The World Seems to Be Surrendering to Climate Change
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.
None of these moves are back breakers for climate action, and some may even be defensible to climate campaigners on the basis of political necessity. But tellingly, each would have been very hard to imagine five years ago. From 2019 to 2021, governments around the world added more than 300 climate adaptation and mitigation policies each year. In 2023 the figure was under 200. In 2024 it was under 50.
Carney is a former central banker who's spent years rallying the financial world in support of climate goals, as part of what is called the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero. In the year after it was announced in 2021, the alliance's industry-led banking arm added nearly 100 signatories. Over the past year, the group has added fewer than 10 members, and since December, it has lost BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. The S&P Global Clean Energy Transition Index has been in steady decline, the energy analyst Nat Bullard recently noted, with its value falling by more than half since 2021. This month a symposium sponsored by the People's Forum in New York raised the prospect that just a few years past its much-ballyhooed heyday, we had already reached the end of green capitalism.
Perhaps the phrase was always an alibi for business as usual, an opportunity for the profit-minded to surf the zeitgeist and lay claim to ecological beneficence. But even so, there has been an undeniable change. When Bloomberg recently analyzed earnings calls of S&P 500 companies going back to 2020, it found that the companies talked about the environment in the first quarter of 2025, on average, 76 percent less than they did three years ago.
And when financiers do talk about it, the tone is very different. Five years ago, the chatter was about the business opportunity of a successful transition; these days, as Kate Aronoff wrote recently in The New Republic, it is much more likely to emphasize the opportunities of a hotter world (booming demand for air-conditioning, for instance). A recent report from Morgan Stanley declared that the goals of keeping warming within the limits that more than 190 nations adopted a decade ago in Paris are now well out of reach, thanks to 'recent setbacks to global decarbonization efforts': Populism, inflation, energy prices and the cost of living crisis and interest rates and the cost of financing anything, let alone something with a relatively low rate of return. Other reports from JPMorgan Chase and the Institute of International Finance reached the same conclusion.
What is perhaps most shocking about this is that, as I've written, these very same probable outcomes were what gave rise to the wave of climate alarm that seemed to so profoundly improve our climate prospects just a few years ago. In the aftermath of the Paris Agreement and thanks to the work of scientists working to clarify the stakes of honoring it, we got a glimpse of a world 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than preindustrial levels and were, collectively, terrified into action by what we saw.
In the years since, we've watched warming accelerate and many of those premonitions become real in the form of once unimaginable disasters.
But for many, the terror has subsided, giving way to a sort of heavy acquiescence. Last week the writer and activist Bill McKibben titled a reflection on the subject 'A Chill Falls on the Climate Community' — he's trying to reignite the flame with a major action toward the end of this summer — and last month Bill Gates's climate initiative, Breakthrough Energy, closed its policy and advocacy office and laid off much of its staff in Washington, suggesting that there was little to agitate for when it comes to climate in today's D.C.
There, earlier this month the Council on Foreign Relations began a Climate Realism initiative — offering among its guiding principles that the world should give up on its cherished goals of limiting warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius and instead prepare for a far more punishing 3 degrees or more. To some in the audience, it seemed like a declaration of indifference masquerading as pragmatism. 'Even if we stop clinging to 1.5,' the Carnegie Endowment's Noah Gordon asked plaintively, 'must we concede 3?'
Consider this as a moral challenge, and the answer must be 'no.' As a matter of carbon math, though, the problem looks harder to solve.
These days, when reckoning with the loss of cultural momentum, climate advocates will often point to green records set each year — worldwide annual solar power installations having more than doubled since 2021, annual global investment in the energy transition doubling to $2 trillion in just three years, renewables producing 92.5 percent of added worldwide power capacity last year. And although a staggering share of that global progress is taking place in China, in the United States the progress can be similarly breathtaking: wind capacity up 23-fold in two decades, according to a new analysis in Vox, utility-scale battery capacity up 29-fold in just five years and more U.S. electricity generated by renewables than fossil fuels last year, for the very first time.
Climate optimists look at all that and say, whatever the politics, economics has made the energy transition unstoppable. In the long run, over generations, that still seems like a safe bet to me. But it's in the short run, just decades, that the pathways to what we once identified as relatively livable futures will be made or broken. And there I find myself wondering: How unstoppable is the transition, really?
I'll write more about that in the coming weeks.
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