When U.S. President Donald Trump spoke at the 2026 World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland in January, he angrily berated the United States' European allies for using green energy and claimed, without any evidence, that climate change is a "hoax." European countries get their energy from a variety of sources, including green energy (wind and solar), nuclear power and fossil fuels. But Trump was angry that they are using green energy at all.

European scientists and environmentalists were quick to push back against Trump's claims about climate change, arguing that Europe should be using more green energy — not less — and offering plenty of scientific data to back up their arguments. Trump and his allies, however, only doubled down on their claims about climate change, green energy and fossil fuels.

That type of doubling down is the focus of an article by The New Republic's Kate Aronoff, headlined "The Denialism Presidency" and published on April 16.

When confronted with facts about climate change, the war in Iran or the U.S. economy, Aronoff stresses, the second Trump Administration doubles down on "denial."

"It isn't unusual for members of the Trump Administration to deny and downplay climate change," Aronoff explains. "But climate denial — a mainstay of the GOP for most of this century — has also become something of an operating manual for the right as it reacts to other crises it would like to pretend are not happening. (Treasury Secretary Scott) Bessent, this week, likewise, dismissed the sprawling economic turmoil caused by the administration's decision to go to war with Iran, which now involves a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz."

Bessent argued that the Iran war is worth a "small bit of economic pain," but Aronoff notes that according to economists, the effects of the war will be much deeper than the treasury secretary is claiming. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), for example, is warning that an escalation of the Iran war could set off a global recession.

"At another event in Washington," Aronoff observes, "(Bessent) asserted that price spikes resulting from the war in Iran — which helped inflation rise three times faster in March than in February — were a passing fad, despite the fact that the Strait of Hormuz is not poised to return to business as usual anytime soon. Whenever it reopens, experts warn that the effects of its now-more-than-month-long closure will be felt for years."

Aronoff continues, "Whether it's climate change or a looming global recession, the script is the same: downplay, deny, and project confidence. This playbook works for Bessent and other members of the Trump Administration because they are wealthy enough to insulate themselves from the effects of both rising temperature and economic catastrophe."

When President Donald Trump talks about climate change, he often recycles one well-known, shaky argument: that doing anything about it will be a financial disaster. After pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, he said it was costing the U.S. “trillions of dollars that other countries were not paying.” He’s also said that President Joe Biden’s plan to boost electric vehicles threatened the auto industry with “economic destruction” (before Trump “saved” the industry by reversing it, of course). Trump has tried to scare other countries into following suit, telling world leaders last year, “If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.”

If you look at the Trump administration’s justification for scrapping environmental protections, it always comes back to money. Officials justify these moves with estimates that almost always avoid or downplay the stunning costs of letting climate change continue unchecked, even as extreme weather brings the risk into focus. A record-breaking spring heat wave scorched the Western U.S. at the end of March, worsening wildfire forecasts and threatening the snowpack that’s crucial for the region’s water supplies. The costs are already hitting home: An analysis from the Brookings Institution in September found that the effects of climate change, from rising insurance rates to the health threats from wildfire smoke, are costing the average American household between $219 and $571 a year, depending on how much bad weather you attribute directly to climate change. For some households, the costs exceeded $1,000 a year.

It’s clear that taking action to prevent such disasters doesn’t hurt the economy as a whole, said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School, but it does hurt some industries — namely, oil companies. For decades, the fossil fuel industry has been promoting the story that taking action on climate change is too costly. “There is this prevailing narrative out there, and I guess what I would say is that this is not by accident,” Wagner said. In the early 1990s, the American Petroleum Institute began commissioning economists to produce research that made any effort to rein in greenhouse gases appear prohibitively expensive. One industry-funded study in 1991 calculated that imposing a carbon tax of $200 a ton would shrink the U.S. economy by 1.7 percent by 2020. It ignored the cost of failing to act on climate change.

The tradition continues today through the Trump administration’s cost-benefit calculations for repealing environmental regulations. For decades, the Environmental Protection Agency accounted for the health benefits of cutting air pollution — such as avoided asthma attacks and premature deaths — when it created cost-benefit analysis for approving clean air rules. That changed in recent months, when the Trump administration’s EPA revamped the practice so that it now effectively treats the value of saving human lives at $0. It has also thrown out the “social cost of carbon,” a metric that estimates the economic damage from floods, droughts, and other effects of global warming, which the Biden administration had set at $190 a ton. Last June, an investigation by The Associated Press found that Trump’s EPA consistently emphasized the costs of pollution rules while omitting their benefits — even though for 17 of the 20 rules AP examined, the benefits outweighed the costs, sometimes by a lot.

When the agency rescinded its fuel efficiency standards for vehicles in February, along with its own ability to regulate climate change, it promised that the new fuel standards would save Americans $1.3 trillion in car payments by 2055. But a chart buried in the EPA’s regulatory impact analysis found that fuel purchases, vehicle repair, insurance, and other costs would add up to $1.5 trillion over that same time period, outpacing any savings from the repeal. Another problem became clear after the U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran caused average gas prices in the U.S. to surge above $4 a gallon: The administration’s savings estimate had assumed that gasoline prices would stay around $3 per gallon over the next 30 years.

