DAVID BLACKMON: Trump Brings Hard Times For The Climate Alarm Movement

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.