Libby Lindsay spent 21 years working underground as a miner for Bethlehem Steel in West Virginia. She saw many safety improvements over the years, and always felt grateful that she could call the local Mine Safety and Health Administration office whenever she wondered whether a rule was being followed. She joined the safety committees launched by the local chapter of the United Mine Workers, which collaborated with the agency to watchdog coal companies. She understood the price that had been paid for the regulations it enforced. “Every law was written in blood,” she said. “It’s there because somebody was injured or killed.”

Still, she and others who work the nation’s mines worry President Trump is about to limit the agency’s local reach. As his administration targets federal buildings for closure and sale, 35 of its offices are on the list. Fifteen are in Appalachian coalfields, with seven in eastern Kentucky alone and the others concentrated in southern West Virginia and southeastern Pennsylvania. Of the remaining 20 offices, many are in the West, in remote corners of Wyoming, Nevada, and Colorado. Miners’ advocates worry these closures could reduce the capacity of an agency that’s vastly improved mining safety over the past 50 years or so and could play a vital role as the Trump administration promotes fossil fuels like coal, and as decarbonization efforts increase the need for lithium and other metals.

Since its inception in 1977, the agency has operated under the auspices of the Department of Labor to reduce the risks of what has always been one of the world’s most dangerous jobs. Before Congress created the agency, known as MSHA, hundreds of miners died each year, in explosions, tunnel collapses, and equipment malfunctions. (The number was far higher through the 1940s, often reaching into the thousands.) Last year, 31 people died in mining accidents, according to the agency’s data. Even after accounting for coal’s steady decline, that tally, while still tragic, reflects major strides in safety.

“Coal mining is a tough business. It’s a very competitive business. There’s always a temptation to compete on safety, to cut corners on safety, to make that your competitive advantage as a mine operator,” Christopher Mark, a government mine safety specialist who has spent decades making the job safer, told Grist. “And it’s our job to make sure that nobody can do that.”

Trump’s pick to lead MSHA, Wayne Palmer, who is awaiting confirmation, previously was vice president of the Essential Minerals Association, a trade association representing extraction companies. The Department of Labor declined to comment on the proposed lease terminations. A representative of the U.S. General Services Administration, which manages federal offices, told Grist that any locations being considered for closure have been made aware of that, and some lease terminations may be rescinded or not issued at all. 

Read Next

A new federal rule aims to protect miners from black lung disease

Katie Myers

Many of the country’s remaining underground coal mines – the most dangerous kind – are located in Appalachia. MSHA has historically placed its field offices in mining communities. Although the number of coal mines has declined by more than half since 2008, tens of thousands of miners still work the coalfields. Many of them still venture underground.

The dwindling number of fatalities comes even as the MSHA has been plagued by continued staffing and funding shortfalls, with the federal Office of the Inspector General repeatedly admonishing the agency for falling below its own annual inspection targets. It also has recommended more frequent sampling to ensure mine operators protect workers from toxic coal and silica dust. After decades of work, federal regulators finally tightened silica exposure rules, but miners and their advocates worry too little staffing and too few inspections could hamper enforcement. 

“There are going to be fewer inspections, which means that operators that are not following the rules are going to get away with not following the rules for longer than they would have,” said Chelsea Barnes, the director of government affairs and strategy at environmental justice nonprofit Appalachian Voices. The organization has worked with union members and advocates for those with black lung disease to lobby for stricter silica dust exposure limits.

Last month, the United Mine Workers’ Association denounced the proposed office closures. As demand for coal continues to decline, it worries that companies could pinch pennies to maximize profits — or avoid bankruptcy. ​​”Companies are completely dependent upon the price of coal,” said Phil Smith, executive assistant to union president Cecil Roberts. ”[If] it’s bad enough, they think, ‘Well, we can cut a corner here. We can pick a penny there.’”

The Biden administration made an effort to staff the agency. In the waning days of Biden’s term, Chris Williamson, who led the agency at the time, told Grist he was “very proud of rebuilding our team” because “you can’t go out and enforce the silica standard or enforce other things if you don’t have the people in place to do it.” The union worries that the Trump administration, which has pursued sweeping layoffs throughout the government, will target MSHA, where many of the Biden hires remain probationary employees. Despite the previous administration’s attempts to bolster the agency, it still missed inspections due to understaffing.

Anyone who isn’t terminated will have to relocate to larger offices if Trump shutters local outposts, placing them further from the mines they keep tabs on. In addition to inspecting underground mines at least quarterly and surface mines biannually, inspectors make more frequent checks of operations where toxic gases are present. They also respond to complaints. Work now done by people in the offices throughout eastern Kentucky likely would be consolidated in Lexington, Kentucky, or Wise County, Virginia, which are 200 miles apart. 

