Talk about waste and abuse!

Like many of us, Buddy usually took trees for granted

They're planting trees in New Orleans. Or they were - until Trump arrived in the White House.

A small group, mostly volunteers, were reforesting the city which lost 200,000 trees in a few hours during Hurricane Katrina. The project would have helped restore not just the look of this lovely city. Greater tree cover will help cope with heavier rainfall and higher heat. Trees offer shade to buildings and people, as well as reduce temperatures and air conditioning costs. They also absorb water and make the soil more spongy, lowering flood risk.

As with many climate adaptation projects, this effort is led by a non-profit civic organization, Sustaining Our Urban Landscape. With a small staff, SOUL relies largely on volunteers. The group had been adding staff and increasing the number of planting events. They had set a goal of nearly doubling their output to about 3,000 trees per year. Then with no notice or explanation, funding was cut off.

Yes, the White House was forced to rescind its memo, and two federal judges temporarily blocked the cuts, but SOUL can't find a way to connect to any of the money it was getting under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Thousands of other IRA grantees are in the same plight this month.

The freeze, which came with no notice, meant that SOUL’s signed contracts were suddenly uncertain. To protect the nurseries and other suppliers, they had no choice but to cancel all orders for the rest of the season. They also have to find a way to keep paying the workers who water their trees. If the group doesn't get a windfall of a half-million dollars soon, it will close its doors at the end of this month.

As with many projects funded by the IRA, SOUL is not alone in this project. Although they are the lead group, their funding comes from the government through partner organizations, the Arbor Day Foundation and the New Orleans Office of Resilience and Sustainability, who have the staff to do the federal paperwork. These organizations will survive, but the blocked funding probably means the end of the nonprofit group SOUL. And the replanting project.

And this is only one of thousands of examples of WASTE being suddenly caused by the actions of the new Administration. What an ABUSE!

Why?

I cannot find an answer to this question. And anyway the real question is not why Trump does these things; it’s why such huge numbers of Americans cheer him on.

Cutting off these funds makes no sense politically. Overall, 85% of the investments and 68% of the jobs from the IRA would have gone to Red States.

I’m operating on the suppositions that enough of Trump’s actions will hurt MAGA voters who will begin to notice this and let him know their displeasure strongly enough to persuade him to reverse them - just as he’s been reversing some of his tariffs. ClimateDog readers can help this process by finding and publicizing other instances of local pain from IRA cuts, stories like the New Orleans trees, and making sure all elements of our community see them clearly.

Live Oaks

New Orleans may have lost thousands of trees in the 140-mile-an-hour Katrina winds, mostly sweetgum, maple, and pine. But almost none of the city’s live oaks were killed. A symbol of the Old South, these massive, gnarly trees, often draped with Spanish moss, some of them hundreds of years old, continue to give central New Orleans much of its shade and character.

Let’s hope that the live oak’s size, strength, and longevity can somehow find its way into Americans’ concerns to protect ourselves from growing climate dangers.