How the Grift Works

Trump pulls off a nasty con--and maybe he gets rolled too

Three card monte, midtown Manhattan, circa 1980

When I was a cub reporter at the New Yorker in the early 1980s, New York City was actually a somewhat seedy and dangerous (if fascinating) place (sort of fitting the image currently assigned it by MAGA ideologues who have ignored its almost complete makeover into a remarkably safe enclave). In those days, anyone wandering the Times Square neighborhood where I worked could count on seeing a three-card monte game on every block, with fast-talking card sharps hustling the tourists. It wasn’t very sophisticated, but it must have worked because they were out there every day.

The grift playing out this week in the federal government around climate is no more complicated, but it too relies on speed and distraction. On the first day of his term, Trump set up the con by asking the EPA to evaluate its 2009 finding that greenhouse gas emissions were dangerous. Yesterday, EPA czar and former failed gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin dutifully made his long-awaited announcement: nothing to fear from carbon dioxide, methane, and the other warming gases.

"Today is the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen," EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said when he first announced the idea. "We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S. and more."

Trump didn’t really need to do this in order to stop working on the climate crisis—he’s done that already. The point here is to try and make that decision permanent, so that some future administration can’t work on climate either, without going through the long and bureaucratic process of once again finding that the most dangerous thing on the earth is in fact dangerous.

The problem with this simple one-two punch from Trump and Zeldin is that someone will challenge it in court as soon as it becomes official. “If EPA finalizes this illegal and cynical approach, we will see them in court,” said Christy Goldufss of the NRDC. And they’ll have an argument, since—well, floods, fires, smoke, storms. I mean, if carbon dioxide was dangerous in 2009, that’s a hell of a lot more obvious 16 years later. The Supreme Court upheld the idea that co2 was dangerous in 2007—here’s how Justice John Paul Stevens began that opinion

A well-documented rise in global temperatures has coincided with a significant increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Respected scientists believe the two trends are related. For when carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere, it acts like the ceiling of a greenhouse, trapping solar energy and retarding the escape of reflected heat. It is therefore a species—the most important species—of a “greenhouse gas.”

But that was a different, and non-corrupted, Supreme Court. John Roberts wrote the dissent, and he’s doubtless eager to do with climate change what he’s already done with abortion. But that would be easier if they had some “well-respected experts” to say that there’s not any trouble—stage three of this grift. It’s true that there aren’t any well-respected experts that believe that, but the White House has hired several aged contrarians who have maintained for decades that global warming is not a problem, even as the temperature (and the damage) soared. And yesterday they released a new report that reads more or less like a Wall Street Journal op-ed. In it they cherry pick data, turn to old and long-debunked studies, and in general set up a group of strawmen so absurd that one almost has to grin in admiration. Actual climate scientists were lining up to say their papers had been misquoted, but all you needed was a modicum of knowledge to see how stupid the whole enterprise was. Just as an example, our contrarians hit the old talking point that co2 is plant food—indeed, “below 180 ppm, the growth rates of many C3 species are reduced 40-60 percent relative to 350 ppm (Gerhart and Ward 2010) and growth has stopped altogether under experimental conditions of 60— 140 ppm CO2.” Great point except that there is no one calling for, and no way, to get co2 levels anywhere near that low. I led a large-scale effort to remind people that anything above 350 ppm is too high, and that was so successful that we’re now at 420 ppm and climbing. Too little carbon dioxide is a problem for the planet in the way that too little arrogance is a problem for the president

And yet, when it finally reaches the Court, they will doubtless cite this entirely cynical and bad-faith document to buttress the case that the EPA should be allowed to stop paying attention to carbon dioxide. As I said, it’s a pretty easy to follow swindle, but they count on the fact that most people won’t. Butter won’t melt in their mouths—as Energy Secretary (and former fracking executive) Chris Wright said in his foreword to the new report

I chose the [authors] for their rigor, honesty, and willingness to elevate the debate. I exerted no control over their conclusions. What you’ll read are their words, drawn from the best available data and scientific assessments. I’ve reviewed the report carefully, and I believe it faithfully represents the state of climate science today.

