How to Save the Environment from Trump and Project 2025

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Welcome to Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams from Cricket Media.

I'm your host, Stacey Abrams.

Welcome back to our show.

I hope everyone had a good holiday season.

But now it's time to get back to work because we are mere weeks away from Trump's inauguration.

My niece Faith, who many of you know helped me launch Assembly Required, was home from her first semester in college.

We spent more time catching up on Silo and Cross, both are really good shows, than talking politics, but she did share how she was adjusting after the election.

Namely, we talked about how to process what she was hearing, about the appointments, about deportations, about what the real reach of the presidency is.

Look.

They both have about four years, Faith and Trump.

The question is, what will he do with his and how will it affect hers?

For all of us, the specter of the unknown is not just terrifying, it's paralyzing.

And it's enraging that someone else might determine our destiny.

But like I told Faith, he has some power, but no one has all of the power.

Our job is to pool what we've got and see what we can make happen.

One of the places where the unknown meets shared power is how we can prepare for what will happen on the environment.

It's far from the only area where the outgoing and incoming presidents have distinctly opposite visions, but it is definitely one of the most consequential.

Just as a quick reminder, in his first term, Trump pulled us out of the Paris Climate Accords.

He rolled back over 100 environmental regulations domestically.

He has also consistently called climate change a hoax.

President Biden passed the largest piece of climate legislation in history through the Inflation Reduction Act or IRA, which invested nearly $400 billion into reducing emissions, shoring up clean energy, and creating jobs.

Just this week, President Biden took further action to protect both the East and the West Coast from offshore drilling.

With this announcement, President Biden has now conserved over 670 million acres of America's lands and waters.

Basically, every Biden climate policy is is already a target for Trump's second term.

Like that offshore drilling ban Biden just announced this Monday, Trump has already told Hugh Hewitt on his radio show that he'll change it on day one.

I see it just came over that Biden has banned all oil and gas drilling across 625 million acres of U.S.

coastal territory.

It's ridiculous.

I'll unban it immediately.

I will unban it.

I have the right to unban it immediately.

What's he doing?

Why is he doing it?

To clarify, President Biden did issue two presidential memoranda to protect vast areas from offshore oil leasing and drilling.

But for those wondering, a presidential memorandum is a lot harder to rescind than an executive order.

And undoing these on day one is not exactly realistic.

It will take an act of Congress.

I point this out because progress is in the details.

As our regular listeners know, the thing we've been doing in preparation for Trump's second term is is looking at Project 2025 and its policy suggestions as both chilling and glaring insight into what's coming and how we can fight back.

You see, Project 2025 demonizes the Biden administration's climate policies and falsely minimizes the very complex impact of carbon emissions on everything from air quality to climate change.

In addition to misleading the public, the document contains tons of recommendations to roll back environmental protections and gut the very agencies tasked with keeping our air and water clean and our communities safe.

But there are glimmers of hope.

For example, a recent victory in Deep Red Montana, where the state Supreme Court ruled six to one that Montana was violating the residents' constitutional right to a clean environment by permitting oil, gas, and coal projects without regard for global warming.

We might be tempted to assume Trump is going to win, but we'd be wrong.

Our job is to understand what's threatened versus what's really possible, and then do something about it.

Here to help us understand the most significant threats and opportunities is journalist Teak Brut.

He's a senior staff writer at Grist, a nonprofit independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate solutions and a just future.

Teak has been following the Trump campaign and Project 2025's climate priorities.

He's written stories from all over the world, and we're lucky that he's able to join us here today on Assembly Required.

Teak, thank you so much for joining us here on Assembly Required.

Thanks for having me.

It's great to be here.

So I want to start with a big picture question.

For those of us who watched Captain Planet, we understand that Donald Trump is no Dr.

Blight, but can he wipe out four years of Biden's pro-environmental policies in a single term?

I think he can pause them and roll them back.

It's a little bit unclear exactly how bad it'll be, but it's not going to be good.

Okay.

So no Dr.

Blight.

The way I look at it is that it sort of depends on who comes next in the next administration after Trump.

You saw Trump roll back a bunch of environmental regulations, then you saw Biden put them back in.

And with a lot of these things, they take

years to really have major effects on, say, appliances or actual machines that are getting put out in the world.

So this tug and pull and tug and pull between administrations, I think at the very least, we're looking at delayed climate action, which I think is going to be probably the biggest impact, right?

