As the year comes to a close, 2025 looks like a turning point in the world’s fight against climate change. Most conspicuously, it was the year the U.S. abandoned the effort. The Trump administration pulled out of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which unites virtually all the world’s countries in a voluntary commitment to halt climate change. And for the first time in the 30-year history of the U.N.’s international climate talks, the U.S. did not send a delegation to the annual conference, COP30, which took place in Belém, Brazil.

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here.

The Trump administration’s assault on climate action has been far from symbolic. Over the summer, the president pressed his Republican majority in Congress to gut a Biden-era law that was projected to cut U.S. emissions by roughly a third compared to their peak, putting the country within reach of its Paris Agreement commitments. In the fall, Trump officials used hardball negotiating tactics to stall, if not outright derail, a relatively uncontroversial international plan to decarbonize the heavily polluting global shipping industry. And even though no other country has played a larger role in causing climate change, the U.S. under Trump has cut the vast majority of global climate aid funding, which is intended to help countries that are in the crosshairs of climate change despite doing virtually nothing to cause it.

It may come as no surprise, then, that other world leaders took barely veiled swipes at Trump at the COP30 climate talks last month. Christiana Figueres, a key architect of the 2015 Paris Agreement and a longtime Costa Rican diplomat, summed up a common sentiment.

“Ciao, bambino! You want to leave, leave,” she said before a crowd of reporters, using an Italian phrase that translates “bye-bye, little boy.”

These stark shifts in the U.S. position on climate change, which President Donald Trump has called a “hoax” and “con job,” are only the latest and most visible signs of a deeper shift underway. Historically, the U.S. and other wealthy, high-emitting nations have been cast as the primary drivers of climate action, both because of their outsize responsibility for the crisis and because of the greater resources at their disposal. Over the past decade, however, the hopes that developed countries will prioritize financing both the global energy transition and adaptation measures to protect the world’s most vulnerable countries have been dashed — in part by rightward lurches in domestic politics, external crises like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and revolts by wealthy-country voters over cost-of-living concerns.

The resulting message to developing countries has been unmistakable: Help is not on the way.

In the vacuum left behind, a different engine of global climate action has emerged, one not political or diplomatic but industrial. A growing marketplace of green technologies — primarily solar, wind, and batteries — has made the adoption of renewable energy far faster and more cost-effective than almost anyone predicted. The world has dramatically exceeded expectations for solar power generation in particular, producing roughly 8 times more last year than in 2015, when the Paris Agreement was signed.

China is largely responsible for the breakneck pace of clean energy growth. It now produces about 60 percent of the world’s wind turbines and 80 percent of solar panels. In the first half of 2025, the country added more than twice as much new solar capacity as the rest of the world combined. As a result of these Chinese-led global energy market changes and other countries’ Paris Agreement pledges, the world is now on a path to see 2.3 to 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.1 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by 2100, compared to preindustrial temperatures, far lower than the roughly 5 degrees C (9 degrees F) projections expected just 10 years ago.

These policies can be viewed as a symbol of global cooperation on climate change, but for Chinese leadership, the motivation is primarily economic. That, experts say, may be why they’re working. China’s policies are driving much of the rest of the world’s renewable energy growth. As the cost of solar panels and wind turbines drops year over year, it is enabling other countries, especially in the Global South, to choose cleaner sources of electricity over fossil fuels — and also to purchase some of the world’s cheapest mass-produced electric vehicles. Pakistan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and Malaysia are all expected to see massive increases in solar deployment in the next few years, thanks to their partnerships with Chinese firms.

“China is going to, over time, create a new narrative and be a much more important driver for global climate action,” said Li Shuo, director of the China climate hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute. Shuo said that the politics-and-rhetoric-driven approach to solving climate change favored by wealthy countries has proved unreliable and largely failed. In its place, a Chinese-style approach that aligns countries’ economic agendas with decarbonization will prove to be more successful, he predicted.

Meanwhile, many countries have begun reorganizing their diplomatic and economic relationships in ways that no longer assume American leadership. That shift accelerated this year in part due to Trump’s decisions to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, to impose tariffs on U.S. allies, and more broadly, to slink away into self-imposed isolation. European countries facing punishing tariffs have looked to deepen trade relationships with China, Japan, and other Asian countries. The EU’s new carbon border tax, which applies levies to imports from outside the bloc, will take effect in January. The move was once expected to trigger conflict between the EU and U.S., but is now proceeding without outright support — or strong opposition — from the Trump administration.

African countries, too, are asserting leadership. The continent hosted its own climate summit earlier this year, pledging to raise $50 billion to promote at least 1,000 locally led solutions in energy, agriculture, water, transport, and resilience by 2030. “The continent has moved the conversation from crisis to opportunity, from aid to investment, and from external prescription to African-led,” said Mahamoud Ali Youssouf, chairperson of the African Union Commission. “We have embraced the powerful truth [that] Africa is not a passive recipient of climate solutions, but the actor and architect of these solutions.”

The U.S. void has also allowed China to throw more weight around in international climate negotiations. Although Chinese leadership remained cautious and reserved in the negotiation halls in Belém, the country pushed its agenda on one issue in particular: trade. Since China has invested heavily in renewable energy technology, tariffs on its products could hinder not only its own economic growth but also the world’s energy transition. As a result the final agreement at COP30, which like all other United Nations climate agreements is ultimately non-binding, included language stipulating that unilateral trade measures like tariffs “should not constitute a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination or a disguised restriction on international trade.”

Calling out tariffs on the first page of the final decision at COP30 would not have been possible if negotiators for the United States had been present, according to Shuo. “China was able to force this issue on the agenda,” he said.

But Shuo added that other countries are still feeling the gravitational pull of U.S. policies, even as the Trump administration sat out climate talks this year. In Belém last month, the United States’ opposition to the International Maritime Organization’s carbon framework influenced conversations about structuring rules for decarbonizing the shipping industry. And knowing that the U.S. wouldn’t contribute to aid funds shaped climate finance agreements.

In the years to come, though, those pressures may very well fade. As the world pivots in response to a U.S. absence, it may find it has more to gain than expected.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/international/2025-trump-climate-change-paris-agreement-china/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

I’ve been a vegetarian for over a decade. It’s not because of my health, or because I dislike the taste of chicken or beef: It’s a lifestyle choice I made because I wanted to reduce my impact on the planet. And yet, twice a day, every day, I lovingly scoop a cup of meat-based kibble into a bowl and set it down for my 50-pound rescue dog, a husky mix named Loki.