Field offices have been consolidated before, and mining experts acknowledged there may be a time and a place for such things, but it’s highly unusual to close so many without due process. In early March, the House Committee on Education and Workforce submitted a letter to Vince Micone, the acting secretary of labor, requesting documents and information on the closures and expressing concern that as many as 90 mine inspection job offers may have been rescinded. Their letter specifically referred to the agency’s history of understaffing that led to catastrophes like the Upper Big Branch mine explosion that killed 29 people in 2010, the nation’s worst mining accident in four decades.

“One of the lessons of the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster, according to MSHA’s own internal investigation, is that staffing disruptions at the managerial level resulted in MSHA’s inspectors failing to adequately address smaller-scale methane explosions in the months leading up the massive explosion that killed 29 miners fifteen years ago this April,” read the letter, which was signed by Democratic representatives Bobby Scott of Virginia and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.

The impact of potential cuts stretches far beyond coal, into the mines that will extract the lithium and other metals needed for clean energy and other industries. As of last year, the nation employed almost 256,000 metal and nonmetal miners who pull copper, zinc, and other things from the earth. “It’s an agency that matters, regardless of how we’re producing our energy,” said Chelsea Barnes of Appalachian Voices.

After spending so much time in the mines, Lindsay is concerned by the direction the Trump administration is heading, even as lawmakers in states like West Virginia and Kentucky have in recent years attempted to roll back regulations. “That’s going to be the future of MSHA,” she said. “They’re going to be in name only. Miners are going to die. And nobody but their families are going to care.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump administration moves to shutter mine safety offices in coal country on Mar 25, 2025.

Every January in Elko, Nev., an influx of cowboys and cowboy wannabes take over the town with events like rawhide braiding workshops, bluegrass concerts and poetry readings. It’s all part of the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, which celebrated its 40th year in January.

Hosted by the Western Folklife Center, this year’s gathering was the second most attended Cowboy Poetry Gathering in its 40-year history. Kristin Windbigler, chief executive officer of the Western Folklife Center, attributes this to a resurging interest in cowboy culture among younger people.

“This year was the year that it felt like everything tipped,” Windbigler said in a phone interview with the Sierra Nevada Ally. “It felt like the median age of the attendees dropped by about 20 years.”

She said this could be because the Center has put more effort into growing their social media presence and inviting younger artists to perform.

“We have a tremendous amount of reverence for the past and for traditions, but you can’t really pass on traditions if you don’t have the up and coming generations there too,” Windbigler said.

People from all over the country and beyond visit this small eastern Nevada town to celebrate the rural West and meet with old friends. The first gathering was held in 1985 for a little under 1,000 guests, and it has grown exponentially since then.  About 14,000 tickets were sold at this year’s various events, and the Center estimates 8,000 people attended at least one portion of the gathering.

Windbigler said this bodes well for the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering’s future – as long as the Center can remain afloat.

An article published by the Elko Daily Free Press in January claimed the Center has lost more than $2 million over 12 years. In response, Windbigler said that most of that loss is due to depreciation on their office building. It can also be attributed to the Covid-19 pandemic that forced them to cancel the in-person portion of the gathering for two years in a row.

To build long-term financial stability, the Western Folklife Center is planning to turn the building they own – the historic Pioneer Hotel – back into a hotel. They already have a restaurant and bar in the Pioneer Saloon on the building’s first floor, and according to a feasibility study the Center paid for, renting the hotel rooms would likely fill their current profit gap.

They need $6.5 million to fund this project, and right now, they’re about one-third of the way there. Over the next several months, they will move into the permitting portion of the hotel project. Once that’s done – and if they can raise enough money – the project should be “shovel-ready,” Windbigler said.

Until then, their main focus is making the gathering the best it can be for as long as possible. That means honoring the many different versions of cowboy culture, including the one that existed 40 years ago at the gathering’s inception and the culture that still exists today–despite the challenges modern farming faces.

The number of U.S. farmers and ranchers has declined precipitously since the mid-1900s, while their average age has steadily increased. Small businesses have been bought up by large corporations across the farming industry, consolidating the number of operating ranches.

This means that the number of tried and true “cowboys,” – those who make a living off livestock and the land – has also declined.

But based on the thousands of people that visit Elko every January, it doesn’t seem like the interest in cowboy culture is going away anytime soon.

“I don’t really buy into all of the ‘cowboy is a dying breed’ and the ‘West is dead’ stuff,” Windbigler said. “You know, things change, but people are still out there living lives connected to agriculture.”

Her ultimate goal is to honor those lives and hopes her work can encourage younger generations to follow suit.

The National Cowboy Poetry Gathering is meant to do just that, and despite the hiccups of depreciating assets or a pandemic, Windbigler said the Western Follklife Center has no plans to stop hosting an event that many attendees return to year after year.

“The pandemic killed off a lot of arts and culture organizations like us, and we consider it a small miracle that we survived,” Windbigler said.

Yet, despite the challenges, arts and culture focused on rural life will always have a home in Elko, if Windbigler has anything to do with it.