Every word of that is nonsense, but it doesn’t matter—because it’s an official document on the right letterhead it will do the trick. This is precisely what science looks like when it’s perverted away from the search for truth. It’s disgusting.

Still, there’s another grift also underway this week, and this one that may work the other way and do the world some good. The president announced his new trade deal with the EU, which calls for 15 percent tariffs—but it’s sweetened by the European promise to buy $750 billion worth of American natural gas in the next three years. Trump has essentially been using the tariff process as a shakedown, a way to repay his Big Oil cronies for their hundreds of millions in support: it’s pretty much exactly like a mob protection racket, where you buy from the guy you’re told to or you get a rock through the window. The White House quickly put out a list of thank yous, including one from the American Petroleum Institute: “We welcome POTUS’ announcement of a U.S.-EU trade framework that will help solidify America’s role as Europe’s leading source of affordable, reliable and secure energy.”

And yet, as Reuters first noted and then many others also calculated, the numbers are clearly nonsense. First, the EU actually doesn’t buy any energy itself, and it can’t tell its member states what to purchase; in fact, even those member states usually rely on private companies to buy stuff. Second, it’s physically impossible to imagine the U.S. selling Europe $250 billion worth of natural gas a year. As Tim McDonnell wrote at Semafor,

Total US energy exports to the world were worth $318 billion last year, of which about $74.4 billion went to the EU, according to Rystad Energy. So to meet the target, the EU would need to more than triple its purchases of US fossil fuels — and the US would need to stop selling them to almost anyone else.

“These numbers make no sense,” said Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a researcher specializing in European gas markets at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

The biggest reason it won’t happen, though, is that Europe is quickly switching to renewable energy. As Bill Farren-Price, head of gas research at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, explained to the Financial Times

European gas demand is soft and energy prices are falling. In any case, it is private companies not states that contract for energy imports,” he said. “Like it or not, in Europe the windmills are winning.”

Trump will doubtless coerce some countries into buying more LNG in the short run, and that will do damage. Global Venture announced yesterday that they’d found the financing for the massive CP2 export terminal, which has been opposed by both climate scientists and environmental justice activists. As Louisiana’s Roishetta Ozane said yesterday,

“The CP2 LNG facility is an assault on everything I hold dear. It’s a direct threat to the health and safety of my community and an assault on the livelihoods of our fishermen and shrimpers.

I’ve seen my kids struggle with asthma, eczema, headaches, and other illnesses that result from the pollution petrochemical and LNG plants dump into my community. I won’t stop opposing this project in every way I can, because my children – and everyone’s children – deserve to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and live in a healthy environment. I refuse to let Venture Global turn my community into a sacrifice zone for the sake of its profits.”

But my guess is that such facilities won’t be pumping for as many decades as their investors imagine. Europe pivoted hard to renewables because Vladimir Putin proved an unstable supplier of natural gas; Trump’s America is hardly more reliable, since the president has made it clear he’ll tear up any agreement on a whim. Any rational nation will be making the obvious calculation: ‘I may not have gas of my own, but I’ve got wind and sun and they’re cheap. I’d rather rely on the wind than the windbag.’

Trump’s a conman, but he’s also a mark.

In other energy and climate news:

+Superb reporting in the LA Times on how climate change and immigration intimidation are making life impossible for many Californians. As Marcos Magaña writes

In the Inland Empire, where summer temperatures regularly climb into the triple digits, Hernandez said many families are now making impossible choices: Do they turn on the air conditioning or buy groceries? Do they stay inside and risk heat exhaustion, or go outside and risk being taken?

These questions have reshaped Isabel’s life. She now goes to work only a few days a week, when she feels safe enough to leave her children. That means there’s not enough money to cover the bills.

