“Trump…assault on environmental requirements is extra strident than assertive” – Watts Up With That?
Essay by Eric Worrall
“…When historians look back to 2025,…they will tell the story that…the United States…gave up…its primacy…to…its…adversary…”
A nadir of human inaction on climate change
The second Trump administration’s assault on the environment was just as damaging as expected, but other developments this year offer at least some hope for the future.
By Bill McKibben
December 9, 2025
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For example, he described his understanding of climate science (in its modern form, arguably invented in the United States, whose scientists first tracked the gases accumulating in the atmosphere and then created computer models that allowed us to predict our fate), Donald Trump said: “There used to be a global slowdown. If you look back years ago in the 1920s and 1930s, they said, “Global cooling will kill the world.” We have to do something. Then they said: Global warming will kill the world. But then it started to get cooler. In my opinion, this is the biggest fraud ever perpetrated in the world.” Then, referring to modern environmental protection, one of America’s greatest contributions to the world – an awareness that has enabled dramatic purification of our air and water in recent decades, Trump said: “In the United States we still have radicalized environmentalists, and they want the factories to stop.” Everything should stop. No more cows. We don’t want any more cows. I guess they want to kill all the cows. They want to do things that are just incredible.”
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And yet, It is at least possible that Trump and Co.’s attack on environmental standards is more strident than confident. Because something else happened this year that gives at least some hope for the future: the remarkable rise of clean, renewable energy, which set all kinds of records in 2025. In May, China installed an average of three gigawatts of solar capacity per day in a rush to build solar farms before the end of growth subsidy policies – the US installed a total of twenty-one gigawatts in the first three quarters of this year. …
Similar transitions took place almost everywhere…
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Or Maybe it’s America that’s in trouble. When historians look back to 2025, I believe they will tell the story that the United States voluntarily gave up its technological and economic supremacy in a matter of months became his main theoretical opponent within a few months. China’s green energy exports this year through July were one and a half times larger than American oil and gas exports over the same period. …
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Read more: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/2025-in-review/climate-change-donald-trump
Let’s see if I understood this correctly. It was a “low point in human inaction on climate change,” but renewable energy “set all sorts of records in 2025.”
Which one is it, Bill?
The proof that President Trump is right that renewable energy is terribly expensive and not the future is the cost of electricity in California.
If the cost of electricity in strictly green places like California dropped significantly and became the cheapest electricity in the US, I would be interested to know how they did it. We would all do that. But the reality is that renewable energy is insanely expensive when you add in the cost of maintaining an entire second-generation system, be it gas turbines kept on standby most of the time, or massive excess capacity and days or weeks of battery backup capacity. And it will stay that way for the foreseeable future.
Bill also managed to ignore the AI climate wrecking ball in his article. You can’t just close your eyes and wish it would all go away, Bill, the energy-guzzling AI is here to stay. My prediction: Even California will collapse by 2030. If California wants to remain a tech hub, they need to switch to cheap energy like everyone else.
It is Bill McKibben and his fellow Greens who are becoming desperate and shrill. Thanks to AI, our victory in the field of energy sanity is now inevitable. But it will be fun to watch the green kabuki show, because those who have inflicted so much punishment on our society by promoting incoherent energy ideas will watch as all their grandiose net-zero dreams finally collapse.
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