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here.

Until recently, I hadn’t devoted a huge amount of thought to that paradox. Then I read an article in the Associated Press headlined “People often miscalculate climate choices, a study says. One surprise is owning a dog.”

The study, led by environmental psychology researcher Danielle Goldwert and published in the journal PNAS Nexus, examined how people perceive the climate impact of various behaviors — options like “adopt a vegan diet for at least one year,” or “shift from fossil fuel car to renewable public transport.” The team found that participants generally overestimated a number of low-impact actions like recycling and using efficient appliances, and they vastly underestimated the impact of other personal decisions, including the decision to “not purchase or adopt a dog.”

The real objective of the study was to see whether certain types of climate information could help people commit to more effective actions. But mere hours after the AP published its article, its aim had been recast as something else entirely: an attack on people’s furry family members. “Climate change is actually your fault because you have a dog,” one Reddit user wrote. Others in the community chimed in with ire, ridiculing the idea that a pet Chihuahua could be driving the climate crisis and calling on researchers and the media to stop pointing fingers at everyday individuals.

Goldwert and her fellow researchers watched the reactions unfold with dismay. “If I saw a headline that said, ‘Climate scientists want to take your dogs away,’ I would also feel upset,” she said. “They definitely don’t,” she added. “You can quote me on that.”

The study set out to understand how to shift behavior by communicating climate truths. Instead, its media coverage revealed a troubling psychological trade-off: When climate-related messaging strikes a nerve, it may actually turn people off from the work of shifting societal norms.

It’s an instinct I understand on some level. I love Loki, and my knee-jerk reaction is to defend the very personal choice of sharing one’s life with a dog. I also sympathize with redirecting the blame toward the biggest polluters: billionaires and fossil fuel companies (not Bon-Bon, the pet Chihuahua in question). But is it irresponsible to shrug off any conversation about the environmental impact of our pets — something far more within our control than, say, the overthrow of capitalism?

Is there a way to have a frank discussion about the climate impact of our personal lives without it going to the dogs?

Oftentimes, when I’m questioning how a particular climate behavior might fit into my life, I try to imagine how it looks in my vision of a sustainable future. It’s why, for instance, I don’t own a car and am dedicated to riding public transit, even though it isn’t always super convenient. I’m keen to be an early adopter of systems I believe in. But I struggle to imagine a future without companion animals, even knowing about their environmental impact — which is admittedly substantial.

Dogs and cats eat meat-heavy diets, which is where the bulk of their carbon pawprint comes from. A 2017 study from UCLA found that dogs and cats are responsible for about 25 to 30 percent of the environmental impact of meat consumption in the United States. That’s equivalent to a year’s worth of driving by 13.6 million cars. For pets that eat traditional kibble or wet food, that protein may come from meat byproducts — otherwise-wasted animal parts, such as organs and bones, not approved for human consumption. But an increasing number of pet owners are opting to feed their fur babies “human-grade” meat products, which requires additional resources and generates extra emissions.

After they eat, of course, they poop. A lot. At least for dogs, that poop typically gets bagged in plastic and sent to the landfill. And it turns out all the biodegradable poop bags I’ve diligently bought over the years don’t help matters much; they also release greenhouse gases in landfills, and most composting programs don’t accept pet waste.

With more dogs around than ever before — the U.S. dog population has steadily increased from 52.9 million in 1996 to a new peak of 89.7 million in 2024 — their overall climate toll is more than a Chihuahua-sized issue. But pets are also more than just sources of carbon pollution. According to a 2023 Pew Research poll, 97 percent of owners say they consider their pets to be part of their families, with 51 percent of respondents saying they are on the same level as a human family member. So whenever their climate impact crops up in the discourse, as it has periodically, it makes sense that people tend to get defensive.

For some climate advocates, the solution has been to shift messaging away from individual responsibility and focus instead on big, systemic changes like overhauling our electricity and transit systems through governmental investment in clean energy. In her essay “I work in the environmental movement. I don’t care if you recycle,” author and podcaster Mary Annaïse Heglar wrote: “The belief that this enormous, existential problem could have been fixed if all of us had just tweaked our consumptive habits is not only preposterous; it’s dangerous … It’s victim blaming, plain and simple.”

Heglar and others have taken a strong stance against environmental purity — the idea that you can’t care about or advocate for systems-level change if you aren’t first changing your own habits. But not everyone agrees that individual actions should be completely deemphasized in the climate conversation. Kimberly Nicholas, a climate scientist and author of the popular book Under the Sky We Make, has argued that wealthy people living in wealthy countries — and globally, “wealthy” is a lower bar than you might think — do have a responsibility to slash their outsize carbon emissions. And particularly for those of us living in democracies, personal action isn’t just about the choices we make as consumers.

“There’s still an ongoing tension between personal and system change, or individual and collective action,” Nicholas said. “It’s really hard to get that right — to get the right balance there that acknowledges the role and the importance of both, and to talk about and study and describe both in a way that motivates people to take high-impact actions.”

Goldwert saw that tension play out in her maligned climate communications study. In the experiment, participants reviewed 21 individual climate actions (like eating less meat) and five systemic actions (like voting) and rated their commitments to taking each action. Two test groups then received clarifying information about the relative impact of the 21 individual actions — one group was asked to estimate their ranking before learning how they actually ranked, the other group received the information straight-up. But participants didn’t receive any data about the carbon-mitigation potential of the five collective actions, which would be far more difficult to quantify.

What Goldwert’s team found surprised them: The teachings did nudge people toward higher-impact personal actions, but their stated likelihood of engaging in collective ones actually went down — a backfire effect that hints at the perils of focusing too much on personal lifestyle choices.

“It might be kind of like a mental substitution,” Goldwert said. “People feel like, ‘OK, I’ve done my part individually. I kind of checked the box on climate action.’”

Participants were also asked to rate the “plasticity” of each of the actions, or how easy it would be to adopt. And those measurements revealed another nuance in how people view different forms of climate action. For the individual-focused options, participants were more likely to commit to actions they saw as requiring little effort. For the systemic actions, they were more interested in whether it would have an impact — something researchers are still working on quantifying.

“If you think voting or marching is just symbolic or ineffective, you’re not going to engage,” Goldwert said. “We have to show people evidence that their voice or their vote can shift policy, corporate practices, or social norms.”