Isabel and her family now spend most of the day confined to a single room in their mobile home, the only one with air conditioning. Their electricity bill has rocketed from $80 to $250 a month. So far, her family has been able to make partial payments to the utility, but she fears what will happen if their electricity gets cut off, as has happened to some of her neighbors.

Before the raids, Isabel’s family would cool off at a nearby stream, go to air-conditioned shops or grab a raspado, or shaved ice. But in the face of heightened enforcement, these sorts of routines have largely been abandoned. “Those are very simple things,” Hernandez said, “but they are very meaningful to families.”

Fear also makes it difficult to spend time at public cooling centers, libraries or other public buildings that in theory could offer an escape from the heat. Isabel’s youngest child isn’t used to staying quiet for long periods, and she worries they’ll draw attention in unfamiliar public spaces.

“I do my best to keep them cool,” Isabel said, explaining that she now resorts to bathing her children regularly as one cooling strategy.

Itzel’s father, who is undocumented, hasn’t left his apartment in over a month out of fear of immigration enforcement actions. He used to make up to $6,000 a month as a trucker — now, he can’t afford to turn on his air conditioning

Meanwhile, as Yale Climate Connections reports, climate change is making conditions at the Everglades internment camp intolerable. Yessenia Funes, always reliable, writes

Jeff Masters, a meteorologist with Yale Climate Connections, participated in training missions at the Everglades airstrip in the 1980s during hurricane-hunting missions with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He said the area is not fit to keep people for extended periods, especially during hurricane season.

Masters said that seven recorded hurricanes have affected the site. At least three hurricanes since 1999 (Irene, Irma, and Eta) have brought seven to 10 inches of rain to the site, which lies seven to 12 feet above sea level. If a hurricane strikes, the impact on detainees would depend on how well the state engineered the detention facility to drain out water. The speed and effectiveness of an evacuation are other factors. There’s only one road in and out of the area.

“Moving 3,000 people from the middle of the swamp to God knows where in a mad scramble, if this is the scenario, is irresponsible and dangerous,” said Thomas Kennedy, a policy consultant with the Florida Immigrant Coalition who has been on the ground organizing against the facility and for the rights of those imprisoned.

+Donald Trump, of course, took his anti-wind crusade to Europe last week—but there’s some good pushback underway. In Scotland, as Bloomberg’s Willem Marx pointed out, entrepreneurs are learning how to combat NIMBYism effectively:

Like other Scottish Highlanders and islanders, residents of Lewis have long been forced from land their forebears have farmed for centuries to make way for powerful, but often absent, landowners. These so-called clearances could be violent, prompting waves of emigration to North America and elsewhere that continued well into the 20th century. (One émigré was Donald Trump’s mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, who left Lewis for New York in 1930; on a trip to Scotland this week, the US president is dedicating one of his golf courses there to her.) For those who remained, though, the heavy-handed action by outsiders also fostered communal resilience.

Calum Iain Maciver, a former deputy chief of the local government on Lewis and the nearby islands, has tapped into that resilience to advocate for wind power. The tall, affable 64-year-old has been tasked with establishing a nonprofit to manage community disbursements from the Stornoway Wind Farm and a similar project Danish developer Eurowind Energy A/S aims to build half an hour south. In both instances, landowners will receive substantial lease payments, while local communities will own 20% of the operation and receive fixed annual fees for the sites’ generating capacities. While both have taken decades to come to fruition, “if the project is solid, you will eventually be able to persuade people to get there,” Maciver says over a plate of fish and chips in Stornoway. In the UK, “so many different people have to be satisfied, each defending their own silo.”

Meanwhile, in Britain’s Telegraph newspaper, a reliably conservative voice, senior travel writer Greg Dickinson made a point that can’t be made too often. Most normal people think windmills are…kind of beautiful. On a trip to Cornwall, his toddler in the back seat started to babble excitedly. “But what was he trying to say? Win termites?”

+The sluggish growth of America’s EV charger network is finally surging, Suvrat Kothari reports

The deployment of new fast charging ports, as well as stations, is on record pace in 2025, charging data company Paren said in a report released Monday.

