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How Manipulators Use Disgust to Hijack Our Brain

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Thursday, March 14, 2024

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.Disgust is an incredibly powerful negative emotion, capable of inducing vomiting, panic, and rage. The sound evolutionary reason for our experience of disgust is that it helped keep us alive—by making repellent the tastes, sights, smells, and other sensations associated with death, rottenness, or toxicity. So when your refrigerator smells wrong and, upon inspection, you find that the culprit is a piece of chicken that has gone south, you feel nauseated by something that just a week ago made your stomach growl with anticipation. And instead of eating the bad meat, you throw it out.An important part of the brain that helps govern this process is the insula, which works to keep us safe by alerting us to pathogens in our environment that might harm us. But if the insula is damaged, disgust can decrease or disappear. Scholars in 2016 showed this in an experiment involving patients with neurodegenerative diseases that affect the insula; compared with controls, the patients who had compromised insula response reported experiencing less disgust when they viewed television and film scenes that featured something disgusting, such as Trainspotting’s infamous drugs-down-the-toilet scene.[Read: How to cultivate disgust]Over time, disgust stimuli extended beyond pathogens to include not just physical phenomena but also behavioral actions, such as seeing someone do something you find objectionable. Indeed, certain immoral actions or opinions that you perceive as dangerous can elicit disgust. So if you feel strongly about, say, the environment, a person expressing what you consider a terrible viewpoint about pollution or climate change can make you feel a visceral disgust for that person—almost like something you’ve tracked in on your shoe.If this now begins to sound a little dangerous—because your disgust reflex could be vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation by an unscrupulous demagogue who can tweak your insula—you are right to be concerned. Scholars have shown that political communication can activate the public’s sensitivity for disgust. You may have noticed that demagogic leaders tend to use disgust-based language for out-groups: The Nazis often referred to Jews as rats, and Hutu leaders in Rwanda called Tutsis cockroaches in the run-up to the genocide there. These were clearly efforts to associate people with creatures that spread disease and to inflame public revulsion.Fortunately, it can’t happen here, right? Well, think of the last time someone in American politics, media, or public life—perhaps someone who shares your views—referred to others as “disgusting,” said that opponents were “trash” or “vermin,” or called their convictions a “mind virus.” This rhetoric was intended to stimulate your insula, provoking the panic and rage that come with disgust, and make you more willing to take actions based on hate.The political leaders and ideological activists who are adept at triggering your disgust to serve their purposes are hard to escape: Their claims on your attention are ever more intrusive in our always-on media culture. But if you can recognize their technique of evoking disgust, you can also find ways to prevent their machinations from working on you.The abuse of human disgust to provoke hatred is highly manipulative, and suggestive of so-called dark-triad personalities, about whom I have written previously in this column (I recently launched a short dark-triad quiz inspired by this 2014 paper, if you are curious about where you fall on the spectrum). They are the 7 percent of a recent study’s international population sample who display dominant traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, and they make life miserable if you have dealings with them in work or love. We all have known people like this personally, and suffered as a result. Getting away from them is always the right strategy.No doubt, many advocates for ideological causes are good and virtuous, and even those who are neither of those things are not necessarily dark-triad types. But scholars have found that people who score highly in certain dark-triad characteristics are associated with participation in politics and involvement in activism. This can lead to a phenomenon known as “virtuous victimhood,” wherein activists try to stake out a moral high ground based on claims of mistreatment rather than on righteous actions. Dark-triad activists can be found on both the left and the right, turning our democracy into a Hobbesian struggle for power and twisting efforts to achieve social change into vindictive cancel culture.[Arthur C. Brooks: The sociopaths among us—and how to avoid them]It doesn’t take too many shrewd influencers to spread disgust, because the emotion is highly contagious. Researchers have shown that when people watch video clips of the faces of people who are disgusted, this observation alone activates the viewers’ own insula. That is what enables a climate of political or social polarization to easily take hold in a culture, so that just a few influential manipulators with an audience can convince many others that a viewpoint contrary to their own is an existential threat—and that those with opposing or different views are disgusting, in effect a dangerous human pathogen in our society.In history’s worst cases, this dynamic has led to genocide. That seems a remote threat in the America of 2024, yet the phenomenon can still make solidarity across differing segments of society impossible, and explain many of our ongoing polarization problems today. America’s crisis of civility, whether in the Capitol in Washington, D.C., or on college campuses, owes much to the manipulation of disgust on either side of the aisle.For years, researchers thought that political conservatives were especially susceptible, but recent research has shown that this is not true; their sensitivity depends on the issue at hand. For example, conservatives do tend to feel disgust for behavior such as consuming illegal drugs or disturbing a church service, but liberals feel disgust when witnessing environmental pollution or xenophobia. An interesting recent example of this was the coronavirus, which appeared to elicit less disgust among conservatives than among liberals.[From the March 2024 issue: The ride of techno-authoritarianism]One key to breaking malign actors’ grip on our insulae is precisely the knowledge of how it works. Researchers who in 2022 were studying ways to lower disgust sensitivity in patients dealing with obsessive-compulsive disorder found that an effective way to do so is through education about how disgust works. Next time a leader encourages you to feel disgusted by the way other people think about immigration, climate change, or criminal justice, just say, “Hands off my insula, buddy.”Another way to fight off the efforts of disgust influencers is to increase your exposure to whatever they’re trying to manipulate your negative reaction to. Dutch food scholars in 2021 looked at the main public barrier to sustainable food alternatives such as laboratory-cultivated meat and edible insects—foodstuffs that would typically provoke a disgust response in many cultures. The researchers found that the best way to break down this barrier was through increased exposure to these alternatives.I will confess that I have no desire to eat bugs. But I have found in my own work and life that my disgust for others’ beliefs decreases when I meet in person the people who hold them. I suspect that this is one reason activist leaders seem to enforce a purity culture in their movement and can be so eager to cast out opponents with “problematic” views. If you actually meet the problematic person, you will find it harder to maintain a dehumanizing disgust for them, misguided though you may think they are.While you are working to avoid the manipulation of your insula by leaders and activists, make sure that you are not inadvertently spreading disgust: Remember that disgust is contagious when people witness it in us. Notwithstanding your feelings about others and their beliefs, endeavor to eradicate language that expresses loathing and contempt toward them.[Read: What is a populist?]You might have one last question lurking after reading all of this: What if some people truly do deserve your disgust? What if their behaviors and beliefs are so reprehensible that you should consider them to be social disease vectors?As a social scientist working in the center of conventional American discourse on social and political issues, I would humbly ask you to consider whether you can think of moments when you have been unduly influenced by an activist or leader to revile an opponent, and regretted that manipulation later. But even if you can be sure that no one’s been tampering with your insula, consider what your goal is in the causes you espouse. If it is to change society, then you will need to change others’ opinions—and people rarely change their mind if they feel that they’re seen and portrayed as an object of disgust.