We're headed well past one degree Celsius of warming, towards 1.5, probably towards 2 degrees Celsius of warming.

We don't have the time really to waste another four years of delays.

Aaron Powell,

thinking about what Biden has put in place and how much power Trump has to stall it out,

which of the component pieces have had the greatest potential impact and therefore could be stalled out?

I think, you know, the rollback of the IRA is going to be a massive one.

And I think stalling that will actually have more of an impact than some of the other things that can be done.

But you are going to see Trump has vowed to stop leasing new land for offshore wind.

I think that'll be major.

And he's going to start leasing land for drilling and gas exploration.

So I think you're going to start to see this

shift away from an energy transition.

It'll be pieces here and pieces there, but it's sort of going to be a lifeline for fossil fuels and sort of extend its life.

And I think

where you'll see the longest impacts is if it encourages new infrastructure that's going to last 30, 50, 100 years, and then you've baked in natural gas.

pipeline or whatever it might be, like a natural gas line to your house, that will be there for generations in a way that can't be undone.

So I think it'll be sort of the sum of its parts, but it all encourages fossil fuel consumption and infrastructure build out in a way that I think over the long term will have climate impacts.

So let's stick with IRA for a moment.

So it is the most significant climate action legislation in American history.

And a big piece of it looked at how we, I mean, despite the name Inflation Reduction Act, it was, I think, the most significant piece that, to your point, will have the longest shelf life was about how it changes our engagement with fossil fuels and with clean energy.

Can you talk a little bit about some of the component pieces that were there?

And as a part of that, what could Trump stop?

What could he roll back?

And what are things that are just moving too fast for him to and his administration to have real impact?

Yeah, so I think there are some things that consumers or most Americans will see the most.

One is that EV electric vehicle tax credit.

So that is $7,500

on

many new electric vehicles.

You get a tax credit towards buying that.

Home electrification and home energy efficiency, everything from weatherization to getting $800 to put in an induction stove in your home.

So those are some of the consumer side ones and impacts that I think people will see a lot of.

But then there are larger ones, like encouraging utility-scale solar and wind,

and training workforces of contractors to be sort of literate in this world.

So, the range is huge.

And, of course, there are some controversial things like

the support of hydrogen, which is often fossil fuel-based.

So, we'll see exactly what Trump is able to roll back on his own.

And it's mostly going to require congressional action or support.

And he has, you know, such a narrow majority in the House.

We'll see what's possible.

But tax credits, for example, all tax credits will have to be either repealed or changed by Congress.

Trump cannot do that on his own.

But what he can do is slow a lot of the spigot of money that's coming out.

So, for example, the IRA had $9 billion to go towards state programs for home electrification and energy efficiency.

Only about $3 billion of that has actually been awarded.

And so it's an open question

how,

I think it's through the DOE, so how

the next DOE administration handles that $6 billion of remaining money.

I mean, by statute,

I think they're required

to use it, but I think it can be really slowed or it can be reprogrammed or the awards can just not go through.

Like, I think there's a lot of ways where, you know, the money, the tap can just be slowed down and just gummed up.

And the administration has become smarter.

So if you look at Trump's first term, they made a lot of sort of

legal blunders in the beginning when they were trying to roll back rules.

because they were new to sort of government bureaucracy and government rulemaking, et cetera.

They made missteps that they aren't going to make this time.

And so I think they will be as efficient as they possibly can in getting some of their agenda passed.

Well, let's stick with this for one more second.

So let's talk about the state dollars that are going out through the IRA.

A lot of those states have Republican senators.

So those are states where if the money suddenly dry up and a neighbor has it in another state, if a cousin can say, I just got this money, but why can't we have it in our red state?

Do you think that will have impact on particularly how senators are thinking about how they would vote on these repeals?

Yeah, so there's been $200 to $300 billion from the IRA sort of allocated already, and 70 to 80% of that has gone to Republican congressional districts.

And you've seen, I think it was 18 Republican members of Congress write House Speaker Johnson to say like, hey, like these are, you know, there's some things here that we definitely want to save.

And so he's, you know, Speaker Johnson has said that he wants to take a scalpel approach rather than a sledgehammer approach to the IRA.

Trump has said he wants to take a sledgehammer approach to the IRA.

So I think you're going to see this continued standoff between the House and Trump and the Senate also to a certain extent for how

much of this actually gets done.