“We live to fight another day.”

A U.S. District Court judge ruled Thursday that federal agencies illegally fired tens of thousands of employees over President’s Day weekend.

At the end of a March 13 hearing of American Federal of Government Employees v. U.S. Office of Personnel Management (AFGE v. OPM), Judge William Alsup placed a preliminary injunction on federal agencies, ordering them to immediately reinstate the employees that were fired per an OPM directive from President Donald Trump in February. The defendants swiftly filed an appeal, but unless another judge intervenes, Alsup’s ruling stands as the default.

The basis of his ruling, Alsup declared in scathing language, was that the government deliberately went after the workers with the least amount of appeal power, making them the easy targets of an unfair and arbitrary government slash.

“I got goosebumps,” said Don Neubacher after the judge issued his decision. He’s a former superintendent of Yosemite National Park and a board member of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, one of the plaintiffs in the case. “We’re very happy with the ruling. We’re going to celebrate it.”

Alsup’s order rang like a takedown of the federal government. It came from his review of the evidence: On Jan. 20, the OPM instructed federal agencies to compile a list of all their workers who had been hired within the past two years or had recently received a promotion, officially called probationary workers. Then, on Feb. 13 and over President’s Day weekend, the OPM ordered agencies to fire that group. In a template email, the OPM cited the employees’ poor work performance, even though many of the workers had earned stellar performance reviews.

Labor unions, including the AFGE, quickly challenged the OPM. At the first hearing of AFGE v. OPM on Feb. 27, Alsup granted a temporary restraining order and said the federal government’s efforts to expunge its employees were “unlawful, invalid, and must be stopped and rescinded.”

Alsup used nearly the same language Thursday morning. Ahead of the hearing, the plaintiffs had sought an injunction against an expanded list of defendants that included all 23 federal agencies that dismissed probationary staff. Alsup applied his ruling to the departments of Veteran Affairs, Agriculture, Defense, Interior and the Treasury, where the record of the unlawful OPM action “was the strongest,” he said. But he invited the plaintiffs to submit briefs making the case for tacking on other agencies.

“It’s a very conservative ruling, and a very strongly worded ruling by the judge,” said Peter Jenkins, a senior counsel for the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility who wasn’t involved in the case. “It was a great ruling.”

The lawsuit is arguably the most successful one so far among the suits that labor unions, nonprofits and states have hurled at the OPM. In one lawsuit filed in the District of Columbia, a judge decreed that fired workers should direct their complaints to internal labor committees, such as the Merit System Protection Board (MSPB), rather than resolve their grievances in court. In a legal challenge against another OPM initiative, a program that incentivized resignations, a Massachusetts judge ruled against the unions that brought the suit, declaring that they were not directly impacted by the OPM actions and thus did not have standing.

During the Thursday hearing, the federal government’s lawyers repeated their arguments, insisting that the plaintiffs’ case lacked standing. As part of its defense, the OPM also asserted that the agencies’ leadership had called the shots rather than simply obeying the OPM’s orders to lay off their probationary employees. The OPM revised its initial memo after Alsup’s restraining order, adding a disclaimer that OPM was “not directing agencies” to terminate employees. But during the second hearing, Alsup rejected the defendant’s claim. “It’s illustrative of the manipulation by the OPM to orchestrate this government lie,” he said.

At first, Alsup concurred with the rulings in previous lawsuits that he lacked the jurisdiction to hear the unions’ case, because fired workers should seek relief from their oversight boards rather than go through court.

But in the March 13 hearing, new arguments presented by the plaintiffs on how Trump has dismantled those independent groups made him reconsider.

President Trump targeted one Office of Special Counsel leader in particular, Hampton Dellinger, who was planning to restore all terminated probationary workers before he himself was fired, reinstated and then fired again. Trump also attempted to boot one of the chairs of the MSPB but was foiled by a judge. Had he succeeded, it would have left the board bereft of the minimum number of staff to vote on petitions. This erosion of the official channels of appeal made Alsup decide not to rule out litigation.

Alsup called the top-down firings a “watchdog cannibalization” during the hearing. “I have a feeling that’s where we’re headed now, that there’s no relief” for fired employees, he said.

“It is a sad, sad day, when our government would fire some good employees and say that it was based on performance. Well, that’s a lie.”

In addition, the plaintiffs in AFGE v. OPM include organizations other than unions, such as the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, Western Watersheds and the state of Washington, to name a few. Since the first hearing, Alsup has concurred with those organizations that they have suffered concrete injury from the sweeping dismissals, to the point where they could no longer carry out their organizations’ missions.

The vast public outcry against the federal firings has already sparked some reversals. The National Park Service, National Science Foundation, Environmental Protection Agency and other agencies have rehired some of their terminated staff members. Three weeks after the Department of Agriculture dismissed nearly 6,000 probationary workers — including some 3,400 Forest Service employees, per AFGE’s recent legal filings — the MSPB issued an order to reinstate all terminated staff members for 45 days following Alsup’s Feb. 28 memorandum opinion. But as of March 13, many fired workers were still awaiting word from their supervisors about their employment.