And what you can do to stop them

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.

Disgust is an incredibly powerful negative emotion, capable of inducing vomiting, panic, and rage. The sound evolutionary reason for our experience of disgust is that it helped keep us alive—by making repellent the tastes, sights, smells, and other sensations associated with death, rottenness, or toxicity. So when your refrigerator smells wrong and, upon inspection, you find that the culprit is a piece of chicken that has gone south, you feel nauseated by something that just a week ago made your stomach growl with anticipation. And instead of eating the bad meat, you throw it out.

An important part of the brain that helps govern this process is the insula, which works to keep us safe by alerting us to pathogens in our environment that might harm us. But if the insula is damaged, disgust can decrease or disappear. Scholars in 2016 showed this in an experiment involving patients with neurodegenerative diseases that affect the insula; compared with controls, the patients who had compromised insula response reported experiencing less disgust when they viewed television and film scenes that featured something disgusting, such as Trainspotting’s infamous drugs-down-the-toilet scene.

[Read: How to cultivate disgust]

Over time, disgust stimuli extended beyond pathogens to include not just physical phenomena but also behavioral actions, such as seeing someone do something you find objectionable. Indeed, certain immoral actions or opinions that you perceive as dangerous can elicit disgust. So if you feel strongly about, say, the environment, a person expressing what you consider a terrible viewpoint about pollution or climate change can make you feel a visceral disgust for that person—almost like something you’ve tracked in on your shoe.

If this now begins to sound a little dangerous—because your disgust reflex could be vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation by an unscrupulous demagogue who can tweak your insula—you are right to be concerned. Scholars have shown that political communication can activate the public’s sensitivity for disgust. You may have noticed that demagogic leaders tend to use disgust-based language for out-groups: The Nazis often referred to Jews as rats, and Hutu leaders in Rwanda called Tutsis cockroaches in the run-up to the genocide there. These were clearly efforts to associate people with creatures that spread disease and to inflame public revulsion.

Fortunately, it can’t happen here, right? Well, think of the last time someone in American politics, media, or public life—perhaps someone who shares your views—referred to others as “disgusting,” said that opponents were “trash” or “vermin,” or called their convictions a “mind virus.” This rhetoric was intended to stimulate your insula, provoking the panic and rage that come with disgust, and make you more willing to take actions based on hate.

The political leaders and ideological activists who are adept at triggering your disgust to serve their purposes are hard to escape: Their claims on your attention are ever more intrusive in our always-on media culture. But if you can recognize their technique of evoking disgust, you can also find ways to prevent their machinations from working on you.

The abuse of human disgust to provoke hatred is highly manipulative, and suggestive of so-called dark-triad personalities, about whom I have written previously in this column (I recently launched a short dark-triad quiz inspired by this 2014 paper, if you are curious about where you fall on the spectrum). They are the 7 percent of a recent study’s international population sample who display dominant traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, and they make life miserable if you have dealings with them in work or love. We all have known people like this personally, and suffered as a result. Getting away from them is always the right strategy.

No doubt, many advocates for ideological causes are good and virtuous, and even those who are neither of those things are not necessarily dark-triad types. But scholars have found that people who score highly in certain dark-triad characteristics are associated with participation in politics and involvement in activism. This can lead to a phenomenon known as “virtuous victimhood,” wherein activists try to stake out a moral high ground based on claims of mistreatment rather than on righteous actions. Dark-triad activists can be found on both the left and the right, turning our democracy into a Hobbesian struggle for power and twisting efforts to achieve social change into vindictive cancel culture.

[Arthur C. Brooks: The sociopaths among us—and how to avoid them]

It doesn’t take too many shrewd influencers to spread disgust, because the emotion is highly contagious. Researchers have shown that when people watch video clips of the faces of people who are disgusted, this observation alone activates the viewers’ own insula. That is what enables a climate of political or social polarization to easily take hold in a culture, so that just a few influential manipulators with an audience can convince many others that a viewpoint contrary to their own is an existential threat—and that those with opposing or different views are disgusting, in effect a dangerous human pathogen in our society.

In history’s worst cases, this dynamic has led to genocide. That seems a remote threat in the America of 2024, yet the phenomenon can still make solidarity across differing segments of society impossible, and explain many of our ongoing polarization problems today. America’s crisis of civility, whether in the Capitol in Washington, D.C., or on college campuses, owes much to the manipulation of disgust on either side of the aisle.

For years, researchers thought that political conservatives were especially susceptible, but recent research has shown that this is not true; their sensitivity depends on the issue at hand. For example, conservatives do tend to feel disgust for behavior such as consuming illegal drugs or disturbing a church service, but liberals feel disgust when witnessing environmental pollution or xenophobia. An interesting recent example of this was the coronavirus, which appeared to elicit less disgust among conservatives than among liberals.

[From the March 2024 issue: The ride of techno-authoritarianism]

One key to breaking malign actors’ grip on our insulae is precisely the knowledge of how it works. Researchers who in 2022 were studying ways to lower disgust sensitivity in patients dealing with obsessive-compulsive disorder found that an effective way to do so is through education about how disgust works. Next time a leader encourages you to feel disgusted by the way other people think about immigration, climate change, or criminal justice, just say, “Hands off my insula, buddy.”

Another way to fight off the efforts of disgust influencers is to increase your exposure to whatever they’re trying to manipulate your negative reaction to. Dutch food scholars in 2021 looked at the main public barrier to sustainable food alternatives such as laboratory-cultivated meat and edible insects—foodstuffs that would typically provoke a disgust response in many cultures. The researchers found that the best way to break down this barrier was through increased exposure to these alternatives.

I will confess that I have no desire to eat bugs. But I have found in my own work and life that my disgust for others’ beliefs decreases when I meet in person the people who hold them. I suspect that this is one reason activist leaders seem to enforce a purity culture in their movement and can be so eager to cast out opponents with “problematic” views. If you actually meet the problematic person, you will find it harder to maintain a dehumanizing disgust for them, misguided though you may think they are.