When climate scientists are thinking about what's happening in a second term, and I know you mentioned two degrees Celsius, can you talk a bit about what that means in terms of the emissions reduction targets that we set for 2030?

And

what do climate scientists think happen if we don't make any progress during the next four years?

Well, we're already on track.

to sort of miss climate targets.

So this isn't going to help.

And weirdly, if you look back at Trump's first term, there was a decrease in emissions.

And I was reading a little bit about this recently, and there were sort of two reasons behind that.

One was the global pandemic, right?

Like, you know, the economies and everybody's use of everything fell off a cliff, which was a temporary decrease in emissions for the country.

Another big one is that electricity demand remained low during Trump's first term, which allowed the sort of natural retirement of sort of coal and some of the power, like the fossil fuel used to power power plants.

Electricity demand is growing, and there hopefully won't be another global pandemic so emissions during trump's second term seem very likely to not decrease if not go up so

we are going to get further away from global and domestic uh emissions targets and if we miss them we're going to keep seeing the sort of natural disasters we've already been seeking in the u.s right milton was a billion dollar storm.

The number of billion dollar storms or the average time between billion storms, have gone from about four months to a matter of weeks.

And so we're just going to keep, like Vermont,

which is often on every list of climate havens, right, where I am, has seen 100-year floods

for the last few years.

So these are the kind of impacts that you're going to start to see more of as the sort of needle rises.

Offshore drilling has been a tug of war for the last, I would say, 20 years.

And each administration comes in trying to undo what the last administration did.

On Monday of this week, I talked at the top of the program that Joe Biden actually issued a presidential memoranda using a provision of statute versus an executive order, essentially taking a lot of land and a lot of

capacity for offshore oil drilling off of the table.

And

that decision to use a a statute versus using an executive order has some real meaning when it comes to environmental regulations.

Can you talk a little bit about what Biden did and why it matters?

Yeah, I mean, he took the entire eastern seaboard offline for

oil drilling.

He took parts of the Pacific Northwest, chunks of the Gulf of Mexico.

I think it's pretty major.

I haven't, it's so new that I haven't delved too far into the statute versus executive order.

I do know that I got an alert recently that Trump is obviously trying to already,

you know, reverse the ban, ban the ban, if you will.

And so I think you'll see him try to do that.

But my guess is it's going to the courts.

And this is going to be a common theme.

I think you're going to see a lot.

of climate rulemaking, a lot of climate legislation, a lot of climate everything end up in the courts over the next few years,

which in a lot of ways is, I think, what conservatives want, right?

Because if it ends up in the courts, it at least delays a lot of this stuff,

if not plays to their favor with a Supreme Court that is

skewed conservative.

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Two of the people that he's appointed that would be overseeing these agencies, you've got Lee Zeldon, who's Trump's pick to lead the EPA, and you've got Chris Wright, who's his energy secretary.

What can you tell us about former Representative Zeldin, about Chris Wright, and how concerned we should be about the roles that they will play leading these regulatory agencies?

Yeah, I mean, Chris Wright

is or was the head of the world's largest fracking company, right?

Like he has been a climate skeptic, if not outright denier.

So I think with the DOE, you're going to see

you know, them working with the interior to sort of encourage oil and gas development,

encourage drilling, and doing sort of whatever they can to sort of extend the lifeline of fossil fuels, which to your point earlier, like there are some market forces that are

naturally happening.

And I think you'll see the DOE start to push back against any sort of natural electrification, green transition rules and sort of momentum in any way that they can.

I mean, you start like everything, like the DOE controls such a huge swath, right?

They're the ones that control how efficient your dishwasher is.

They make ENERGY STAR standards.

So

the impact can be like extremely wide.

And I think it sometimes puts, not to focus on appliances, but I found like that's something that impacts people's lives a lot.

And so the Biden administration strengthened appliance standards, but a lot of those don't come into effect until 2026, 2028.

And so those will get rolled back.

And then it puts these manufacturers in this place where do they, you know, how efficient are appliances?

And sort of, you sort of end up with a lot of the status quo a lot of the time.

So I think you're going to see an impact there.

And then, you know, Lee Zeldon is the head of the APA.

He said the IRA sucks, right?

And he's, you know, an anti-regulation, an America-first, you know, policymaker.

And so I think a lot of the Justice 40 initiatives, the environmental justice initiatives that the EPA was part of, I think you're probably going to see a lot of that dry up.

And, you know, Project 2025 has called for an EPA, like slashing its budget and slashing its authority.

