Opinion: Earth Day 2026 is not the same in MAGA America, columnist says

Earth Day’s original promise—honoring a fragile planet and the science that protects it—feels diminished in 2026, argues guest columnist Mike Mozur. Evoking images of Earth seen from Artemis II, he writes that the day’s spirit is threatened by what he calls a sweeping reversal of science-based policy in “MAGA America.” Mozur places today’s debate in the long arc of U.S.

environmental action. Born in 1970, Earth Day helped galvanize responses to smog-choked cities and disasters like Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River fire. He notes that President Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act in January 1970 and created the Environmental Protection Agency that July, while President George H.W.

Bush attended the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, where leaders set shared goals on climate change, deforestation and biodiversity loss.

He credits years of work by scientists, schools, grassroots groups and many companies with cleaner air, water and soil, and points to business shifts: better chemicals management, improved energy efficiency in transportation, housing and commercial construction, and a move away from coal, oil and even natural gas.

According to Mozur, countries committed to renewables have faced less strain from oil supply and price shocks stemming from what he describes as the U.S. war with Iran. Against that backdrop, Mozur contends the environmental record under Trump 45 was “problematic at best,” and that “Trump 47” has taken what he describes as destabilizing, anti-science disruption further.

He argues the current administration removed key scientists and thinned respected advisory panels at the EPA, NOAA, the National Science Foundation and the Interior Department, while filling Health and Human Services science committees with ideological loyalists.

He further criticizes the choice of major donors and tech billionaires as the core of the Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, calling it a departure from past science standards. In Mozur’s view, the bottom line is a turn toward decisions he characterizes as scientifically questionable, politically and environmentally irresponsible, and a retreat from longstanding U.S.

leadership in global science and health. Mozur also takes aim at the administration’s arguments for pulling the United States out of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, a climate treaty ratified by the U.S. Senate. He describes those arguments as nonsensical and says such a move would erode U.S.

stature and influence while harming the global environment. Returning to the day’s origins, Mozur invokes Earth Day’s call to think globally and act locally. He writes that the holiday’s purpose is to safeguard a thinly protected, shared world—and contends that mission is at risk in 2026.