While you are working to avoid the manipulation of your insula by leaders and activists, make sure that you are not inadvertently spreading disgust: Remember that disgust is contagious when people witness it in us. Notwithstanding your feelings about others and their beliefs, endeavor to eradicate language that expresses loathing and contempt toward them.

[Read: What is a populist?]

You might have one last question lurking after reading all of this: What if some people truly do deserve your disgust? What if their behaviors and beliefs are so reprehensible that you should consider them to be social disease vectors?

As a social scientist working in the center of conventional American discourse on social and political issues, I would humbly ask you to consider whether you can think of moments when you have been unduly influenced by an activist or leader to revile an opponent, and regretted that manipulation later. But even if you can be sure that no one’s been tampering with your insula, consider what your goal is in the causes you espouse. If it is to change society, then you will need to change others’ opinions—and people rarely change their mind if they feel that they’re seen and portrayed as an object of disgust.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

RFK Jr Is Running Away From the One Thing He’s Ever Been Right About

As recently as last year, denouncing plastics was a key part of RFK Jr.’s political identity. Running for president as an icon of the health-conscious, he called plastic pollution a “crisis for human health and the environment.” He promised to support an international plastics reduction treaty and to limit the domestic production of plastic. He castigated President Biden for failing to fix the problem. He espoused ambitious solutions to the problem, alarming the plastics industry.These positions, along with concern for food safety and commitment to Making America Healthy Again, won support for his presidential campaign from yoga moms and fitness bros alike. Many of these supporters were then excited when Trump appointed him head of Health and Human Services. His microplastics concern even won him some grudging credit from us here at TNR, alongside sharp criticism of his anti-vaccine actions and other dangerous quackery, which have indeed only gotten more troubling with the death of an unvaccinated child in Texas last month—a tragedy that RFK seemed to minimize in a string of bewildering falsehoods.Now, RFK’s alarmist stance on microplastics is going mainstream. Just as RFK Jr. himself gets quieter on this topic, a host of scientific studies are suggesting that the problem of microplastics may be far worse than we thought—even approaching the scale of climate change as a threat to life on earth. A preliminary Chinese study published on Monday found that microplastics are interfering with plant photosynthesis, a problem that could put more than 400 million people at risk of starvation. Another study, published the next day and authored by researchers at Boston University,  found that microplastics could be contributing to the proliferation of dangerous antibiotic-resistant superbugs. Last month, researchers analyzing the brains of dead humans found, on average, a spoonful of microplastics, which can’t be good. Another new paper found that microplastics were increasingly entering our food supply through fertilizers. All this is especially alarming given that microplastics emitted into our bodies and into the environment have sharply increased over the last decade and, if they continue unchecked, are expected to double by 2040.If this were a normal administration and RFK Jr. a normal activist, such reports would lend momentum and legitimacy to his crusade, perhaps even leading to significant policy change. But this is not a normal administration, and Kennedy is not a normal activist. Despite reports that one of his pet issues is even more urgent than previously supposed, Kennedy seems to have changed the subject. Last week he called anti-Semitism a “malady that sickens societies and kills people with lethalities comparable to history’s most deadly plagues,” as his administration ignores or mishandles both bird flu and measles. (All forms of bigotry can affect human health, but that statement, timed with Trump’s unprecedented crackdowns on universities and on pro-Palestine student protesters, looked more like apologetics for Trump’s authoritarianism.) Another moral panic RFK Jr has been vocal about is “men playing women’s sports” by which he means the tiny number of transgender athletes joining their peers on a ballfield, another bit of rightwing grandstanding irrelevant to public health. He has not issued a single tweet, press release, or policy on microplastics since assuming charge of HHS. Not only is Kennedy saying little about microplastics, even as science mounts to confirm that he has been right to sound the alarm on this issue, but he’s part of an administration that is doing more than any in history to dismantle every mechanism that we could use to address this problem. The Trump administration has decimated the Environmental Protection Agency, are attempting to gut the Endangered Species Act, and are wrecking all the provisions for water protections that they can possibly find. On Wednesday,  in what EPA hatchet man Lee Zeldin called “the most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history,” the administration began rolling back the Clean Water Act itself, lifting most oversight of the nation’s wetlands and waterways in a dramatic reversal not just of Biden policy but of most other presidents since Nixon. Another policy that will badly hamper any plastic-fighting efforts is the withdrawal of more than a billion in National Institutes of Health dollars for scientific research. Some of these cuts are being delayed by a court challenge but the policy has already disrupted medical research on many levels. In the case of Columbia, RFK celebrated the cuts on his X account and on the HHS website (because of alleged antisemitism). Research is inextricable from finding solutions to the microplastics problem, since it is so new and there is still so much that we don’t even understand about it: for example, why do people with dementia have much more plastic in their brains? Is the plastic causing the problem or is there a quality to the brain tissue -or the blood-brain barrier -- that makes it more absorbent or weaker? Without support for science, we won’t even have enough information to attack this problem. The truth is, if RFK Jr were sincere about addressing food and environmental problems, he probably would never have joined the Trump administration in the first place. Indeed, the longer he stays in it, the more he just looks like yet another rich guy with a weird personality helping to sabotage our government. Despite a lifetime of environmentalism and vocal concern for public health, it is his own administration that is the biggest threat right now to our health and our planet. At this point he’s going to be lucky if history remembers him as the freak who left a dead bear in the park. He could go down as the guy who sounded the alarm on microplastics, only to sit back and let them addle our brains and threaten our food supply.