Meanwhile, the MSPB is wading through the thousands of new complaints that have been filed each week — as much as a 21-fold jump since Trump took office — from federal workers who believe they were terminated unjustly.

Even after Alsup’s ruling, the judicial jousting between Trump’s government and federal workers continues. Following the government’s notice to appeal the federal court order, the case will now go to the 9th Circuit Appellate Court for further adjudication. “The bottom line is, there’s a lot of litigating still to be done here,” said Dave Owen, a law professor at the University of California Law San Francisco.

AS A CHILD, Riley Rackliffe dressed as a park ranger for Halloween. He carried his interest in the National Park Service into adulthood, giving up a university teaching position to become an aquatic biologist at Nevada’s Lake Mead National Recreation Area last year. Now, Rackliffe is on the job market once more, his dream job snatched away even before the afterglow of landing it wore off.

Rackliffe is one of the thousand National Park Service workers in the OPM’s crosshairs. But since the court rulings, he and his supervisor are still in the dark about whether Lake Mead’s sole aquatic biologist can get back to doing the work he loved.

“I am definitely still holding onto hope,” he said. But he can’t afford to wait, he said: “I’ve got a mortgage and two kids and bills to pay, so hope isn’t a good financial strategy.” As he hunts for a new job, he’s not banking on landing another aquatic ecologist position in a state that receives only 4 inches of rain annually. “I got fired from the one lake in town,” he said.

More than just individuals’ lives and livelihoods turned upside down, a severely culled staff — not to mention a demoralized one — will challenge the ability of federal agencies to provide the crucial public services they are mandated to perform. In the case of the departments of Interior and Agriculture, the mass firings threaten the management of public lands, both now and in the future. Experts already predict a chaotic recreational season ahead, filled with unkempt campgrounds, heightened wildfire risk and unsafe trail conditions.

“Visitations are going up, but staffing and budgets are going down,” Neubacher said. “At some point something has to give, and we’re pretty close to that.”

Even if agencies comply immediately with the March 13 ruling, that might not be enough to prevent looming damage to public lands and more. Alsup acknowledged that the government could still legally pursue other mechanisms to pare back the workforce, to similar effect. For example, it could undertake a reduction in force, an official process to reorganize and reduce the number of federal employees. In fact, the Trump administration has already repeatedly promised to do so. March 13 is also the deadline that Trump set for agencies to submit plans for drastic downsizing, with another round to come in April.

Still, the Trump administration may not need to win in court to get its way. Legal experts suspect that it’s gambling on stirring up so much uncertainty that federal employees will simply choose to leave. Even if Rackliffe is reinstated, he said, the prospect of future cuts and the turbulent political climate might not make it worth returning.

And while Alsup’s latest court order halts what he concluded to be a hasty reduction in force in disguise, and an illegal one at that, there may be little to celebrate in the long run. “It is a sad, sad day, when our government would fire some good employees and say that it was based on performance. Well, that’s a lie,” Alsup said. “That should not have been done in our country.”

The post Judge rules federal job cuts ‘unlawful’ appeared first on High Country News.

A Canadian mining company behind a massive new lithium mine in northern Nevada has received a $250 million investment to complete construction of the new mine — a project that aims to accelerate America’s shift from fossil fuel-powered cars but that has come under fierce criticism from neighboring tribal nations and watchdog groups for its proximity to a burial site.

Lithium Americas is developing the mine in an area known as Thacker Pass where it plans to unearth lithium carbonate that can be used to make batteries for electric vehicles. The area, known as Peehee Mu’huh in the Numu language of the Northern Paiute, is home to what could be the largest supply of lithium in the United States and is also a site that tribal citizens visit every year to honor dozens of Native men, women, and children who fled American soldiers in an 1865 unprovoked attack at dawn. 

The funding from Orion Resources Partners LP, a global investment firm specializing in metals and materials, will enable the first phase of construction to be completed by late 2027. The investment firm is also considering giving an additional $500 million to support later phases of the mine’s development. 

The critical financial investment comes just weeks after a report from the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch called for a halt to the construction of the mine after concluding its approval violates the rights of Indigenous peoples whose ancestors are buried there. 

“Orion’s commitment to this project highlights the strategic importance of Thacker Pass to national security and developing a domestic supply chain as we work to reduce American dependence on foreign suppliers for critical minerals,” said Jonathan Evans, Lithium Americas’ president and chief executive officer, in a press release.

Lithium Americas said that research indicates the actual burial site is located several miles away from the project site, and a federal judge agreed with the company, citing a cultural inventory study that did not uncover any human remains. Gary McKinney disagrees. He is a spokesperson for the group People of Red Mountain and is a descendant of one of the survivors of the September 12, 1865, massacre.

