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On a crucial — and underappreciated — phrase in the Global Stocktake.
Now it is over. Early on Wednesday morning, negotiators in Dubai reached an agreement at the 28th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the global meeting otherwise known as COP28.
Their final text for the Global Stocktake — a kind of report card on humanity’s progress on its Paris Agreement goals — is contradictory and half-hearted. Instead of blunt language instructing countries to “phase out fossil fuels,” it instead provides a range of options that could let countries achieve “deep, rapid, and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.” One of these possibilities is the tripling of global renewable capacity; another is a call for “transitioning away from fossil fuels.”
So far, this language — this call for leaving fossil fuels — has attracted the most attention by far. Simon Stiell, the UN’s top climate official, said that it marked “the beginning of the end” of the fossil-fuel era, while the climate journalist and activist Bill McKibben has argued that the phrase can become a useful tool for activists, who can now beat it across the head of the Biden administration.
But a separate phrase in the agreement caught my attention. Immediately after calling for transitioning away from fossil fuels, the text makes a different point: that the world must accelerate the development of “zero- and low-emission technologies, including, inter alia, renewables, nuclear, abatement and removal technologies such as carbon capture and utilization and storage, particularly in hard-to-abate sectors, and low-carbon hydrogen production.”
This language may rankle some readers because it seems to give pride of place to carbon capture and storage technology, or CCS, which would allow fossil fuel-burning plants to catch emissions before they enter the atmosphere. (It also seems to conflate CCS with carbon removal technology, even though they are different.) But I believe that the overarching demand — the call for accelerating climate-friendly technologies — represents a crucial insight, one that I could not stop thinking about at the COP itself, and one that is linked to any realistic demand to phase out fossil fuels. Here is that insight: The world will only be able to decarbonize when it develops abundant energy technologies that emit little carbon and that are price-competitive if not cheaper than their fossil-fueled alternatives.
Just as COP28 began, the Rhodium Group, an energy research firm, published a new study looking at how carbon pollution will rise and fall through the end of the century. Unlike other such studies — which ask either how the planet will fare if no new climate policy passes, or what the world must do to avoid 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming — this new study tried to look at what was likely to happen. Given what we know about how countries’ emissions rise and fall with their economies, and when and how they tend to pass climate policy, how much warming can we expect by the end of the century?
As the report’s authors put it, the study was aimed not at policymakers, but at policy takers — the officials, executives, engineers, and local leaders who are starting to plan for the world of 2100.
Here’s the good news: Global greenhouse gas emissions are likely to peak this decade, the report found. Sometime during the 2020s, humanity’s emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and other climate pollution will reach an all-time high and begin to fall. (Right now, we emit the equivalent of 50.6 billion tons of the stuff every year.) This will represent a world-historic turning point in our species’ effort to govern the global climate system, and it will probably happen before Morocco, Portugal, and Spain host the 2030 World Cup.
And that is roughly where the good news ends. Because unlike in rosy net-zero studies where humanity’s carbon emissions peak and then rapidly fall to zero, the report does not project any near-term pollution plunge. Instead, global emissions waver and plateau through the 2030s and 2040s, falling in some years, rising slightly in others, cutting an unmistakably downward trend while failing to get anywhere close to zero. By 2060, annual emissions will have fallen to 39 gigatons, only 22% below today’s levels.
And — worse news, now — that is as low as emissions will ever get this century, the report projects. Driven by explosive economic growth in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, global emissions begin to rise — slowly but inexorably — starting in the 2060s. They keep rising in the 2070s, 2080s, and 2090s. By the year 2090, emissions will have reached 44 gigatons, only 13% below today’s levels and roughly where emissions stood in 2003.
How Greenhouse Gas Emissions Could Fall — Then Rise — in the 21st Century
Rhodium Group
In other words, after a century of work to fight climate change, humanity will find itself roughly where it began. But now, with several thousand additional gigatons of emissions in the atmosphere, the planet will be about 2.8 degrees Celsius warmer (or about 5 degrees Fahrenheit). At its high end estimate, temperatures could rise as much as 4 degrees Celsius, or more than 7 degrees Fahrenheit.
