Trump’s war on the climate demands resistance
The biggest story of the year was, once again, among the least talked about. I’m of course referring to climate change, a topic embedded with some sort of Pavlovian trigger that immediately gets most people to tune out as soon as it is mentioned. Maybe it’s the level of finger-wagging associated with environmental talking points. Maybe it’s the overwhelming despair and helplessness about a problem that is still devouring our globe. Maybe people really just don’t care that our home planet is becoming less habitable for humans.
There’s no denying how serious climate change is. Every year, things get just a little worse and 2025, tied with 2023 as the second-hottest year on record, was no exception. From devastating floods in Southeast Asia that killed more than 1,800 people to the wildfires that plagued Los Angeles to record-breaking Hurricane Melissa that slammed Jamaica, it was another year of colossal disaster fueled by our overreliance on petrochemicals and factory farming. And that barely scratches the surface of how bad things are going to get as our planet cooks and our ecosystem collapses. Don’t forget Canada’s zombie wildfires, the Texas floods, the late autumn Southwest heat waves, the calving Doomsday glacier and on and on.
So why wasn’t all this headline news every single day instead of political infighting, AI slop or celebrity murders? The coverage of climate change, when it occurs at all, is generally below the fold, even though the consequences are so much bigger than most trending issues. I can understand why people tune out the litany of bad news about the planet. There’s an active fascist takeover at the federal level, there are wars and mass atrocities across the globe, public health has been hobbled to the point of losing basic effectiveness, communities are being torn apart by racist immigration policies and if some AI company hasn’t stolen your job, it probably will soon, or so we’re told. Who has time or energy for melting ice caps and mass extinction when day-to-day life is so catastrophic? And how can the media better reflect this reality in a way that is truthful but not depressing?
Climate change is what philosopher Timothy Morton calls a hyperobject: something that so massively occupies space and time that our puny primate brains have trouble fathoming them. The baby galaxies spied by the James Webb Space Telescope and the Greater Tokyo area are hyperobjects too — we can picture them but can barely wrap our heads around them. Climate change is so massive, so slow-moving, so viscous and non-local that it passes through everything in a way that we can’t fully perceive or escape from, despite the fantasies of the ultra-rich. Plenty of us do realize the problem is all around us and bigger than we could possibly solve alone. “There is no exit,” Morton has written, comparing our plight to waking up and realizing that one has been buried alive.
So little wonder the biggest issue of our age is largely ignored. It’s hard to talk about something abstract like the year 2050, a future now closer to us than the Y2K bug, but in just 24 short years, some 3 billion people may suffer chronic water scarcity and 183 million more may go hungry. We’re so embedded in it that we don’t even realize how close to the edge we are.
The debate isn’t over climate change existing — it’s about how bad it is getting and how fast.
Climate scientists try to explain why global heating is so devastating and why it will get worse from here, but even they struggle to fully grasp something so complex. They try their best to fit it into models, but things are spiraling out so quickly that many climate models fail to capture the whole picture or accurately predict how our world is changing. To be clear, the debate isn’t over climate change existing — it’s about how bad it is getting and how fast.
There have been many surprises from extreme weather events or how fast some areas are heating compared to expectations. As Zoë Schlanger reported in The Atlantic last January, this “might look like a failure of modeling, but really, it’s a testament to how bad climate change has been permitted to get, and how quickly.”
Climate change worsened by human behavior made 2025 one of the hottest years ever recorded. Also, the three-year warming average has crossed the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times set in the 2015 Paris Agreement for the first time. pic.twitter.com/3vMzJ75ve1
— The Associated Press (@AP) December 29, 2025
What’s indisputable is that our planet is heating at an accelerating rate and human industrialization is the cause. Where we’re headed could be a lot weirder and more dangerous. Getting that across to the public is a challenge. A lot of the takeaway becomes metrics like the “1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels” that we hear so much about with the Paris Climate Accord. Well, for most of 2025, we continued to exceed that mark. “These milestones are not abstract – they reflect the accelerating pace of climate change and the only way to mitigate future rising temperatures is to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” Samantha Burgess, the strategic lead for climate at European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, said in early December.
The Trump administration doesn’t want you to think about any of this and spent much of this year deleting data and shutting down facilities that study climate change. Most recently, the administration announced its intent to dismantle the nation’s premier atmospheric science center, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. Before that, it was the closure of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, not to mention the shutdown of climate.gov, a primary public resource for this crisis. “It is almost certainly the greatest collective act of scientific vandalism in recent American history,” environmental journalist Bill McKibben wrote in The New Yorker in December. “It would be easy, and accurate, to call 2025 the low point of human action on the climate crisis.”
