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Trump’s
hatred for renewables means the US is falling behind the rest of the world
As well
as embracing ‘beautiful coal’, the president has set about obliterating clean
energy projects
Oliver
Milman
Sun 5 Oct
2025 11.00 BST
US vital
statistics
GDP per
capita per annum: US$89,110 (global average $14,210)
Total
annual tonnes CO2: 4.91bn (second highest country)
CO2 per
capita: 14.87 metric tonnes (global average 4.7)
Most
recent NDC (nationally determined contribution, or carbon plan): 2024
Climate
plans: rated critically insufficient
Six years
after Donald Trump allegedly wrote a suggestive birthday note to Jeffrey
Epstein, the current US president put his name to something that now seems
almost as shocking: a letter calling for action on the climate crisis.
In 2009
Trump, then a real estate developer and reality TV personality, was among a
group of business leaders behind a full-page advertisement in the New York
Times calling for legislation to “control climate change, an immediate
challenge facing the United States and the world today”. The US must lead on
clean energy, Trump and the others wrote, to avoid “catastrophic and
irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet”.
Today,
the letter is jarring. The world continues to dawdle politically in its
response to the climate crisis but clean energy is booming, responsible for
almost all new energy capacity and drawing double the investment of fossil
fuels globally. The market, as those business leaders from 2009 would now note,
has shifted.
Most
starkly, though, Trump has become the planet’s foremost advocate of fossil
fuels, throwing the might of the US presidency into a rearguard battle to keep
the world mired in the era of combusted carbon. There is now no fiercer single
opponent to the collective effort to stave off climate breakdown than Trump.
When
world leaders gather for UN climate talks in Brazil next month, the escalation
of Trump’s hostility towards climate action will be apparent. The US state
department’s office that deals with climate negotiations has been abolished as
“unnecessary”, making it unclear who, if anyone, will represent the world’s
leading economic and military superpower in Belem.
As in his
first term, Trump has again withdrawn the US from the Paris climate deal,
thrown open more land and waters for oil and gas drilling, and set about
dismantling clean air protections that would have prevented thousands of deaths
across America. These rollbacks will “drive a stake through the heart of the
climate change religion”, as Lee Zeldin, Trump’s head of the Environmental
Protection Agency, gleefully put it.
But
Trump’s latest spell in the White House has gone even further, to extremes that
have surprised many onlookers.
Rather
than simply boost a fossil fuel industry that donated handsomely to his
election campaign, Trump has set about obliterating clean energy projects:
halting offshore windfarms that had already been approved, banning wind and
solar from federal land, and eliminating subsidies for renewables and electric
cars (while handing fresh taxpayer dollars to a seemingly futile effort to
revive coal).
“We are
certainly in a different environment than we were in the first Trump
administration,” said Kim Carnahan, who was the chief climate negotiator for
the US during Trump’s first term.
“There’s
a focus on dismantling rather than building. It’s hard to see. We’re not
present for a major global issue and are ceding that ground to our competitors,
which is not good for the United States.”
Not
content with jettisoning Republican free-market orthodoxy in the US energy
market, Trump has sought to intervene in other countries’ climate policies,
scolding the UK for erecting wind turbines and for not drilling enough oil for
his liking. He has also pushed the EU to agree to buy $750bn (£550bn) in US oil
and gas over the next three years, as well as striking fossil fuel deals with
Japan and South Korea.
“Countries
are on the brink of destruction because of the green energy agenda,” Trump told
stony-faced leaders during a UN speech last month. “If you don’t get away from
this green scam, your country is going to fail. You need strong borders and
traditional energy sources if you are going to be great again.”
The
president has tried to rewire language around energy and climate, too. Trump,
who was seemingly radicalised by his disgust at viewing wind turbines from his
Scottish golf course in 2011, has called wind energy “ugly”, “disgusting” and
“pathetic”. The climate crisis is, in his words, a “hoax”.
His
administration has cut or hidden inconvenient climate research, deleted
mentions of climate change from government websites and created an error-strewn
study in their stead and even, despite Trump’s supposed support for free
speech, drawn up a list of banned terms, such as “decarbonisation”,
“sustainable”, “emissions” and “green”. The mere reporting of greenhouse gas
emissions is now verboten, too.
Fossil
fuels, meanwhile, have been rebranded. “I have a little standing order in the
White House,” Trump confided to the UN. “Never use the word ‘coal’, only use
the words ‘clean, beautiful coal’. Sounds much better, doesn’t it?”
All of
this has slowed the adoption of clean energy in the US: in the first half of
the year, spooked businesses closed or downscaled more than $22bn in clean
energy projects, costing more than 16,000 jobs, most of them in Republican-held
districts.
Energy
prices are rising for Americans as a result; and the US’s planet-heating
emissions, while still falling, are expected to worsen their already sluggish
descent in the years ahead.
This
agenda is perplexing even on Trump’s own terms, experts have said. The
president has spoken of making American energy “dominant” and of the need for
jobs and new generation to fuel AI data centres, and yet has undercut this by
attempting to stamp out renewables.
“I do
struggle with this – if you are serious about American energy dominance you
need to deploy, deploy, deploy,” said Abraham Silverman, an energy expert at
Johns Hopkins University.
“It’s
puzzling and very strange to say wind and solar has no role in the American
system when these are often the quickest and cheapest sources. There’s a real
tension in the administration’s main messages.”
The US
government’s abandonment of climate concerns raises broader questions about
America’s place in the world, too. In the geopolitical struggle with China, two
very different visions are being touted to the rest of the world: one that
remains hooked to the fossil fuels touted by the planet’s largest oil and gas
producer, or one that shifts to clean energy components, probably made in
China.
“Trump
continues to embarrass the US on the global stage and undermine the interests
of Americans at home,” said Gina McCarthy, the former top climate adviser to
Joe Biden.
McCarthy
believes that American cities and states committed to climate action can help
to fill the void left by the federal government. Markets and sub-national
governments will continue to shift, even if Trump tries to halt states from
cutting pollution. But from China’s perspective, the race to shape energy, and
thereby alter the overall trajectory of this century, may already be over.
“The last
chance for the US to jump on the green bandwagon has left the station,” said Li
Shuo, a China climate policy expert at the Asia Society Policy Institute, of
Trump’s dismemberment of the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature climate
bill. “In China, this isn’t even treated like a competition. The US is just not
in the game.”
At home,
Trump may order mentions of the climate crisis and its impact to be scrubbed
from the internet, and mock those who worry about such things as “lunatics”,
but the effects of an overheated planet will continue to mount, regardless.
Floods in
Texas, fires in California and uninsurable homes in Florida can only be
dismissed for so long, as can the lure of cheap, abundant clean energy. Trump’s
2009 call for action on climate may be delayed, but it is unlikely to be
denied.
“There is
a dip now, there is less willingness to talk about decarbonisation,” said
Carnahan. “But this is against the tide of what you see happening with
renewable energy in our biggest competitors. They are not just all in, but
really driving ahead.
“All of
this won’t go away because the problem hasn’t been solved. There will still be
concerns about action on climate change because there is no other choice.
“The
problem is still there and the realities of its impacts will just become more
and more clear over time.”
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