A New Series in The Times, Inspired by You
Under President Trump, the federal government has emphatically turned away from fighting climate change and other environmental problems, rolling back regulations and transforming federal agencies.
But across the country, in red and blue states, local efforts tell a more nuanced and hopeful story.
From state legislatures to county boards and community groups, from tribal lands to city parks and postage-stamp backyards, everyday people are doing quiet, vital work to confront climate change and biodiversity loss. For the past few months, we’ve been seeking out these often-unsung efforts, which, while smaller in scale, have already benefited local residents, the climate and the natural world.
Throughout this year, we will be highlighting one success story in each state, and we want to hear from you about what’s happening in your neck of the woods.
(To send us stories from your community, simply reply to this email or fill out the form at the bottom of this page.)
“While climate change and biodiversity loss are global challenges, local solutions have a tangible impact,” said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and policy expert at Texas Tech University and The Nature Conservancy. “Both directly, in terms of reducing emissions and protecting ecosystems, and indirectly, by inspiring broader action and building support for regional and national policies.”
In the noisy partisanship over climate politics, the potency of state and local efforts is often lost. While the federal government holds powerful purse strings, experts say other levels of government and society have a lot of sway, too, in safeguarding nature and adopting cleaner forms of energy.
“Energy is actually, in many ways, much more of a state issue,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth and the payments company Stripe. “A lot of what gets built and when it gets built is up to state governments and local public utility commissions and that sort of thing.”
Many of these efforts bridge ideological divides. Kate Burgess, who tracks state legislation to protect land for the National Caucus of Environmental Legislators, said there were bipartisan conservation efforts underway across the country. According to Burgess, 42 states had introduced 230 pieces of legislation broadening access to the outdoors, a move that can lead to expanded conservation protections, allowing humans and wildlife to both thrive.
Twenty-one states are considering 118 pieces of legislation around pesticide reforms. Already this year, a number of bipartisan conservation bills have passed.
“There are rollbacks, but there’s also a ton of progress and momentum,” Burgess said.
This week, we began the series with a handful of stories.
Did you know that the much of the capital of one of the reddest states in the nation is heated with clean energy? Would you like to see wildlife crossing a highway without putting themselves, or us, in danger? Let us take you inside a clinic in Hawaii where people and nature are healing each other. You can find those and more stories here, and we will be adding to them over the year.
In part, this series was inspired by you. For years, readers have been telling us that they want us to cover more than environmental doom and gloom. They want solutions. Cara’s entire beat focuses on people working to help repair our climate and ecosystems. Catrin covers biodiversity, and tries to weave solutions into a steady stream of bad news.
This series lets us turn a solutions-oriented lens on the whole country, and our whole climate and environment team here at The Times will be joining in.
We hope these stories will be a balm against the political divisions tearing at our country. At minimum, they will offer evidence that environmental solutions cannot be boxed into neat red and blue categories.
Read more from the 50 States, 50 Fixes project:
To read more of our climate solutions coverage, please see our twice-a-month series The Climate Fix.
Regulation
E.P.A. offers a way to avoid clean-air rules: Send an email
Last year, the Biden administration required coal- and oil-burning power plants to greatly reduce emissions of toxic chemicals including mercury, which can harm babies’ brains and cause heart disease in adults.
Now, the Trump administration is offering companies an extraordinary out: Send an email, and they might be given permission by President Trump to bypass the new restrictions, as well as other major clean-air rules.
The Environmental Protection Agency this week said an obscure section of the Clean Air Act enables the president to temporarily exempt industrial facilities from new rules if the technology required to meet those rules isn’t available, and if it’s in the interest of national security. — Hiroko Tabuchi.
Climate law
She inspired laws to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable. Now, she’s a target.
Fresh out of law school in 2022, Rachel Rothschild wrote a memo laying out the legal justification for a new strategy to fight climate change: States could force oil and gas companies to pay for the damage caused by extreme floods and wildfires that are made worse by the use of their products.
Rothschild’s work was foundational. It provided the basis for the nation’s first “climate superfund” laws, which were passed in New York and Vermont last year and could be adopted by as many as six more states as soon as this year. If implemented, they could cost oil companies billions of dollars.
The work made Rothschild a target. She is one of a number of lawyers, law professors and judges who have been the focus of a campaign to discredit them led by a conservative group with ties to the fossil fuel industry and the Trump administration. — Coral Davenport
Disaster aid
Billions in FEMA grants were frozen after Musk targeted the agency
A post from Elon Musk last month trumpeted a supposedly startling discovery by his team of government cost-cutters: The Federal Emergency Management Agency had provided $59 million to house undocumented immigrants in New York City. The money, he declared, was “meant for American disaster relief and instead is being spent on high end hotels for illegals!”
Then, after a pair of related Trump administration orders issued soon after the social media post from Musk, FEMA staff were without sufficient guidance on how to proceed when undocumented immigrants are concerned.
The result has effectively frozen payments on billions of dollars in disaster grants, according to two people briefed on the process and an internal document viewed by The New York Times.
While the freeze did not stop aid going directly to disaster survivors, it has disrupted payments to states, local governments and nonprofits, with ramifications being felt across the country. — Christopher Flavelle, Eduardo Medina and Luis Ferré-Sadurní