I, for one, was surprised to see that participants rated the commitment to “not purchase or adopt a dog” as easy. When I asked Goldwert what might be behind that, she noted that dog ownership is a decision people don’t make very often. It also doesn’t require any action at all for people who already don’t own dogs. The results surely would have been different if the listed action was “get rid of your existing dog.” (Which it was not — a point that readers seemed to miss, based on Reddit comments about the study and the “crazy emails” Goldwert said she received.)

Still, for an animal lover like me, the idea of never adopting another dog doesn’t feel easy to commit to at all. It feels like an immense sacrifice. The sadness I feel at the thought of a future without dogs points me to another important factor when it comes to motivation for climate action: joy.

Actions we take to try and mitigate the climate crisis may be partially driven by how easy they are for us or how effective we believe them to be — but any choice we make is also driven by what we find joy in. It’s an essential part of staying committed and resilient in the fight for a better future. In this way, carbon-intensive activities like dog ownership have value beyond their weight in emissions.

“People have an emotional attachment to the people and animals and creatures that we love,” Nicholas said. “And that is actually, I think, very powerful. We’re not only going to solve climate change by lining up all the numbers — we certainly need to do that, but we have to tap into what people really care about and realize all those things are on the line and threatened by the amount of climate change we’re heading for with current policies.”

Would I fight to ensure that dogs, like my beloved Loki, can continue wagging happily on this planet? Heck yes, I would. I’ve always felt that being a pet person goes hand-in-hand with a sense of altruism and responsibility. And if not giving up our pets means fighting climate change by voting, marching, donating, advocating, and consuming like our pets’ lives depend on it, I think we can all get on board.

That might also mean adjusting our pets’ diets. While making my dog a full vegetarian seems challenging (though technically possible), just cutting out beef has a significant impact — shifting to “lower-carbon meats” was even one of the high-impact actions included in Goldwert’s study. That’s one Loki can easily commit to. And we already buy insect-based treats, which leave a pungent odor in my pockets but seem to please his taste buds.

There are also ways that dog ownership intersects with other climate-related behaviors. Anecdotally, I would say I travel less because I have a dog whose care I need to think about. Walking him every day has also made me vastly more connected to my local environment, the goings-on in my neighborhood, and my neighbors themselves — all of which are important aspects of building climate resilience. Some dogs have even been trained to sniff out invasive species and help identify environmental contaminants. (Not Loki, who has never worked a day in his life.)

Though I’d never thought about it quite this way before I read Goldwert’s study, the climate actions I take have a lot to do with the love I feel for Loki. Not because I want to leave a better world for him — I recognize the reality that I will almost certainly outlive him — but because my feelings for him bring me closer to the love I feel for all living things on this planet. This “ice age predator” who shares my home, as the anthropologist and comedian David Ian Howe puts it, is a living reminder of the relationship humans have with other species, going back many thousands of years.

As the saying goes, “Be the person your dog thinks you are.” And next time you get a little worked up about the realities of the climate crisis and your accountability within it, consider taking yourself on a walk.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/culture/the-climate-paradox-of-having-a-dog/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

It’s the end of the year, and so one should be compiling ten-best lists.

And I turned 65 last week, having spent almost my entire adult life in the climate fight, so it’s one of those moments when I wish I could look back with a certain amount of satisfaction.

But since I owe you honesty, not exuberance, just at the moment I can’t provide much celebration. I was hopeful this column might be about a big victory — on Wednesday the board that controls New York City’s pension funds was considering whether or not to pull tens of billions from Blackrock because of the investment giant’s climate waffling, which would have been a massive display of courage. Sadly, City Comptroller Brad Lander hadn’t gotten the measure on the agenda before the final meeting of his term, and he seems to have run out of time and political juice — the idea was tabled.

And so we’re left staring at a pile of recent defeats, at least in this country (which is an important qualification). I’ll try to end in a more hopeful place, but I fear you’re going to have to work through my angst with me for a few minutes.

The most traumatic item is the Trump administration’s decision to shut down the National Center for Atmospheric Research, born like me in 1960. It was a product of that era’s faith in science, a faith that paid off spectacularly. Take weather forecasting. As Nature reported Wednesday:

Work at NCAR played a key part in the rise of modern weather and climate forecasting. For instance, the lab pioneered the modern dropwindsonde, a weather instrument that can be released from an aircraft to measure conditions as it plummets through a storm. The technology reshaped the scientific understanding of hurricanes, says James Franklin, an atmospheric scientist and former branch chief of the hurricane specialist unit at the US National Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida.

But its most historically significant work has been in understanding the dimensions of the ongoing climate crisis. Nature again:

On the global scale, NCAR is known for its climate-modelling work, including the world-leading models that underpin international assessments such as those from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).Hundreds of scientists pass through NCAR’s doors each year to collaborate with its researchers. More than 800 people are employed at NCAR, most of whom work at the centre’s three campuses in Boulder, including the iconic Mesa Lab that sits at the base of jagged mountain peaks and was designed by architect I. M. Pei.

There’s no question about why the administration is doing what it’s doing. Project 2025 enforcer Russell Vought explained it quite succinctly — NCAR must go because it is “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.” This is stupid — it’s like closing the fire department because it’s a source of “fire alarmism” — but it’s by now an entirely recognizable form of stupid. And it’s also sly: It’s like spraypainting over the surveillance cameras so you can rob the bank without anyone watching. But of course nothing changes with the underlying physics. Indeed, as the announcement came down, NCAR was closed for the day because:

the local electrical company planned to cut electricity preemptively to reduce wildfire risk as fierce winds were forecast around Boulder. In 2021, a wildfire ignited just kilometres from NCAR; fuelled by powerful winds, it ripped through suburban homes, killing two people. Many researchers say this is a new normal of increased fire risk in an era of climate change—a topic of study at NCAR.

I am glad people are rallying to fight — there was an emergency press conference Thursday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, where many of the world’s Earth scientists are gathered. Third Act Colorado is working with Indivisible on a weekend rally. This is the scientific equivalent of tearing down the East Wing of the White House, and given the moment a lot more significant.

But I’m saddened to see how little our representatives in D.C. seem to really care, even the Democratic ones. Sixteen Democratic Senators voted Thursday to confirm President Donald Trump (and Elon Musk’s) nominee to head NASA, even though, as Brad Johnson pointed out in his Hill Heat newsletter, the administration is trying to slash science research at the agency in half.

The new head, Jared Isaacman, is clearly on board. As he wrote this spring, “Take NASA out of the taxpayer funded climate science business and leave it for academia to determine.” But of course the administration is wrecking that too — they cut off the funding for the gold standard climate research program at Princeton on the grounds that it was “contributing to a phenomenon known as ‘climate anxiety,’ which has increased significantly among America’s youth.”

