Carbon, canceled

On the Brooklyn Bridge, a boy in a green cap grips a cardboard sign that reads, in shaky block letters: Tiny hands off our state! Around him, a stroller brigade chants for solar panels, while a drummer pounds a beat powered by an electric Ford F-150. This is “Sun Day” — 450 rallies across the country meant to celebrate renewable energy, even as the White House works furiously to dismantle it.

The Trump administration has not just slowed climate policy. It has declared war on it. Last week, the president proposed canceling the government’s 16-year-old endangerment finding — the scientific ruling that greenhouse gases threaten human health. Without it, the Environmental Protection Agency loses its legal teeth. No more limits on tailpipes. No more caps on smokestacks.

At the same time, the administration has halted major wind projects — including one 80 percent built — and moved to erase clean energy tax credits. Solar developers and offshore wind companies talk of “stop work” orders arriving like eviction notices. Fossil fuel donors, who bankrolled Trump’s return to the White House, are getting their money’s worth.

But here’s the catch. The U.S. energy mix is changing anyway. In March, fossil fuels supplied less than half of the nation’s electricity for the first time. Texas — oil-soaked, drill-baby-drill Texas — is the fastest-growing clean energy state. The physics of warming, after all, don’t pause for politics.

That may explain why the administration is targeting the numbers themselves. At NASA, satellites that track greenhouse gases are slated for decommissioning. At NOAA, the billion-dollar disaster database — once a grim annual tally of hurricanes, fires and floods — has gone dark. At the EPA, the greenhouse gas reporting system, which forced 8,000 facilities to disclose emissions, has been axed as “red tape.” If you don’t like what the data shows, stop collecting it.

Critics call it denial by deletion. “Measuring itself is a political act,” said Syracuse University political scientist Sarah Pralle. Without statistics, she argues, problems can be made to disappear — at least on paper.

Yet the climate movement is trying to flip the script. Instead of only naming villains, activists are staging solar concerts, Indigenous dance performances, even unveiling a net-zero fire station. The bet is that optimism, not just outrage, can broaden the coalition — conservatives who like homegrown energy independence, suburban homeowners enticed by lower bills, even developers who see profit in panels.

The reality is more complicated. Courts could side with the administration, locking in legal precedents that cripple future attempts to regulate greenhouse gases. Abroad, allies nod politely, buy more American gas, and quietly double down on their own climate pledges.

At home, the rallies continue. Children carry hand-lettered signs, strollers roll past fossil fuel headquarters, and solar panels go up on Habitat for Humanity homes. But optimism alone cannot blunt the consequences. If the administration succeeds in scrubbing the data and dismantling the science, America could enter a dangerous twilight where climate disasters grow deadlier even as official records vanish. The physics of global warming will not wait, and the longer denial holds sway in Washington, the more catastrophic the reckoning will be.

illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

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