Donald Trump has been on a vendetta against “windmills” — and, really, any form of clean energy — for many years. He has close ties to the fossil fuel industry, essentially telling them he’d do whatever they want if they gave his presidential campaign $1 billion. We knew Trump’s first year back in office would be a disaster for the climate — but experts say the scope of the damage has exceeded their worst fears.
Like the Los Angeles fires at the start of 2025, which were fueled by climate change, the damage that has been done has been overwhelming and brutal.
“I think that a lot of these actions were straight out of the Project 2025 playbook,” Jennifer Duggan, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, tells Rolling Stone. “I think that what has been surprising or shocking has been the speed and the scope and just the complete disregard for the rule of law.”
One of the most recent examples came in December, when Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and one of the architects of Project 2025, announced that the Trump administration was dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. The climate research center provided essential data for climate scientists — playing a key role in everything from weather forecasting to flight safety. Vought called it a source of “climate alarmism.”
The administration has meanwhile been canceling major renewable energy projects in numerous states, which has set up various court battles. It plans to lower fuel efficiency standards for motor vehicles, which are one of the primary sources of carbon emissions, and the historic climate investments contained in the Inflation Reduction Act were largely dismantled — even though much of the money that was invested went to conservative states.
The Biden administration had moved to regulate methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, generated by the oil and gas industry, but those regulations may be out the window, too. Dozens and dozens of other environmental regulations have been repealed — often to the benefit of large corporations.
The Environmental Protection Agency, typically tasked with … protecting the environment, has been totally reoriented. It is working to rescind the Endangerment Finding, a 2009 agency decision that has been pivotal for regulating greenhouse gases. The EPA is required by law to determine which “pollutants” it will regulate, and for years CO2 has been one of those pollutants, but the Trump administration is trying to reverse that decision. Doing so would deal a huge blow to efforts to curb carbon emissions.
It has been such an all-out, whole-of-government assault on climate progress that the EPA is even removing references to human-caused climate change from its website. Perhaps that’s to be expected from an administration that’s been trying to convince the world that climate change might actually be a good thing.
“It does seem to me that a reasonable reading of the administration’s actions is that they’re trying to lock us into fossil fuels for the long-term,” says Andrew Dessler, director of the Texas Center for Extreme Weather at Texas A&M University. “Whereas other countries, like China, are going all-in on renewables, because renewables are cheaper.”
While utility bills have been increasing, Dessler says the Trump administration has been pushing the country toward “expensive, dirty” energy. Renewable energy has been cheaper than fossil fuel-derived energy for some time now.
“This is not just an attack on regulation. This is an attack on actual good governance,” says Daniel Kammen, a distinguished professor of energy at the University of California, Berkeley. “About 20 years ago, so many clean energy and clean air policies were good environmentally and socially, but they were not home runs economically. They’ve all become home runs economically.”
China, on the other hand, reportedly invested over $600 billion into renewable energy in 2025. The country is producing so many renewable energy components, such as wind turbines, solar panels and batteries, that it’s exporting them around the world.
“They’re going to be the energy provider for the world,” Dessler says. “They want to be the dominant economy of the 21st century, and controlling energy is the way you do that.”
Kammen notes the irony of the United States playing a major role in the development of renewable energy, but then moving away from it now that it’s economically viable and the country can benefit from its use. He says it’s “bad economic policy, bad environmental policy and bad competitiveness policy.”
“China, Vietnam, Germany — they’re all laughing at us because we did all the heavy lifting,” Kammen says. “We did all the R&D for decades, and now it’s time to reap the benefits. This administration has decided to give the benefits of our hard work to everybody else and to take no benefits for themselves.”
The effects will be felt in the short-term when people are calculating their utility bills, but there will also be many long-term effects. The world doesn’t have an infinite amount of time to win the fight against climate change, and each fraction of a degree of warming beyond two degrees Celsius could make hurricanes more powerful, wildfires more destructive, droughts more common, and extreme heat more deadly.
“All they care about is enriching themselves,” Kammen says. “This is a group of Neanderthals in power.”
While 79-year-old Donald Trump won’t live to see the full consequences of the suffering he is unleashing on the world, future generations will. Many will likely die due to the decisions that are being made today. Kammen says what’s happening is an affront to humanity, and that the people involved deserve to be held accountable for their actions.
“These people should all be prosecuted someday,” Kammen says, portraying the administration’s assault on the environment as a crime against humanity. “I’m not joking. These people should be prosecuted.”
