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Stop Greed, Build Green. Also: We killed all of Florida's oranges

Author

Brad Johnson
April 23, 2026

PRESENTED BY PSYLLIDS AND JAYS

Hey! I just found out about another great DC Climate Week happy hour, happening this afternoon at the Dirty Habit! The Climate and Community Institute, Lead Locally, and Groundwork Collaborative1 are hosting the Stop Greed, Build Green Happy Hour in celebration of their new joint project of a post-Trump Green New Deal policy and political agenda.

The fossil-fueled fascists are already running their 2028 campaign on climate. From Trump’s relentless referencing of the “Green New Scam” to slashing regulations to make way for more data centers to propping up a dying coal industry that is both uncompetitive and uniquely polluting, the right is all-in on climate—but only to make it worse…

The Trump administration’s violent and flagrant enforcement of racial hierarchy is already alienating key parts of Trump’s 2024 coalition, and his inability to improve affordability has created a critical opening to offer people something different: a vision of the future that can actually drive prices down, create good jobs, and improve people’s quality of life…

In the wake of DOGE and Project 2025, there will be an urgent need not only to rebuild the administrative state, but to re-envision what the state can do to realize a green transition.

Senators are taking the rest of the week off, after the GOP majority pushed a three-year $70 to $140 billion payoff for Trump’s ICE-CBP secret murder police through on a 50-48 vote at 3:36 am. House GOP have to sign off, which will be a mess, but you know what they say: fascism is messy.

florida oranges they're the sweetest

Greening is good, unless it’s psyllid-borne citrus greening, one of the key reasons Florida’s oranges are gone:

In 2003, the mighty Florida orange industry produced 242 million boxes of fruit, with 90 pounds of oranges per box, most of which went on to become orange juice. Now, not even 25 years later, the United States Department of Agriculture was forecasting a pitiful 12 million boxes of oranges, the least in more than 100 years, the worst year since last. A decline of more than 95 percent. And everyone knew, more or less, that even that figure was not happening. “Twelve million? I would doubt it,” Matt Joyner, CEO of Florida Citrus Mutual, the state’s largest trade group, told me.

In his obituary for Florida’s orange industry, Alexander Sammon offers a sobering story of the inevitable evanescence of industrial agriculture—a boom of growth and glyphosate, followed by a collapse of disease, fossil-fueled storms, corporate consolidation, sprawl, and hyperscalers. Maybe greed isn’t good.

The metaphors are a bit on the nose: “Tropicana got the MLB stadium in St. Petersburg, where the Tampa Bay Rays played until Hurricane Milton blew the roof off in 2024.”

Eichelhäher (*Garrulus glandarius*) im Flug - die leuchtend blauen Flügelspiegelfedern sind unverkennbar! Als intelligenter Corvide versteckt er im Herbst tausende Eicheln als Wintervorrat und vergisst dabei viele - so pflanzt er unbewusst ganze Eichenwälder.

Hearings on the Hill:

Climate Action Today:

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1  technically Groundwork’s c4 arm, Groundwork Action

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