This temperature rise will be caused by legacy emissions from polluters like the United States and China, but as the century goes on, it will increasingly come from Asian and African countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia, Nigeria, Kenya, and others. Why? It’s not like these countries, say, reject renewables or electric vehicles: In fact, Rhodium anticipates that renewables will have grown up to 22-fold by the end of the century.
Instead, emissions rise because fossil fuels are cheap and globally abundant — they remain one of the easiest ways to power an explosively growing society — and because of the growth of the so-called hard-to-abate sectors in these countries are slated to grow just as quickly as the economies themselves. Indonesia, Nigeria, and Vietnam will demand many megatons of new steel, cement, and chemicals to furnish their growing societies; right now, the only economical way to make those materials requires releasing immense amounts of carbon pollution into the atmosphere.
Let’s be clear: Rhodium’s report is a projection, not a prophecy. It should not provoke despair, I think, but determination. Many of the so-called hard-to-abate activities, such as steel or petrochemical making, should more aptly be called activities-that-we-haven’t-tried-very-hard-to-abate yet; people will likely find a way to do them by the middle of the century. (When I asked Bill Gates what he thought about the Rhodium Group’s findings, he replied that predicting the carbon intensity of certain activities in 2060 was all but impossible: We might have safe, cheap, and abundant nuclear fission by then, or even nuclear fusion.)
Yet it heralds a shift in climate geopolitics that, while it has not yet happened, is not so far away. Since the modern era of global climate politics began in 1990, most carbon emissions have come from just a handful of countries: China, the United States, and the 37 other rich, developed democracies that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD. These countries have emitted 55% of climate pollution since 1990, while the rest of the world — the remaining low- and middle-income countries — have emitted only 45%.
But from now to 2100, that relationship is set to reverse. Through the end of the century, China and the OECD countries emit only 40% of total global emissions, according to Rhodium’s projections. The rest of the world, meanwhile, will emit 60% of global emissions.
In other words, decarbonization will soon become a challenge for middle-income countries. These countries will not be able to spend extra to buy climate-friendly technologies, but they are simply too populous for rich countries to subsidize. At the same time, these countries lack an existing fleet of fossil-fuel-consuming equipment, so they will not need to transition away from fossil fuels in the first place. Unlike in the United States, where we will have to shut down our oil-and-gas economy as we build a new one to replace it, Kenya or Indonesia can more or less build a climate-friendly middle-class economy de novo, much in the same way that in the 2000s countries “leapfrogged” landline telephones and adopted cell phones. Yet countries will only be able to leapfrog the fossil-fuel era if the climate equivalent of cell phones exist: if climate-friendly technologies are plentiful, useful, and price-competitive.
That’s not all it will take, of course. The world will have to phase down the production and consumption of fossil fuels, because the existence of climate-friendly technologies will not guarantee their use. Humanity may also have to create and enforce a strong moral taboo around burning fossil fuels, much in the same way that it has created a taboo around, say, child labor. But none of that can happen unless climate-friendly alternatives exist: Otherwise countries will ensure that they gain access to the energy that their development requires.
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On disaster relief, rain in California, and solar power
Current conditions: Storm Herminia could bring fresh flooding to England and Wales, just days after Storm Éowyn • A giant iceberg is on a collision course with the island of South Georgia in the Atlantic Ocean • Phoenix, Arizona, might see rain today for the first time in 156 days.
President Trump signed an executive order establishing a review council to assess the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and said the agency needs to be “drastically” improved. The council will have no more than 20 members, and will include department heads as well as people from outside the government that are appointed by Trump himself. “These non-Federal members shall have diverse perspectives and expertise in disaster relief and assistance, emergency preparedness, natural disasters, Federal-State relationships, and budget management,” the order states. This new council will be tasked with scrutinizing the agency’s disaster relief efforts and making recommendations for improvement. Trump has slammed FEMA and the prior administration for their responses to recent natural disasters, including Hurricane Helene and the wildfires in Los Angeles. Misinformation and conspiracy theories – often floated by Republican politicians and rightwing figureheads – spread quickly in the wake of both emergencies. The executive order insists there are “serious concerns of political bias in FEMA.” While touring hurricane damage in North Carolina a few days ago, Trump suggested “getting rid of” FEMA altogether, although that would require some help from Congress. The Project 2025 playbook from the Heritage Foundation has recommended that FEMA be removed from the Department of Homeland Security, and that programs like the National Flood Insurance Program be privatized.
