Certain words and phrases take on new meaning as time goes by, often due to the politicization of our language. A clear example is the linguistic evolution of what it means to be an environmentalist.
Decades ago, concern for the environment largely centered on keeping the land free of clutter, the water protected from contamination, and the cities unpolluted by soot and smog. One of the major environmentalist movements of the 1960s was fronted by then-first lady Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson, who initiated a campaign to “Keep America Beautiful.”
Trump’s executive order is a first step toward reclaiming environmentalism and unifying the country around the concept of a cleaner world.
Johnson explained that her passion for beautification was in perfect concert with other important objectives. “Getting on the subject of beautification is like picking up a tangled skein of wool,” she wrote in a 1965 diary entry. “All the threads are interwoven — recreation and pollution and mental health, and the crime rate, and rapid transit, and highway beautification, and the war on poverty, and parks — national, state and local. It is hard to hitch the conversation into one straight line, because everything leads to something else.”
The campaign to clean up the national landscape was bolstered by a heavy rotation of television ads showing litter along highways, in waterways, and in parks and imploring people to “Keep America Beautiful.” Most famous in the long-running campaign was an early 1970s ad ending with a close-up of actor Iron Eyes Cody, a tear falling from one eye as he surveyed a polluted environment. Cody turned out to be an Italian-American, not a Native American as portrayed, but that’s another story.
But as the “global warming” movement came into vogue, the definition of environmentalism began to shift. Left-wing media, politicians, and organizations began to define environmentalism almost solely on the basis of adherence to its greenhouse gas theories and demonization of the fossil fuel industry. In their world, anyone supporting our most reliable and dependable energy sources — natural gas, fuel oil, and coal — disqualified themselves as environmentalists. In fact, they were accused of being “anti-environment.”
Too often, the left’s political targets played right into their hands, struggling to defend themselves and sometimes even downplaying or ridiculing the importance of a clean environment. By allowing “environmentalism” to be redefined and co-opted by the radical left, true environmentalism was lost. Fortunately, a recent action by President Donald Trump will help reverse course.
While Independence Day weekend headlines were dominated by the passage and signing of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, an executive order signed by Trump on July 3 went largely under the radar — but it may have an even more lasting impact. The president’s “Make America Beautiful Again” order “establish[ed] a council tasked with conserving public lands, protecting wildlife populations, and ensuring clean drinking water,” as the Washington Post described it, while adding that the order remained “silent on climate change.”
While the Post and other left-wing news outlets cling to the “climate change” definition of environmentalism, Trump’s executive order is a first step toward reclaiming the term and unifying the country around the concept of a cleaner world.
Trump’s order tasks all federal land management agencies with the following:
Promote responsible stewardship of natural resources while driving economic growth, expand access to public lands and waters for recreation, hunting, and fishing, encourage responsible, voluntary conservation efforts, cut bureaucratic delays that hinder effective environmental management, and recover America’s fish and wildlife populations through proactive, voluntary, on-the-ground collaborative conservation efforts.
Trump’s order was inspired by the years-long efforts of 27-year-old Benji Backer, a “conservative environmentalist” who leads a group called “Nature Is Nonpartisan.”
“This issue needs to get out of the culture wars,” Backer told the Post. “People just are so divided over President Trump, right? But if he could do one thing that brings people together, and it’s protecting the environment, it would change the course of the issue forever.”
RELATED: Environmental activists 'horrified' by Trump administration's announcement on greenhouse gas rules
By returning “environmentalism” to its original purpose of protecting the air, land, and water, the Trump administration will open the doors for those targeted by the left as environmental villains, welcoming everyone — right, left, and center — to actively engage in real environmentalism.
Those who provide America and the world with our most affordable and reliable energy sources have long cared about preserving the environment. In particular, they have continually invested in new technologies that make traditional energy cleaner than ever.
For example, advances in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies used to extract natural gas have allowed the United States to lead all major industrialized countries in carbon reductions. Home heating oil burner emissions have been reduced to near-zero levels, while sulfur content has been reduced from 1% to about 0.5%. Moreover, rapidly evolving coal plant technology means that modern pollution controls reduce nitrogen oxides by 83%, sulfur dioxide by 98%, and particulate matter by 99.8%.
As Benji Backer says, it’s time to move environmentalism out of the realm of the culture wars. Americans across the political spectrum love the environment and understand the need to protect it. Led by the president’s “Make America Beautiful Again” commission, the day is here when we can once again declare in unison that we are all environmentalists.
Editor’s note: A version of this article was originally published at the Empowerment Alliance via RealClearWire.
