Shetland Vikings and a mega-prison: photos of the day
Displaced Palestinians return to their homes from southern regions via Salah al-Din road after the ceasefire agreement Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
Ultra-Orthodox Jews protest against conscription Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
Rescuers of the State Emergency Service work to extinguish a fire in a building after a drone strike Photograph: Sergey Bobok/AFP/Getty Images
Protesters clash with local police during a protest against the eviction of a building known as L'Antiga Escola Massana (Old Massana School). The building has been occupied by squatters since 2020 Photograph: Quique García/EPA
Volunteers from the humanitarian aid organisation Samaritan's Purse sift through debris from homes razed by the Eaton Fire to help salvage and recover property in California Photograph: Frederic J Brown/AFP/Getty Images
Muslims raise their arms as a cleric displays a holy relic, believed to be a hair from the Prophet Muhammad's beard, during Miraj-ul-Alam celebrations at the Hazratbal shrine Photograph: Tauseef Mustafa/AFP/Getty Images
Hindus arrive for a holy dip at Triveni Sangam, the confluence of the Ganges, the Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati rivers, on the eve of the Mauni Amavasya , or new moon day, during the Kumbh Mela festival Photograph: Rajesh Kumar Singh/AP
Soldiers march with torches to mark the 172nd anniversary of the birth of the national independence hero José Martí Photograph: Ramón Espinosa/AP
Inmates in a cell at the Counter-Terrorism Confinement Centre (CECOT) mega-prison, where hundreds of members of the MS-13 and 18 street gangs are being held. The CECOT, the largest prison in Latin America and emblem of the war against gangs of the government of President Nayib Bukele, was inaugurated two years ago on Saturday Photograph: Marvin Recinos/AFP/Getty Images
President Trump pumps his fist as he walks on the South Lawn of the White House Photograph: Kent Nishimura/AFP/Getty Images
Indigenous people from the Amazonian state of Para gather in an event at the headquarters of the Para state education secretariat. Hundreds have continued the protests that began two weeks ago, seeking to guarantee the right to education for Indigenous peoples Photograph: Marx Vasconcelos/EPA
A model presents a creation by Matthieu Blazy for Chanel's spring/summer 2025 haute couture collection during Paris fashion week Photograph: Teresa Suárez/EPA
Visitors take photographs on their phones of Leonardo da Vinci's painting of the Mona Lisa, at the Louvre museum Photograph: Thibault Camus/AP
Members of the Up Helly Aa festival's 'Jarl Squad' pose with a replica Viking longship after the morning parade in Lerwick. Up Helly Aa dates back to the 1880s and celebrates Viking culture and the heritage of the Shetland Islands
Photograph: Tolga Akmen/EPA
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NBC News
2 hours ago
- NBC News
Trump's EPA wants to repeal regulations on carbon emissions from power plants
The Environmental Protection Agency announced Wednesday that it will aim to eliminate existing limits on greenhouse gas emissions from coal- and gas-fired power plants, a move that would curb the agency's ability to combat climate change under the Clean Air Act. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a news conference that Biden-era carbon pollution standards for power plants 'suffocate' the economy in order to protect the environment. Zeldin, who was appointed by President Donald Trump in January, stated that the agency's announcement was a huge step forward in energy dominance for the U.S., while promising that no power plants would emit more than they already do. Currently, the power sector accounts for a quarter of all U.S. emissions, according to the latest EPA emissions data. Zeldin also said the EPA plans to weaken Biden-era regulations on mercury emissions from power plants. Environmental advocates say the EPA's proposal is an escalation in the Trump administration's ongoing push against climate action across federal agencies, including at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of Energy and the National Weather Service. In 2024, the Biden administration finalized the most stringent carbon pollution standards for power plants to date in an effort to tackle the climate crisis — but now, those rules face an uncertain future. Gina McCarthy, a former EPA Administrator under President Joe Biden, called Zeldin's announcement a 'political play' that defies 'decades of science and policy review' in a statement on Wednesday. 'By giving a green light to more pollution, his legacy will forever be someone who does the bidding of the fossil fuel industry at the expense of our health,' McCarthy said. Jill Tauber, the vice president of litigation for climate and energy at Earthjustice, a nonprofit currently suing the Trump administration over several environmental rollbacks said: 'Eliminating pollution standards from the largest industrial source of greenhouse gas pollution in the United States flies in the face of what the law requires, what the science tells us, and what we're seeing every day.' Power plants in the U.S. are a huge contributor to global carbon emissions. A report published by the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law found that if the U.S. power sector were its own country, it would be the sixth-largest emitter in the world. Under the first Trump administration, the EPA rolled back several Obama-era greenhouse gas standards on power plants, but this recent announcement marks the first time the agency has suggested outright repeals. Zeldin's move on power plants follows his promise in March to tackle the 'climate change religion' by reconsidering or repealing 31 regulations surrounding tailpipe emissions, coal ash regulations and oil and gas wastewater management. The proposed rule, which will now move into its comment period, will face scrutiny from legal advocates and environmental nonprofits like Earthjustice and the Natural Resources Defense Council, which say the EPA is obligated to regulate greenhouse gas emissions by law — citing seminal cases like the 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA lawsuit, which determined that greenhouse gases must be regulated by the EPA under the Clean Air Act. 'We'll be watching closely to see if the EPA proceeds with repealing these life-saving standards based on a legal theory that doesn't pass the laugh test,' said Meredith Hawkins, the federal climate legal director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. 'The NRDC stands ready to defend the public's right to breathe in court if needed.' Cutting historic limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants would impact global climate change, but it could also cause ripple effects on human health and the economy. Harvey Reiter, an energy and utilities lawyer and a law professor at George Washington University, says that if the EPA moves forward with its planned repeals, he expects some energy companies and utilities that have retooled operations and made long-term investments in renewable energy to sue the Trump administration. 