authority have the ability to solve complex problems.
Changing that perspective is extraordinarily difficult, often because of the nature of good and bad news: The former usually happens slowly and invisibly, while the latter often happens dramatically and all at once.
Take the program created in the Energy Department under George W. Bush to provide loans to innovative energy technologies. If most Americans had heard of it, it was because of one company: Solyndra, a manufacturer of innovative but overly expensive solar panels. Undercut by a decline in prices of traditional panels, the company went under, and its $535 million loan was never repaid. Republicans made Solyndra’s failure into a major controversy, claiming that the program showed that government investment in green technology was corrupt, ineffective, and wasteful.
What few people heard about was that the loan program overall not only turned a profit at the time (and for what it’s worth, it still does), it also provided help to many successful companies, even if a few failed — as any venture capital investor could tell you is inevitable. The successes included Tesla, which used its federal loan to ramp up production of the sedans that would turn it from a niche manufacturer of electric roadsters into what it is today. Needless to say, Elon Musk does not advertise the fact that his success was built on government help.
More recently, the hurricane response has shown how partisan polarization can be used to undermine trust in government — especially when Donald Trump is involved. Trump took the opportunity of the hurricanes to accuse the federal government of being both political and partisan, delivering help only to those areas that vote for Democrats. Soon after, he promised to do precisely what he falsely accused the Biden administration of doing, saying that if he is president again, he will withhold disaster aid from California unless Gov. Gavin Newsom changes the state’s water policies to be more to Trump’s liking. “And we’ll say, Gavin, if you don’t do it, we’re not giving any of that fire money that we send you all the time for all the fire, forest fires that you have,” Trump said. And in fact, in his first term Trump did try to withhold disaster aid from blue states.
What sounds like hypocrisy is actually something much more pernicious. As he often does, Trump is arguing not that he is clean and his opponents are dirty, but that everyone is dirty, and it’s just a question of whether government is in the hands of our team or their team. When he says he’ll “drain the swamp,” he’s telling people both that government is corrupt, and the answer is merely to change who gets the spoils. If you believe him, you’ll have no trust in government whatsoever, even if you might think he’ll use it in a way you’ll approve of.
We’ve seen again and again that people want government to perform well and get angry when it doesn’t, but they don’t reward competence when it happens. Which is why making sure systems operate properly and problems are solved is necessary but not sufficient to win back trust. Government’s advocates — especially those who are counting on it to undertake ambitious climate action both now and in the future — need not only to deliver, they have to get better at, for lack of a better word, propaganda. Policy success is not its own advertisement. And despite his ample policy achievements, Joe Biden has not been a charismatic and effective messenger — on the role of government, or much else.
Ronald Reagan used to say that the most frightening words in the English language were “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”; the oft-repeated quip was at the center of his incredibly successful effort to delegitimize government in the eyes of voters. To reverse the decline of trust so people will believe that government has the knowledge and ability to tackle climate change, the public needs to be reminded — often and repeatedly — of what government does well.
Touting past and present successes on climate — and disaster relief, and so many other ways the government solves problems every day — is essential to building support for future climate initiatives. Those successes are all around, it’s just that most people never hear about them or take them for granted. But promoting government as an engine of positive change should be as high a priority for climate advocates, including those who hold public office, as discrediting government was for Reagan and is for Trump.
After a decade of leadership, voters are poised to overturn two of its biggest achievements. What happened?
Twenty years ago, you could still get away with calling Redmond, Washington, an equestrian town. White fences parceled off ranches and hobby farms where horses grazed under dripping evergreen trees; you could buy live chicks, alfalfa, and Stetson hats in stores downtown. It wasn’t even unusual for Redmond voters to send Republicans to represent their zip code in the state legislature, despite the city being located in blue King County.
The Redmond of today, on the other hand, looks far more like what you’d expect from an affluent (and now staunchly progressive) suburb of Seattle. A cannabis dispensary with a pride flag and a “Black Lives Matter” sign in the window has replaced Work and Western Wear, and the new high-performing magnet school happens to share a name with one of the most popular cars in the neighborhood: Tesla. But Washington is a state full of contradictions, and among Redmond’s few remaining farms is one registered under the winkingly libertarian name of “Galt Valley Ranch LLC.” It belongs to a multimillionaire who has almost single-handedly bankrolled the most significant challenge yet to Washington’s standing as a national climate leader.
Andrew Villeneuve, the founder of the Northwest Progressive Institute, a left-wing think tank also based in Redmond, told me he’s struggled to get voters to pay attention to ballot measures in the past. “I’ve had no such awareness issues this year,” he said. “Nobody’s like ‘Who’s Brian Heywood?’”
