Earth Day in the Age of Arsonists

The planet nears dangerous thresholds as Trump’s America keeps turning cruelty, chaos, and delusion into public policy

Good morning! It is Earth Day, which means the annual ritual of corporations slapping a leaf on the logo, politicians pretending they just discovered photosynthesis, and the rest of us once again being asked to contemplate the small inconvenience of planetary collapse while billionaires commute by private jet to climate panels. The science, meanwhile, has given up on subtlety. The World Economic Forum’s 2026 Global Risks Report says extreme weather, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, critical changes to Earth systems, and natural resource shortages dominate the long-term threat landscape. Earth is not sending us a polite memo. It is pounding on the door.

This year’s Earth Day does offer something more useful than recycled platitudes. California’s grid met more than 100% of demand with wind, water, and solar on 98 of 116 days from late winter to early summer in 2024, with no blackouts, while battery output jumped 105% and fossil gas use fell an estimated 40% from the same period a year earlier. At the same time, Hampton, Virginia has been leaning into a “living with water” approach built around wetlands, plant-lined basins, marsh restoration, and oyster-seeded reefs instead of the usual macho fantasy that you can shout at the ocean until it respects property values. And the 2026 Tyler Prize went to Toby Kiers for work showing how mycorrhizal fungi help stabilize ecosystems and mediate an estimated 13 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide each year. That is the part worth holding onto today: the crisis is accelerating, yes, but so is the proof that action works.

That theme of action still mattering showed up in court too. One of the better pieces of news today is that a federal judge rejected Trump’s claim that he should be immune from the January 6 civil suits brought by assaulted police officers and Democratic lawmakers. The ruling reportedly concludes that his Ellipse speech and his pressure campaign were political acts, not protected presidential duties. Which is a relief, because “attempting to overturn an election” was never meant to be folded into the White House job description between pardoning turkeys and staging photo ops with factory helmets. For the pro-democracy crowd, this is a reminder that the law has not entirely rolled over and played dead.

Of course, while one court was reminding Trump that “official acts” is not a magic incantation for coup attempts, his Justice Department was busy proving exactly why institutional guardrails matter. DOJ has now charged the Southern Poverty Law Center with financial crimes, accusing it of defrauding donors through payments to informants who infiltrated extremist groups. But even the reporting on the indictment suggests the government is offering very little to show that paying sources to gather information was the same as funding extremism. That is a hell of a leap, even by this administration’s standards. The whole thing reads like a revenge fantasy dressed up in federal stationery, one more example of a government that mistakes ideological grievance for law enforcement.

Because the authoritarian project is nothing if not fully diversified, Texas is now marching ahead with state-mandated Ten Commandments posters in public school classrooms after the Fifth Circuit ruled the law can take effect. The majority essentially brushed aside the old Supreme Court precedent, while the dissent argued that lower courts do not get to declare binding precedent dead just because they are feeling spiritually adventurous. The state says the display is merely passive, as though children legally required to sit in those classrooms for years can simply avert their eyes and think secular thoughts. Christian nationalism now comes with the same sales pitch as toxic sludge: perfectly harmless as long as you do not touch it, breathe it, or acknowledge that it is everywhere.

The human cost of all this ugliness is not confined to courtrooms and culture-war legislatures. NBC reports that Afghan allies who helped the United States fight the Taliban, including interpreters, special forces veterans, and families with more than 400 children, may now be sent to the Democratic Republic of Congo after the Trump administration halted their promised U.S. resettlement. Many have already passed extensive security screening. Many have waited years and have family here. Now the administration appears ready to offer them a choice so grotesque it barely qualifies as a choice at all: exile to another conflict-ridden country where they have no ties, or return to Taliban rule and take their chances with imprisonment, persecution, or death. There are betrayals, and then there is asking people to risk their lives for America and later informing them that America has misplaced its conscience.

The same brutal logic is showing up far from our borders. In a harrowing Guardian report, Ecuadorian fishers described being struck by drones while working off the Galápagos, then detained at gunpoint by soldiers on a U.S.-flagged patrol vessel, hooded, handcuffed, and eventually returned home without charges after a bewildering trip through Salvadoran custody. The broader campaign has reportedly killed at least 178 people since September, according to WOLA, the Washington Office on Latin America, a longtime human rights watchdog focused on U.S. policy and abuses in the region. The United States has offered little public evidence to support claims that targeted boats were actually engaged in trafficking. This is what we can expect to happen when “war on narco-terrorists” becomes one of those phrases meant to end inquiry rather than begin it. Civilians get blown apart, governments hide behind jargon, and somewhere in Washington a press secretary probably calls it a success because the euphemisms tested well in a focus group.

All of it traces back, in part, to the same performative recklessness that has defined Trump’s foreign policy from the beginning. The 2015 Iran nuclear deal was not perfect, but it forced Iran to ship out 98% of its uranium stockpile, dismantle two-thirds of its centrifuges, cap enrichment, and submit to monitoring. A serious president who wanted a stronger follow-on deal would have kept those constraints in place and negotiated from there. Trump, being Trump, preferred the demolition derby approach: tear it up first, sneer at Obama second, invent a better replacement sometime after lunch. And the contrast is hard to miss: under Obama’s deal, the Strait of Hormuz stayed open and the region, while hardly tranquil, was not lurching from one manufactured crisis to the next. Now the deal is gone, Iran’s nuclear activity expanded, and one of the world’s most important shipping lanes has become a recurring symbol of geopolitical chaos. Instead of a “far better” agreement, Trump helped turn a contained problem into a wider mess his defenders now pretend was inevitable. Nothing says master strategist quite like removing the brakes before you have figured out where the cliff is.

Even the markets are getting tired of the act. The Financial Times reports that the dollar has given up much of its war-related gains as traders unwind bullish bets amid hopes of de-escalation with Iran and renewed attention to possible Fed rate cuts. The dollar is down 2.3% from its late-March peak against a basket of peers and is on course for its worst month since August. Once the immediate fear trade fades, investors apparently return to the same nagging concern they keep having under Trump: chaos is not strength, and volatility is not competence. He can posture as the human embodiment of force all he likes, but markets, stubborn creatures that they are, continue to notice when the emperor’s economic theory is just a spray tan wrapped around a panic attack.

So that is the shape of the day. On Earth Day, the planet is telling us in increasingly blunt terms that systems can break. Courts are telling Trump that accountability still exists. His administration is telling civil rights groups, wartime allies, schoolchildren, and foreign civilians exactly how little restraint remains in the machinery of power. And reality, whether in climate science, foreign policy, or currency markets, keeps delivering the same verdict: swagger is not governance, cruelty is not strength, and destruction is not proof of seriousness. The good news, thin but real, is that intervention still works.

Marz and I are still playing catch-up today, but with luck, caffeine, and only minimal interference from the forces of darkness, we should be back to our normal rhythm by week’s end. Until then, thank you for hanging in with us. Please know you remain in our thoughts during our moonbeam vigils.