America's largest power grid is under strain, and its operators are passing on the costs to the consumer.
PJM Interconnection provides power to about 67 million Americans on the East Coast, servicing Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and more.
Other states that rely on PJM's power, like Maryland and Virginia, are also home to some of the biggest data centers in the country. These data centers, which often service large online companies that operate artificial intelligence programs and chatbots, are allegedly at the center of power price increases that PJM says might be here to stay.
'Prices will remain high as long as demand growth is outstripping supply.'
PJM's prices went up by 800% in 2024 after auctions proved the demand for power was greater than the supply. According to Reuters, prices for the power plants went from $28.92 per megawatt-day to $269.92 per megawatt-day.
"Prices will remain high as long as demand growth is outstripping supply — this is a basic economic policy," said PJM spokesman Jeffrey Shields, per Reuters. "Right now, we need every megawatt we can get."
While PJM blames outside sources, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro (D) has threatened that his state would abandon the power provider if it could not find a way to lower costs.
In June, Shapiro told Reuters that leaving PJM is definitely on the table, with the outlet reporting that according to over two dozen members of the industry (including power developers and regulators), PJM has made the situation worse by delaying auctions and pausing applications for new plants.
RELATED: Microsoft’s billion-dollar plan to reopen Three Mile Island for AI data centers
While the real answer is likely somewhere in between, PJM did stop processing new applications for power plants in 2022, all while the industry is revitalizing itself around them.
Last September, Microsoft announced it would reopen Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island to power its data centers.
Amazon said in October it was building small modular nuclear reactors in Virginia for its cloud computing and AI.
Oracle also announced three reactors of its own, while the state of Texas announced $50 billion worth of nuclear upgrades in November.
It seems both facts are true: PJM is being outpaced by private industry, and the quest for power is indeed very real.
"We've been underinvesting in American power infrastructure for about 50 years due to bad industrial policy and environmental laws," Isaiah Taylor, founder of Valar Atomics, told Blaze News.
"It's a five-alarm fire," the nuclear reactor manufacturer continued.
Taylor explained that energy demands in the United States have been kept low by exporting manufacturing power to China, while restricting power consumption domestically.
"Both have been terrible for America," he said. "We now have a weakened industrial base, nerfed 'energy efficient' consumer products, and a 50-year-old grid."
RELATED: One town got a nuke plant; the other got a prison … and regret
— (@)
The Department of Energy agrees. A new government report analyzed by The Hill noted that 104 gigawatts' worth of power will go offline by 2030. The report suggested that the annual outage time for consumers could increase from eight hours per year to a shocking 800 hours per year if the problem goes unaddressed.
"This report affirms what we already know: The United States cannot afford to continue down the unstable and dangerous path of energy subtraction previous leaders pursued, forcing the closure of baseload power sources like coal and natural gas," Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a statement to The Hill.
“In the coming years, America’s reindustrialization and the AI race will require a significantly larger [power] supply of around-the-clock, reliable, and uninterrupted power,” Wright added. "President Trump’s administration is committed to advancing a strategy of energy addition, and supporting all forms of energy that are affordable, reliable, and secure."
The solution, according to Valar Atomics, is to rapidly deregulate and "unleash capitalism."
So far, that solution has seemingly worked for private industry, even for states like Texas. On the East Coast, however, a nuclear nudge would need to come sooner rather than later.
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
The ruling class trades in carbon outrage like it’s gold. Sanctimony fuels its crusade against oil, gas, and coal — never mind that those very fuels built the modern world. The comforts we take for granted — from longer lives and stocked shelves to clean water and lifesaving medicine — all trace back to the energy abundance that hydrocarbons made possible.
Still, the decarbonization faithful press forward. They dream of a carbon-free Eden, even as the global power grid, still humming on fossil fuels, refuses to cooperate.
Critics keep forecasting a shift away from fossil fuels. Reality keeps proving them wrong.
You won’t find a clearer contradiction than in the Yuxi Circle.
Draw a circle with a 2,485-mile radius around the southern Chinese city of Yuxi. British geographer Alasdair Rae did just that — and inside it resides 55% of the world’s population: some 4.3 billion people crammed into just 7% of Earth’s surface. The region includes China, India, much of Southeast Asia, and parts of Pakistan. Some of it — like the Tibetan Plateau and the Taklamakan Desert — is barren. But the rest is packed with cities, factories, and the aspirations of hundreds of millions clawing their way toward modern life.
Why does this matter? Because this region now anchors the world’s biggest fight over energy, growth, and climate policy.