So I think he's going to be one of those rare federal agency heads that actually allows the curtailing of his own agency.

And I think you saw this a bit during the first administration where the EPA shifted from enforcement to sort of letting companies self-police.

And I think you'll see a good chunk of that under Zeldin as well.

And then some of my colleagues have written about this, but there's like sort of smaller, sneakier stuff that'll probably get undone too.

For example, the EPA has looked into or called for is in the midst of implementing air monitoring around sort of oil refineries and oil infrastructure.

And you'll probably see efforts like that.

paused or rolled back.

And so

I think you're going to see a lot of these little impacts on regulation that will just creep up everywhere.

And I know that during the first term, Trump had issued, I think it was an executive order that called for

two regulatory rollbacks for every new regulation put in place.

And I think he's vowed to up that to a 10 to 1 ratio.

Given that Lee Zeldon has this animus towards clean air, clean water,

keeping

communities free of chemicals and pesticides, and that this is Project 2025's one of their main core imperatives.

How would you tell the average person, especially someone living in a red state, to think about what role and response they could have if they are watching their leaders side with those who are trying to make their lives harder?

What would you say they should be thinking about?

Well, so that's the interesting thing, right?

So Lee Zeldin or Trump won't say they're against clean water or clean air, right?

Trump has called himself the most

have the cleanest water and the cleanest air under his presidency.

And so I think

what they are is they're anti-regulation.

They're anti-things that make it harder for companies to make money, such as scrubbers on power plants, right, that reduce emissions and pollutions in areas.

So I think it's going to be sold as sort of pro-business, anti-regulatory.

This will help your economy, but it's been proven over and over again that when those roadblocks and those watchdogs are taken away, you end up with less clean air and less clean water.

And so I think it's going to be,

you know, I think there's been movements in the first

Trump administration towards sort of like citizen science and like monitoring air quality in the private sector or nonprofit sector, monitoring water quality in the nonprofit sector.

So,

I think those sort of efforts are going to become more and more important.

So, I would just urge people to realize that the impacts are almost certainly going to be less clean water and less clean air, and just sort of look at ways that they can monitor that in their own house.

And it sort of happened to me accidentally over the last like year or two, we've been trying to decarbonize our home.

We had a gas stove, and

last year my wife was pregnant and we were about to have our first kid.

And the summer before that, Vermont got a bunch of wildfire smoke from,

I think it was Canada at the time and it blew west.

And so it was one of these first times, talk about climate impacts, is the first times Vermont had really bad wildfire smoke.

So we bought an indoor air purifier that would, the light would go from green to red when there was some sort of

disturbance or pollutant in the atmosphere.

So, after in the fall, after the wildfire smoke passed and we were back to sort of normal, we kept using this.

And we noticed that every time we turned on our gas stove, the air purifier would kick up and turn sort of orange or red.

And that, to us, was the impetus for going to an induction stove.

You know, gas was obviously part of it, but these sort of environmental in-our house daily impacts

are really sort of have been driving some of our decision making.

And so, stuff like that, you can start to potentially, if you live near an oil facility, maybe try to get your own air monitor or look into state or local or nonprofit programs that would help fund an air monitor in your community.

And then

you don't have to listen to whether it be a Republican or Democrat tell you how clean your air water is.

You can take a look for yourself.

I want to talk about that for a second because I think what you've just offered are two very important activation steps.

Like you said, we at this moment have to become our own monitors, our own hall monitors.

And we live in a moment where there's technology available, but there's also a communication channel, multiple ones called social media, where you can start to let people know what you're learning.

And

we can crowdsource our own security.

And I think the other piece that you laid out earlier is

understanding that being anti-regulatory actually has meaning.

And I think

one of these opportunities is to think about the language that we're using when we're having these conversations.

And I really appreciate the fact that you talk about who is being roadblocked by a regulation, but what's on the other side of the roadblock?

who is on the other side.

And so I think there's an opportunity for listeners to think about when you hear about a regulatory change, instead of just presuming that there's something that was inherently wrong with the regulation in the first place, ask questions.

Why was that regulation in place?

Can you talk a little bit for the average person who hasn't gone through a regulatory process?

What are some of the key things for them to be listening for or looking to when regulations are being changed and how citizens can engage?

Yeah, just stepping back one second on your sort of citizen action thing,

the other big plug I will make is for for journalism, right?

And I think

a lot of outlets have started to do more sort of community-focused journalism.

