In service to his vision of the world, the President has spent the year undoing every environmental law he can find. The zeal of his lieutenants—Lee Zeldin, at the Environmental Protection Agency; the former fracking executive Christopher Wright, at the Department of Energy; and others—has been remarkable. They’ve unleashed oil drilling along the coasts, opened up vast new stretches of the interior for coal mining, scrapped laws that attempted to staunch the flow of methane from gas wells into the air. Here’s Wright, on climate science, “Like, it’s a real physical phenomenon. It’s worth understanding a little bit. But to call it a crisis and point to disasters and say that that’s climate change, that’s to say, I’m not going to do my homework.”
Indeed, he and his colleagues are working hard to make it impossible for anyone to do their homework. They’ve shut down NASA’s upper Manhattan Goddard Institute for Space Studies, where James Hansen and other scientists first documented our plight, proposed to shut down the satellites that watch the climate changing, and even planned, in next year’s budget, to shut down the monitoring stations at Mauna Loa and elsewhere which keep track of how much carbon is pouring into the atmosphere. It 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 action on the climate crisis.
And yet, it’s at least possible that Trump and company’s assault on environmental norms is more shrill than confident. Because something else happened this year that gives at least some hope for the future: the remarkable rise in clean, renewable energy, which set every kind of record in 2025. In May, in a rush to get solar farms up before a subsidies-for-growth policy ended, China was installing an average of three gigawatts of solar capacity a day—the U.S. installed a total of twenty-one gigawatts in the first three quarters of this year. China, which is currently at the center of the renewable revolution, broke its own records with ease: after surpassing its 2030 targets in 2024, it set new targets for 2035 this year, including a renewable-electricity share exceeding thirty per cent. It’s not alone: India met a 2030 target early, too. As Reuters reported in July, fifty per cent of installed electric capacity in the world’s most populous country ran on something other than fossil fuels. That’s not the same thing as saying it generated half its power from the sun and wind, but India was definitely trending in the right direction: coal use dropped nearly three per cent in the first half of the year.
Similar transitions have been occurring almost everywhere: in November, the Energy Information Administration reported that California used seventeen per cent less natural gas to produce electricity than it had the year before. Pakistan, which has seen a rapid solar buildout in the past two years, reached an agreement with Qatar to divert twenty-four liquified natural-gas cargoes in 2026 after domestic demand fell—with Pakistan bearing the loss if Qatar sells the cargoes below contract price. They simply don’t need the imports anymore. All told, through September, we generated almost a third more energy from the sun this year than last.
All this flies in the face of Trump’s call for U.S. “energy dominance” from oil and gas. He’s tried, with some success, to build that dominance on the back of tariffs—when the E.U. and Japan agreed to buy hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of liquefied natural gas, he cut their threatened tariff rates substantially, in what could be described only as a shakedown. He’s also done his best to wreck the prospects of clean energy, not only gutting President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which was designed to help America catch up with China’s green-tech lead, but also trying to halt work on nearly completed wind farms off the Atlantic seaboard. Just weeks ago, he put the kibosh on what would have been America’s largest solar array, in Nevada. And he’s tried to take his case around the world, lecturing leaders about the folly of clean energy.
Here he is again, at the U.N., offering his definitive take on solar and wind power: “By the way, they’re a joke. They don’t work. They’re too expensive. They’re not strong enough to fire up the plants that you need to make your country great. The wind doesn’t blow. Those big windmills are so pathetic and so bad, so expensive to operate, and they have to be rebuilt all the time and they start to rust and rot. Most expensive energy ever conceived. And it’s actually energy. You’re supposed to make money with energy, not lose money. You lose money, the governments have to subsidize. You can’t put them out without massive subsidies.” And this is how he summed up the situation: “And I’m really good at predicting things. . . . I don’t say that in a braggadocious way, but it’s true. I’ve been right about everything. And I’m telling you that if you don’t get away from this green-energy scam, your country is going to fail.”