As recently as last year, denouncing plastics was a key part of RFK Jr.’s political identity. Running for president as an icon of the health-conscious, he called plastic pollution a “crisis for human health and the environment.” He promised to support an international plastics reduction treaty and to limit the domestic production of plastic. He castigated President Biden for failing to fix the problem. He espoused ambitious solutions to the problem, alarming the plastics industry.These positions, along with concern for food safety and commitment to Making America Healthy Again, won support for his presidential campaign from yoga moms and fitness bros alike. Many of these supporters were then excited when Trump appointed him head of Health and Human Services. His microplastics concern even won him some grudging credit from us here at TNR, alongside sharp criticism of his anti-vaccine actions and other dangerous quackery, which have indeed only gotten more troubling with the death of an unvaccinated child in Texas last month—a tragedy that RFK seemed to minimize in a string of bewildering falsehoods.Now, RFK’s alarmist stance on microplastics is going mainstream. Just as RFK Jr. himself gets quieter on this topic, a host of scientific studies are suggesting that the problem of microplastics may be far worse than we thought—even approaching the scale of climate change as a threat to life on earth. A preliminary Chinese study published on Monday found that microplastics are interfering with plant photosynthesis, a problem that could put more than 400 million people at risk of starvation. Another study, published the next day and authored by researchers at Boston University,  found that microplastics could be contributing to the proliferation of dangerous antibiotic-resistant superbugs. Last month, researchers analyzing the brains of dead humans found, on average, a spoonful of microplastics, which can’t be good. Another new paper found that microplastics were increasingly entering our food supply through fertilizers. All this is especially alarming given that microplastics emitted into our bodies and into the environment have sharply increased over the last decade and, if they continue unchecked, are expected to double by 2040.If this were a normal administration and RFK Jr. a normal activist, such reports would lend momentum and legitimacy to his crusade, perhaps even leading to significant policy change. But this is not a normal administration, and Kennedy is not a normal activist. Despite reports that one of his pet issues is even more urgent than previously supposed, Kennedy seems to have changed the subject. Last week he called anti-Semitism a “malady that sickens societies and kills people with lethalities comparable to history’s most deadly plagues,” as his administration ignores or mishandles both bird flu and measles. (All forms of bigotry can affect human health, but that statement, timed with Trump’s unprecedented crackdowns on universities and on pro-Palestine student protesters, looked more like apologetics for Trump’s authoritarianism.) Another moral panic RFK Jr has been vocal about is “men playing women’s sports” by which he means the tiny number of transgender athletes joining their peers on a ballfield, another bit of rightwing grandstanding irrelevant to public health. He has not issued a single tweet, press release, or policy on microplastics since assuming charge of HHS. Not only is Kennedy saying little about microplastics, even as science mounts to confirm that he has been right to sound the alarm on this issue, but he’s part of an administration that is doing more than any in history to dismantle every mechanism that we could use to address this problem. The Trump administration has decimated the Environmental Protection Agency, are attempting to gut the Endangered Species Act, and are wrecking all the provisions for water protections that they can possibly find. On Wednesday,  in what EPA hatchet man Lee Zeldin called “the most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history,” the administration began rolling back the Clean Water Act itself, lifting most oversight of the nation’s wetlands and waterways in a dramatic reversal not just of Biden policy but of most other presidents since Nixon. Another policy that will badly hamper any plastic-fighting efforts is the withdrawal of more than a billion in National Institutes of Health dollars for scientific research. Some of these cuts are being delayed by a court challenge but the policy has already disrupted medical research on many levels. In the case of Columbia, RFK celebrated the cuts on his X account and on the HHS website (because of alleged antisemitism). Research is inextricable from finding solutions to the microplastics problem, since it is so new and there is still so much that we don’t even understand about it: for example, why do people with dementia have much more plastic in their brains? Is the plastic causing the problem or is there a quality to the brain tissue -or the blood-brain barrier -- that makes it more absorbent or weaker? Without support for science, we won’t even have enough information to attack this problem. The truth is, if RFK Jr were sincere about addressing food and environmental problems, he probably would never have joined the Trump administration in the first place. Indeed, the longer he stays in it, the more he just looks like yet another rich guy with a weird personality helping to sabotage our government. Despite a lifetime of environmentalism and vocal concern for public health, it is his own administration that is the biggest threat right now to our health and our planet. At this point he’s going to be lucky if history remembers him as the freak who left a dead bear in the park. He could go down as the guy who sounded the alarm on microplastics, only to sit back and let them addle our brains and threaten our food supply.

What’s happening to EPA-funded community projects under Trump?

PITTSBURGH — The Biden administration pledged more than $53 million to community groups across the country for air monitoring projects in 2022, many of which were just getting underway when Trump took office. Trump issued executive orders that temporarily froze federal funding for environment-related projects (along with other key services and programs across the country), then fired and re-hired staff at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has caused confusion and delays in the implementation of key environmental health programs nationwide. The uncertainty has only been intensified by the news that the agency is repealing dozens of environmental regulations and plans to close all of its environmental justice offices. Programs facing a funding freeze included the 132 air monitoring projects in 37 states slated to receive $53.4 million in federal funding, which represent the agency’s largest investment in community air monitoring to date. Western Pennsylvania is one of a handful of geographic regions that received funding for multiple community air monitoring projects under the program. The region is home to numerous pollution sources that impact environmental health, including fracking, steel mills, petrochemical plants, and other industrial manufacturing. Exposure to this pollution increases the risk of cancer, heart and respiratory disease, premature death, and even mental illness. “I think there’s a misconception about abuse and waste of these federal funds that is so important to counter,” Ana Tsuhlares Hoffman, director of the air quality program at Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab, told EHN. The CREATE Lab is managing and analyzing the data collected from all of the federally-funded community air monitoring projects in western Pennsylvania. Organizations receiving federal funding, Hoffman said, need to be “open and up front about what we stand to lose if we lose this funding.” EHN spoke with Hoffman about how the Trump administration’s actions have impacted air monitoring projects in the region, and environmental health research and advocacy more broadly. Editor’s note: This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. EHN: What impacts on local environmental health research and advocacy have you seen from the federal funding freeze? Hoffman: We had four weeks of waking up not knowing if we’d be able to pay salaries for key staff or keep our promises to community members while our funds weren’t accessible and EPA staff were not allowed to communicate with us at all. It was a long, difficult process to administer the grants for the EPA’s community air monitoring projects. I’m so grateful to the nonprofits that took on this role — they’re all tiny compared to the organizations that usually receive federal funding, but they stepped up to figure out how to administer these grants on behalf of smaller grassroots organizations and individuals who’d been doing this work on their own for decades. Local nonprofits including FracTracker Alliance, Protect PT, GASP, and the Breathe Project worked together to decide who would represent different geographies and specific industrial polluters that had concerned residents for a long time. There was a lot of pressure to comply with the EPA requirements, which included a long list of quality assurance concerns we’d never encountered before. Securing those grants was hard-won and painful to achieve, but at the end of the process we felt like we’d leveled up our air monitoring capabilities in a meaningful way. We spent years getting to this place, and were just starting to collect air monitoring samples and process data when we learned about the funding freeze. It felt like years’ worth of activists’ and researchers’ time and effort was hanging in the balance. The big concern was whether we’d be able to pay people who were just hired to conduct new, federally-funded air monitoring projects, and whether we’d be able to keep the commitments that we’ve made to residents. That was a horrible moment where we had to go to residents to say, “We know we’ve been telling you for years that we’re working to get you answers about what you’re breathing next to this compression station or factory, but we’re not sure if we can follow through on that commitment.” EHN: What’s the status of those air monitoring projects now? Hoffman: As of right now, our grants have been un-suspended and reinstated, and we are able to access our funds, so we’re resuming the work. Our legal advisors have reminded us that we need to stay in compliance with our grant funds by continuing the work, even if it seems like there’s a chance the rug will be pulled out from under us. There’s a national network of federal funding recipients that’s facilitated by the Environmental Protection Network, which has been providing pro bono legal assistance to groups impacted by the federal funding freeze. They helped us organize instead of panicking, and groups across the country were able to successfully win back access to our funding by working in a coordinated way. Speaking as a university representative, there are labs like the CREATE Lab all across the country that serve local environmental research needs and are funded by federal dollars that are in much worse straits than we are. In cases like that, universities will have impossible decisions to make about whether to continue to support those initiatives as they lose funding for the administrative staff that keep universities running. EHN: How do you think Trump's rollbacks of environmental and health regulations could impact enforcement of those regulations at the federal, state, and local level? We’ve always had to use a combined effort of people power and legal support to effectively watchdog industrial polluters. But now we have less hope that our already significantly-underfunded agencies, like the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, will be able to respond to concerns and conduct inspections in the way that they need to. There already aren’t enough investigators to come out when watchdogs produce evidence of pollution events that are worthy of investigation, and I do think enforcement is now being deprioritized. We’ll have to be more thoughtful and diligent in our data collection and evidence collection efforts. We’ll have to be systematic as best we can to try and help fill those gaps. EHN: How are environmental health advocates changing course to adapt to the new political landscape? I think we will have to adjust our hopes for engagement with the EPA. We’ll have to collectively change gears to hold polluters accountable as best we can while federal agencies lose access to the resources they need to properly enforce environmental regulations. We’ll have to accept that “energy dominance for America” means that any push to shift to a more sustainable and environmentally-friendly economy is going to be hampered, and that our hopes for building a better future will likely need to be put on pause while we focus on defending our previous progress. We’ll really need to work together. We all only have so many brain cells and so many hours in the day, but when we work collectively we’re much more powerful.