It’s hard to disagree. Despite all this, there was plenty of good news, at least in the energy sector. Renewables like solar and wind broke all sorts of records in 2025, surpassing coal as a source of electricity worldwide, with the impact being felt most in Africa and South Asia. China, in particular, “now dominates global production of renewable energy technologies. It makes 80% of the world’s solar cells, 70% of its wind turbines, and 70% of its lithium batteries, at prices no competitor can match,” the journal Science reported, declaring renewable energy its “2025 Breakthrough of the Year.” Renewable energy costs have become the cheapest in many places and the tech is constantly improving to be more efficient. The green revolution is closer than ever.
Nothing gives the finger to Trump and his billionaire acolytes, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, et al., like creating parallel economies and governments that serve people and the planet, not shareholders.
That’s nice to hear, but the green energy transition isn’t happening nearly fast enough, with fossil fuel emissions still reaching a record high in 2025, according to recent research by the Global Carbon Project. It predicts some 38.1 billion metric tons of fossil carbon dioxide emissions this year alone. And of course, much of this renewable push was not happening in the U.S., as the Trump administration did its best to undo any progress the country was making. Not only did Trump deregulate air pollution controls, open up the country for more drilling and jack up natural gas exports, his “big, beautiful” bill also axed tax credits for electric vehicles and renewable energy projects. At least 16 states have sued the federal government after Trump suspended electric vehicle charging programs. As for the president himself, Trump has spent decades repeatedly dismissing climate change as a “hoax,” which is in line with everything he disregards. As for the “national energy emergency” Trump declared early in his second term, “hoax” might be the only word appropriate. We don’t lack for destructive energy policy.
It’s unclear whether the gains in renewables will be enough to slow our planet from boiling, but these gains do matter. It may not seem like it, but there’s a big difference between 1.5º of warming and 1.6º and especially 2º or more. Each notch upward translates into more extreme weather, more crop failures, more extinct species and more human deaths. Maybe we couldn’t stop global temperatures from reaching 1.5º above preindustrial levels, but that shouldn’t stop us from trying even harder.
But good luck getting people to even pay attention to this problem. It’s not going to be easy, but literally nothing else matters. Even if we repelled the Nazis again and found an immigration policy that wasn’t Stalinesque, fixed the holes in the economy that people fall through and guaranteed health care for all, none of it would matter on a burning planet with dead oceans. (The inverse is also true. It would not be ideal to live on a perfectly healthy planet where white supremacy and misogyny reign.)
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So 2025 was a mixed bag in terms of fighting for our future, but it’s far from over. If we want to get through to people how much this matters, we need a message they can’t scroll past. I believe the solarpunk movement offers cautious optimism and a prescription for change that could carry us into 2026 and beyond.
Solarpunk is more than just the antithesis of cyberpunk, “Blade Runner” and a devastated environment smothered by technofascism. It’s a countercultural movement that imagines us finding an actual balance with nature while improving people’s quality of life. Most often, the campaign is associated with aesthetics — the Studio Ghibli-like floating gardens and cottagecore vibes. But that’s merely the “solar” part, which, as mentioned, is in no short supply. We need more of the “punk” aspect — defying authoritarianism, building solidarity networks, leaning into DIY instead of capitalism. Nothing gives the finger to Trump and his billionaire acolytes, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, et al., like creating parallel economies and governments that serve people and the planet, not shareholders.
True punk, as in the music genre, teaches us about camaraderie and self-expression that challenges the status quo. It translates nicely to protecting vulnerable species and building sustainable communities. Let 2026 be a time to find the solarpunk in everything, especially one’s local community, whether that’s urban gardens or citizen regulators filling in where the Environmental Protection Agency fails. There are other strategies for fighting climate change, not least of which is protesting the perpetual petrostate whenever possible. “Degrowth” is one of the best antidotes to our hyper-consumerist culture.
To be most effective and cut through the noise, the climate movement needs intersectionality. Environmental justice is racial justice is health justice is social justice. We need all of these things to be moving in the right direction. What we can’t do is give up. Despair is easy, especially with fossil fuel bullies pulling no punches. But every inch of progress matters, every battle won is preventing our home world from becoming just a little worse. Things seem bleak now, but buried under all the terrible statistics and policy is a message we can’t ignore: we must act.
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