Business
Trump Brings Hard Times For The Climate Alarm Movement
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
An Aug. 18 New York Times story detailing hard times for the nation’s environmental groups in this second presidency of Donald Trump contains a clear lesson in the perils that come with basing an entire movement on crony capitalist federal policies.
That lesson is this: What the government gives, it can also take away.
Headlined “Environmental Groups Face ‘Generational’ Setbacks Under Trump,” the story’s writers bemoan hardships now being faced by major environmental groups like the Sierra Club, the NRDC, Greenpeace and others, who have watched as the President and his team of disruptors have dismantled much of the Biden agenda in just eight months. Worse, they now face the horror of watching EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin go after the very foundation of climate alarm orthodoxy, the agency’s Obama-era 2010 endangerment finding on greenhouse gases.
One former Sierra Club president, Ramon Cruz, says the morale across the entire movement “is destroyed” as members have watched their IRA subsidy-fueled house of cards come tumbling down. Things have turned so sour at the Sierra Club that the group’s board of directors abruptly fired Executive Director Ben Jealous earlier in August after what was said to have been “an extensive evaluation of his conduct.” The move came after Jealous had taken the Club through several rounds of layoffs amid struggles to maintain money flows.
Much of the pain being felt by these alarmist groups today stems from the provisions contained in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act phasing out green energy subsidies.
Ruthy Gourevitch, a policy director at the Climate and Community Institute, bemoans the movement’s new reality under Trump. “With one election and one bill, most of the signature climate work that organizations, advocates and movements have been working toward is largely undone,” he says, perhaps unwittingly saying the quiet part about the government-forced nature of his own movement out loud.
Someone really should inform these leaders of the modern environmental movement that they live in a constitutional republic which holds elections every four years. If your movement’s “signature work” is based almost entirely on a single massive power grab by a single federal agency and a single overreaching bill signed by a single-term president, then yes, a single election can undo it all fairly rapidly.
The pain is especially hard for groups who beefed up staff based on the promise of millions, even billions, of dollars coming in from all the grants that were shoved out the door at the EPA and Department of Energy in the final weeks of the Biden presidency. Faced with the effort by Zeldin to claw back $27 billion of such grants, Rewiring America cut 28% of its staff recently.
Those $27 billion in grants were handed out under an IRA-established Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a huge pot of money the Competitive Enterprise Institute describes as “an EPA slush fund that requires the agency to create slush funds for nonprofits.” Now deprived of those funds, the climate alarm non-profits find themselves in a heap of unfunded trouble.
The question for these groups now becomes one of finding the best way to shift tactics. The Times quotes billionaire and former Democratic presidential contender Tom Steyer as writing on Facebook, “If we want to win, we need a fundamental recalibration. Climate can no longer be a separate cause. It must be the context for making people’s lives better. It has to feel like relief. Like opportunity.”
To do that, someone will need to inform residents of tiny towns like Taft, Texas, how those hundreds of giant windmills surrounding their city represent relief and opportunity.
That seems like a big lift, one that only seems larger without all those gold bars from the government to help pay for it all.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
You’ve probably heard by now the blockbuster news that Microsoft founder Bill Gates, one of the richest people to ever walk the planet, has had a change of heart on climate change.
For several decades Gates poured billions of dollars into the climate industrial complex.
Some conservatives have sniffed that Bill Gates has shifted his position on climate change because he and Microsoft have invested heavily in energy intensive data centers.
AI and robotics will triple our electric power needs over the next 15 years. And you can’t get that from windmills.
What Bill Gates has done is courageous and praiseworthy. It’s not many people of his stature that will admit that they were wrong. Al Gore certainly hasn’t. My wife says I never do.
Although I’ve only once met Bill Gates, I’ve read his latest statements on global warming. He still endorses the need for communal action (which won’t work), but he has sensibly disassociated himself from the increasingly radical and economically destructive dictates from the green movement. For that, the left has tossed him out of their tent as a “traitor.”
I wish to highlight several critical insights that should be the starting point for constructive debate that every clear-minded thinker on either side of the issue should embrace.
(1) It’s time to put human welfare at the center of our climate policies. This includes improving agriculture and health in poor countries.
(2) Countries should be encouraged to grow their economies even if that means a reliance on fossil fuels like natural gas. Economic growth is essential to human progress.
(3) Although climate change will hurt poor people, for the vast majority of them it will not be the only or even the biggest threat to their lives and welfare. The biggest problems are poverty and disease.
I would add to these wise declarations two inconvenient truths: First: the solution to changing temperatures and weather patterns is technological progress. A far fewer percentage of people die of severe weather events today than 50 or 100 or 1,000 years ago.
Second, energy is the master resource and to deny people reliable and affordable energy is to keep them poor and vulnerable – and this is inhumane.
If Bill Gates were to start directing even a small fraction of his foundation funds to ensuring everyone on the planet has access to electric power and safe drinking water, it would do more for humanity than all of the hundreds of billions that governments and foundations have devoted to climate programs that have failed to change the globe’s temperature.
Stephen Moore is a co-founder of Unleash Prosperity and a former Trump senior economic advisor.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
At Tesla’s Austin headquarters, investors backed Musk’s 12-step plan that ties his potential trillion-dollar payout to a series of aggressive financial and operational milestones, including raising the company’s valuation from roughly $1.4 trillion to $8.5 trillion and selling one million humanoid robots within a decade. Musk hailed the outcome as a turning point for Tesla’s future.
“What we’re about to embark upon is not merely a new chapter of the future of Tesla but a whole new book,” Musk said, as The New York Times reported.
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The decision cements investor confidence in Musk’s “moonshot” management style and reinforces the belief that Tesla’s success depends heavily on its founder and his leadership.
Tesla Annual meeting starting now
https://t.co/j1KHf3k6ch— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 6, 2025
“Those who claim the plan is ‘too large’ ignore the scale of ambition that has historically defined Tesla’s trajectory,” the Florida State Board of Administration said in a securities filing describing why it voted for Mr. Musk’s pay plan. “A company that went from near bankruptcy to global leadership in E.V.s and clean energy under similar frameworks has earned the right to use incentive models that reward moonshot performance.”
Investors like Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood defended Tesla’s decision, saying the plan aligns shareholder rewards with company performance.
“I do not understand why investors are voting against Elon’s pay package when they and their clients would benefit enormously if he and his incredible team meet such high goals,” Wood wrote on X.
Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, Norges Bank Investment Management — one of Tesla’s largest shareholders — broke ranks, however, and voted against the pay plan, saying that the package was excessive.
“While we appreciate the significant value created under Mr. Musk’s visionary role, we are concerned about the total size of the award, dilution, and lack of mitigation of key person risk,” the firm said.
The vote comes months after Musk wrapped up his short-lived government role under President Donald Trump. In February, Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team sparked a firestorm when they announced plans to eliminate the U.S. Agency for International Development, drawing backlash from Democrats and prompting protests targeting Musk and his companies, including Tesla.
Back in May, Musk announced that his “scheduled time” leading DOGE had ended.
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