The scope of President Trump’s assault on the country’s climate ambitions, over just three months, is not just enraging but also perversely awe inspiring.
In the run-up to the November election, conventional analysis suggested that a Trump victory would mean an additional four billion tons of CO2 emissions to the atmosphere by 2030, a total surrender on the climate pledges the country had made under the Paris Agreement and the functional end of the global goals that agreement established among nearly all the world’s nations.
But in many ways, on climate as on other fronts, the administration has been worse than was feared — taking an ax to the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, pressuring foreign countries to increase their consumption of American liquefied natural gas as part of the administration’s trade war and casting the whole future of President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act in doubt. As Matthew Zeitlin wrote in Heatmap last week, an end to subsidies for green energy under the act could strip solar power of its cost advantage over natural gas, and the Trump administration has tried to block states from pursuing climate goals on their own.
It has been haphazardly sabotaging the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service, presumably for the sin of working on climate-related assessments, and canceling so much research funding that public agencies and university programs alike are feeling they’re in free fall. During his first administration, Trump loved to talk about tree planting as an alternative climate solution; in this term, he’s canceling those programs, too. The Biden administration sometimes boasted about its whole-of-government response to climate change; this is a whole-of-government counteroffensive.
But the story of retreat from climate politics is larger than Trump or his desire to make America more of a petrostate and is more worryingly global than merely MAGA. Just a few years ago, worldwide climate concern seemed to be reaching new peaks almost monthly, with cultural momentum growing and policy commitments following. Then came Covid, inflation and higher interest rates, which made the cost of living and global debt crises worse — and above all, perhaps, a new accommodation to the brutal realities of climate change that some call pragmatism and some normalization. Surveys still show widespread climate concern; in a poll covering 130,000 people in 125 countries, 89 percent of respondents said they wanted stronger action. But at the highest levels of discourse and policy debate, just a few years since the Inflation Reduction Act and Boris Johnson declaring, “It’s one minute to midnight on that Doomsday Clock,” the tide is going out on climate alarm. In truth, it has been for a while.
In Europe, leaders have spent the years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reckoning with the energy crisis that it produced and, in part, rethinking the commitments of the continent’s landmark Green Deal. In Britain officials are debating dropping legally binding commitments to reach net-zero carbon emissions. In Mexico its climate scientist president, Claudia Sheinbaum, is building fossil-fuel infrastructure, and in Canada the new prime minister, Mark Carney, chose as his first official act the repeal of the country’s landmark carbon tax.