PITTSBURGH — The Biden administration pledged more than $53 million to community groups across the country for air monitoring projects in 2022, many of which were just getting underway when Trump took office. Trump issued executive orders that temporarily froze federal funding for environment-related projects (along with other key services and programs across the country), then fired and re-hired staff at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has caused confusion and delays in the implementation of key environmental health programs nationwide. The uncertainty has only been intensified by the news that the agency is repealing dozens of environmental regulations and plans to close all of its environmental justice offices. Programs facing a funding freeze included the 132 air monitoring projects in 37 states slated to receive $53.4 million in federal funding, which represent the agency’s largest investment in community air monitoring to date. Western Pennsylvania is one of a handful of geographic regions that received funding for multiple community air monitoring projects under the program. The region is home to numerous pollution sources that impact environmental health, including fracking, steel mills, petrochemical plants, and other industrial manufacturing. Exposure to this pollution increases the risk of cancer, heart and respiratory disease, premature death, and even mental illness. “I think there’s a misconception about abuse and waste of these federal funds that is so important to counter,” Ana Tsuhlares Hoffman, director of the air quality program at Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab, told EHN. The CREATE Lab is managing and analyzing the data collected from all of the federally-funded community air monitoring projects in western Pennsylvania. Organizations receiving federal funding, Hoffman said, need to be “open and up front about what we stand to lose if we lose this funding.” EHN spoke with Hoffman about how the Trump administration’s actions have impacted air monitoring projects in the region, and environmental health research and advocacy more broadly. Editor’s note: This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. EHN: What impacts on local environmental health research and advocacy have you seen from the federal funding freeze? Hoffman: We had four weeks of waking up not knowing if we’d be able to pay salaries for key staff or keep our promises to community members while our funds weren’t accessible and EPA staff were not allowed to communicate with us at all. It was a long, difficult process to administer the grants for the EPA’s community air monitoring projects. I’m so grateful to the nonprofits that took on this role — they’re all tiny compared to the organizations that usually receive federal funding, but they stepped up to figure out how to administer these grants on behalf of smaller grassroots organizations and individuals who’d been doing this work on their own for decades. Local nonprofits including FracTracker Alliance, Protect PT, GASP, and the Breathe Project worked together to decide who would represent different geographies and specific industrial polluters that had concerned residents for a long time. There was a lot of pressure to comply with the EPA requirements, which included a long list of quality assurance concerns we’d never encountered before. Securing those grants was hard-won and painful to achieve, but at the end of the process we felt like we’d leveled up our air monitoring capabilities in a meaningful way. We spent years getting to this place, and were just starting to collect air monitoring samples and process data when we learned about the funding freeze. It felt like years’ worth of activists’ and researchers’ time and effort was hanging in the balance. The big concern was whether we’d be able to pay people who were just hired to conduct new, federally-funded air monitoring projects, and whether we’d be able to keep the commitments that we’ve made to residents. That was a horrible moment where we had to go to residents to say, “We know we’ve been telling you for years that we’re working to get you answers about what you’re breathing next to this compression station or factory, but we’re not sure if we can follow through on that commitment.” EHN: What’s the status of those air monitoring projects now? Hoffman: As of right now, our grants have been un-suspended and reinstated, and we are able to access our funds, so we’re resuming the work. Our legal advisors have reminded us that we need to stay in compliance with our grant funds by continuing the work, even if it seems like there’s a chance the rug will be pulled out from under us. There’s a national network of federal funding recipients that’s facilitated by the Environmental Protection Network, which has been providing pro bono legal assistance to groups impacted by the federal funding freeze. They helped us organize instead of panicking, and groups across the country were able to successfully win back access to our funding by working in a coordinated way. Speaking as a university representative, there are labs like the CREATE Lab all across the country that serve local environmental research needs and are funded by federal dollars that are in much worse straits than we are. In cases like that, universities will have impossible decisions to make about whether to continue to support those initiatives as they lose funding for the administrative staff that keep universities running. EHN: How do you think Trump's rollbacks of environmental and health regulations could impact enforcement of those regulations at the federal, state, and local level? We’ve always had to use a combined effort of people power and legal support to effectively watchdog industrial polluters. But now we have less hope that our already significantly-underfunded agencies, like the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, will be able to respond to concerns and conduct inspections in the way that they need to. There already aren’t enough investigators to come out when watchdogs produce evidence of pollution events that are worthy of investigation, and I do think enforcement is now being deprioritized. We’ll have to be more thoughtful and diligent in our data collection and evidence collection efforts. We’ll have to be systematic as best we can to try and help fill those gaps. EHN: How are environmental health advocates changing course to adapt to the new political landscape? I think we will have to adjust our hopes for engagement with the EPA. We’ll have to collectively change gears to hold polluters accountable as best we can while federal agencies lose access to the resources they need to properly enforce environmental regulations. We’ll have to accept that “energy dominance for America” means that any push to shift to a more sustainable and environmentally-friendly economy is going to be hampered, and that our hopes for building a better future will likely need to be put on pause while we focus on defending our previous progress. We’ll really need to work together. We all only have so many brain cells and so many hours in the day, but when we work collectively we’re much more powerful.