America is on track to add 16,700 public fast-charging ports by the end of this year, which would be about 2.4 times the number of ports added in 2022. If this pace continues, the U.S. will have 100,000 public fast-charging ports by 2027.

"Despite the [federal funding] pause and other factors, 2025 will be a record year of fast charging deployment—our estimate of nearly 20% year-over-year increase in new ports," Paren's Chief Analyst Loren McDonald said in an email.

Partly contributing to this trend are what Paren calls “Charging 2.0” companies. That means new companies such as Ionna, Mercedes-Benz High Power Charging, BP Pulse and Walmart that are heralding the next phase of charging in the U.S.

In this phase, new EV charging stations are becoming more standardized, with a minimum of 10 stalls that deliver 350 kilowatts to 400 kilowatts of maximum power. That means more available plugs for EV drivers, less congestion and faster charging times. In fact, 63% of the ports deployed in the second quarter were capable of delivering 250 kilowatts or more power, up from 47% in the first quarter.

+Why did atmospheric levels of CO2 surge at a record pace last year? A new study concludes it was because hot, wet weather saw dramatic increases in respiration by plants. As New Scientist’s James Dineen put it,

Hot and wet weather in 2024 – the hottest, wettest year on record – caused ecosystems on land to emit nearly as much carbon dioxide as they took out of the atmosphere, according to a preliminary analysis. This is the second year in a row in which the land carbon sink has nearly vanished due to climate-related stressors, and would explain why 2024 saw a record jump in the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere.

The findings could also mean that the land carbon sink – which normally removes billions of tonnes of CO₂ from the atmosphere each year and is essential for meeting climate targets – is weakening decades earlier than expected.

+Corbin Hiar, in Politico, breaks the news that a group of researchers were secretly planning a “test to dim sunlight.” This is James Bond—or, more exactly, SPECTRE—stuff.

The details outlined in funding requests, emails, texts and other records obtained by POLITICO’s E&E News raise new questions about a secretive billionaire-backed initiative that oversaw last year’s brief solar geoengineering experiment on the San Francisco Bay.

They also offer a rare glimpse into the vast scope of research aimed at finding ways to counter the Earth’s warming, work that has often occurred outside public view. Such research is drawing increased interest at a time when efforts to address the root cause of climate change — burning fossil fuels — are facing setbacks in the U.S. and Europe. But the notion of human tinkering with the weather and climate has drawn a political backlash and generated conspiracy theories, adding to the challenges of mounting even small-scale tests.

Last year’s experiment, led by the University of Washington and intended to run for months, lasted about 20 minutes before being shut down by Alameda city officials who objected that nobody had told them about it beforehand.

That initial test was only meant to be a prequel. Even before it began, the researchers were talking with donors and consultants about conducting a 3,900-square-mile cloud-creation test off the west coasts of North America, Chile or south-central Africa, according to more than 400 internal documents obtained by E&E News through an open records request to the University of Washington. 

“At such scales, meaningful changes in clouds will be readily detectable from space,” said a 2023 research plan from the university’s Marine Cloud Brightening Program. The massive experiment would have been contingent upon the successful completion of the thwarted pilot test on the carrier deck in Alameda, according to the plan. The records offer no indication of whether the researchers or their billionaire backers have since abandoned the larger project.

+Abrahm Lustgarten has a remarkable story for Pro Publica about the rapid drying of the planet, mostly from drawing down irrigation aquifers. Read the whole thing—here’s a taste:

As the planet gets hotter and its reservoirs shrink and its glaciers melt, people have increasingly drilled into a largely ungoverned, invisible cache of fresh water: the vast, hidden pools found deep underground.