He and many others believe the project area to be a graveyard for his ancestors, in part due to Indigenous oral histories and a 1929 autobiography describing the massacre there. 

“What that mine is doing is desecrating,” McKinney said. “They’re erasing parts of the history of the Northern Paiute and Western Shoshone people.” 

He said the mine was approved during the COVID-19 pandemic when reservations were shut down, Indigenous communities were grappling with high rates of the virus, and few realized the project was moving forward. 

Read Next

A transition to clean energy was supposed to be equitable. Instead, it’s hurting Indigenous communities.

Sarah Sax

“Our tribal chairman at that time, he died of COVID,” said McKinney, who is an enrolled member of the Duck Valley Shoshone Paiute Tribe. “What I’m saying is this whole thing wasn’t done with the best of morals or intentions of honoring and respecting those cultural sites.” 

His organization, People of Red Mountain, sued to stop the mine along with four tribes — Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, Burns Paiute Tribe, Summit Lake Paiute Tribe, and Winnemucca Indian Colony — but no court challenges have been successful. The Duck Valley Shoshone-Paiute Tribe also criticized the mine in an appeal to the United Nations special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples.

The American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch report from last month concluded the mine violates Indigenous peoples’ right to free, prior and informed consent to projects that affect their territories. The report notes tribes have raised concerns about the risk of toxic waste from the mine polluting their water and about their cultural practices being curtailed by limited access to the area.

In a letter to Human Rights Watch, Tim Crowley, vice president of government and external affairs at Lithium Americas, emphasized that the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which contains the right to free, prior, and informed consent, is not binding. At the same time, the U.S. government believes consulting with tribes is sufficient without achieving support from all tribes, he said. 

“Further, the Treaty of Ruby Valley, which is the treaty that pertains to Western Shoshone peoples in the Thacker Pass area, does not reserve rights to access off-reservation public land,” Crowley wrote. “The Thacker Pass Project is not in a federally recognized Native American territory. If it were, mining could not happen without the express consent and approval of that tribe.”

The new investment in Lithium Americas from Orion Resources Partners LP helps fulfill the terms of a $2.26 billion loan that Lithium Americas received last fall from the U.S. Department of Energy to support the project. 

Abbey Koenning-Rutherford from the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch said the Thacker Pass mine is symbolic of the broader risks of mining to Indigenous peoples and underscores why there’s a need to reform a 1872 U.S. mining law that enables companies to claim mineral rights on federal lands, including land stolen from tribal nations.

“The United States should respect Indigenous peoples’ centuries-long connections to Peehee Mu’huh and act to prevent further harm at Thacker Pass,” Koenning-Rutherford said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A $250M investment will help this lithium mine get up and running. That’s bad news for these tribes. on Mar 13, 2025.

President Donald Trump signed a slew of executive orders on the evening of January 20, his first day in office, focused on offshore wind, fossil fuel development, and Arctic drilling.

Included in this windfall is a declaration of a National Energy Emergency, showing just how serious the incoming administration is about establishing its own energy policy.

The emergency declaration gives Trump the power to suspend some requirements under the Clean Air Act. It also aligns with the Trump administration’s priority to expand fossil fuel production in the U.S. to meet growing power demand.

At least 47% of all emissions from carbon-intensive energy production in the U.S. come from rural America, according to a 2024 report from the Rural Climate Partnership. Currently, about 60% of coal-fired power plants reside in rural America.

With the majority of the country’s coal plants and over 80% of clean energy plants like wind, solar, and geothermal based in rural areas, what happens to climate and environmental policy under the next administration has a bearing on rural Americans.

And the majority of American energy currently being built is renewable, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which is under the Department of Energy. The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in 2022 made clean energy incentives widely available for communities and businesses across the country.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) received more than $13 billion from the legislation to carry out three programs, including rural electrification efforts, under their Rural Development umbrella.

Trump has ordered federal agencies to “immediately pause” the dispersement of IRA funds. Additionally, the new administration has given agency leaders 90 days to review all “processes, policies, and programs for issuing grants, loans, contracts, or any other financial disbursements” of IRA funds to align them with Trump’s energy policy.

Notably, the new administration’s definition of “energy” and “energy resources” excludes renewables like wind and solar.

To date, the vast majority of U.S. solar and wind plants have been built in rural areas, per the Rural Climate Partnership’s report.

“Clean energy is rural energy,” said Josh Ewing, founding director of the Rural Climate Partnership. “Almost all of the clean energy that needs to be built to power the United States is going to be built in rural places.”

Funding from the IRA will accelerate the clean energy boom in rural places once it lands in communities. While it is difficult to get a complete picture of the IRA funding that has been allocated or spent by the USDA, nearly $9 billion in rural clean energy grants have been announced as of December 2024. Much of that funding is still on its way out the door.