A hedge fund manager, multimillionaire, and recent California transplant, Heywood has in short order made himself the supervillain of Washington’s left. His Joker arc into politics involves fleeing the liberal dystopia of the Golden State in 2010 for the no-income-tax refuge of Washington, only to discover that Olympia was progressive, too. This year, he set out to personally “fix stupid things” in his adopted state by spending $6 million out of pocket on a signature-gathering campaign that ultimately landed four conservative initiatives on Washington’s general election ballot. (His campaign, Let’s Go Washington, is also allusively named, although Heywood toldThe Seattle Times that he is not a MAGA supporter.)
Two of the four ballot measures Heywood has willed before voters this November address standard small-government gripes: One would repeal the capital gains tax, and the other would allow workers to opt out of the state’s long-term care payroll tax. Others, however, will ask Washingtonians to vote directly on whether to repeal the state’s landmark cap-and-invest carbon-trading program (I-2117) or block its transition away from natural gas (I-2066).
“We’ve faced initiatives like these before,” Villeneuve told me, “but what is different is how many of them are coming at once.”
As in many Western states, it’s relatively easy for a motivated individual with means to collect the roughly 320,000 signatures needed for a petition to end up on the ballot in Washington. (Contract workers are paid up to $5 per signature, and they often descend on ferry lines, where bored motorists can be talked into putting down their names as they wait for the next boat.) But while rich activists have leveraged this system in the past — Washingtonians may remember the name Tim Eyman — the outcome of the ballot measures before voters this fall will be closely watched by other states and legislatures to gauge how directly popular bold climate progress really is.
“What happens in Washington will certainly have an impact on what happens around the rest of the country,” Leah Missik, the Washington deputy policy director at the clean energy nonprofit Climate Solutions, who also serves on the executive board of the No on 2066 campaign, told me. She added, “If these [laws] are in any way repealed or weakened, that is a sign to other states, and I think it would be incredibly damaging and incredibly unfortunate.”
Though politics in Washington have long been conservation-minded and, shall we say, crunchy (I grew up in Redmond), the state really began to stand out as a leader in progressive climate policy with Governor Jay Inslee’s election in 2013. During Inslee’s tenure, Washington committed to one of the most aggressive 100% clean energy pathways in the country, passed a wide-ranging building emissions law that RMI described as “significantly [raising] the level of ambition on what might be possible for other states,” and in 2023 enacted its landmark cap-and-invest program, called the Climate Commitment Act, which has generated over $2 billion in state revenue so far for transit projects, decarbonization initiatives, and clean air and water programs. Washington has even been credited with inspiring some of President Biden’s climate actions in office.
With Inslee, a Democrat, retiring at the end of this term, Let’s Go Washington’s campaign begins to appear designed to dismantle his legacy while proposing little in the way of alternatives. Hallie Balch, the communications director, denied this allegation in an emailed statement, telling me the initiatives “promote choice and affordability.” The cap-and-invest program, for example, “has not done what the governor said it would do,” she said, and “there are no metrics in place to track [its] success.”
Though the CCA’s cap covers about 75% of the state’s total greenhouse gas emissions, it’s true that we’re still a few years away from having a clear picture of the program’s results. (The law’s first compliance deadline for polluters isn’t until this November.) “The CCA has only been around for almost two years at this point, and so we haven’t yet seen the big emissions declines,” Emily Moore, the director of the climate and energy program at the Sightline Institute, a nonpartisan sustainability think tank that does not take an official position on initiatives, told me. “But what we are seeing,” she added, “is the money that it has generated for a whole suite of climate-friendly and community-friendly projects.”
There isn’t a revenue source remotely comparable to cap-and-invest available to fund the state’s transit, infrastructure, and community projects if the program goes away, meaning a repeal would have a dramatic impact on everything from bus service to salmon recovery projects to local heat pump and induction stove rebates, with most likely getting the axe. The program is also one of the main levers Washington has to reach its goal of reducing emissions 95% below 1990 levels by 2050. As one person involved in crafting the CCA described the upcoming vote on I-2117 to me, it’s “life or death for climate action in Washington.”
That’s partially because I-2117 wouldn’t only repeal the CCA; it would also bar the state from implementing a new climate tax or cap-and-invest program at any point in the future. When asked what an alternative might be last week during a debate at Seattle University’s Department of Public Affairs and Nonprofit Leadership, Heywood vaguely proposed “something that works.”