While bureaucrats in Brussels sip espresso and activists glue themselves to the pavement in London, the real action plays out in Asia’s economic engine. In cities like Shanghai, Delhi, and Tokyo, energy demand soars — and fossil fuels do the heavy lifting. Coal and gas plants keep the lights on, while wind and solar trail far behind.
China burns more coal than the rest of the world combined. India burns more than the United States, the European Union, and the United Kingdom combined. The 10 ASEAN countries rank third. Oil use tells the same story: China and India sit alongside the U.S. atop the global leaderboard of consumption. Economic growth, it turns out, runs not on hashtags but on hydrocarbons.
Critics keep forecasting a shift away from fossil fuels. Reality keeps proving them wrong.
Hundreds of millions in the Yuxi Circle are still striving for what Westerners call a “decent life.” That means refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioning — and with them, a dramatic spike in electricity demand.
RELATED: Climate orthodoxy punishes the West
For context: The average American consumes 77,000 kilowatt-hours of energy each year. The average Indian uses a 10th of that. A Bangladeshi? Just 3% of what the average Norwegian consumes.
Now multiply that gap by a population of billions, and you begin to understand what’s coming.
The living room revolution is only the start. An industrial boom is building behind it — factories, office towers, and shopping malls all hungry for electricity. The coming surge in energy use across the Yuxi Circle will make the West’s climate targets look like a quaint relic of the past.
In this part of the world, the green fantasy runs headfirst into human need. Wind and solar can’t meet the moment. Coal, oil, and gas can — and do.
Just as they did for the West, these fuels now power the rise of the rest. And no amount of Western guilt or climate alarm will change that.
The left’s favorite climate doomsday prophet, Greta Thunberg, has decided to expand her activism into geopolitical waters. On June 1, Thunberg boarded the Madleen with the Freedom Flotilla Coalition to deliver “symbolic aid” to Gaza, which is to say that she set out with intentions to make a statement about her solidarity with Palestinians rather than deliver actual humanitarian assistance.
Her bold plan to break Israel's naval blockade, however, quickly backfired when Israeli forces intercepted the yacht in international waters. Thunberg, along with several other passengers, was detained. The left, clutching their pearls, echoed Thunberg's cries of “kidnapping,” but the climate panic poster child was swiftly deported back to her home country of Sweden.
BlazeTV host Stu Burguiere can’t help but laugh at “Greta’s big boat adventure.”
“I hope you've been following the saga. It's been so much fun,” he says.
Before she embarked, Thunberg said of her endeavor: “No matter how dangerous this mission is, it’s not even near as dangerous as the silence of the entire world in the face of the livestreamed genocide.”
“Yeah, I really haven’t heard anything from the Palestinian side this entire time. They’ve been totally silent,” says Stu sarcastically.
If Thunberg was actually worried about genocide, perhaps she should consider who funded her little marine adventure.
“The funding for this particular boat adventure comes from who else but London-based Hamas operative ... Zaher Birawi. He was described in Parliament as a person with, quote, ‘links to Hamas,”’ says Stu.
The Israeli naval blockade Thunberg and the Freedom Flotilla Coalition were aiming to break through was imposed because aid shipments destined for Gaza had been smuggling arms to Hamas. When Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz heard of Thunberg’s “symbolic aid” mission, he told “the anti-Semitic Greta and her fellow Hamas propagandists” to “turn back,” vowing that they “would not make it to Gaza.”
And while Katz’s statement proved true, Thunberg’s “kidnapping” narrative did not.
“They tell her in advance, they're going to stop her. They do stop her,” he says, pointing out the irony that Israel is supposedly the “genocidal regime.”
The Israel Foreign Ministry capitalized on the irony when it posted the following image of Thunberg being offered a sandwich on the naval ship that “kidnapped” her:
— (@)
“It's an adorable photo of her in a little puffy life jacket with a frog hat, just smiling at a wonderful sandwich,” says Stu.
In Thunberg’s defense, she was offered “a prepackaged sandwich.”
“What kind of genocidal terrorists are they?” Stu asks facetiously.
To hear more details about Greta’s embarrassing failed mission, watch the video above.
To enjoy more of Stu's lethal wit, wisdom, and mockery, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
President Donald Trump overturned California’s authoritarian ban on gas-powered vehicles on Thursday, signing a resolution approved by Congress last month. California became the first state in the nation to pursue a phase-out of gas-powered cars, attempting to halt all new sales by 2035 and effectively force its citizens to purchase electric vehicles. After Trump’s move, […]
The Golden State’s overreach extends to the garbage, but these policies ignore the real trash.
www.theblaze.com