In Chicago, an Environmental Organization Feeds a Community

A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox. At the base of the Little Village Arch, a group of protesters gathered earlier this month. Braced against the biting winter chill, they loudly decried the raids of immigrant communities […] The post In Chicago, an Environmental Organization Feeds a Community appeared first on Civil Eats.

A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox. A towering, two-story arch, trimmed in barrel tiles with an all-caps marquee, makes it very clear where you are: “BIENVENIDOS A LITTLE VILLAGE.” The structure rises high above bustling 26th Street in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood, where independent restaurants, retails, and street vendors make it one of the highest-grossing commercial corridors in Chicago. This is the threshold of the Little Village neighborhood, home to many immigrants from Central America as well as the largest community of Mexican Americans in the Midwest. At the base of the Little Village Arch, a group of protesters gathered earlier this month. Braced against the biting winter chill, they loudly decried the raids of immigrant communities ordered by the incoming Trump administration, which aimed to arrest and deport an estimated 2,000 immigrants across this sanctuary city, and more nationwide. In this climate, members of this tight-knit community must rely on each other now more than ever. The entry to Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood. (Photo credit: The City of Chicago, 2021) One of the strongest advocates for the neighborhood is the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO). For decades, the nonprofit has fought to protect Little Village’s land, air, and the life in between. Its multifaceted, community-led food justice program includes hot meal dropoffs, backyard garden startups, and a new farm, just a few blocks from the arch, where fresh produce can be picked up for free. LVEJO is now also a landmark for Little Village. Last December, LVEJO received the national Food Sovereignty Prize, awarded for “grassroots, agroecological solutions from the people most harmed by the injustices of the global food system,” according to a press release from the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance. “I felt so glad that the Food Sovereignty Prize committee really got what the team was trying to do here,” says LVEJO’s deputy director, Juliana Pino. “It’s not just about simply growing food. It’s really about committing to the land, defending and protecting each other in the land, and showing up for a community in ways that are really rooted.” LVEJO’s role in the local food system was years in the making, and it began with environmental activism. Pino recalls how, in 1994, a group of parents forced their local elementary school to restrategize renovation plans after some children suddenly became ill, likely from toxins released during the renovation process. That foundational group of parents would soon expand to include other community leaders and go on to tackle environmental injustices neighborhood-wide as Little Village Environmental Justice Organization. “It’s not just about simply growing food. It’s really about committing to the land, defending and protecting each other in the land, and showing up for a community in ways that are really rooted.” Over its 30 years, LVEJO has shuttered two local coal power plants as well as an asphalt roofing manufacturer, Celotex, which was deemed a Superfund site by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and took the better part of a decade to remediate; now it is a 21-acre neighborhood park. Viviana “Vivi” Moreno grew up near the neighborhood, hearing these stories. “I knew people whose family members were affected by the coal power plants,” she says. In college, while elbow-deep in a detailed case study about LVEJO in her environmental health class, she fully connected the dots, and began to see “the legacy that polluting industries have in communities of color and immigrant communities of color.” Moreno joined LVEJO as a volunteer more than a decade ago, and has evolved alongside the organization. Now LVEJO’s senior food justice organizer, she helps facilitate a multigenerational network of neighbors who offer essential insight on traditional farming practices and foodways. Pino sees the work as a multitiered form of sustenance: “A number of those folks . . . had a really hard time sustaining employment due to racism and disrespect for their skills and undervaluing the knowledge that they have. And on top of that, they were looking for ways to sustain the ancestral practices that they had back from their origin countries, as well as feed their families.” Such cultural knowledge risks being lost if it isn’t transferred to the next generation. Viviana Moreno is Little Village Environmental Justice Organization’s senior food justice organizer. (Photo credit: Little Village Environmental Justice Organization) LVEJO’s multi-pronged food justice program is offered free of cost and is communicated primarily through word of mouth. Eight food justice staff members and 50 to 80 volunteers run the program, which includes the pandemic-born Farm Food Familias project, created in collaboration with Getting Grown Collective. The project has served more than 50,000 meals so far, using produce donated by and purchased from local urban farms. “What we noticed with this mutual aid program is that it wasn’t just COVID, it was an economic issue,” says Moreno. “A lot of folks lost their jobs because of either contracting long COVID or losing family members, and were having a hard time getting back to an economic space where they could provide for their families. So, that’s where some of the meals came in and they were really beautiful and healing.” Funding for Farm Food Familias and LVEJO’s other food initiatives, as well as for the organization as a whole, comes largely from private foundations that have supported LVEJO for years, as well as individual donors. Moreno also organizes Backyard Gardens Little Village, a program that supplies residents with education and materials—including plants and garden beds—to activate their own gardens. About 20 homes participate so far. And Moreno is helping to develop a blossoming 1.3-acre greenspace, La Villita Park, which opened in 2014 on a portion of the converted Celotex site. Semillas de Justicia (Seeds of Justice), a half-acre community garden and farm, sits just outside the park. A series of painted vignettes adorn the garden’s fence: people gardening together, whimsical hearts, the landmark arch, and messages affirming the neighborhood’s existence: “Defiende La Villita!” and “Let us breathe!” During the growing season, Semillas’ garden beds are fully occupied by 70 households. The adjoining vegetable farm hosts a weekly free farmers’ market, offering produce freshly harvested from the site. LVEJO collaborates with community members in deciding what to grow, to ensure that the land offers agency to the people of the neighborhood while fortifying their connection to culture and heritage. Yasmin Ruiz, food justice co-organizer at Chicago’s Little Village Environmental Justice Organization. The organization won the national Food Sovereignty Prize in December. (Photo credit: Little Village Environmental Justice Organization) This includes several varieties of tomatoes, corn, beans, pumpkin, medicinal herbs, and edible flowers such as marigolds, a key element of Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebrations in the fall. Last year, between the community garden and the farm, LVEJO collectively harvested and distributed nearly 16,000 pounds of produce and about 1,000 fresh eggs during a time when the price of eggs and other groceries had spiked. LVEJO’s farm manager, Nateo Carreño, says it isn’t uncommon for elders to stroll by during the growing season and offer a hand. Every interaction is a chance to pass down ancestral knowledge, and sometimes, a pat on the back. Carreño recalls, “A señora just [told] us, ‘I walked to the park to tell you guys that your potatoes taste like they have butter in them.’” Both of Carreño’s grandfathers were farmers, and Carreño sees the soil as a wonderland of living, breathing organisms that can heal itself over time if given the proper support. Years after being reclaimed and cared for by LVEJO, the soil here not only produces bountiful harvests, but also teems with beneficial bacteria like Mycobacterium vaccae, which get absorbed through the skin and trigger serotonin, the “happy hormone,” in the brain. “I love soil, that’s my jam,” says Carreño. “There’s just something in you that wakes up when you start working with plants and start working with soil.” For now, in the stillness of the winter, the land sleeps. Meanwhile, its caretakers keep planning. When the new season begins, LVEJO will continue to sow its mighty vision for Little Village. The post In Chicago, an Environmental Organization Feeds a Community appeared first on Civil Eats.