“We always knew we were going to have to defend this program at the ballot box,” Joe Fitzgibbon, the majority leader of Washington’s House of Representatives and the chair of the House Environment and Energy Committee, who helped create the CCA, told me. He admitted that he’d expected such a defense to take the form of legislative elections, but 2022 came and went without a single backer of the CCA losing their seat. “I guess in hindsight, I thought we were out of the woods,” Fitzgibbon said.
Let’s Go Washington has labeled I-2117 a “hidden gas tax” and, bundled with its other initiatives, is running on the slogan “vote yes, pay less.” I-2117 is already the most expensive ballot measure campaign of this election cycle — and the most controversial, with Heywood campaigning at gas stations offering discounted gas, which opponents say violates vote-buying anti-bribery laws. But opposition to the initiative has also rallied a remarkable and unprecedented coalition of strange bedfellows in defense of the CCA, including over 500 businesses, environmental groups, health care organizations, faith leaders, tribes — as well as more than 30 breweries, “a very important coalition member in the state of Washington,” as No on I-2117’s communication director Kelsey Nyland quipped to me. Jane Fonda recently swung through the state to stump for I-2117; the ‘no’ campaign even has the support of the Green Jobs PAC, whose contributors include Shell and BP.
While almost all the advocates I spoke to about I-2117 were feeling optimistic ahead of Washington ballots going out at the end of this week, the most recent Cascade PBS/Elway poll on the initiative shows support has dropped slightly since May, with 46% saying they would vote no over 30% who would vote yes. (Heywood has pointed optimistically to the number of undecided voters this leaves.) Still, it seems pretty unlikely that Washingtonians will repeal their cap-and-invest program.
I-2066 is a different story.
To the immense frustration of its opponents, Let’s Go Washington touts I-2066 as “Stop the Gas Ban.” The measure was only certified for the ballot in July, compared to January for 2117, meaning that organizers have had much less time to mobilize — several major national green groups, including Defenders of Wildlife and the Environmental Defense Action Fund, confirmed to me that they’d endorsed No on I-2117 but not considered a position on I-2066 — and are on the back foot to combat misinformation.
For one thing, there is no gas ban: I-2066, rather, would repeal parts of a Washington law directing its largest utility, Puget Sound Energy, to consider electrification alternatives before installing new gas pipes; scuttle a pilot effort to promote thermal energy networks as a gas alternative; and, most starkly, it would bar cities and towns, as well as Washington’s energy code, from “prohibiting, penalizing, or discouraging” gas appliances in buildings. “Discouraging” does a lot of work here. For example, Seattle’s building emissions performance standard, which doesn’t ban gas but nudges large developments toward a 2050 net-zero emissions target, could be in jeopardy.
Still, all of this is a lot to expect voters to sort through in the few minutes they might spend filling in the bubbles in their ballot, especially when Let’s Go Washington is making out its message to sound like one simply about energy choice. Add the opaque triple-negative climate campaigners have to sell (“vote no on a ban on banning gas”), and the messaging headaches grow more severe.
Earlier this month, the editorial board for the largest media outlet in Washington, The Seattle Times, endorsed a yes vote on I-2066, arguing for a slower transition away from fossil fuels that leans more heavily on natural gas. “Unfortunately, we are up against a network of fossil fuel corporations and their allies who have a lot of money and who are very invested in the status quo because it perpetuates their wealth and their influence,” Missik, who’s involved with the No on I-2066 campaign, told me, pointing to the Building Industry Association as well as Northwest Natural, National Propane Gas Association, and Koch Industries, who have backed the other side. I-2066 is also polling much better than I-2117; as of September, 47% of voters said they would vote yes, compared to 29% who said they’d vote no.
Rather than interpret those numbers as the electorate’s backlash to Washington’s climate progress, advocates argue they indicate how fossil fuel groups have successfully capitalized on the door propped open by Heywoods’s signature-gathering campaigns. It’s “because one guy opened his wallet; it is that simple,” Villeneuve, the founder of the Northwest Progressive Institute, said. “There is no grassroots movement to overturn these laws; it doesn’t exist. Brian Heywood brought this entire thing into being.” Or, as Missik put it: “Most Washingtons do believe in climate progress, whether or not this will be overridden by money. I sure hope not.”
All of this ultimately brings us back to the question of what Heywood’s whole deal is. With the singular exception of I-2066, his $6 million initiatives seem mostly doomed.
Some I spoke to floated the idea that Heywood and his allies are using Washington as a testing ground for dismantling climate action and seeing what sticks. “If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere: It can happen in California, it can happen in Colorado, it can happen in New York, it can happen in all these states that have passed really strong climate policies,” Caitlin Krenn, the climate and clean energy director of the nonprofit Washington Conservation Action, told me.