And both journalists and also nonprofits often build in the digital age, it's gotten way easier to build these tools where you can type in your zip code and see what's happening where you are.

So I'm thinking of a ProPublica did a formaldehyde investigation recently where you can type in your zip code and see what the formaldehyde risk might be in your neighborhood.

And Rewiring America has a tool where you can type in your zip code and see what sort of electrification and energy efficient rebates are available to you.

So just wanted to make a plug for those tools, which I found really useful.

Plug away.

And

on the regulatory side,

the Federal Registry is where a lot of new rules or new proposed rules get placed.

And then there's public comment periods.

And that is a place where if there are issues that you are concerned about, I will just start typing in things you're concerned about and you can start to see what's happening there.

You know, it can be a multiple, you know, many page rulemaking document, but the public comments I found actually distill a lot of the arguments and the part, the controversial parts you probably care about really well.

I've also found that

if you have local politicians, whichever way you lean left or right or wherever, they often have constituent email lists.

And so I found that getting on those can be sometimes helpful to sort of figuring out what might be coming down the pipeline.

Or if there's a local nonprofit you like that follows housing, right, they might

send out something to their email list about, hey, here's a new state or federal rule that you need to care about or should look at at least.

And they usually do a pretty good job at flagging some of those things.

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I want to talk about someone who's made getting good information harder in recent years, and that's Elon Musk.

This is someone who made his name by leveraging federal funds to actually bolster his business interest in electric vehicles.

And now he's working for a climate denier who wants to reverse

the intention.

So, how do you square who Elon Musk was and who he is?

And I don't want you to get into the psychology, but I would love your thinking about how the intersection of Musk and Tesla and just his business interest with Doge

and also

how they will take on fossil fuels in this new administration, given the real cost to consumers for supporting the fossil fuel industry.

So, I think it boils down to self-interest or sort of business interest, as you mentioned.

Early in Tesla's existence, sort of the federal subsidies, I think it was in the hundreds of millions of dollars for some of the RD stuff.

And then, you know, probably more than that in sort of tax credits for their Teslas earlier on.

Because

for those those who may not be following closely tesla hit sort of production cap limits and so was ineligible for a while for some of these ev tax credits so early on those were very important to tesla but now tesla isn't as reliant on federal tax credits as other companies uh like you know ge or stellantis or or those other american car companies so now uh he's even said this the ev tax credits will hurt those companies way more than they'll hurt tesla so i think that sort of squares that circle for me at least is he he doesn't stand to lose nearly as much from getting rid of the ev tax credits as as other companies do as for whether they'll take on fossil fuels uh i actually wrote about this uh the other day on a suggestion from my editor because this idea that they want to cut two trillion dollars or roughly a third out of the federal budget you're going to need a pretty big axe to do that.

And there are

a lot of subsidies for fossil fuels and

in the range of billions and then even more for stuff like ethanol-based fuels, corn-based ethanol.

So I think it'll be

a real, one person I talked to called it a truth test or like a litmus test for

how committed they are to this idea of just slashing government subsidies and support writ large.

But almost no one I talked to expected them to be, to actually go after fossil fuels, right?

In theory, it's possible,

but we don't know anything really about Doge yet, right?

We don't know whether it's going to operate inside or outside the government or where it's going to sit or

how are Elon and Ramaswani going to go toe-to-toe with cabinet secretaries?

Like, are they going to get

more access to Trump?

I think there's so many questions.

But in theory, if they're slashing sort of subsidies, there's a lot that could be slashed that also apply to fossil fuels.

But by and large, the expectation is that it's going to hurt climate policy and sort of the green transition as they start to cut government supports.

You've been writing and thinking a lot about market forces, and Elon Musk and his coterie represent a fairly significant part of that.

But how do you think about how market forces will play

into addressing climate change in this administration?

And can you explain your thinking and why you think this is an angle that we need to focus on?

Two words that come to the first two words that come to my mind are heat pumps.

Or maybe it's one word, but I think it's two.

Heat pumps

are,

I think, a perfect example of how market forces are really playing out here.

The industry is now selling more electric heat pumps than they are gas boilers.

And this was even before, this trend started before the IRA.

People are realizing that they can heat and cool their homes at the same time,

often, especially if you don't live in extreme climates, for less money, with less breakdown.

So I think that is a prime example of product and market that has just gone somewhat independently of government regulation and started to take over.