More Americans Are Going to Fall Into Toxic Traps

Environmental justice was patching over gaps in federal law that allowed for zones of concentrated harms.

Tracking the Trump administration’s rollback of climate and environmental policies can seem like being forced through a wormhole back in time. The administration tried to freeze funding that Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act directed to clean energy, turning that particular clock back to 2022. The Environmental Protection Agency could scrap the finding that greenhouse-gas emissions pose threats to human health and the environment, which has underpinned federal climate efforts since 2009. The Trump administration has also barred scientists from working on the UN’s benchmark international climate report, a continuous collaboration since 1990. And it has demolished federal work on environmental justice, which dates back to the George H. W. Bush administration. As part of its purge of so-called DEI initiatives, the administration put 160 EPA employees who work on environmental justice on leave, rescinded Biden’s executive orders prioritizing this work, and pushed to terminate, “to the maximum extent allowed by law,” all environmental-justice offices and positions by March 21.The concept of environmental justice is grounded in activists’ attempt in the early ’80s to block a dump for polychlorinated biphenyls, once widely used toxic chemicals, from being installed in Warren Country, North Carolina, a predominantly Black community. Evidence quickly mounted that Americans who were nonwhite or poor, and particularly those who were both, were more likely to live near hazardous-waste sites and other sources of pollution. Advocates for addressing these ills called unequal toxic exposures “environmental racism,” and the efforts to address them “environmental justice.” In the early ’90s, the first President Bush established the Office of Environmental Equity, eventually known as the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice, and President Bill Clinton mandated that federal agencies incorporate environmental justice into their work.Biden, though, was the first president to direct real money toward communities disproportionately affected by pollution—places where, say, multiple factories, refineries, truck yards, and garbage incinerators all operated in a condensed area. As with so many targets of Trump’s crusade against DEI, the damage will be felt by poor people across the country. This choice will certainly harm communities of color, but it will also touch everyone, including many of Trump’s supporters, living in a place burdened by multiple forms of environmental stress. Under Trump’s deregulatory policies, that category will only keep expanding.“There are still these places where life expectancy is 10 to 15 years less than other parts of the country,” Adam Ortiz, the former administrator for EPA Region 3, which covers the mid-Atlantic, told me. Cancer rates are sky high in many of these areas too. Some of these communities are predominantly Black, such as Ivy City, in Washington, D.C., a historically redlined, segregated, working-class community where the air is fouled by a rail switchyard, a highway, and dozens of industrial sites located in a small area. But plenty of the small rural areas that have benefited from environmental-justice money look like Richwood, West Virginia, where catastrophic flooding—a growing climate hazard in the region—knocked out the local water-treatment plant. Residents there are poor, white, and generally politically conservative. In many cases, these communities had gotten little federal attention for generations, Ortiz said.Untangling the knot of pollution in these places is slow work, in part because federal laws don’t adequately address overlapping environmental ills: The Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act regulate only one form and one source of pollution at a time. A population exposed to many pollution sources simultaneously, or to a cocktail of toxins, has little redress. Each business regulated by these laws may follow them and still end up creating places that, like Ivy City, have dangerously bad air quality. Cumulative impact is a gaping regulatory chasm into which millions of Americans fall each year. Federal environmental-justice efforts aimed to fill it.The Trump administration has now halted projects such as the ones Ortiz worked on. People who had spent years gaining trust with local communities, and who had worked with local companies to help them alter things such as how they vented pollution, were dismissed or reassigned. By then, in Ivy City, the EPA had managed to address a “handful” of the 40 or 50 pollution sources plaguing the area, Ortiz said.But some work did get done, and its benefit will likely persist despite the Trump administration’s attempt to make environmental justice disappear. Paul Mohai, a professor at the University of Michigan who served as a senior adviser to the EPA’s environmental-justice office, told me. In his view, one president can’t erase the progress made over the past decades, particularly outside the federal government.Because he was there at the beginning, Mohai knows what these knotty pollution problems looked like when few in government were paying attention. When he co-wrote a review of the literature on environmental justice in the early 1990s, he struggled to find more than a dozen papers on the topic. Now, he said, more publications are coming out and more nonprofit groups have formed to tackle these issues than he can keep track of.Surely some of them will be affected by the president’s restrictions on grant making for scientific research. But the facts accrued through existing research cannot be erased: People of color in the U.S. are exposed to a 38 percent higher level of the respiratory irritant nitrogen dioxide, on average, than white people. Low-income communities are disproportionately targeted for hazardous-waste sites. Poor people and people of color suffer the most from climate impacts such as flooding and extreme heat. Several states have also put environmental-justice considerations into their laws; one in New Jersey restricts certain new industrial permits in places that are already overburdened, for instance. The decisions of a single administration can’t undo all that.But millions of disadvantaged Americans live in states that are not interested in passing these kinds of laws. And layoffs at the EPA will dilute what protections federal clean-air and water legislation do afford, by making enforcement less possible. As the climate crisis deepens—growing the threats of extreme heat, sea-level rise, and catastrophic rainfall, each a hazard that can rob people of safety—more places could succumb to the gaps in these laws as well. Many climate dangers are akin to those of pollution because they create zones of harm where residents bear the costs of the country’s environmental compromises and have little to help them through it. Nothing in any federal law specifically compels the government to protect people from extreme heat, or from unprecedented flooding, though both are set to descend on Americans more often and disproportionately harm poor people and people of color.As these stresses multiply, they’ll be layered onto a landscape already dotted with sites where heavy industry and major traffic create concentrations of emissions. Without laws to address the cumulative impact of these, more Americans will be left sicker and will die sooner. It’s taken decades for the country to start reckoning with that fact to begin to move toward a more useful vision of safety. For now, it seems, all progress is on pause.