Too many Democratic leaders are feeling comfortable waving off climate concerns, because of a feeling that it might be a political problem for them. That was exemplified Thursday morning in the New York Times when center-right pundit Matt Yglesias issued a strident call for liberals to “support America’s oil and gas industry.”

That he did it hours after that oil and gas industry won its fight to shutter climate research was probably coincidental, but the piece was a woebegone recycling of decades-old bad-faith arguments from a person who has insisted repeatedly that climate change is not an existential risk. Yglesias wants us to follow Obama-era “all of the above” energy policies even though they date from 15 years ago, when clean energy was more expensive than dirty, and long before we had the batteries that could make solar and wind fully useful. It’s no longer a good argument, but he has not changed his tune one iota — he keeps invoking Barack Obama, as if what was passable policy in 2008 still made sense.

The centerpiece of his argument is that we should support the gas industry because at least it produces less carbon than coal.

It is much cleaner than coal, consumption of which is still high and rising globally. Increased gas production, by displacing coal, has been the single largest driver of American emissions reductions over time. To the extent that foreign countries can be persuaded to rely on American gas exports rather than coal to fill the gaps left by the ongoing build-out of intermittent wind and solar that’s a climate win.

By now anyone following this debate knows that this is a mendacious point. That’s because the switch to gas has reduced American carbon emissions at the cost of increasing American methane emissions. Those who, like Yglesias, followed last year’s debate over pausing permitting for liquefied natural gas export terminals know that the crucial point was the science showing that in fact American LNG exports were worse than coal. The job is to get others to switch to solar, not coal — and that’s happening everywhere except the US, whose appetite for the stuff is apparently the thing still driving up global consumption even as demand drops in China and India.

Having written many many op-eds for the Times, I know that they fact-check things like the methane numbers; this should not have eluded them, but in fairness it’s eluded Democrats for decades, because gas has been such a convenient out for those unwilling to stand up to Big Oil. If I sound sore here, it’s because I’ve tried and failed to get this basic point of physics across; it’s just technical enough that senators often forget it, but ostensibly serious people like Yglesias should at least grapple with it.

All of this comes on the 10th anniversary of the Paris climate talks — and 10th anniversary of the Congress and (Democratic) president approving the resumption of US oil exports. I celebrated my 55th in Paris, and I remember being hunched over a laptop at a cafe writing what I think may have been the only op-ed opposing that resumption. As I said at the time:

It’s especially galling that Senate leaders — Republicans and Democrats — are apparently talking about trading this gift to Exxon and its ilk for tax breaks for wind and solar providers. It’s hard to imagine a better illustration of politicians who simply don’t understand the physics of climate change. We don’t need more of all kinds of energy—we need more of the clean stuff and way, way less of the dirty. Physics doesn’t do backroom deals.

And indeed the senators who said it was no big deal were wrong. America is, as Tony Dutzik pointed out this week, now the biggest oil exporter on Earth. He lays out the case nicely:

“There is currently little if any incentive for US oil producers to export crude oil even if the ban is lifted,” wrote Michael Levi of the Council on Foreign Relations, for example, in December 2015.A decade later, those breezy assessments have proven to be wildly off-base. “The United States produces more crude oil than any country, ever,” reads a 2024 headline from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), one of the agencies that got it wrong. Not only did lifting the crude export ban lead to a surge in oil production, but it also dramatically reshaped the global energy system, US politics, and greenhouse gas emissions.

So, anyway, feeling a little sad. But I do think this is a low point, because I think around the rest of the world, where Trump (and pundits like Yglesias) have marginally less sway, things are continuing to break the right way. In fact, this week the premier journal Science picked its scientific “Breakthrough of the Year” and it turned out to be not some fascinating if arcane new discovery, but instead the prosaic but powerful spread of renewable energy around the planet:

This year, renewables surpassed coal as a source of electricity worldwide, and solar and wind energy grew fast enough to cover the entire increase in global electricity use from January to June, according to energy think tank Ember. In September, Chinese President Xi Jinping declared at the United Nations that his country will cut its carbon emissions by as much as 10% in a decade, not by using less energy, but by doubling down on wind and solar. And solar panel imports in Africa and South Asia have soared, as people in those regions realized rooftop solar can cheaply power lights, cellphones, and fans. To many, the continued growth of renewables now seems unstoppable—a prospect that has led Science to name the renewable energy surge its 2025 Breakthrough of the Year.The tsunami of tech spilling from China’s factories has changed the country’s energy landscape—and its physical one, too. For decades China’s development was synonymous with coal, which produced choking air pollution and massive carbon emissions, still greater than those of all other developed nations combined. Now, solar panels carpet deserts and the high, sunstruck plateau of Tibet, and wind turbines up to 300 meters tall guard coastlines and hilltops (see photo essay, below). China’s solar power generation grew more than 20-fold over the past decade, and its solar and wind farms now have enough capacity to power the entire United States.
China’s burgeoning exports of green tech are transforming the rest of the world, too. Europe is a longtime customer, but countries in the Global South are also rushing to buy China’s solar panels, batteries, and wind turbines, spurred by market forces and a desire for energy independence. In Pakistan, for example, imports of Chinese solar panels grew fivefold from 2022 to ‘24 as the Ukraine war pushed up natural gas prices and the cost of grid power. “For people who were asking, ‘How am I going to keep the lights on in my home,’ it was a very obvious choice,” says Lauri Myllyvirta, an analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. In South Africa, old and unreliable coal plants drove a similar dynamic. Ethiopia has embraced solar and wind amid worries that hydropower, the country’s mainstay, will decline as droughts become more frequent.

That’s the fight as we head into 2026. Trump and Big Oil have had the run of things this year, but their idiocy is pushing up against limits: Among other things, it turns out that permitting every data center imaginable while cutting off the supply of cheap sun and wind is sending energy prices through the roof, which may be a real issue as midterms loom.

I’m not retiring — I’m here for the fight, and you too I hope.

Bill McKibben is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and co-founder of 350.org and ThirdAct.org. His most recent book is "Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?." He also authored "The End of Nature," "Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet," and "Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future."

The cost-of-living has emerged as one of the biggest political headwinds facing Donald Trump in his second term, and according to a report from ABC News, his leadership has sent one particular cost soaring that will hit close to home, literally, for many: energy bills.

