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Nearly every day of President Donald Trumps first 100 days in office, his administration came out with new attacks on the environment. On a single day in March, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency announced plans to roll back more than two dozen environmental regulations, affecting everything from mercury pollution at coal power plants to fuel efficiency standards for cars. On the same day, it shut down its environmental justice offices and made plans to limit the Clean Water Act. To help make it easier to follow the barrage of rollbacks, the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is tracking the actions online. It’s not clear yet what will survive lawsuits and actually stick, though the policy decisions are already having real-world consequences. Here’s a partial look at what’s happened so far. April 28: The Trump administration “released” the scientists who were working on a national report about how climate change affects the United States. The report, required by Congress, has been published every four years since 2000. April 24: Trump issued an executive order to fast-track permits for deep-sea mining, which environmental groups say could cause irreparable harm to marine ecosystems. April 24: The Department of the Interior announced a new “emergency permitting” approach that would fast-track approval for some energy projects from a period of one to two years to just two weeks, skipping most of the standard process of environmental review. (Wind and solar projects don’t qualify for the accelerated process; it’s aimed at fossil fuels.) April 23: The Trump administration eliminated the Office of Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, which was responsible for global climate diplomacy. April 22: The Trump administration announced plans to cut hundreds of jobs at the EPAs Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, an office focused on helping communities that have suffered the worst impacts of pollution. April 21: The EPA announced plans to cancel around $40 million in grants aimed at protecting children from toxic chemicals, including pesticides and PFAS (forever chemicals). April 18: The White House announced a list of mining projects for expedited approval, including a copper mine in Arizona that Native American tribes say is on sacred land and could cause environmental damage, including draining scarce water resources. April 18: The Department of the Interior announced a new program to expand offshore oil and gas drilling. April 17: The Department of the Interior announced plans to cut $10 billion for clean energy projects. April 16: The Trump administration proposed a new rule redefining what it means to “harm” wildlife under the Endangered Species Act. Habitat destruction, one of the leading causes of extinction, would no longer be considered harm. April 16: The Trump administration took the first steps to roll back former President Joe Biden’s protection of millions of acres of public lands in the West and in Alaska. April 15: The Department of Energy issued a rule to repeal water efficiency standards for showerheads. April 15: The EPA gave the worst-polluting coal power plants exemptions from new limits on toxic pollution, including mercury, which is especially dangerous for children. April 15: The EPA announced plans to get rid of the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, which requires major polluters to track and report climate emissions. April 11: The Trump administration announced plans to end climate research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), including data used to predict hurricanes. April 9: Trump issued an executive order that aims to erase hundreds of existing environmental and public health rules; this is undoubtedly unconstitutional. April 9: Trump issued an executive order requiring agencies to add expiration dates to energy and environmental regulations. April 9: Trump issued an order that aims to block states from enforcing their own climate laws. April 9: The Trump administration cut nearly $4 million in climate research funding at Princeton University, saying the research promoted exaggerated climate threats and blaming it for increasing climate anxiety. April 8: Trump issued executive orders to boost coal power, including opening up federal land to new mining and potentially forcing some coal plants to stay open when they were planning to close. April 5: The Trump administration reortedly plans to stop states from limiting the use of PFAS (known as forever chemicals) in consumer goods. April 4: The Trump administration canceled the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, which gave grants to communities to prepare for floods, wildfires, hurricanes, and other disasters. (One example of a project that lost what the administration called wasteful and woke funding: upgrading culverts in DeKalb County, Georgia, to keep roads usable during heavy rain and flooding.) April 3: The U.S. Department of Agriculture issued an Emergency Situation Determination that opens up more than 100 million acres of national forests to more logging. April 2: The Trump administration fired all staff members working on the Low Income Energy Assistance Program, which was designed to help families afford heating and cooling. March 20: Trump issued an executive order to increase mining on public land. March 19: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service delayed the process of listing the monarch butterfly as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. March 19: The Department of Energy granted conditional authorization for the LNG export terminal in Louisiana, which will pollute local communities and dramatically add to climate pollution. March 17: Trump signed a law repealing a fee on oil and gas companies for excess emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The fee would have had the same effect on pollution as taking 8 million gas cars off the road. March 17: The EPA announced plans to gut its science office and lay off more than 1,000 scientists. March 14: The EPA stopped enforcing pollution regulations at energy facilities. March 12: The EPA announced sweeping plans to dismantle more than two dozen air quality and carbon pollution regulations. That included an attack on the endangerment finding,” which makes it possible to regulate climate pollution like CO2 under the Clean Air Act. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin described it as “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.” March 12: The EPA and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced plans to revise the definition of waters of the U.S. under the Clean Water Act, threatening to strip protection from streams, wetlands, and other water sources that supply communities with drinking water and support wildlife. March 12: The EPA announced that it was shutting down its environmental justice offices, which worked on projects like helping rural communities prepare for flooding or install sewage systems. March 10: The EPA announced the cancellation of $1.7 billion in environmental justice grants. March 3: The Trump administration ordered thousands of new EV chargers to be disconnected at federal buildings. March 1: Trump labeled imported wood a national security risk” and issued an executive order to dramatically expand logging in U.S. public forests. February 19: The Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a memo to remove 10 climate-related words and phrases from its documents, including climate resilience and changing climate. February 18: The Trump administration fired hundreds of FEMA workers while disasters were ongoing in states like Kentucky and West Virginia. February 18: The EPA froze access to $20 billion in grants under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which supported projects like solar farms and EV chargers. (Even after a judge ordered the release of the money, the intended recipients still couldn’t access it.) February 14: The Trump administration fired more than 1,000 National Park Service workers. Workers were later rehired, but the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is currently looking for ways to make cuts again. February 14: Trump issued an executive order to create a “National Energy Dominance Council” led by fossil fuel allies that excludes wind and solar power. February 6: The Trump administration ordered states to suspend a $5 billion program to build a network of new EV charging stations. January 31: The Trump administration scrubbed climate-related language from government websites. January 31: Trump officials released billions of gallons of water from dams in California, claiming incorrectly that it could have prevented the Los Angeles-area wildfires, and giving California farmers new worries about water shortages. January 28: The EPA dismissed members of the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee and Science Advisory Board, two groups that offer expertise on air pollution standards. January 28: The Department of Transportation started the process of weakening fuel economy standards. January 21: Trump issued an executive order to end the American Climate Corps, a program that was designed to train thousands of young people to work on jobs like solar installation and wildfire prevention. January 20: Trump issued an executive order to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement. January 20: Trump revoked executive orders from Biden that protected certain areas of federal water, opening up sensitive habitats to offshore oil and gas drilling. January 20: Trump issued an executive order called “Unleashing America’s Energy” that aims to revive the abandoned Keystone XL pipeline, fast-track fossil fuel development, limit incentives for buying electric vehicles, and roll back efficiency standards for appliances. For the full listand to follow new attacks on the environment from the Trump administrationcheck out NRDC’s tracker.
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E-Commerce
Barbara Bouza went from architecture to Imagineering and back again. A trained architect who spent nearly 19 years working on building projects for the world’s largest architecture and design firm, Gensler, Bouza made an unconventional career pivot in 2020 when she became president of Walt Disney Imagineering, the famed division of the Disney corporation focused on theme parks, experiences, and future technologies. After four years of navigating pandemic closures, updating theme parks around the world, and debuting new cruise ships, she’s now coming back to her roots in architecture and taking on a new role as executive director of market strategies and growth at the architecture and engineering firm CannonDesign. With this unique background, she has some ideas about how the architecture industry can broaden its approach by creating multifunctional spaces where people can live, work, and play. Her time at Imagineering has shown her that designing places for people requires thinking about the wide range of different users of a spacewhether within the confines of a theme park or in more of a real-world setting like a workplace or an educational facility. But a theme park is also a real place. Going from working on architecture projects for Gensler to theme park projects for Disney was less of a jump than most people would think, Bouza says. “You go out to a job site at a park for an attraction, and it’s very similar. Similar consultants, similar contractors, but not so much steel that is straight. It is all over the place because we’re turning people upside down. But they’re the same ideas around safety and quality,” she adds. “The process is very similar, but with a lot more disciplines integrated.” The approach, though, is much different than the way a traditional architecture firm works. Within Imagineering, Bouza says there were between 100 and 120 different disciplines that might get involved in any given project. She sees the opportunity for an architecture firm like CannonDesign to include more types of expertise on its projects. Hiring Bouza is part of the firm’s strategic long-term vision to diversify the services it offers clients, beyond the few years it takes to design and build a building. “The silo-ization in the profession is a missed opportunity to really address some big problems with our clients,” says Brad Lukanic, CannonDesign’s CEO. He says Bouza will help the firm figure out what new design services it can offer, and help clients to “articulate a very cohesive vision for things that really aren’t known yet because technologies are evolving, and experiences are evolving.” There is some precedent for Bouza’s career shift. In 2023, Bob Weis, Bouza’s predecessor at Imagineering, made a similar jump to architecture, joining Gensler as its global immersive experience design leader. Bouza’s new role won’t be about bringing Imagineering into architecture, but rather exploring the ways that architecture and design services should be changing to meet new client demands. She says that requires thinking more expansively about how a place can serve people and create a venue for new ideas. “Being at Disney was like getting a PhD in this idea that there are other aspects of what we call the built environment,” she says. Pulling on her Imagineering experience of developing a new cruise ship, Wish, and launching World of Frozen at Hong Kong Disneyland, Bouza says she learned a lot about designing for the varied experiences of every participant in a space, from the families on vacation to the performers roaming the theme park to the maintenance crews working behind the scenes. She also embraces the immersive nature of the Disney approach and sees ways that architecture projects can do more to engage their users beyond the basics of the design brief. “[Imagineering] is so story driven. And that’s one area that I really want to see more in architecture,” she says. “I think the storytelling out there can be very strong. I think the execution of the work is strong. But I think where we really need to look is the science behind it, because guest behavior, consumer behavior, is really evolving.” After years building very different kinds of projects, Bouza says she’s happy to be back in the architecture world. “It’s like riding a bike,” she says.