Rainstorms have prompted flooding alerts in parts of Los Angeles that have been left charred by recent large wildfires. The downpours are helping firefighters get a handle on the blazes that remain, with the Palisades, Eaton, and Huges fires all more than 90% contained. But the city is on edge: Too much rain could trigger landslides and flooding around burn scars. A flood advisory is in effect around the Palisades fire burn scar, and areas surrounding the Eaton fire burn scar are also on high alert. The rain could also bring “toxic runoff” – rainwater laced with the chemicals leftover from burned objects like cars and furniture. Workers have been putting improvised filters over storm drains to try to trap pollutants. The worst of the rain was expected Sunday night and Monday.
In case you missed it: The Department of Interior issued an order suspending the ability of its staff, except a few senior officials, to permit new renewables projects on public land. The document suspended the authority of “Department Bureaus and Offices” over a wide range of regular actions, including issuing “any onshore or offshore renewable energy authorization.” The suspension lasts for 60 days and can only be overridden by “a confirmed or Acting official” in a number of senior roles in the Department, including the secretary. “This step will restrict energy development, which will harm consumers and fail to meet growing electricity demand,” Jason Ryan, a spokesperson for American Clean Power, the clean energy trade group, told Heatmap in an email. “We need an ‘all-of-the-above’ energy strategy, not just a ‘some-of-the-above’ approach.”
President Trump has also requested that the Supreme Court pause all pending litigation on environmental cases, including one focusing on California’s EPA waiver to set and enforce its own vehicle emissions standards. Sources toldReuters the administration has also reassigned four Justice Department attorneys that focus on environmental issues, so that the government “speaks with one voice.”
U.S. power generation growth will be led mostly by new solar power additions over the next two years, according to the Energy Information Agency. It expects 26 gigawatts of solar to be added in 2025, down from 37 GW in 2024. Wind power additions are expected to increase by about 8 GW this year, but honestly, who knows. Meanwhile, 6% of coal generating capacity will be removed this year as coal plants are retired. U.S. energy consumption is expected to continue growing at its current rate of about 2% per year through 2026, which would mark the first three years of consecutive growth since the early 2000s.
Energy Information Agency
Here’s a little bit of good news to start the week: Trade group data suggests that air-source heat pump sales outpaced those of gas furnaces by 37% in the U.S. last year – or at least through November. If confirmed, that would be the widest margin recorded, much bigger than last year’s 21%. “The data comes with a notable caveat,” Canary Mediacautioned. “Heat pumps outsold gas furnaces, but that doesn’t necessarily mean more households are choosing heat pumps over gas heating; homes often need multiple heat pump units to replace a single fossil fuel-fired appliance.”
“We spend a lot of time talking about short-term financials, but we’re building a business for the next few decades. So, eh, who cares? It’s going to be a little more challenging the next couple of years.”
–Rivian founder and CEO R.J. Scaringe speaking toInsideEVs about whether Trump’s policies will affect his EV company
It’s useful for more than just decarbonization.
Now that President Donald Trump has been officially inaugurated and issued his barrage of executive orders celebrating fossil fuels and shelving climate technologies such as wind energy and electric vehicles, climate tech startups are in a pickle. Federal funding can play a critical role in helping companies scale up and build out first-of-a-kind projects and facilities. So how to work with a government hostile to one of these startups’ core value propositions: aiding in the energy transition?
Talk of clean tech and electrification may be out of vogue, but its utility is not. The potential of many of these companies goes beyond mitigating climate change and into the realm of energy security and resilience — something the Department of Defense is well aware of.
