Tik Root, Grist

The head of FEMA defended the agency on Capitol Hill. Trump fired him.

"This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here."

On Thursday, the Trump administration forced Cameron Hamilton, the acting head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, out of his job. The move came one day after Hamilton told lawmakers that the agency, which the administration favors dismantling, shouldn’t be eliminated.

“I do not believe it is in the best interests of the American people to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency,” Hamilton told members of the House homeland security subcommittee. President Donald J. Trump named him acting head of the agency — more specifically, the senior official performing the duties of the administrator — in January. His bio no longer appears on the FEMA website.

EXCLUSIVE: Breastfeeding mom of US citizen sues Kristi Noem after being grabbed by ICE

Hamilton’s statement directly contradicted one made a day earlier by his boss, Kristi Noem. She leads the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, which oversees FEMA. Addressing the House Oversight Committee on Tuesday, she said, “The president has indicated he wants to eliminate FEMA as it exists today.”

Neither FEMA or DHS explained why Hamilton is no longer in his position.

Tension between Hamilton and Noem has been mounting for weeks. In late March, after news leaked that DHS was considering downsizing FEMA, the department suspected Hamilton of leaking the information and gave him a lie detector test, which cleared him. Politico was the first to report his ouster.

“I think Cam did the best he could with what he was facing,” one person who recently left the agency and asked to remain anonymous told Grist. “He earned a lot of respect from FEMA staff.”

FEMA employed more than 20,000 people at the start of the second Trump administration. Its stated mission is “helping people before, during, and after disasters.” For many Americans, the agency is the face of the federal government’s response to events such as Hurricane Helene, the Los Angeles fires, and other disasters. It also runs the National Flood Insurance Program, which covers millions of American homes.

As climate change fuels more extreme weather, the long-underfunded agency has strained to keep pace with its mandates. Hamilton’s departure is happening as the country heads into an Atlantic hurricane season that begins June 1 and is expected to be especially active.

Both FEMA and DHS confirmed that David Richardson, the assistant secretary at DHS’s Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office, will take over for Hamilton. Richardson, who previously served as a Marine in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Africa, takes the helm at a time when the future of FEMA remains both unclear and in peril.

Noem has already begun to dismantle the agency. In early April, she announced that it would discontinue mitigation-related grant initiatives. The cancellations include the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, or BRIC, program — the agency’s main climate adaptation program — which was launched during Trump’s first term and has helped hundreds of communities across the country prepare for the impacts of climate change.

DHS has also recently revived President Trump’s earlier “fork in the road” approach to downsizing, which gave employees various options to leave voluntarily, such as early retirement, deferred resignation, or a buyout. It’s unclear how many FEMA employees took the offer.

Hamilton reportedly had been making further plans to significantly transform FEMA’s workforce, including potentially sending more employees into the field to respond to disasters. Apparently those changes weren’t enough.

“When Disaster Strikes, We’re Here to Help,” the FEMA’s website reads. The worry among the agency’s supporters is that, in removing Hamilton, the Trump administration may be clearing the path for broader rollbacks — or a future in which FEMA doesn’t exist at all.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/politics/the-head-of-fema-defended-the-agency-on-capitol-hill-trump-fired-him/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

Shortly after he was elected, Donald Trump announced an economic gambit that was aggressive even by his standards. He vowed that, on the first day of his second term, he would slap 25 percent tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, and boost those already placed on Chinese products by another 10 percent.

The move set off a frenzy of pushback. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau even flew to the president-elect’s Florida resort to make his case. Economists say the potential levies threaten to upend global trade — including on green technologies, many of which are manufactured in China. The moves would cause price spikes for everything from electric vehicles and heat pumps to solar panels.

“Typically, with tariffs, we’ve seen [companies] pass them along to the consumer,” said Corey Cantor, electric vehicles analyst at Bloomberg NEF. Ansgar Baums, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan foreign policy think-tank Stimson Center, said retaliatory moves from the three targeted countries would only make things worse. “It will drive up consumer costs and hurt those who cannot afford it.”

Trump acknowledges that possibility. But he has argued that tariffs are necessary to force Canada and Mexico to crack down on drugs, particularly fentanyl, and migrants crossing the border into the U.S.

It’s not the first time Trump has turned to tariffs as a foreign policy tool. In 2018 and 2019, he imposed them on a litany of goods, from steel and aluminum to photovoltaic solar panels and washing machines. While the Biden administration eased some of those duties, it kept many in place, especially those targeting China, and recently raised tariffs on Chinese items including electric vehicles, solar cells, and electrical vehicle batteries. Experts say these efforts have done little more than raise prices.

“The consensus on the first round of Trump tariffs is that [they] generally did not improve American productivity,” said Alex Muresianu, a senior policy analyst at the Tax Foundation, a right-leaning think tank. The nonprofit calculated that, in the long run, Trump’s first round of tariffs will hurt gross domestic product and cost the United States some 142,000 jobs. Baums was even more blunt about their impact: “They were a big failure. They didn’t achieve much.”

The recently threatened tariffs would ratchet prices even higher on things like solar panels, but are also much more far reaching because of their broad application to North American trading partners. One sweeping impact would be on gasoline prices because, although the U.S. is world’s largest oil producer, older domestic refineries can only process the type of heavier crude that comes from Canada. GasBuddy projects that tariffs could add 35 to 75 cents to a gallon of gas.

Automakers will also be hard hit, as $97 billion in parts and some four million vehicles come from Canada and, especially, Mexico. That’s where some of the more affordable electric vehicles, such as Ford’s Mustang Mach-E and the Chevrolet Equinox, are manufactured. Wolfe Research said that “given the magnitude, we’d expect most investors to assume Trump ultimately does not follow through with these threats” but that, if they were put in place, tariffs would add $3,000 to the price of the average car, regardless of whether it’s powered by gasoline or a battery.