Citing new findings from a Democrat-aligned climate advocacy group, Climate Power, ABC News on Monday reported that energy bills across the US have increased by 13 percent since Trump returned to the White House in January. This analysis was based on data released by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The report laid the blame for this increase on a few factors, primarily citing Trump's "One Big Beautiful" federal funding bill, which he signed into law over the summer. According to Climate Power, this bill is "driving up utility costs and destroying jobs by removing cheaper, cleaner energy sources from the grid, all while funding new tax breaks for the oil and gas industries."

The report also estimated that, due to the new energy projects cut or delayed since Trump's return to the presidency, the US has lost out on 24,958.5 megawatts of planned energy generation. Trump's policies have notably targeted green energy projects, scaling them down significantly or eliminating them outright.

This loss of energy serves to exacerbate another issue driving up costs, according to Climate Power: the proliferation of power-hungry AI data centers. David Spence, a professor of energy law and regulation at the University of Texas, explained to ABC News that demand for energy is ballooning in 2025, and outpacing production "by a lot."

"We're just not able to bring new supply on as quickly as demand is growing, and that's driving prices up," Spence said.

The Trump administration has claimed, contrary to available evidence, that green energy sources drive up the cost of electricity prices. In fact, many green energy sources at a sufficient scale can produce notably cheap energy, with Australia set to offer homes three hours of free power a day thanks to a surplus of solar energy.

Trump has also claimed for years that wind power turbines cause cancer rates to increase in areas where they are built, and increase whale deaths when built offshore, despite no studies finding a credible link for either claim. A BBC News report indicated that Trump's opposition to wind turbines might have originated when 11 of them were constructed off the coast of his golf course in Scotland, a change in the coastal view he decried as "ugly."

History is unfolding in the Atlantic Ocean right now. Hurricane Melissa has spun up into an extraordinarily dangerous Category 5 storm with maximum sustained winds of 175 mph, and is set to strike Jamaica Monday night before marching toward Cuba. This is only the second time in recorded history that an Atlantic hurricane season has spawned three hurricanes in that category. Melissa has already killed at least three people in Haiti and another in the Dominican Republic.

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here.

The threats to Jamaica will come from all sides. The island could see up to 30 inches of rain as the storm squeezes moisture from the sky, like a massive atmospheric sponge, potentially causing “catastrophic flash flooding and numerous landslides,” according to the National Hurricane Center. Melissa also will bulldoze ashore a storm surge of up to 13 feet — essentially a wall of water that will further inundate coastal areas. “No one living there has ever experienced anything like what is about to happen,” writes Brian McNoldy, a hurricane scientist at the University of Miami.

It will take some time for scientists to determine exactly how much climate change supercharged Melissa, but they can already say that the storm has been feeding on warm ocean temperatures made up to 800 times more likely by global heating. This is how climate change is worsening these tropical cyclones overall: The hotter the ocean gets — the seas have absorbed 90 percent of the extra heat that humans have pumped into the atmosphere — the more energy that can transfer into a storm. “The role climate change has played in making Hurricane Melissa incredibly dangerous is undeniable,” Marc Alessi, a climate attribution science fellow at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a statement.

Scientists can already estimate that climate change has increased Melissa’s wind speeds by 10 mph, in turn increasing its potential damage by 50 percent. “We’re living in a world right now where human-caused climate change has changed the environment in which these hurricanes are growing up and intensifying,” said Daniel Gilford, a climate scientist at the research group Climate Central. “Increasing temperatures of the atmosphere is increasing how much moisture is in the atmosphere, which will allow Melissa to rain more effectively and efficiently over the Caribbean, and could cause more flooding than otherwise would have occurred.”

Making Melissa extra dangerous is the fact that it’s undergone rapid intensification, defined as a jump in sustained wind speeds of at least 35 mph in a day, having doubled its speed from 70 to 140 mph in less than 24 hours. This makes a hurricane all the more deadly not only because stronger winds cause more damage, but because it can complicate disaster preparations — officials might be preparing for a weaker storm, only to suddenly face one far worse. Research has shown a huge increase in the number of rapid intensification events close to shore, thanks to those rising ocean temperatures, with Atlantic hurricanes specifically being twice as likely now to rapidly intensify.

At the same time, hurricanes are able to produce more rainfall as the planet warms. For one, the atmosphere can hold 7 percent more moisture per degree Celsius of warming. And secondly, the faster the wind speeds, the more water a hurricane can wring out, like spinning a wet mop. Accordingly, hurricanes can now produce 50 percent more precipitation because of climate change. “A more intense hurricane has stronger updrafts and downdrafts, and the amount of efficiency by which the storm can rain basically scales with how intense the storm is,” Gilford said. Making matters worse, Melissa is a rather slow-moving storm, so it will linger over Jamaica, inundating the island and buffeting it with winds.

As Melissa drops rain from above, its winds will shove still more water ashore as a storm surge. The coastlines of the Caribbean have already seen significant sea level rise, which means levels are already higher than before. (Warmer oceans have an additional effect here, as hotter water takes up more space, a phenomenon known as thermal expansion.) All of this means the baseline water levels are already higher, which the storm surge will pile on top of. “Just small, incremental, marginal changes in sea level can really drive intense changes,” Gilford said.

Jamaica has an added challenge in its mountainous terrain. Whereas water will accumulate on flat terrain, it behaves much more unpredictably when it’s rushing downhill because it easily gains momentum. “When you get a storm like this that is approaching the higher echelons of what we have observed, it’s harrowing, especially because it is pointing at a populated island with complex terrain,” said Kim Wood, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Arizona. “You’re dealing with a funneling effect, where that water, as it falls, will then join other water that’s coming down the mountainside and exacerbate the impacts.”

Maybe the only good news here is that the National Hurricane Center was able to accurately predict that Melissa would rapidly intensify. And in general, scientists have gotten ever better at determining how climate change is supercharging hurricanes, so they can provide ever more accurate warnings to places like Jamaica. But that requires continuous governmental support for this kind of work, while the Trump administration has slashed scientific budgets and jobs. “We couldn’t do this without continued investment in the enterprise that supports advances in not just science, but forecasting and communicating the outcomes of those forecasts,” Wood said.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/extreme-weather/how-hurricane-melissa-got-so-dangerous-so-fast/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

The phrase that has come to define the Trump administration’s message on climate change was born in Durham, New Hampshire, on December 16, 2023.