The White House’s climate webpage has gone dark, but the Department of Defense’s climate resilience portal is up and running (at least for now). As the site reads, “The changing climate is one of many threat multipliers to National Security, which adds complexity to Department of Defense decisions.” That’s a major reason why this agency can’t stop, won’t stop funding climate technologies. Another reason is that many technologies that happen to be good for the planet might also simply be the best tool for the job, meaning the DOD need not utter the word “climate” at all when justifying its decision to deploy new solutions.
“The Defense Department, so far in our experience, has framed things largely in terms of alternative benefits that our technology can have, such as fuel supply chain redundancy and reliability,” Ted McKlveen, co-founder and CEO of the hydrogen storage company Verne, told me. Verne received a $250,000 Small Business Innovation Research grant from the Army last May to work on the development of hydrogen vehicles.
Cindy Taff, CEO of the next-generation geothermal startup Sage Geosystems, told me something similar. “What the military likes to talk about is energy resilience,” she said, though she has heard the DOD tout the climate benefits of her company’s tech, too. Sage currently has multiple DOD engagements, including feasibility studies with both the Army and Navy and a $1.9 million grant to build a demonstration project for the Air Force.
That’s not to say it’s clear what the Department of Defense’s funding priorities under Trump will be. When I contacted the DOD in mid-December to request an interview for this story, a spokesperson initially told me they would help connect me to the right person. But as Trump’s inauguration drew nearer, I got a message saying the agency would have to hold off until it got more guidance, as “it remains to be seen in the next few weeks what direction the new administration is going.”
Regardless of how the priorities shake out, practically every climate-focused company and venture capitalist I talk to emphasizes that their companies will only succeed if they can make or invest in products that can compete on economics and/or quality alone, sans government support. That was true even before a second Trump turn in the White House started to look like an inevitability, and this new administration will at least partially reveal which companies can do that. But while everybody aims to be independent of federal support, they might not actually need to say goodbye to that funding stream, so long as they can tout their economic and performance benefits to the right customers.
Take Pyka, for example. When Michael Norcia co-founded the autonomous electric aircraft company in 2017, the ultimate goal was to design a passenger plane. “We want that to be our legacy, but we were also very, very realistic about the challenges associated with actually doing that,” he told me. So when the DOD took an interest in the company’s commercial cargo planes and their potential ability to deliver supplies in contested environments, the startup jumped at the opportunity, delivering its first aircraft to AFWERX, the innovation arm of the Department of the Air Force, early last year. Interest from such a lucrative government customer helped the company to close its $40 million Series B round in September.
Of course, the decarbonization benefits of electrifying military cargo delivery would be huge. But unsurprisingly, Norcia told me that the DOD primarily frames the opportunity in terms of the capabilities of all-electric or hybrid-electric planes, which could take a variety of fuels, operate quietly, and give off minimal heat, making them more difficult to detect via thermal imaging. Plus, the more equipment is electrified the better, “in terms of having them be able to operate in a highly contested environment, where moving fuel around maybe is not feasible,” Norcia explained. Not to mention the fact that if a manned aircraft is shot down, people die, meaning that in a counterfactual sense, Pyka’s tech is saving lives.
Verne’s North Star is also decarbonization. And given that the military is the world’s largest oil consumer, McKlveen was excited to partner with the Army to put its hydrogen storage tech to use in medium and heavy-duty vehicles. The company stores hydrogen (ideally green hydrogen, produced via renewables-powered electrolysis) at high density as a cold, compressed gas, making it possible to build hydrogen vehicles with greater range and lower cost than has traditionally been done. Similar to Pyka, the Army is enthused that these vehicles would be difficult for adversaries to detect, as they’re quiet and give off little heat. Likewise, McKlveen told me that hydrogen power could replace the Army’s notoriously noisy generators.
While Verne has also partnered with the Department of Energy and its R&D arm, ARPA-E, McKlveen said that working with the DOD has been unique in a few ways. “The key difference is the DOD is a customer and a grant provider. So they can say both what their needs are as a potential customer and represent a potential customer,” he explained. This, along with the agency’s clear, phased approach that it puts companies through, helps bring a level of transparency to the whole process, from pilot to full-fledged military implementation, that McKlveen appreciates.
