In service of his vision of the world, the president spent a year repealing every environmental law he could find. The zeal of his aides—Lee Zeldin of the Environmental Protection Agency; former fracking chief Christopher Wright of the Department of Energy; and others – it was wonderful. They unleashed oil drilling along the coast, opened up vast new areas for coal mining, and repealed laws that tried to stop the flow of methane from gas wells into the air. Here's what Wright says about climate science: “It's a real physical phenomenon. It's worth understanding a little bit. But calling it a crisis and pointing to disasters and saying it's climate change, I'm not going to do my homework.”
Indeed, he and his colleagues work hard to make homework impossible for anyone. They closed NASAThe Goddard Institute for Space Studies in upper Manhattan, where James Hansen and other scientists first documented our plight, has proposed shutting down satellites monitoring climate change and even planned in next year's budget to shut down monitoring stations at Mauna Loa and other places that track how much carbon is being released into the atmosphere. This is almost certainly the greatest collective act of scientific vandalism in recent American history. It would be easy and accurate to call 2025 the low point of human efforts to combat the climate crisis.
Still, it is at least possible that Trump and company's assault on environmental regulations is more abrupt than confident. Because something else happened this year that gives at least some hope for the future: the massive growth of clean, renewable energy that set all sorts of records in 2025. In May, in a rush to get solar farms up and running before growth subsidy policies end, China installed an average of three gigawatts of solar capacity per day, while the US installed a total of twenty-one gigawatts in the first three quarters of this year. China, currently at the center of the renewable energy revolution, has easily broken its own records: having exceeded its 2030 targets in 2024, it set new targets for 2035 this year, including a share of renewable electricity exceeding thirty percent. Not only that, but India also achieved its 2030 target ahead of schedule. Fifty percent of installed electricity capacity in the world's most populous country runs on non-fossil fuels, Reuters reported in July. That's not the same as saying it generates half its energy from solar and wind, but India is certainly moving in the right direction, with coal use down nearly three percent in the first half of the year.
Similar transitions are happening almost everywhere: In November, the Energy Information Administration reported that California used seventeen percent less natural gas to generate electricity than the year before. Pakistan, which has seen rapid growth in solar energy over the past two years, has reached an agreement with Qatar to divert twenty-four cargoes of liquefied natural gas in 2026 after a collapse in domestic demand. At the same time, Pakistan will suffer losses if Qatar sells cargo at a price below the contract price. They just don't need imports anymore. Overall, through September this year we produced almost a third more solar energy than last year.
All this contradicts Trump's call for US “energy dominance” through oil and gas. He tried, with some success, to reinforce this dominance through tariffs: when the EU and Japan agreed to buy hundreds of billions of dollars of liquefied natural gas, he substantially reduced the threatened tariff rates in what could only be described as a crowding out. He has also done everything he can to destroy clean energy prospects, not only gutting President Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, which was designed to help America catch up with China's lead in clean technology, but also trying to halt work on nearly completed wind farms off the Atlantic coast. Just a few weeks ago, he put an end to America's largest solar array in Nevada. And he tried to spread his message around the world by lecturing leaders about the folly of clean energy.
And here he is again, at the UN, offering his definitive view on solar and wind energy: “By the way, it's a joke. They don't work. They're too expensive. They're not strong enough to run the power plants you need to make your country great. The wind doesn't blow. Those big windmills are so pathetic and so bad, they're so expensive to run and they keep having to be rebuilt and they're starting to rust and rot. The most expensive energy ever. By design. And it's actually energy. You have to make money with energy, not lose money. You lose money, governments have to subsidize it. You can't pay it off without huge subsidies.” I was right about everything. And I'm telling you that if you don't get away from this green energy scam, your country will fail.”