Cantor, at Bloomberg NEF, says adding even a few thousand dollars to the price can drastically expand or contract the potential market of buyers for a vehicle. For example, about 70 percent of consumers consider a $35,000 car, a number that jumps to about 87 percent when a car is $30,000.

“People adjust their behavior,” he said. That could further harm an EV sector that will also likely be reeling from Trump’s rollback of federal tax-credits for electrified vehicles.

Baums doesn’t believe that more tariffs will meaningfully shift industries to the US and the Trump administration “underestimates” how complicated that process would be. Others say some relocation could occur. Michelle Davis, director and head of global solar for research firm Wood Mackenzie, wrote that the levies “would undoubtedly increase domestic manufacturing activity to meet market needs.” But even then, she adds, that “this would result in a more expensive market for domestic buyers.”

In addition to prices, Muresianu also worries that the type of protectionism that Trump favors could stymie innovation. He points to the U.S. shipbuilding industry as an example: it once supplied most of the world’s ships but, in large part due to policies meant to shield domestic shipyards from competition, American vessels have since become drastically more expensive than those made overseas and now account for less than 1 percent of the global total. Tariffs could impose similar stagnancy on other U.S. industries, Muresianu says.

Baums’ concerns are more existential. Trump, he says, is geo-politicizing issues like climate change in ways that will ultimately make it more difficult to share technology, lower costs, and combat greenhouse gas emissions. He would like countries to instead come together and agree that some industries — including cleantech — are too important to put at the center of a trade war.

“The planet is burning,” said Baums. “If there’s anything we should try to cooperate on, it’s stuff that makes a clean transition happen.”

This story was originally published by Grist. You can subscribe to its weekly newsletter here.

A "quite radical" report suggests governments and communities, not the private sector, should be leading the carbon removal industry.

To get to the Super Bowl on time, Taylor Swift took a private jet from Tokyo to Los Angeles and then hustled to Las Vegas. The carbon removal company Spiritus estimated that her journey of roughly 5,500 miles produced about 40 tons of carbon dioxide — about what is generated by charging nearly 5 million cell phones. But don’t worry, the company assured her critics: It would take those emissions right back out of the sky.

“Spiritus wants to help Taylor and her Swifties ‘Breathe’ without any CO2 ‘Bad Blood,’” it said in a pun-laden pitch to reporters. “It’s a touchdown for everyone.”

The startup is among dozens, if not hundreds, of businesses trying to permanently remove climate-warming gases from the atmosphere. Its approach involves drawing carbon directly from the air and burying it, but others sink it in the ocean. Last week, Graphyte, a venture backed by Bill Gates, began compacting sawdust and other woody waste that are rich in carbon into bricks that it will bury deep underground.

Spiritus says “sponsoring carbon offsets is a step toward environmental responsibility, not an endorsement of luxury flights” and added that “celebrities are going to take private jets regardless of what Spiritus does.” Even before the company stepped in, Swift reportedly planned to purchase offsets that more than covered her travel. But some climate experts say moves like Spiritus’ illustrate the dangerous direction the rapidly growing carbon dioxide removal, or CDR, industry is headed.

“The worry is that carbon removal will be something we do so that business-as-usual can continue,” said Sara Nawaz, director of research at American University’s Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy. “We need a really big conversation reframe.”

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says carbon removal will be “required” to meet climate targets, and the United States Department of Energy has a goal of bringing the cost down to $100 per ton (a price point Spiritus claims it wants to deliver as well). What concerns Nawaz is the outsize role that private companies are currently playing.

“It’s very market-oriented: doing carbon removals for profit,” Nawaz said. That reliance on the market, she elaborated, won’t necessarily lead to the just, equitable, and scalable outcomes that she hopes CDR can achieve. “We need to take a step back.”

Nawaz co-wrote a report released today titled “Agenda for a Progressive Political Economy of Carbon Removal.” In it, she and her co-authors lay out a vision for carbon removal that shifts away from market-centric approaches to ones that are government-, community-, and worker-led.

“What they suggest is quite radical,” said Lauren Gifford, associate director of the Soil Carbon Solutions Center at Colorado State University who was not involved in the research. She supports the direction the authors advocate, adding, “They actually give us a roadmap on how to get there, and that in itself is progressive.”

Nawaz compared carbon removal’s current trajectory to the bumpy path that carbon offsets has followed. That industry, in which organizations sell credits to offset greenhouse gas emissions, has been plagued by misleading claims and perverse incentives. It has also raised environmental justice concerns where offsets are disproportionately impacting frontline communities and developing nations. For example, Blue Carbon, a company backed by the United Arab Emirates, has been buying enormous swaths of land in Africa to fuel its offsets program.

“We don’t want to do that again with carbon removal,” she said.

Philanthropy is one possible alternative to corporate carbon removal. The report cites a nonprofit organization called Terraset that puts tax-deductible donations toward CDR projects (including Spiritus’). But, Nawaz says, that approach won’t grow quickly or sustainably enough to remove the many gigatons of emissions needed to meaningfully address climate change.

“That’s not a scalable approach,” she said. “We’re going to need so much more money.”

The report argues that communities and governments must play a central role in the industry. Nawaz cites community-driven carbon removal efforts out West, such as the 4 Corners Carbon Coalition, as examples of what might be possible on the local level. Nationally, she points to Germany’s transition away from coal as a way that governments can not only fund but fundamentally drive clean energy policy that puts workers at the fore.