And lest we forget, “they also have a very large budget,” he told me. For fiscal year 2025, the DOD has requested $849.8 billion, while the DOE, by comparison, has requested a mere $51.4 billion.
“I find military people to be get-it-done type of people,” Taff of Sage Geosystems told me. “So I think that helps to create a sense of urgency and also push things along a lot faster than you would see with maybe other organizations.” Sage uses drilling technologies adopted from the oil and gas industry to access heat for clean electricity production across a wide variety of geographies. This is an especially attractive option for the DOD as the majority of geothermal infrastructure is underground, and thus well protected from attack. And unlike other renewables, this tech can provide 24/7 energy no matter the weather conditions. So it’s no surprise that the military is pouring money into this sector, pursuing partnerships with other big names in the geothermal space such as Fervo Energy and Eavor.
Electric planes, hydrogen, and geothermal all felt intuitively justifiable to me from a defense standpoint, but I was more surprised to learn that the DOD has gotten into the alternative proteins, a.k.a. “fake meat”, industry. Though meat substitutes won’t power tankers or keep the lights on, the Defense Department’s $1.4 million grant to The Better Meat Co. is intended to strengthen the American supply chain. China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs views lab-grown meat as critical to its five-year agricultural plan. “So we don’t want to have the United States be importing clean protein in the way that we’re currently dependent on Asia for our semiconductors and photovoltaics,” Paul Shapiro, the company’s CEO, told me.
The Better Meat Co. produces a protein called Rhiza that’s derived from microscopic fungi, which it then sells as an ingredient to other companies to make either 100% animal-free meat or a meat blend. “This isn’t an alternative protein program. It’s a domestic biomanufacturing program,” Shapiro told me when I asked if military funding for meat substitutes could be at risk under Trump. Looking at some of the other companies that got grants through the same program, he said, “it’s literally like bio manufacturing things for military planes and jet lubricants and chemical catalysts for bullets.” That is, probably not Republican targets for defunding. “It’s clearly solely about wanting the U.S. to be a leader in biomanufacturing for the products that the world is going to depend on in the future.”
The DOD also sees promise in numerous other clean energy technologies, including nuclear microreactors for their portability and ability to provide off-grid energy in remote locations and alternate battery chemistries that could help the U.S. move away from a dependence on Chinese-produced lithium-ion batteries.
But despite the deep well of funding and pragmatic approach to deployment that the Department of Defense offers, agreeing to work with the DOD isn’t always an obvious choice. Many fear their company’s tech could be used in ways and in wars that they oppose. In 2018, for example, thousands of Google employees signed a letter opposing the company’s participation in Project Maven, a partnership with the Pentagon that uses artificial intelligence to improve the accuracy of drone strikes. Supporters of the project said it would lead to fewer civilian deaths, while protestors argued that Google “should not be in the business of war.” Google did not renew the contract. More recently, employees at Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have signed petitions opposing their company’s provision of cloud computing and AI services to the Israeli government.
Norcia noted that most, but not all of his employees were neutral to positive when it came to working with the Air Force, while “for a small minority of the company, it unfortunately was not something that they really wanted to devote their life to.” While he understands that perspective, Norcia does believe that Pyka’s work with the DOD is a net positive for the world. “If you assume wars are going to keep happening — which, unfortunately, I think is the reality — I’d rather have it be the case that they’re more of a robot war than a human war,” he told me. And at the end of the day, passenger planes are still the goal.
As for his team at Verne, McKlveen told me everybody was on board. “The Defense Department has led to some of the biggest innovations of the last century, whether that’s the internet or GPS. And our team knows that.” Plus, even if the DOD doesn’t talk much about the climate benefits of sustainability-focused tech, that doesn’t negate them. A 2019 study revealed that the Pentagon purchases an average of 100 million barrels of oil per year, so from that perspective, “it’s hard to find a bigger customer that we can address,” McKlveen told me.