I think you've seen the costs of renewable energies, so solar and wind, just especially especially at utility scale, but also somewhat at the household scale, just plummet.

And that has had nothing to do, or not nothing, but large, that's also been happening independent of U.S.

domestic climate policy.

I think

the one wrench that Trump has threatened and almost certainly will throw into market forces is tariffs.

This is just a big lever that he has at his disposal that he said he will already use.

And I think there was news the other day that he's now considering more universal tariffs rather than targetive tariffs, which makes it harder to circumvent by going and importing through a different country.

So I think that is the biggest way in which Trump can probably disrupt the market forces behind a green transition.

And also, I think there's some...

Some of this rebate money could change people's calculus on whether a heat pump or something makes sense.

But often, from people I've talked to and even myself, like

they're on par regardless of subsidies, and subsidies just help.

And I think you're going to see

both tariffs and a change in rebates.

Who that's really going to impact is lower income consumers.

And, you know,

last year, the IRS released data that there were 8 billion or so dollars of tax credits claimed by people, like energy efficiency tax credits claimed by people and the majority of those fell or the bulk of those fell in the hundred to two hundred thousand dollar income range so already you're seeing that the green transition is is something that you know

you know upper middle class is gravitating towards and i think tariffs and uh rolling back rebates will only accelerate that and make it less accessible for lower income income individuals.

But I do think a lot of this is headed down a path anyway, right?

Like the federal government

has very little say over whether somebody, a business or your home decides to install an electric vehicle charger.

And like that sort of stuff will continue to happen as people need them and businesses decide that they're worth the investment.

So I'm going to give you a really simple, easy, low-stakes question to take us out of here.

One of the side effects we know of the climate change conversation is what's described as climate despair.

When it all just feels too overwhelming and too hopeless, we give in and potentially give up.

So, here on Assembly Required, what we try to provide are antidotes to that despair.

We try to invite guests on who help us wrap our heads around complicated topics like you have, and who help us brainstorm on ways to take action.

And you have given us a great deal of, I think, incredibly useful information.

But when you are doing this this work day after day, when you are

trying to make certain that that

monitor in your home doesn't tell you that the appliances in your home are going to cause you harm, when you're reporting and you're writing about so many topics that can be overwhelming, how do you keep yourself from just giving up?

Yeah, I mean, that's a great question.

So I generally cover climate change nationally and internationally.

So I found actually some solace in sinking a lot of effort into my own home.

Like I just spent hours and hours thinking about how I could do this in my own life.

And I found it weirdly comforting, right?

Like I didn't have to think about the emissions going over China and Europe.

I could just sort of think about my house for a little bit.

And I find that...

really enjoyable.

And I really liked, like, I don't know if I'm just a nerd, but I really liked talking to my public utility about like

what programs they had to help me reduce,

you know, energy.

And like, there's so many cool, like, there's this utility in California that started to

just offer people heat pumps instead of replacing the natural gas pipeline, especially in rural communities where they only have like three houses at the end.

And those are programs that.

if you just ask, you'll find out about and you might actually be eligible for.

There's just so much out there that I didn't know about when I started doing this.

So I found focusing on the local and even hyper-local level has really been quite enjoyable.

And a lot of the local journalism right now on environmental reporting is really fascinating.

Like in Georgia, a lot of the work that was done on the nuclear plant that's opening there, I think is something that like I think people can stay engaged in and it doesn't necessarily feel like

big climate policy that you're engaging in.

It's sort of a local issue that could affect your community, but does have those implications.

So, broadly, I would say just sort of think about touch points in your daily life.

Like, as you walk around, like whether it's your

car or like the

fossil fuel that goes into making the rubber, the plastic in your cookware, or like, I just think there's just so many touch points and find out what's important to you, to kids, right?

I've heard so many people say that they started to care about climate change because their kids started talking about it after learning about greenhouse gas emissions in school or

talking to their friends about it.

For me, sports is often like, I think a lot about like down the road for me, I have a semi-pro soccer team where climate justice is their mission, right?

So like,

I often find weird ways into it.

Electrifying muscle cars, I heard someone got into as a way of like, as a touch point for this.

So,

you know, almost anything can potentially do it.

Well, T Root, thank you so much for being on Assembly Required.

Thanks so much for having me.

This was great.

Each week, we want to leave the audience with a new way to act against what can feel inevitable, an opportunity to make a difference, a way to get involved, or just get started on working out a solution.

We call this segment Our Toolkit.