Flanked by flannel-clad supporters holding “Live free or die” signs, then-candidate Donald Trump wished the crowd a Merry Christmas before launching into what he saw as the biggest faults of the current administration. He swung at President Biden himself (“crooked Joe”) and the state of the economy (“Bidenomics”). About 10 minutes in, he arrived at Biden’s climate policies, which he said were “wasting trillions of dollars on Green New Deal nonsense.”

But Trump wasn’t satisfied with his choice of insult, perhaps recognizing that echoing “Green New Deal” served to amplify his opponents’ pro-climate action rallying cry. So in front of the crowd, he began riffing on ways to undermine it in real time.

“They don’t know what they’re doing, but you’re going to be in the poorhouse to fund his big government Green New Deal, which is a socialist scam. And you know what? You have to be careful. It’s going to put us all in big trouble,” he said. “The Green New Deal that doesn’t work. It’s a Green New Scam. Let’s call it, from now on, the ‘Green New Scam.'”

The crowd roared, shaking their signs in approval. “I do like that term, and I just came up with that one,” Trump said. “The Green New Scam. It will forever be known as the Green New Scam.”

There’s been plenty of attention on Trump’s purge of climate change language, and for good reason: Government workers are tiptoeing around vocabulary they once used freely. “Clean energy,” “climate science,” and “pollution” are on the list of “woke” words federal agencies have told employees to avoid. Recently, a memo circulated at the Department of Energy’s renewable energy office advised employees to remove or rephrase basic terms including “climate change,” “emissions,” and “green.” But the administration is doing more than making these phrases disappear. It’s also introducing new language designed to undermine the foundations upon which trust in climate science and policy is built.

In the nine months since Trump began his second presidency, the phrase “Green New Scam” — always capitalized — has appeared in White House fact sheets and press statements, echoed across federal agencies and by Republicans in Congress.

“He’s quite effective at creating sticky phrases and using repetition to amplify them,” said Renee Hobbs, a communications professor at the University of Rhode Island who wrote a book on modern propaganda. “That’s the classic propaganda strategy, right? You repeat the phrases that you want to stick, and you downplay, ignore, minimize, or censor the concepts that don’t meet your agenda.”

It’s part of a broader effort to erase information about how the planet is changing. In recent months, the administration has axed entire pages about climate change and how to adapt to it, said Gretchen Gehrke, who monitors federal websites with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. The 400 experts working on the government’s next official climate report were dismissed, then all the past reports vanished, too. The administration has proposed stopping long-running projects that monitor carbon dioxide levels, and the Environmental Protection Agency is no longer collecting greenhouse gas emissions data from polluting companies.

You could see it as a three-pronged strategy. First, erase language related to climate change. Second, dismantle the scientific foundation supporting it. Third, fill the void with a message that matches Trump’s political priorities — like the “Green New Scam.”

“We’ve always understood language shapes reality, and language can create unreal realities,” Hobbs said. “And I think that’s what Trump is doing with his language of climate change.”

In Trump’s growing arsenal of anti-climate catchphrases, “Green New Scam” remains a go-to weapon. The Green New Deal concept was a ripe target for Trump because it serves as a catch-all for progressive positions, said Josh Freed, senior vice president for climate and energy at the think tank Third Way. “That was the target that I think Trump honed in on and flipped the script on, and turned it into a vulnerability and catchphrase for what he felt the public would see as positions that were extreme,” he said.

Trump has taken the idea to an international audience. In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly last month, he spent a full 10 minutes ranting off-script about climate policy, deriding renewables and international efforts to address climate change. “If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail,” he told the world leaders in attendance.

In the same speech, he went on to call climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” He also claimed that “the carbon footprint is a hoax made up by people with evil intentions.”

Conspiracy theories are a common tool in propaganda, according to Hobbs. “Conspiracy theories are catnip because they postulate this malevolent actor who’s doing something secretly to hurt people, and humans are hardwired to pay attention to stuff like that,” she said. Studies have shown that fake news about climate change is more compelling to people than scientific facts.

Still, Trump is fighting an uphill battle trying to paint climate change as fake. About 70 percent of Americans acknowledge that global warming is happening. Meanwhile, recent polling found that most Americans don’t trust Republicans on the environment, with only 23 percent preferring the party’s plan for tackling environmental issues.

But if a phrase gets repeated often enough, it can begin to bend reality, even if it’s inaccurate. It’s a rule that Trump intuitively understands, and a driving force behind his linguistic prescriptions. “I have a little standing order in the White House — never use the word ‘coal,’ only use the words ‘clean, beautiful coal,’” Trump said in his speech to the U.N. “Sounds much better, doesn’t it?”

Coal may be dirty by basically every yardstick people use to decide whether something is clean, but the phrase “clean coal” could still change people’s associations with the fuel. “If you can control vocabulary, you’re controlling thought,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania who has spent decades studying campaign messaging. Once we adopt a new set of terms, those words start doing the thinking for us, she said. People absorb the assumptions that are baked into them, often without even noticing.

Jamieson says it’s part of a broader strategy to boost fossil fuels over renewable energy sources like solar and wind. The Trump administration has canceled billions of funding in clean energy projects while simultaneously fast-tracking permits for new pipelines and other fossil fuel infrastructure. Last month, the Energy Department announced it would pour $625 million into rescuing the coal industry, which has been dying as natural gas and renewables have taken off.

“The administration is trying to align the vocabulary through which we talk about the environment with policies that are consistent with increased drilling,” Jamieson said. “You don’t have to do much work to see the relationship between the policies and the language.”

As for how to respond to propaganda, Hobbs said that turning to facts — like scientists and journalists often do — is not the most effective strategy. Research has long shown that feelings are more important than facts in changing people’s minds. “You fight propaganda with propaganda, right?” she said. Climate advocates are increasingly connecting climate change to inflation and the rising cost of living, in an effort to reach Americans struggling with high electricity bills.

On the micro level, Hobbs said she’s seen success in online experiments where people engaged in genuine, open conversations about different propaganda topics, from free speech rights to the role of social media influencers. The format prompted people to talk about conspiracy theories they’ve encountered, what feelings those stories evoked, and which ones were harmful. Participants were encouraged to open up about their uncertainties and where they were coming from — and in doing so, they often came to their own realization that their beliefs might be influenced by propaganda. Hobbs said that people decreased their fear of others who thought differently and became more critical about the information they were receiving.

“We can’t help but be exposed to propaganda,” Hobbs said, “but how we react to it is up to us.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/language/strategy-behind-trump-climate-catchphrase-green-new-scam/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

It has been a big week in energy news, with several resounding wins for efficiency advocates.