Norcia agreed. “I think the gains of your impact get turned way up if you’re doing work with the DOD,” he said, “as opposed to, you know, building an app that makes something incrementally more efficient or more addictive.”
The president is on his way to Los Angeles next.
On his fifth day back in office, President Trump is making the rounds to recent disaster zones —- North Carolina, which is recovering from Hurricane Helene, and later Los Angeles, where fires are still burning. In the immediate aftermath of both catastrophes, Trump was quick to blame Democrats for their response. Touching down in North Carolina earlier today, he sounded the same tune as he proposed overhauling or even eliminating the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is responsible for disaster preparation and recovery nationwide.
On the tarmac, Trump told the press that his administration was “looking at the whole concept of FEMA,” saying he would rather states be solely responsible for disaster recovery. Later, at a hurricane recovery briefing, Trump said that he planned to sign an executive order that would “begin the process of fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA — or maybe getting rid of FEMA.” Trump dodged questions on details of the order or a timeline for implementation.
While speaking to a group of North Carolina families at a separate event, Trump told them, “Unfortunately, our government failed you, but it wasn’t the Trump government. It was a government run by Biden.” False claims about the hurricane response, stoked by Trump during the final month of his campaign against Kamala Harris, led FEMA to put up a “myth and fact” response page on its website to debunk swirling rumors.
It is true, however, that earlier this month, FEMA informed thousands of displaced North Carolina residents that their vouchers for temporary housing were about to expire for one of three reasons: their homes had been deemed “habitable,” the residents had not approved a FEMA inspection, or the agency couldn’t get in contact with them. Speaking to the families, Trump said this was unjustifiable given that “your government provided shelter and housing for illegal aliens from all over the world.” He claimed he would “surge housing solutions” to the state that went beyond FEMA’s temporary measures, but did not provide more details as to how.
After arriving in Los Angeles, where large swaths of the city have been devastated by still-active wildfires, President Trump met with Governor Gavin Newsom on the tarmac, striking a conciliatory tone as he said he wanted to “work together” to help L.A. recover. This disaster also prompted a flurry of misinformation when fire hydrants in the city temporarily ran dry. While the city’s water infrastructure simply wasn’t equipped to put out numerous simultaneous historic blazes, Trump put the blame squarely on Newsom and his previous opposition to a policy that would have redirected water from a river delta in Northern California to farms in the Central Valley and cities in Southern California, endangering a fish species called the Delta smelt.
Experts say this has nothing to do with the fires or the ability to put them out, as all water storage tanks were full and the blazes were due to a combination of drought and extreme winds. Yet Trump has continued to hold up the protection of the smelt fish as all that’s wrong with California’s fire response, even making it a feature of his recent executive order “Putting People Over Fish: Stopping Radical Environmentalism To Provide Water Solutions To Southern California.”
After a tour of the Pacific Palisades neighborhood and a photoshoot with L.A. firefighters, Trump met with city and state leaders and pledged to declare a national emergency that would allow him to waive all federal permits for rebuilding. “The federal permit can take 10 years. We’re not going to do that. We don’t want to take 10 days,” Trump said to applause. “I’d ask that the local permitting process be the same.”
L.A. Mayor Karen Bass agreed that she wanted to expedite the process but reiterated that before rebuilding efforts could begin in earnest, all the fire debris needed to be cleared. That’s an arduous process that the Army Corp of Engineers estimated could take 18 months to complete. While Bass vowed to speed up this timeline, Trump claimed that “the people are willing to clean out their own debris.”
Trump also repeated his promise to “open up the pumps and valves in the North,” though again, there’s no evidence that more piped water would have done anything to prevent these fires. “We want to get that water pouring down as quickly as possible. Let hundreds of millions of gallons of water flow down into Southern California, and that’ll be a big benefit to you.”
And he didn’t miss an opportunity to mention the smelt once more, telling the assembled leaders “it’s in numerous other areas. So it doesn’t have to be protected. The people of California have to be protected.”
Editor‘s note: This story has been updated to reflect Trump’s visit to Los Angeles.