According to Ewing, IRA funding that has been announced — like some of the grants from the USDA — may not yet have legally binding contracts in place. Without a contract, it could now be susceptible to Trump’s dispersement freeze.

“Highest Environmental Standards” and Deregulation

Trump has promised that his administration will maintain the “highest environmental standards,” including the “cleanest air and water on the planet.” The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is the nation’s top environmental regulatory office, charged with enforcing pollution and wastewater standards under the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, which have been around since the 1970s.

But the President has plans to deregulate the EPA as a means to spur American businesses. Rollbacks of rules governing chemical standards and the disposal of toxic coal waste that occurred during Trump’s first term provide some insight as to how the new administration plans to deregulate the EPA.

In the time since Trump’s first term, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the long-held “Chevron deference” precedent, giving courts the power to overrule how federal agencies interpret laws that pertain to their areas of expertise. This new standard gives Trump more latitude to make changes at the EPA following his political priorities.

Trump also plans to revamp his efforts to cut down on government regulations, notably through his new Department of Government Efficiency, to be led in part by Elon Musk. Those efforts could look like this executive order from his first term, directing federal agencies to eliminate two regulations for each new one passed and weakening environmental regulations.

Trump issued an executive order on January 20 freezing all rules not yet published in the Federal Register and subjecting them to a review, a move which is typical for new administrations to take upon assuming office.

The new administration also rescinded 78 executive orders issued by former President Joe Biden, including a number that made explicit reference to climate change.

“Climate extremism has exploded inflation and overburdened businesses with regulation,” the White House wrote in the day one executive order.

Some Optimism Remains

Ewing told the Daily Yonder he is optimistic that the grants that have been announced will still reach rural communities.

“I have a hard time seeing any lawmaker want to take money away from rural electric cooperatives that they are going to use to reduce energy costs for their consumers,” Ewing said.

“You start cutting support for clean energy, you’re going to hurt rural people more than you hurt anybody else.”

This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

The Feather River Canyon begins just outside of Quincy, California. This corridor is home to Highway 70, one of the few year-round arteries to the many mountain communities. It is known for fishing and notable whitewater rafting, as well as steep canyon walls.

The holiday season brought a series of storms to this area as part of an atmospheric river, a long, narrow plume of moisture that can stretch for thousands of miles. Think of it as a rain storm that travels along the jet stream. These events not only bring increased rainfall and provide much-needed precipitation to the American West; they also bring increased risks of landslides, especially in areas affected by wildfires.

Since the 2021 Dixie Fire, there have been nearly a dozen reported landslides that have closed Highway 70 along the Feather River Canyon. These slides have ranged from small to major, closing the highway from just a few hours to days or weeks at a time. The trifecta of wildfires, topography, and heavy rainfall work effectively to dislodge the exposed rock and dirt.

“When you take away the vegetation, the raindrop goes directly to the soil and that mechanical action of the raindrop on the soil can help dislodge soil particles and start moving material down slope,” said Nina Oakley, Ph.D, an applied meteorologist and climatologist for the California Geological Survey.

Oakley specializes in atmospheric rivers and geohazards, and her work focuses on the interaction between extreme rain events and post-fire burn areas. She stressed that these burned areas have a huge affect on future landslide activity, because without vegetation on the surface, raindrops have a stronger impact force on the ground, which can more easily dislodge soil.

Though not directly related, atmospheric rivers and wildfires play an important role in the landscapes of California, Nevada, and other western states. Research has shown that as temperatures rise due to climate change, the atmosphere holds more water vapor and therefore injects more moisture with every rainfall. In fact, for every 1˚ Celsius increase in temperature, the atmosphere can hold 7% more water vapor. In burn areas, like those in eastern California, these elevated moisture levels are leading to landslides.

These events in turn lead to increasing road maintenance work to combat the effects to travel corridors in the region.

“Especially the Feather River Canyon, with the geography that’s in there, you get the water that comes through the rock with a lot of storms, so it definitely is prone to debris and slides,” explained Chris Woodward, spokesperson for Caltrans District Two. 

Woodward, who has been with Caltrans for eight years, said there has always been land and rock slide activity in the canyon–but it’s increasing.

“It feels like since the Dixie fire, we’ve had even more [landslides], with a large portion of it being in the burn scar as well,” he said.

Atmospheric rivers and wildfires aren’t the only culprits causing landslides in the region. The unique Sierra Nevada geology and topography also contribute. Younger volcanic rocks lie on top of older granite stone, giving the Feather River Canyon a unique geology that is more prone to landslides. Throughout the canyon, there are already varying degrees of erosion that can be seen in some places.

Caltrans regularly patrols the Highway 70 corridor and makes minor repairs throughout the year, and the agency schedules extra crew members during winter storms. Woodward said the state divides Caltrans into multiple districts, allowing each unit to adequately focus on its assigned region. District Two maintains more than 4,000 miles of highway across eight counties. They have 22 maintenance stations and more than 30 different crews to cover this stretch of northern California.