'The biggest impacts of the proposed rules are uncertainty and instability,' he said. 'Nobody knows what to do next. It makes investment decisions harder. It makes decisions about hiring, staff and employees harder. It creates a lot of uncertainty in the market.' Greenhouse gas emissions from power plants are not just a climate issue. Burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide as well as other air pollutants, including nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, mercury and fine particulate matter, which are linked to increased risk of respiratory issues and cardiovascular disease. Regulating carbon emissions from power plants broadly reduces other air pollution for communities living near power plants, said Laura Kate Bender, the vice president of nationwide advocacy and public policy at the American Lung Association. 'It works both ways. On the one hand, power plants burning fossil fuels contribute to climate change and cause health problems at the same time,' said Bender. 'And then climate change, in many cases, contributes to extreme heat, or more wildfire smoke, or more ozone smogs. Climate change is a health emergency, and cutting carbon in the power sector is a critical tool in the toolbox for fighting climate change.'
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
Trump's EPA announces major rollbacks to power plant pollution limits
US power plants will be allowed to pollute nearby communities and the wider world with more unhealthy air toxins and an unlimited amount of planet-heating gases under new regulatory rollbacks proposed by Donald Trump's administration, experts warned. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) unveiled a plan on Wednesday that would repeal a landmark climate rule that aims to mostly eliminate greenhouse gases from power plants by the 2030s and would, separately, weaken another regulation that restricts power plants' release of hazardous air pollutants such as mercury. 'We choose to both protect the environment and grow the economy,' said Lee Zeldin, administrator of the EPA, at an event to announce the plans. He said the rollbacks will save households money while also defying what he called 'the climate change cult'. The climate rule has 'saddled our critical power sector with expensive, unreasonable and burdensome regulations', Zeldin said. 'American energy suffered and Americans who rely on reliable, affordable energy suffered. The good news is those days are over.' The EPA's proposals will go out for public comment and are likely to face legal challenges. They target a rule crafted last year by the Biden administration to phase out emissions from electricity-producing fossil fuel plants, which are responsible for around a quarter of US greenhouse gases, and a regulation called the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, which Biden toughened in 2023 to slash harmful pollution suffered by communities. These rollbacks come despite overwhelming scientific evidence of the dire consequences of the worsening climate crisis and the harm caused by pollutants such as mercury, which can seep into water, soils and the air and has been linked to neurological damage in young children as well as heart, lung and immune system ailments in adults. Coal-fired power plants cause nearly half of all mercury emissions in the US, according to the EPA. More than 200 health experts wrote to the EPA on Wednesday warning the moves 'would lead to the biggest pollution increases in decades and is a blatant give-away to polluters'. The experts added the reversals are 'a direct contradiction to the Environmental Protection Agency's mission of protecting public health and the environment'. Trump, however, has vowed to boost fossil fuel production at all costs, having reaped record donations from the oil and gas industry during his election campaign. At Wednesday's EPA event, Zeldin was joined by eight lawmakers, all Republicans – Kevin Cramer, Troy Balderson, Brett Guthrie, Carol Miller, Dan Meuser, Rob Bresnahan, Michael Rulli and Riley Moore – who have collectively received more than $3m from fossil fuel donors in their own election campaigns, a Guardian analysis of the OpenSecrets database shows. Bresnahan, a Pennsylvania representative, holds personal financial interests in more than 20 fossil fuel companies. In justifying the deletion of the Biden climate plan, which the EPA previously estimated would deliver $370bn in net benefits, Zeldin has claimed that US power plants only produce a small and declining fraction of the world's emissions. This is despite the fact that if these power plants were a country, it would be the sixth-largest emitter on the planet. Gina McCarthy, who was EPA administrator under Barack Obama, said that Zeldin's 'dismantling of our nation's protections from power plant pollution is absolutely illogical and indefensible. It's a purely political play that goes against decades of science and policy review.' 'By giving a green light to more pollution, his legacy will forever be someone who does the bidding of the fossil fuel industry at the expense of our health,' she added. 'Everyone will be affected by his actions, but the most vulnerable among us, our kids and grandkids, will suffer the most.' The EPA has embarked upon a wide-ranging blitz upon environmental regulations since Trump became president, setting about removing or loosening clean air and water rules that, collectively, were on track to save 200,000 American lives in the decades ahead. Trump, who has adopted the mantra of 'drill, baby, drill', has claimed unhindered fossil fuel production will bring down energy costs, although he has sought to hobble clean energy such as solar and wind, which are typically the cheapest sources of new electricity generation. The rollbacks follow the second-hottest May on record globally, and a record-hot 2024 that unleashed a stunning number of climate-driven disasters and six weeks of extra-dangerously hot days. Experts have warned that sea level rise is on track to cause 'catastrophic inland migration', including to millions of Americans, with climate shocks set to wipe 50% from global GDP by the end of this century. 'It's completely reprehensible that Donald Trump would seek to roll back these lifesaving standards and do more harm to the American people and our planet just to earn some brownie points with the fossil fuel industry,' said Patrick Drupp, climate policy director at the Sierra Club. 'This administration is transparently trading American lives for campaign dollars and the support of fossil fuel companies, and Americans ought to be disgusted and outraged that their government has launched an assault on our health and our future.'
