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 Dozens and dozens of other environmental regulations have been repealed — often to the benefit of large corporations.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.”
Donald Trump looks to an image of Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed during a campaign rally on Sunday, Oct. 25, 2026, in Port Huron, Mich.
Republicans Are Driving the Most Racist Election Cycle in a Generation
In 2010, a splinter group of far-right Republicans known as the Tea Party summoned a red wave of Republican voters in Barack Obama’s first midterm elections, capitalizing on the remnants of the global financial crisis and troop surges in Afghanistan to help the GOP win 63 seats in Congress. The Tea Party wanted to be known as fiscal conservatives, but their darkest power was abject, open fury that the United States had dared to elect a Black man as president.
But 2010 was not, somehow, the most racist election in recent memory. It’s the 2026 midterms, thanks to the invective spewed by the man in the White House and the worst dregs of his movement around the country. With a war in Iran, skyrocketing gas prices, rampant inflation, and a burgeoning housing crisis, the GOP has no claim to fiscal conservatism this election cycle. Instead, all they have is race.
“There’s five hundred million Arabs in the world,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said recently. “And yet they don’t produce science. They don’t win the Nobel Prize. They don’t win the Fields Prize. They don’t win the Wolf Prize. They don’t produce literature.”
RFK was making a barely veiled reference to the primary target of Republican racism this cycle: Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. El-Sayed is a muslim, and is sufficiently left wing so as to invite the ire of basically every faction of American politics, including centrist Democrats, centrist Republicans, and the far right, who have taken up the cause of cutting him down with particular zeal. Trump has joined in:
“If Abdul and the Democrats win, they will open the floodgates and invite hordes of jihadis to our shores, creating a nightmare of violence and terror until you cannot even have a Christmas,” Trump said at a rally in Port Huron on Sunday.
Trump has repeatedly issued some of the worst attacks against El-Sayed, repeating the claim that he is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and calling him a “jihadist.” He has also gleefully mocked El-Sayed’s name at multiple campaign stops, and said over the weekend that he would “be the only senator that has to go through a metal detector before he is allowed to go in the Senate,” the implication, of course, being that he is a potential terrorist.
Vice President JD Vance, not one to be out-done, accused El-Sayed of “anti-white” racism, a familiar line of attack by members of the far right looking to mobilize economically disadvantaged white voters.
“Abdul El-Sayed, who maybe more than any Democrat running in the nation has engaged in the kind of explicitly anti-white racial hatred that has become common in the Democratic Party,” Vance said at a rally in Michigan on Tuesday. “I’d say that person should not be elected.”
The attacks on El-Sayed are shocking and crude, but they didn’t spring out of a vacuum. Racist dogwhistles — and more explicit attacks — have been common fodder for the GOP for decades, from Ronald Reagan’s popularization of the term “welfare queen” — a veiled attack on impoverished Black Americans — to Trump’s support of the Barack Obama birth certificate conspiracies. Some of Trump’s earliest political breakthroughs came on the back of demonizing Latin American immigrants and painting undocumented migrants as a boogeyman threatening the livelihoods of “real” Americans.
All these threads have come together in the second Trump administration, with the persecution of Haitian immigrants who were stripped of their Temporary Protected Status by the Department of Homeland Security, a campaign of terror across the heartland committed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, repeated denigration of African countries in public speeches, and constant racist dogwhistles in official government communications. The Trump administration has raided the home of a sitting congresswoman, Somali-American Representative Ilhan Omar, reportedly as part of an investigation aiming to strip her of her citizenship. Trump has repeatedly suggested Omar should be deported, while making fun of her head coverings.
Trump’s racism has spread throughout the GOP, emboldening the most fringe candidates to take positions so blatantly bigoted that some squeamish members of their party are cringing. In Texas, Railroad Commissioner candidate Bo French recently doubled down on a racist post he made remarking on the number of Indian-American students at a recent University of Texas football game. Republican megadonor Elon Musk, a white South African born and raised under apartheid, has spent entire months this year posting incessantly about race, repeatedly returning to racist tropes to attack Democratic candidates as he pours money into attack ads in several states.
This kind of animus is the sign of a desperate party — one whose own consultants are already admitting might be “fucked.” The idea they’re selling to American voters is simple: Hate your neighbor, based not on what they say or do, but because of who they are. The problem is, most of their enemies are just as American as their marks, and no amount of rhetoric can cover up the fact that they’re here to stay.