The fossil fuels industry has been able to buy enough power to block most action. We did get the Inflation Reduction Act, as well as other executive-branch actions in the past few years though.. It's not yet enough, but if we can attain just a touch more political power, it'll be possible to do a lot more.
This is a key difference between government programs and corporate self-dealing: the terms are well-known and not hidden in fine print
FEMA is in fact offering people up to $750 in immediate aid if they've lost wages or housing in the hurricane, so people have the ability to accept that. They're not taking peoples' houses or anything; it's pretty much no-strings-attached for Americans taking it.
It's more that Trump read a book:
Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler's collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. Kennedy now guards a copy of My New Order in a closet at his office, as if it were a grenade. Hitler's speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist.
"Did your cousin John give you the Hitler speeches?" I asked Trump.
Trump hesitated. "Who told you that?"
"I don't remember," I said.
"Actually, it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he's a Jew." ("I did give him a book about Hitler," Marty Davis said. "But it was My New Order, Hitler's speeches, not Mein Kampf. I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but I'm not Jewish.")
Edit: I'll note that this appears to the only time Trump has been observed reading a book.
Yep. Per the article:
But what feels novel in the aftermath of this month’s hurricanes is how the people doing the lying aren’t even trying to hide the provenance of their bullshit. Similarly, those sharing the lies are happy to admit that they do not care whether what they’re pushing is real or not.
The problem is that you can't write out the details of how people might abuse a system centuries hence; people are really innovative about that. What they tried to do was build a system of competing centers of power, so that so long as the bulk of elected officials were interested in doing the right thing for the country, they'd be able to serve as a check on those who aren't.
Our problem today is that we've got a major party which is interested in ending democracy, and which has a real chance of holding enough positions of power that it's not possible for the majority of the people who stop them.
The Republicans might, but would have a much harder time being in a position to do so, since the Democrats would:
- add PR and DC as states
- Enable every American to vote every time
- End state-level gerrymandering nationally
Large-scale tree planting can remove some CO2 from the atmosphere, but nowhere near as much as humans add by extracting and burning fossil fuels. See https://skepticalscience.com/1-trillion-trees-impact.html for a detailed assessment of what this looks like.
Checking is hard when phones and electricity are out.
I actually did lookups for the CEOs of a couple of these on opensecrets.org and couldn't find any monetary donations for the current NYT CEO or CNN CEO. Doesn't mean they're not trying to get Trump elected, but it's not by donating to his campaign.