But there are other rumors, too. The Washington State Standard’s Jerry Cornfield recently quoted a local GOP chair calling Heywood’s initiatives “a powerful tool” that will “help get Republicans elected” — essentially, a turnout generator. (“We certainly want to see as many people as are eligible to vote exercise their right to make their voices heard, but our top priority is to educate voters about what's at stake with the initiatives this November,” Balch told me in response.) And then there is Heywood’s ranch. Republicans have long cosplayed as rural farmers and cowboys to tap into the masculine conservative fantasy of rugged individualism (what Texas Monthly once called “authenticity drag”). It’s essentially an image-building exercise — perhaps not so unlike positioning yourself as the guy who tried to rein in the state’s runaway Dems.
So far, Heywood has dodged questions about whether he plans to run for governor, and his campaign told me he “isn't using the initiatives as anything other than a way to bring broken policies directly to the people to vote on.” But with this year’s ballots going out to Washington voters today, it’s also a question for another time.
Regardless of what happens, many of the organizers I spoke to rejected the framing of Washington voters cooling on climate. One went as far as to tell me that the time, attention, and money Heywood has spent trying to roll back Washington’s progress is the highest compliment of all. “This is part of the process of doing big things,” Isaac Kastama, who was involved in enacting the CCA and now works for the advocacy group Clean and Prosperous Washington, told me. “If it’s not big and if it goes undetected, that probably means you’re not doing something serious enough.”
Current conditions: Fire weather in California has prompted intentional power cuts for more than 5,000 PG&E customers • Large parts of central and northern Italy are flooded after heavy rains • The eastern U.S. will see “tranquil and near seasonable” weather this weekend.
Carbon emissions from forest fires have risen by 60% in two decades, according to a new study published in the journal Science. “We had to check the calculations because it’s such a big number,” Matthew Jones, the lead author of the report and a physical geographer at the University of East Anglia in England, toldThe New York Times. “It’s revealed something quite staggering.” The research specifically links this trend to climate change, which is creating hotter, drier conditions. Emissions from boreal forest fires in Canada and Siberia saw a particularly large increase between 2001 and 2023. In one type of boreal forest, emissions nearly tripled. The rise in emissions from forests – which normally serve as large carbon sinks – “poses a major challenge for global targets to tackle climate change,” the researchers said.
NFL stadiums across the country could suffer $11 billion in losses by 2050 due to climate-related disasters, according to a new report from climate risk analysis firm Climate X. The report ranks 30 stadiums based on their vulnerability to extreme weather events. MetLife Stadium in New Jersey ranks highest, with damages exceeding $5.6 billion by 2050. California’s SoFi Stadium and Arizona’s State Farm Stadium are also highly exposed. It’s worth noting that the Climate X analysis uses a “high-emissions” scenario that would see temperatures rise by 4.3 degrees Celsius by 2100. The International Energy Agency estimates we’re more on track to see about 2.4 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the century.
The Interior Department yesterday announced the approval of Fervo’s Cape Geothermal Power Project in Utah. The project could generate up to 2 gigawatts of electricity, which would supply power to more than 2 million homes. Fervo’s enhanced geothermal system works by injecting water into hot rock beneath Earth’s surface and using the heated water to generate electricity.
In government funding news, the Department of Energy on Friday announced $2 billion for 38 grid transmission projects across 42 states. This is the the third round of awards from the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships Program. The DOE estimates these projects will create 6,000 jobs and support 7.5 gigawatts of capacity.
More than three-quarters (77%) of all the coral reef areas on the planet have experienced heat stress that can trigger coral bleaching since February 2023, representing the largest mass bleaching event ever recorded, Reutersreported. “This event is still increasing in spatial extent and we’ve broken the previous record by more than 11% in about half the amount of time,” said NOAA Coral Reef Watch coordinator Derek Manzello. “This could potentially have serious ramifications for the ultimate response of these reefs to these bleaching events.” Researchers have called for an emergency session on coral bleaching to be held at the UN COP16 biodiversity summit in Colombia, which starts on October 21.
Climate change is causing “widespread distress” among America’s young people, according to a new study published in The Lancet that is the first of its kind to focus on the U.S. The researchers surveyed some 15,800 people between the ages of 16 and 25 and found that:
“These effects may intensify, across the political spectrum, as exposure to climate-related severe weather events increases,” the authors said. The state-by-state breakdown of how concerned people feel is quite interesting:
The Lancet
New York State has reached its goal of installing 6 gigawatts of distributed solar generation one year ahead of schedule.
Editor's note: An earlier version of this article inaccurately described the generating capacity of the Fervo project in item number three. It has since been corrected. We regret the error.