Analysis-Germany's Climate Activists on Edge as Parties Shape Coalition Agenda

By Riham AlkousaaBERLIN (Reuters) - Climate activists fear the worst when Germany's conservatives and Social Democrats begin to thrash out a joint...

BERLIN (Reuters) - Climate activists fear the worst when Germany's conservatives and Social Democrats begin to thrash out a joint climate policy for their future coalition government. A country once seen as a beacon of progressive climate policy is poised for a significant reset, with the conservatives - having in part blamed Germany's ambitious green goals for chronic economic weakness - keen to roll back targets and policies amid rising voter apathy on climate.As Europe's largest emitter of CO2 but also Europe's biggest generator of renewable energy, Germany's future stance on climate issues will be even more critical after the United States' withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and with the European Union under pressure from some members to ease regulations and goals."If there was ever a time to panic about climate and politics, now would be it," Luisa Neubauer, a prominent German climate activist with Fridays for Future, told Reuters.Since winning February's election, the CDU has affirmed its commitment to Germany's overarching 2045 target of being climate neutral but emphasizes a "pragmatic approach that supports the economy, industry, and public acceptance", according to Andreas Jung, the conservatives' climate policy spokesperson.The party wants to abolish a future ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars, end restrictions on the use of cars, reverse a law phasing out fossil fuel heating, and reintroduce diesel subsidies in agriculture. How strongly the SPD will defend its green election pledges - to stick to national and EU targets, invest in green infrastructure and renewables, and focus on affordable climate protection - in coalition talks is key, climate activists say. Nina Scheer, an SPD climate spokeswoman, told Reuters it would be important to develop a common understanding with the conservatives on an accelerated and systematic transition to renewable energies. But that could be tricky. The SPD has been significantly weakened and came in third place in the election, with just 16.4% of the vote, its worst ever result."The SPD is not a traditional climate policy party like the Greens, so we shouldn’t expect them to push this issue as strongly," said Stefan Marschall, political scientist at the University of Duesseldorf.Greenhouse gas emissions in Germany fell by 12.5% under the three-party "traffic light" coalition of the SPD, Greens, and Free Democrats, thanks to a renewable energy push and a drop in industrial production.But emissions cuts in sectors such as transport and building - 38% of Germany's 2024 total emissions- have stalled.Expanding net-zero policies to these sectors has faced growing resistance in Germany and Europe, amid a cost-of-living crisis that has shifted climate protection lower on German voters' priorities in the February election.Only 12.8% of Germans saw climate protection as the most important issue in this election, down from 24.4% in 2021, a study by IW Koeln economic institute showed.Environmental and expert groups say Germany is not expected to meet the 2045 target as things stand. The Green Party, heading for opposition, still wields some influence, after threatening to tie its support for a new conservative-SPD financial package to the inclusion of some climate investment commitments within that plan.    Germany cannot unilaterally reverse EU laws, but its influence is strong. The center-right European People's Party (EPP), the largest group at the European parliament and which includes Germany's conservatives, launched a campaign in December to weaken the bloc's climate rules.At a recent EPP retreat in Berlin, conservative leader and Germany's likely next chancellor Friedrich Merz signed a declaration calling on the EU to abandon its renewable energy goals, a step backed by industry."If Germany is not standing by the Green Deal, the Green Deal is gone," said German Green MEP Michael Bloss, referring to the EU's target. The conservatives' climate policy relies heavily on CO2 pricing as a mechanism to cut emissions and fund investment."We are focusing on three pillars: gradual CO2 pricing with social compensation, reliable subsidies, and a strategy of enabling rather than excessive regulation," CDU's Jung said. The European emissions trading system (ETS), extending to the transport and buildings sectors from 2027, is expected to increase prices and make heating or powering vehicles with fossil fuels less appealing. But if prices rise too much that creates a crisis of affordability.Germany must annually invest about 3% of its GDP in climate protection measures like power grid upgrades, industry electrification and public transport expansion, to meet its 2045 climate neutrality goal, says Berlin-based think tank Agora.The conservatives and SPD this week agreed to create a 500 billion euro infrastructure fund and overhaul borrowing rules but dedicated climate investments are not included in the fund. The conservatives have also promised sweeping tax cuts that would deprive state coffers of almost 100 billion euros of annual revenue, according to the Ifo economic institute. "The biggest gap in the conservatives’ current program is the lack of a clear strategy to make climate transition fair or affordable for the poorer half of the population," said Christoph Bals, political director at research group Germanwatch.The chance of sluggish climate action under a future conservative-led government is likely to spark more legal battles and direct action activism, which surged in Germany, despite the greener SPD-led government.Roadblocks, airport protests, and demonstrations at oil installations captured national attention and triggered a government crackdown and there are already three climate-related constitutional complaints pending before Germany's top court."It's our job to keep this issue alive. The next few years will be challenging, not just for us but also for the CDU (conservatives)," Lena Donat, Greenpeace mobility expert, said. (Reporting by Riham Alkousaa; Editing by Alexandra Hudson)Copyright 2025 Thomson Reuters.Photos You Should See - Feb. 2025

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