“We also have staff, especially during storms, in areas where we’ve seen debris,” said Woodward. “The Feather River Canyon is a good example. You’re always getting some kind of debris, especially if you’re having heavier systems, a lot of rain, different things like that.”

Sometimes the slides and debris can be cleared by patrolling maintenance crews. Other times the slide is massive and the state sends it out to a contractor. Known as a director’s order, this allows Caltrans employees to continue to monitor the road while a contractor clears the slide.

How do atmospheric rivers play into this?

An atmospheric river “is a concentrated corridor of heavy vapor that leads to precipitation, and often heavy precipitation in California,” said Kristen Guirguis, Ph.D., a scientist with the University of California, San Diego.

Imagine a river with intermittent rapids traveling from the sub-tropics to the dryer mid-latitudes. Each series of waterfalls is a storm. Now imagine this river is more than 1,000 miles long and several hundred miles wide. With each waterfall, a storm pounds the West Coast, bringing rain and snow to the region. This is essentially what an atmospheric river resembles. However, not all atmospheric rivers are the same.

“There’s been research that suggests that in the future, precipitation is going to become more volatile,” said Guirguis. This translates to more dry spells in between storms followed by wetter, more intense storms.

“Under climate change, when you have a warmer atmosphere, then you can hold more water vapor. So there’s a potential for just wetter, wetter storms,” she said.

Atmospheric rivers are being increasingly recognized for their importance. Guirguis said they are important to study because these events deliver so much of California’s water, up to 50% percent in some locations. According to the American Meteorological Society, atmospheric rivers transport on average “more than double the flow of the Amazon River.”

It’s only been in  the last two decades that scientists, like Nina Oakley, have really begun to focus more on atmospheric rivers.

“We really need to consider those moisture transport processes to study precipitation extremes,” said Oakley. She added it is important to understand the mechanics of an atmospheric river and how no two are alike.

In 2023, the American Geophysical Union developed a five level scale for these potent storm systems. Similar to a hurricane rating, the intensity scale goes from AR-1 to AR-5. With AR-5 being the most intense, the rating is based on moisture content and duration. These two data points help meteorologists predict the potential rainfall amounts and impact to a region when forecasting an atmospheric river event.

But it’s not moisture alone that leads to landslides in a burn area.

“What will cause flash flooding and debris flows on a recent burn area is tied to rainfall intensity,” said Oakley. “We also have changes in the water repellency of the soil. These physical and chemical processes change the soil water repellency and the potential for erosion.”

Oakley is currently studying the burned area of California’s fourth largest fire, the Park Fire, which began outside of Chico, Calif. and burned almost 430,000 acres. That burn area acts as a valuable case study for scientists.

“The late November storm on the Park fire got about 10 inches of rain, but it was all kind of moderate intensity,” said Oakley. “So we didn’t have any debris flows observed there, even with all that rain, because it wasn’t intense.”

Without high-energy, intense rainfall, Oakley said an atmospheric river may not cause a landslide–but those aren’t the only concerns. Wildfires and atmospheric rivers can also cause increased sediment runoff, which alters waterways, fisheries, and water resource infrastructure. This intersection of rain and fire is blending the impact of climate change in compounding ways.

“There’s all these cascading effects of having a wildfire and rainfall occurring on it,” explained Oakley.

With winter in full swing and wildfires extinguished, more atmospheric rivers are on their way. How they impact the burn scars of the Caldor, Dixie, or Park fire is yet to be known. But scientists like Oakley and Guirguis are working to help inform the public about the potential impact of these weather events.

The best thing Oakley urged the public to do ahead of a storm is to stay informed.

“Tune into your local National Weather Service office and determine whether there’s a hazard in your burn area,” Oakley said. “Is it an extreme atmospheric river or not?”

Editor’s Note: As the Sierra Nevada Ally has reported, the incoming Trump administration has signaled its intent to reduce or remove certain climate-related federal agencies, like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). That agency is responsible for managing and maintaining the nationwide emergency radio network that alerts the public of extreme weather events.

Two key climate agencies could look different–or cease to exist–under a Trump administration

Follow live election results from the Associated Press to see how Nevadans are voting for federal offices.

This story was first published in The Fulcrum and republished with permission.

Although Nevada has a sitting U.S. senator who is Latina (Catherine Cortez-Masto), Latino political representation still lags. This could explain why some Latino voters feel discouraged or why — despite such high population numbers — Latino voter turnout is lower than that of other demographics in the state.

A study by the Pew Research Center found that 36.2 million Latinos will be eligible to vote in 2024, up 4 million from the 2020 election. This makes Latino voters one of the most critical voting blocs, leading both Democrats and Republicans to ramp up their efforts to tap into such potential support. In Nevada, Latinos are projected to be crucial in both the presidential race and the contest for the state’s other Senate seat, pitting incumbent Jacky Rosen (D) and against Republican Sam Brown. Ads from both parties populate platforms like YouTube — one of the three most used apps by Hispanics — trying to win over the Latino voter bloc.