On Tuesday, voters in Georgia flipped two seats on the state’s Public Service Commission, which oversees utilities and sets rates. They installed a pair of Democrats on this little known, yet powerful, body for the first time in nearly two decades. Further north, Democratic gubernatorial candidates in Virginia and New Jersey handily won after making rising energy prices a centerpiece of their campaigns. The victories came just a few days after The New York Times reported that the Environmental Protection Agency is quietly reconsidering plans to eliminate the popular Energy Star program.

Taken together, these developments suggest that energy costs could be moving the political needle in ways that other issues, like climate change, have not. And, with next year’s midterms on the horizon, it’s an issue both political parties will increasingly have to grapple with.

“When the costs of climate change become evident, there’s a political necessity to find policy that works,” said Bob Inglis, a former Republican congressman who represented South Carolina and has become a leading conservative voice on climate change. “When people see them on their utility bills and they see them in their property tax bills, that’s when they start asking, is there any way to head this off?”

The Trump administration’s potential reversal on Energy Star is one example of the political power that energy prices can have. In May, EPA officials announced at a staff meeting that Energy Star would be “eliminated.” The backlash was swift. Within weeks, a coalition of industry groups wrote to congressional leaders in support of a program that saves Americans some $40 billion a year in utility bills. They called minimizing that financial burden “a clear priority across party lines.”

Republicans, Democrats, appliance manufacturers, and corporate giants like Home Depot lined up in defense of Energy Star and, according to the Times, the EPA is quietly backing off its plans to fully shutter the decades-long initiative, widely considered among the most successful government initiatives in modern history. Its signature blue label is now nearly as recognizable as the Nike swoosh or a Coca-Cola can.

The EPA says the future of Energy Star is still being finalized, and many of the people who work on the program have been laid off or left. But the potential walk-back is a notable change of course for a Presidential administration that has, by and large, moved to gut federal climate and environmental policies. “This is a classic Lee Zeldin leap before you look at the situation,” said Jeremy Symons, a senior advisor at the nonprofit Environmental Protection Network, about the EPA’s administrator. When industry argued that the Energy Star label helps them sell appliances, Zelden appears to have listened.

“Energy star is an American success story,” said Symons. “It’s really a no-brainer.”

Energy costs played a large role in several key political races as well, most notably in Georgia, where the campaign for public utility commission seats revolved around affordability. Republicans argued that fossil fuels offer the best route to stable and affordable power prices in the state. Democrats pointed to a string of rate increases — six in the past two years — to contend that alternatives, such as renewable energy and nuclear, are the way forward. “We need to invest in a smarter, more resilient grid that’s capable of handling the extreme weather that Georgia experiences while also expanding that access to clean energy,” then-candidate Alicia Johnson told Grist in June.

On Tuesday, Johnson and fellow democrat Peter Hubbard, who is a clean energy consultant, flipped two Republican seats by 25 point margins in a race that drew national attention and funding. The wins are the Democrats’ first statewide victories in a non-federal election since 2006.

High energy costs were also a theme of gubernatorial races inNew Jersey and Virginia. In the Garden State, Democrat Mikie Sherrill vowed to declare “a state of emergency on energy costs.” In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger, also a Democrat, campaigned on a platform that included calls to expand clean energy generation and promote home weatherization to ease consumption. Despite President Trump trying to pin surging prices in those states on the Democrats, both Sherrill and Spanberger beat out Republican challengers.

In New Jersey, the local chapter of the League of Conservation Voters funded a campaign ad that attacked the Republican candidate, Jack Ciattarelli, for spiraling electricity rates. The video has 6.9 million views on YouTube and Sara Schreiber, the national organization’s senior vice president of campaigns, said internal polling showed the ad drove up Ciattarelli’s unfavorable rating among all voters by 6 percent, and a staggering 8 percent with Trump voters.

“People care about this issue, they hear what the candidates are saying, and they are siding with the candidates who are offering clean energy solutions to help lower their costs,” said Schreiber.

Dan Jasper, of the climate nonprofit Project Drawdown, said it’s not surprising that framing climate as an affordability issue helps win elections. “When you say “climate,” I think that just seems too far in the future for people,” he said. “But when you put it in terms of everyday expenditures, people start to listen for sure.”

As attention turns to next year’s midterm races, election watchers say utility bills could again be a centerpiece of campaigns across the country. It’s a concern that President Donald J. Trump has already repeatedly brought up, including with promises to cut prices in half. But with energy demand on the rise for the first time in decades and prices rising twice as fast as inflation, Inglis said “I would think that Democrats should really make an issue out of that.”

Energy Secretary Chris Wright acknowledged the risk in August, saying, “momentum is pushing prices up right now. And who’s going to get blamed for it? We’re going to get blamed because we’re in office.”

Jesse Lee, a senior advisor with the climate-politics nonprofit Climate Power, says that the impact of rising costs is so widespread that it could become an issue almost anywhere. But he’s particularly watching states that have seen large rate increases in recent years, such as Texas, Arizona and Pennsylvania. Incumbent moderate Republicans without much a buffer could also be at risk, he said, pointing to Mike Lawler of New York as one example.

Building out the supply of clean energy in the U.S. is a clear antidote to rising demand, Lee said. While Democrats have generally embraced a path lined with renewable energy, many Republicans, including President Trump, have panned that approach.

“Anybody with eyes can see that this is a glaring vulnerability for [Republicans],” Lee said. “Democrats should be embracing it.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/energy/rising-energy-bills-are-rewiring-american-politics/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

Consider your morning cup of coffee. Your kettle’s heating element — or flame on a stove — warms up water that you infuse with beans and pour into a mug. Maybe you get busy and the cup of joe sits there for a while, releasing its heat into the atmosphere of the room, until it reaches equilibrium with the indoor temperature. In other words: It got cold.

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here.

Now consider that the expansive Southern Ocean, which wraps around Antarctica, could one day do much the same thing. Since the Industrial Revolution kicked off, humans have dialed up the kettle to its max, adding extraordinary amounts of heat into the atmosphere, more than 90 percent of which has been absorbed by the sea. (It’s also taken up a quarter of our CO2 emissions.) Under climate change, the Southern Ocean has been storing warmth which, like your morning jolt, can’t stay there forever, and will someday return to the atmosphere.