Now, a new study that examines the world’s total supply of fresh water — accounting for its rivers and rain, ice and aquifers together — warns that Earth’s most essential resource is quickly disappearing, signaling what the paper’s authors describe as “a critical, emerging threat to humanity.” The landmasses of the planet are drying. In most places there is less precipitation even as moisture evaporates from the soil faster. More than anything, Earth is being slowly dehydrated by the unmitigated mining of groundwater, which underlies vast proportions of every continent. Nearly 6 billion people, or three quarters of humanity, live in the 101 countries that the study identified as confronting a net decline in water supply — portending enormous challenges for food production and a heightening risk of conflict and instability.

The paper “provides a glimpse of what the future is going to be,” said Hrishikesh Chandanpurkar, an earth systems scientist working with Arizona State University and the lead author of the study. “We are already dipping from a trust fund. We don’t actually know how much the account has.”

+Amidst the joke that the Supreme Court has become, it’s worth remembering that state courts are often still doing their jobs. Yesterday an Ulster County Supreme court Justice in New York signaled that he’s about to find the state government guilty of dragging its feet on meeting the demands of a state climate law.

Ulster County Supreme Court Justice Julian Schreibman on Friday skewered a lawyer for the state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) who argued that the state could not issue required regulations to cut greenhouse gases any time soon.

“It seems to me that the core of your argument is that we’re living in a time of change and uncertainty, and DEC needs to be given some leeway to accommodate that,” Schreibman said.

“That’s correct, your honor,” replied Meredith Lee-Clark, of the New York State Attorney General’s office, who was representing DEC.

“I don’t know that I’ve ever lived in a time that wasn’t one of change and uncertainty, so I don’t know how that is a governable standard,” the judge continued.

+Some guy name of McKibben had a piece in Mother Jones showing how local red tape is making rooftop solar far more expensive for Americans than anywhere else in the world. Though he interviewed fifteen or twenty people for the story, he seems to have also indulged a fondness for ranting:

If you could easily get a permit to install a low-cost machine that could save you money, and, oh yes, also help ward off the civilizational challenge that is climate change, you might start thinking a little differently about government. Forget YIMBYs for a moment—we’re talking YOMRs. You’ve got a right to the sunshine that falls on your home, whether you’re a renter with a balcony or a homeowner. Free the electron! We’re used to thinking of roofs as protection from rain—but the sun can also provide a shower of dollars and cents, and some bureaucrat shouldn’t force you to stay at the mercy of Big Utility. Why should the Chinese and the Australians and the Germans get access to the sun while you’re denied it? I mean, what the hell—we’re bathed in free energy every daylight hour and we need a bunch of permits to use it? What’s American about that?

And he seems to have also written another long piece for Rolling Stone, on the theme “Solar is Liberation.” In it he somehow manages to namecheck Nietzsche, George Harrison, Saint Francis, and Jung. Showing off if you ask me, but I did enjoy this passage, or at least the last line:

Think of it all as a series of small liberations from complication, at every step of the game. If you want to run a car on gasoline — which we’ve come to think of as the “normal” way — you need a society that can drill holes in the bottom of the sea or use explosives to “frack” gas seams miles beneath the ground. Once you’ve pumped this soup of old biology up to the surface, you need to transport it to a refinery — a massive chemistry set of pipes and valves and steaming exhausts — where you crack it into different components. You take the gasoline fraction and figure out how to get it to a gas station, either on a truck or a pipeline or a ship. There you wait for customers to come in so they can pump a measure into their tanks, where it is then sprayed in tiny increments past a spark plug to run a complicated series of pistons and cylinders that produce motion, as hot exhaust gases spew out a tailpipe. (Make sure you don’t do that with the garage door closed, or you’ll die.)

At my house, sunlight falls on a panel on the roof, and the photons knock electrons loose from small pieces of silicon in the panel, producing electricity. It runs through a cord into my garage and then into the battery of my Kia Nyro, providing the power to turn the wheels — there are about 20 moving parts. You need to replace the tires and the windshield wipers, but there’s not much else to break. You go to the gas station for Diet Dr. Pepper — once you have an EV, it’s basically just a caffeine depot.