Trump Scandal | ModeShift

States Challenge Right to Protest Damage to Water, Land, Environment

by Keith SchneiderApril 11, 2026April 11, 20260

Behold the “No Kings” protests last month. Millions of Americans in the streets opposing the Trump administration’s reckless governing principles. Thousands of communities expressing the solemn right to push back against a clear and present danger. At least for the time being. For real. As public attention is diverted by the daily diet of strategically outrageous presidential distractions, fossil fuel companies and their industrial allies have been quietly advancing a new form of corporate vigilantism. …

Executive Order Puts Oldest Polluting Coal Plants Back in Action

by Keith SchneiderApril 2, 2026April 2, 20260

Until May 2025, utility executives like those at Consumers Energy in Michigan operated in the world of orderly oversight of electricity generation. In coordination with MISO, the regional transmission agency, and the Michigan Public Service Commission (MPSC), Consumers Energy decided when to build new power plants to meet energy demand. When plants grew old and too costly to operate, as happened with the coal-fired J.H. Campbell Generating Station in western Michigan, Consumers collaborated with MISO …

Trump Pollution Exemption Means More Mercury Contamination

by Keith SchneiderMarch 25, 2026March 25, 20260

The practice of reporting on the environment starts with a working knowledge of a range of scientific disciplines. One of them is chemistry. To wit: since the 1960s, when Americans and visionary lawmakers voted to hold polluters accountable for their wastes, a specific chemical pollutant has emerged in each decade as the leading environmental and public health menace prompting legal and political action. The pollutants of primary interest in the 2020s, for instance, are PFAS, …

Copper Riches Lead Congress to Try Shortcut for Boundary Waters Mining

by Keith SchneiderFebruary 25, 2026February 25, 20260

The U.S. Senate this week is poised to vote on a narrowly-cast resolution intended to clear a new pathway to eventually open a long-disputed copper mine close to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northeast Minnesota. There’s a lot more, though, riding on the Senate vote, and not just for a region of the American north country adored for its towering pines, and deep, clear waters. If it’s approved and signed by President Trump, …

Trump Is Desperate to End Era of Land, Water, Wildlife Protections

by Keith SchneiderJanuary 2, 2026January 2, 20260

No one I know, and few people outside my realm, consider their lives near the forests and clean waters of the upper Great Lakes as anything other than a blessing. Even though for two centuries residents here engaged in an ambitious campaign to achieve “progress” – wielding the axe on our trees and building facilities that discharge wastes into our waters – our landscape nevertheless is now a real-life demonstration of the hard-fought and virtuous …

Traces of Old Farm Chemicals Contaminate Water Across the U.S.

by Keith SchneiderNovember 20, 2025November 20, 20250

Even though it delivers airtight data and analysis essential for understanding and managing the risks industrial societies pose to water, land, and health, the U.S. Geological Survey is a federal science agency that rarely attracts public notice. So when my colleague, Brett Walton, told me about a new USGS study that found diminishing concentrations in groundwater for all but one of a group of twenty-two old-school pesticides widely known to cause disease in humans, I got interested. …

Slashing Federal Budget Is Big Problem for State Environment Agencies

by Keith SchneiderSeptember 25, 2025September 25, 20250

Every dollar that the federal government directs to state environment departments enables the Great Lakes and every other region to steward natural resources, yielding many times the value of the federal contribution. State environment departments make the case daily that they merit more financial support, not less. That is why Circle of Blue’s opinion desk has been worried for months about the dangerous consequences of President Trump’s proposal to rip $5 billion – 55 percent …

“America First” Puts Big Hurt on International Water Programs

by Keith SchneiderSeptember 25, 2025September 25, 20250

Last February, when Elon Musk called the U.S. Agency for International Development “a criminal organization” that had outlived its usefulness, the full calamitous measure of closing the world’s most important human aid organization was not yet apparent overseas or in America. Seven months later it is brutally apparent. Across the planet a shameful retreat is occurring in the global work to secure clean water and safe sanitation for millions of people in Africa and Asia. …

A Muffled American Environmentalism

by Keith SchneiderAugust 22, 2025August 22, 20250

Let’s all stand up and cheer our fellow Americans in the West for raising their voices and shutting down a Republican plan last month to sell millions of acres of the public domain. Even considering Earth Day demonstrations in April, it’s the first time any of the Trump administration’s irrational and dangerous initiatives to impede, weaken, and obliterate the nation’s protections for land, water, and air generated more than a peep of resistance. Where has …

In Promoting Polluting Coal, Trump Looks Back. Way Back.

by Keith SchneiderJuly 11, 2025July 11, 20250

Not so terribly long ago the International Energy Agency issued one of the early century’s most optimistic projections for the environment, human health, and water quality. It declared 2013 the year the world’s operating coal mines had reached peak production of 8 billion metric tons. From that year forward, the agency predicted, the use of the dirtiest fuel to generate electricity would steadily decline, carrying with it planet-healing reductions in climate-changing air emissions and water-polluting …