At Assembly Required, we encourage the audience to be curious, solve problems, and do good.

So let's start with being curious.

Read more of Teak and his colleagues' excellent climate change reporting on grist.org.

You can also find valuable information on insideclimate news.org, which produces nonpartisan environmental journalism.

And as we talked about, you can take matters into your own hands.

Get a monitor, sign up for a newsletter.

do the work of telling your community what you know and what you're learning.

Don't wait for the government to do its job when you can help move it along.

Now,

in addition to what Teek and I discussed, we know that for solving problems and doing good, it's not enough to just want to do it.

We need to think about how we get it done.

And one of the ways we're approaching that are through our listener questions.

Before the holidays, I offered some recommendations for our first two steps.

One, identifying an issue that matters to you the most and being as local as you can about how you address it.

Two, I encourage you to figure out who is in charge and who can make the change you want to see, what we refer to in organizing as power mapping.

For step three, I want to turn to a question from listener Tyler Zog.

Tyler writes, Stacey, I'm about to graduate with a bachelor's in statistics in the spring.

I've also recently decided I want my career to be something that improves the world in some way and doesn't just improve shareholder value.

I was hoping for a Harris victory for many reasons, but a big part is because I was hoping to get a research job in the EPA or CDC or one of the many organizations Project 2025 seeks to remove.

With a Trump victory, is it worth seeking a government job?

Do I look at nonprofits or other research-focused organizations, or are they at the same risk with likely removal of government funds?

In short, how can we help continue vital research into health, the environment, civil rights issues, et cetera, when we face an administration that seems to be outright hostile to said research?

I'd appreciate your advice.

Well, first of all, congratulations, Tyler.

And I want to use your question because I want to talk about step three in organizing, in advocacy, and in just responding to what's coming.

Step three is that once we know what we're concerned about, and we know who's responsible, it's time to become our own resident experts.

This conversation today with Teak was a great example of the ways we can do that.

But it's not just enough for us to do it on our own in our homes, in our communities.

This is where people like Tyler come in, because we need experts in the field and in positions of power.

So I'll say this, Tyler.

While it is difficult to work for an administration whose values don't align with yours, we have to remember that the government works for the people, not the politicians.

Most government jobs are actually apolitical.

I had a sister who worked for the CDC for years.

And I can tell you that no matter who she worked for, the science didn't change.

And what that means is that you don't have to excel at politics to do your job.

More importantly, you have to focus on the substance of your work.

That's where we need you.

And that's what you studied for.

Now more than ever, We need good people in government jobs who are willing to do the research the right way.

Yes, there will be constraints on how you can do your work, but the fundamentals remain.

We need folks like you to help folks like us learn about the topics and potential solutions.

For those who are trying to use this research, I want you to identify who studies what you care about or who has written a paper or blog on the topic.

As Teak described, look for newsletters that focus on that area of interest and give you a summary once a week about what's going on.

Even better, reach out to them.

The worst case scenario is that the person you reach out to ignores you and you move on.

But if not, if they do come back, you now have a firsthand resource to help deepen your understanding of the topic.

So I would invite this resource to join you in a Zoom meeting with your group.

This can be a very effective way for an introvert, for example, to convene people without having to actually talk.

So you do the work of setting up the learning opportunity and you let someone else do the talking.

We know that when we learn more, we are better equipped to do more.

And folks like Tyler can help us make that happen, but everyone listening to the show has the ability to become a resident expert on something that matters to you.

So to recap, step one, know your target.

Step two, know who's in charge.

And step three, know who knows more than you and learn from them.

No matter what our target is, we need to be prepared.

So again, over the next few episodes, we'll continue our organizing and insistence training.

Because once we get started, we're going to get a lot of good done.

If you want to tell us what you've learned and solved, send us an email at assemblyrequired at crooked.com or leave us a voicemail.

Your questions and comments might be featured on the pod.

Our number is 213-293-9509.

Well, that wraps up this episode of Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams.

I'll meet you here next week.

Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams is a crooked media production.

Our lead show producer is Alona Minkowski, and our associate producer is Paulina Velasco.

Kirill Polaviev is our video producer.

This episode was recorded and mixed by Evan Sutton.

Our theme song is by Vasilius Vitopoulos.

Thank you to Matt DeGroote, Kyle Seglund, Tyler Boozer, and Samantha Slossberg for production support.

Our executive producers are Katie Long, Madeline Herringer, and me, Stacey Aprams.

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