New modeling suggests that this “burp” of heat — the scientists called it that, by the way — could be abrupt. In a scenario where humanity eventually reduces its greenhouse gas emissions and then goes “net negative,” finding ways to remove those planet-warming pollutants from the atmosphere, global temperatures fall. But suddenly the Southern Ocean belches its accumulated heat, leading to a rate of planetary warming similar to what humanity is causing right now. And the thermal burping would continue for at least a century.

Put another way: According to this modeling, at least, humans figure out a way to reverse climate change, only to see the Southern Ocean essentially restart it. While there would be nothing our descendants could do to stop this — since the warming would be driven by already stored heat — the calculations are yet another urgent call to reduce that pollution as quickly and dramatically as possible.

This sudden eructation is not a sure thing, however — it’s the prediction of a model. But it’s a step toward understanding how the planet could respond as humans continue to manipulate the climate, both warming and cooling it. “The question is: How will the climate system, and specifically the ocean, react to scenarios where we remove CO2 from the atmosphere, and when we have a net global cooling effect?” said Svenja Frey, an oceanography PhD student at Germany’s GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel and coauthor of the paper.

The Southern Ocean may encircle the frozen continent of Antarctica, but it’s very effective at storing heat: It alone holds around 80 percent of the warmth that’s taken up by all the oceans. Some of this comes from currents that transport relatively toasty waters south, but also lots of upwelling in the Southern Ocean brings cold water to the surface to be warmed up.

The skies above the Southern Ocean are also somewhat less reflective than elsewhere around the globe. Cargo ships and industries in the Northern Hemisphere spew air pollution in the form of aerosols, which themselves bounce solar energy back into the cosmos and help brighten clouds, which reflect still more. That cooling phenomenon has vied, in a sense, with the warming that’s come from the burning of fossil fuels. “That competition hasn’t been as prevalent over the Southern Hemisphere, because it’s this slightly more pristine atmosphere,” said Ric Williams, an ocean and climate scientist at the University of Liverpool, who studies the Southern Ocean but wasn’t involved in the paper.

In the scenario the researchers modeled, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 increases by 1 percent every year until the total amount is double what the planet had before the Industrial Revolution. Then negative emissions technologies reduce the carbon concentration by 0.1 percent annually. (The study didn’t look a specific techniques, but one option is direct air capture of CO2, though this remains expensive and limited in scale.) In response, the atmosphere, land, and oceans cool.

But something starts brewing in the Southern Ocean. Its surface becomes colder, but also saltier due to the formation of new sea ice: When sea water freezes, it rejects its salt, which is then absorbed into the surrounding waters and makes the surface layer heavier. “At the same time, we have these warm, deeper waters,” Frey said. “At some point, the water column becomes unstable, and that’s when we have the deep convection event.”

In other words, a burp. It’s just one way that our planet’s extraordinarily complex and intertwining systems might respond to rising and falling emissions in the centuries ahead. “There’s very large uncertainty in the Earth system response to net-negative emissions — we don’t understand that very well,” said Simon Fraser University climate scientist Kirsten Zickfeld, who studies these dynamics but wasn’t involved in the new paper. “We may well encounter surprises along the way, as this paper shows.”

To be clear, in this scenario, removing atmospheric carbon significantly reduces global temperatures, even factoring in the burp. And the faster we move away from fossil fuels, the less CO2 we’ll have to remove down the line. “Doing negative emissions and reducing our carbon load in the atmosphere is a good thing,” Williams said. “I would just add that, rather than do negative emissions, it’s better not to do the positive emissions in the first place.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/oceans/hey-so-one-day-the-ocean-might-burp-up-a-bunch-of-heat/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

Houses in the Altadena and Pacific Palisades neighborhoods were still ablaze when talk turned to the cost of the Los Angeles firestorms and who would pay for it. Now it appears that the total damage and economic loss could be more than $250 billion. This, after a year in which hurricanes Milton and Helene and other extreme weather events had already exacted tens of billions of dollars in American disaster losses.

We’ve endured 10 months of Trump’s mayhem so far. A question I’ve been asking various people is how long they believe it will take for America to recover from Trump — if the nation ever will recover?

It’s impossible to answer with any definitiveness. It depends on how long you believe he’ll remain in office, whether you think Democrats will prevail in the 2026 midterms, what role you believe the Supreme Court will play in constraining Trump, whether you think American voters will boot him (or his successor) out of office in 2028, and if you believe we’ll ever have free and fair elections again.

Here’s the range of responses I’ve been getting. I’d be very interested in yours.

1. We’ll recover quickly; all we need is one good president and a competent Congress. Americans are resilient. We’ve recovered from depression, war, economic calamities (such as the near meltdown of Wall Street), and political strife (think of 1968). We’re polarized at the moment, but we’ve been polarized before (think of the Civil Rights Movement, or the fight for marriage equality). The biggest underlying problems we face are economic — affordability and widening economic inequalities — which a good president and competent Congress can help rectify. I’m optimistic. We’re a practical people. Time and again, when we have to make changes, we roll up our collective sleeves and do so.

2. It will take at least a decade. Although we’re practical and resilient, Trump and his sycophants have done so much damage to the institutional and moral fabric of the nation that I don’t think we can expect to be back — even back to where we were before Trump first came to power — for at least a decade. We will recover, but that will require several terms of a good president and majorities in Congress who understand the importance of both rebuilding and reforming democratic institutions and making the economy work for all instead of a few at the top. This is doable; we’ve achieved these sorts of positive changes and reforms before. But we need to be steadfast and patient.

3. We won’t recover for at least a generation. The damage has been so profound — undermining not only our legal and political systems but also our economic system and even our culture — that I believe it will take several generations before we recover from this. We can do it: giving real hope to the non-college working class, overcoming the racial and ethnic divides that Trump has exacerbated, ensuring equal opportunity, ending the bullying and coarsening that Trump and his lapdogs have encouraged, and opening America back up to the rest of the world — all are possible, but all will require diligent and determined efforts that may not pay off until the end of the century.

4. Never. America will never recover from this. Trump has destroyed what was left of the nation’s capacity for self-government. His two terms — especially the last 10 months and what I expect to be the remainder of his term — have brought us so far from where we should be that we will never be able to get back on track. Trump himself is the consequence and culmination of decades of decay of our democratic institutions, decades of widening inequality, of inadequate responses to climate change, and of irresponsible world leadership. Much as I don’t want to be defeatist or pessimistic, the terrible reality is that there is no longer hope for America.

So, today’s Office Hours discussion question: How long will it take America to recover from Trump, if it ever will?

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.