The Independent
4 hours ago
- The Independent
EPA set to roll back rules that limit greenhouse gases and mercury from US power plants
The Environmental Protection Agency is poised to eliminate rules that limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants fueled by coal and natural gas, part of a wide-ranging rollback of environmental regulations that Administrator Lee Zeldin has said would remove trillions of dollars in costs and 'unleash' American energy. The EPA also plans to weaken a regulation that requires power plants to reduce emissions of mercury and other toxic pollutants that can harm brain development of young children and contribute to heart attacks and other health problems in adults. The planned rollbacks, set to be announced Wednesday, are meant to fulfill President Donald Trump 's repeated pledge to "unleash American energy" and make it more affordable for Americans to power their homes and operate businesses. If approved and made final, the plans would reverse efforts by President Joe Biden 's administration to address climate change and improve conditions in areas heavily burdened by industrial pollution, mostly in low-income and majority Black or Hispanic communities. The power plant rules are among about 30 environmental regulations that Zeldin targeted in March when he announced what he called the 'most consequential day of deregulation in American history.' He said the actions would put a 'dagger through the heart of climate-change religion' and introduce a 'Golden Age' for the American economy. Environmental groups vowed to challenge the rules in court. ' Power plants are among the largest sources of dangerous pollution in the nation. We have modern technologies that allow these plants to reduce pollution with available and cost-effective solutions,' said Vickie Patton, general counsel of the Environmental Defense Fund. The clean-air standards targeted by the EPA under Trump, a Republican, "are protecting people across America today and will safeguard future generations,'' Patton said. 'Ignoring the immense harm to public health from power plant pollution is a clear violation of the law,'' added Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council. 'Our lawyers will be watching closely, and if EPA finalizes a slapdash effort to repeal those rules, we'll see them in court.' The EPA-targeted rules could prevent an estimated 30,000 deaths and save $275 billion each year they are in effect, according to an Associated Press examination that included the agency's own prior assessments and a wide range of other research. It's by no means guaranteed that the rules will be entirely eliminated — they can't be changed without going through a federal rulemaking process that can take years and requires public comment and scientific justification. Even a partial dismantling of the rules would mean more pollutants such as smog, mercury and lead — and especially more tiny airborne particles that can lodge in lungs and cause health problems, the AP analysis found. It would also mean higher emissions of the greenhouse gases driving Earth's warming to deadlier levels. Biden, a Democrat, had made fighting climate change a hallmark of his presidency. Coal-fired power plants would be forced to capture smokestack emissions or shut down under a strict EPA rule issued last year. Then-EPA head Michael Regan said the power plant rules — the Biden administration's most ambitious effort to roll back planet-warming pollution from the power sector — would reduce pollution and improve public health while supporting a reliable, long-term supply of electricity. The power sector is the nation's second-largest contributor to climate change, after transportation. In its proposed regulation, the Trump EPA argues that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from fossil fuel-fired power plants 'do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution' or to climate change and therefore do not meet a threshold under the Clean Air Act for regulatory action. A paper published earlier this year in the journal Science found the Biden-era rules could reduce U.S. power sector carbon emissions by 73% to 86% below 2005 levels by 2040, compared with a reduction of 60% to 83% without the rules. 'Our research shows that EPA's power plant rules make substantial strides to protect human health and the environment,'' said Aaron Bergman, a fellow at Resources for the Future, a nonprofit research institution and a co-author of the Science paper. 'Carbon emissions in the power sector drop at a faster rate with the (Biden-era) rules in place than without them,'' Bergman said in an email. 'And we also would have seen significant reductions in sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, pollutants that harm human health."