What these ads, as well as the political machine, seem to miss is that Latinos are not a monolithic group. This can lead politicians to miss out on the many different factors that shape Latino identities. Voter tendencies can vary significantly between different Latino groups — and even within Latino families.

A multigenerational perspective

Rico Cortez is a Mexican American living in northern Nevada. He was raised by a single mother, Rebecca Guerrero, and his Latino roots, along with growing up with a strong matriarch, have shaped his political views. “Women’s rights are super important to me because women raised me. Women brought me into this world,” Cortez stated.

Latinos tend to put a larger emphasis on family than that of non-Hispanics. According to the Pew Research Center, 84 percent of Latinos believe that family members are more important than friends. Cortez moved back to northern Nevada five years ago to care for his aging mother because his connection to his family is so important.

Rebecca Guerrero was born in Verdi, Nev., in 1929, making her 95 years old. Despite her age, she is still civically engaged and has consistently voted throughout her lifetime. For her, it was important to pass on this civic duty to her children. Her political identity has shaped Cortez, and today, both Guerrero and Cortez represent a unique part of the Latino vote in Nevada.

As a young mother, Guerrero struggled with the cost of living in Nevada. “Well, it was no picnic. It was rough because the man that I was married to didn’t care too much. And we had to go on welfare to get my kids what they needed,” she remembers. Rising rent prices, inflation and increasing the minimum wage have become increasingly important to Guerrero and her family.

This falls in line with the priorities of other Latinos in Nevada. In the state with the largest Latino middle class, the cost of living is one of the most significant issues for many Latino voters. Eighty-four percent of Latinos in Nevada agree that it is difficult for middle-class families to prosper in the United States. Republicans — like GOP Gov. Joe Lombardo — have capitalized on this by touting their ability to do things like loosen requirements for business licenses in the state and tighten immigration laws to save jobs.

Immigration is another critical issue for Latinos in Nevada, and Guerrero has her own immigration story. At 10 years old, she had to leave her dying grandfather in Durango, Mexico, to travel to live with her aunts in California. Leaving him behind was hard for her. “I had to kneel and have my grandfather do the sign of the cross and bless me. Then I crossed, he stayed on that side, and I came to this side,” she said.

While some Republicans have used immigration as a selling point to Latino voters, the Trump campaign has pushed anti-immigration rhetoric and massive amounts of disinformation, leaving some voters, like Guerrero, upset; when asked about Trump, she stated, “If you don’t have a good president, well, everything goes to pot. If we get Trump, well, Trump is an asswipe.”

According to a Univision poll, Latino voters in Nevada favor Kamala Harris by 18 points. While both Guerrero and Cortez will be voting for Harris in November, 41 percent of Latino voters are undecided. Issues like abortion and border security are making some lean toward the former president.

Abortion is one of the most significant issues for Cortez in this election cycle. He sees reproductive rights as an essential part of supporting women. “I’ve just always been an advocate for women. I don’t want to see my little nieces having to fight for things that my mother already fought for.”

For Guerrero, abortion has been a bit of a gray area. She comes from a strong Catholic background. Catholic doctrine opposes abortion. And with Catholicism being the largest faith amongst Latinos, it can sway values and belief systems. While Guerrero is still very religious, time and conversations with her son eventually led her to support a woman’s right to choose. Cortez and Guerrero are among the 44 percent of Nevadan Latinos who say they will vote “yes” on a ballot measure that would establish the right to abortion in the Nevadan Constitution.

The issue of abortion reflects how Latino viewpoints can differ significantly depending on factors such as age, religion and party affiliation. While the Latino vote will be crucial in Nevada and across the nation in November, it is not monolithic, and many different cultures and life experiences shape the identities and values of Latinos in the Silver State.

Regardless of the differences, Cortez is proud to be Latino and is excited to see how important the Latino vote has become in Nevada. He celebrates the sense of community he feels being Mexican American.

“I love that sense of community. I think we have a strong sense of community, and we care for each other and look after each other.”

Latino families in Nevada are a deciding factor this election cycle was first published in The Fulcrum and republished with permission.

Election Day is fast approaching and there are several offices, candidates and ballot questions that are up for a vote of the people on Nov. 5. To help sift through it all, the Sierra Nevada Ally has created a voting guide with links to campaign sites, social media pages and more information on key dates, ballot questions and races that will affect the everyday lives of people living in the region.

This interactive guide includes information on candidates for federal, state and local offices, with links to campaign websites, social media profiles and more information. Simply scroll through the page to browse information or you can click into specific information and races.

Access the voter guide on your desktop computer, laptop, or mobile device by simply clicking “Voter Guide” on the main navigation on the Sierra Nevada Ally homepage.

This guide was made possible through technical support from GovPack, which is funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation.