Despite a year of record-setting heat, devastating climate-generated wildfires, floods, and extreme weather around the world, action to mitigate the climate crisis languished during 2025, especially in the United States. In a blatant quid pro quo, President Trump is rewarding coal, oil, and gas companies for the estimated $450 million they contributed to get him elected. To shore up their profits the Trump administration is increasing subsidies, providing special tax breaks, removing pollution controls, denying funding for alternative clean energy projects, and opening-up large public areas for drilling. This tragic assault on our health and environment, however, is not the only climate story of 2025. The year has also provided hope for the future through phenomenal increases in clean, renewable energy.
In the United States the reversals in efforts to mitigate the climate crisis have been vicious and disingenuous. More than 40 people who have directly worked for oil, gas, or coal companies have been installed in key administrative positions where they have proceeded to undo as many environmental laws as possible – all to shore up fossil fuel companies and to discourage the expansion of clean energy.
Donald Trump’s often-repeated assertion that climate change is a hoax has led his administration to seek ways to undermine climate science. They’ve produced a spurious report from a few contrarian scientists to confuse the public about the science that underpins how carbon pollution from burning fossil fuels overheats the atmosphere (global warming) and causes extreme weather (climate change). They have removed from government websites any mention that climate change is caused by human actions, such as driving gasoline-burning vehicles or heating our homes with gas or generating electricity with coal.