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E-Commerce
When Formula 1 superstar Lewis Hamilton announced in December that he would be leaving the Mercedes team for Ferrari after 246 Grands Prix, 84 victories, and 6 drivers championships in 12 seasons, much of the focus was on Hamilton’s future plans. Just as compelling was the empty seat Hamilton was leaving at Mercedes. His departure triggered an intense internal process for the automakerthe search for a successor. Many of the discussions and debates that resulted in Mercedes choosing young Italian driver Andrea Kimi Antonelli played out over messaging app WhatsApp. That process is now the subject of a new one-hour documentary on Netflix called The Seat, dropping on May 5. Directed by Kyle Thrash, and produced by RadicalMedia, its also a WhatsApp commercial. The Meta-owned app is a producer, and created the project with its content partner Modern Arts. WhatsApps global head of marketing, Vivian Odior, says the company decided to create the doc in order to fully show how the app is often part of critical inflection points in its users lives. When it comes to telling those stories, we believe in giving the space to properly unpack the role we play and share the full story of our user base, says Odior. We dont believe we should be limited by ad formats. Storytelling allows us to occupy a unique position in the hearts of users and pushes beyond the functional role we play. This isnt some ad-tiered piece of content. Its a legitimate addition to the streamers F1 library. Many marketers will be shaking with jealousy or excitement, inspired to make their own move into entertainment. But be forewarned, creating content that can go head-to-head with other films and TV is not for the faint of heart, nor is it for those searching for a formula. Even WhatsApp knows this is a unique brand opportunity. Make your own luck WhatsApp has long been a brand partner to the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 team, and last year Modern Arts created a short film on Hamilton called Push Push. It chronicled the ups and downs of his racing career, as well as his personal struggles with dyslexia and bullying, woven into a conversation he has with a group of teens today about their own lives. That helped build the relationship and trust with Mercedes to make The Seat possible. Modern Arts has a track record of telling compelling stories around the platform, like its award-winning, 26-minute doc We Are Ayenda, about WhatsApps role in helping the Afghanistan Womens Youth National Football Team escape the Taliban. Zac Ryder, the agency’s cofounder and co-chief creative officer, says that made it a lot easier to start figuring out a story to be told around privacy with the Mercedes team. It just so happens that not only is WhatsApp a sponsor of the team, but the entire Mercedes team literally runs on WhatsApp, Ryder says. You very rarely ever send an email. It’s all done on WhatsApp. They have hundreds of WhatsApp groups, and that’s how their entire team is organized, from little details around traveling to big things like engineering and car designs. It’s all shared across WhatsApp. In theory, this sounds like a formula for the greatest product demo video ever made. But Formula 1 teams are known to be about as forthcoming with secrets as the Pentagon. Ryder says Mercedes saw the value in giving the film access to its internal process, with the goal of helping F1 fans fall in love with Antonelli, a relatively unknown 18-year-old driver. For WhatsApp, the goal was to tell a privacy story by showing how well it functions in high-stakes situations. Our job was to figure out how those two things can coexist to make something that was going to be compelling, Ryder says. No one formula Its a unique situation for a brand to have its product at the center of a major sports story. Ryder says the strategy quickly became to make the project revolve around trust. The Mercedes team was trusting its F1 drivers seat to Antonelli, but in the process it was also showing its trust in WhatsApp as a communications platform. In a typical commercial edit, marketers will obsess over how many times the product is mentioned, or the product appears, or the logo is flashed. Modern Arts CEO Brooke Stites says the film is not about that because the brand and its product are so intertwined with the story itself. As a marketing investment, Stites says the film cost about as much as it would to make and buy ad time for a 60-second commercial. Here, the entire budget went into the production because being on Netflix means there isnt the need to pay for advertising space on TV and online. It’s a totally different model, says Stites. It’s not cheap, but it’s what you’re going to spend on a 60-second spot that you then have to spend 10 times more to buy places that force people to watch it. Everyone who watches F1 content on Netflix is going to get served our film. The Seat is not a paid advertising arrangement with Netflix; it was acquired by the streamer in the same way other film and television content is acquired. Other major streamers were vying for the film, but Netflix’s connection to the long-running docuseries Formula 1: Drive to Survive made it the ideal home. For some time brands and ad agencies have been putting make a film for Netflix in their marketing briefs, but the reality is, its not that simple. Stites says there are some critical ingredients a project needs in order to get anywhere near Netflix or any other top-tier streamer. You have to have an amazing story and quality of craft, she says. All these streamers are looking at it and asking, Is this something that’s adding value to my audience? Is this something that my viewers are going to actually want to engage with? That was a big part of the F1 piece. For other brands interested in this type of storytelling, Stites has a piece of advice: Tell a compelling story that involves your brand, dont just tell your brand story. Every brand wants to tap into culture. To tell stories people really want to hear, you need to find the stories in culture that authentically include your brand instead of trying to force-feed your brand into culture. We’re not telling a story about WhatsApp. It’s not about the brand, says Stites. Stories involving brands already exist in culture that are really actually very interesting, and people are willing and wanting to engage with them. Tell a story that people are going to care about, versus starting from a place of Le’s tell a brand story.
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E-Commerce
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