Though you wouldn’t know it from the Trump administration’s projections, protecting the environment can provide a boost for the economy. The Clean Air Act, passed in 1970, not only succeeded in reducing pollution, it also helped economic growth and productivity. Research has shown that the United States’ gross domestic product was 1.5 percent higher in 2010 than it would have been without the legislation, because exposing kids to less air pollution made for more productive workers later.

And if buying clean technology costs you money — well, that’s a boost for the economy, too. “If the government forced you to cut your gas line and install an induction stove and a heat pump, OK, you might hate it because you are forced to pay money for it, but somebody is going to benefit,” Wagner said. “The economy benefits.” He spent $100,000 to renovate his 200-year-old, 750-square-foot loft in Manhattan, installing energy-saving appliances — including a heat pump, an induction stove, and a more efficient fridge — switching to LED light bulbs, and improving insulation, among other measures. “So we spent a lot of money,” Wagner said. “That added $100,000 to the economy.” Eventually, it should save his family money too: The changes cut their utility bill down to about $100 a month, from a high point of $450, though it could take decades for them to recoup the upfront costs.

Of course, it’s one thing for countries with a lot of resources, like the U.S., to invest in technologies to cut emissions and prepare for the impacts of climate change. It’s another thing for cash-strapped countries around the world, who are facing historically high debt levels, to do so. But a recent study looked at decades of data from 172 countries and found that there’s “no inherent trade-off” between adapting to climate change and keeping government finances stable. “There are ways to invest in better preparation for climate change that not only do not endanger fiscal stability, but over the long term can actually contribute towards it,” said Jorge M. Uribe, an author of the study and a professor of economics and business at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Spain. The study, published in the European Journal of Political Economy, found that measures to improve people’s shelter, protection, and comfort can improve public finances.

Uribe hopes that his research can counter the entrenched idea that there’s no common ground between protecting people from climate change and protecting the economy. The frame is so persistent, it often goes unnoticed. For decades, Pew Research has been asking people to pick which of these two statements they agree with: “Stricter environmental laws and regulations cost too many jobs and hurt the economy,” or “Stricter environmental laws and regulations are worth the cost.”

Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, says he’s always hated that question. “It’s a forced trade-off, when we know that environmental protection often has positive economic benefits, yet the framing of that question forces people to choose one or the other,” Leiserowitz said. The Yale program’s surveys have found that most U.S. voters say that protecting the environment is actually good for the economy, with 59 percent agreeing it improves economic growth and provides new jobs. Only a small minority, 18 percent, say that it hurts growth and jobs.

“Look, there are some hard choices that we need to make, right? There are,” Wagner said. “At the same time, I think it’s pretty darn clear that when most people say that there are trade-offs — when most people say it’s the climate versus the economy — they’re wrong.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/economics/trump-administration-climate-economy-government-budget/.

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

Across the country, Republican-led state legislatures are passing a slate of laws that effectively shield oil and gas companies from legal claims that they are responsible for the destruction and mounting toll caused by climate change. Fifteen laws have either been passed or are currently being debated in 11 states. Together, they threaten to remove long-standing tools for the public to hold corporations accountable.

A ProPublica investigation has found that most of these bills are part of a coordinated effort, orchestrated by a constellation of groups that share staff or have funding ties to the prominent conservative activist Leonard Leo, who is credited with placing conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. These groups have drafted state legislation, planned its dissemination and engaged a well-connected lobbying firm to get them signed into law.

The effort is unfolding as courts are weighing more than 30 significant lawsuits by states, counties and municipalities accusing fossil fuel companies of misrepresenting the risks their products posed to consumers and seeking to recoup the costs of disasters and other climate impacts like wildfire losses or coastal flooding that their products helped cause. A goal of the legislation is to block these cases from going forward and prevent new ones from being filed.

The strategy to establish state laws that will make it all but impossible to sue oil and gas companies was laid out in detail by a group of lobbyists and political operatives in December, during a panel presentation at the annual States and Nation Policy Summit of the American Legislative Exchange Council — the influential organization that brings together state lawmakers, corporate leaders and conservative activists to draft and promote legislation.

During the session, one of the panelists, Will Hild, the executive director of a nonprofit called Consumers’ Research, described the climate cases as a liberal effort to use the judicial system to exact a new tax on energy companies in the form of civil judgments. Another panelist, Oramel H. Skinner, the former solicitor general for Arizona and the executive director of the nonprofit Alliance for Consumers, warned that those judgments will trickle down to make citizens’ lives less affordable and ultimately make many of their choices — whether to own pickup trucks or purchase a side of beef — illegal.

ProPublica reviewed an audio recording of the event obtained by the nonpartisan watchdog group Documented.

Hild and Skinner had come to the session with a ready-made fix: a set of pre-written bills and plenty of funding.

Consumers’ Research and the Alliance for Consumers are both funded by organizations connected to Leo. ProPublica examined lobbying records across 25 states, federal tax disclosures for more than a dozen organizations and notes from other closed-door strategy sessions among ALEC members and found that several Leo-supported groups are part of a national strategy to give legal immunity to companies for their climate emissions.

Since 2021, Leo has been deploying a $1.6 billion gift through a series of nonprofits and other organizations that obscure the source and the recipients of donations — so-called dark money groups. Much of that money has been routed through a nonprofit judicial advocacy group Leo founded — now called The 85 Fund — which both receives and disseminates Leo’s funding. Many of these nonprofits are increasingly focused on issues related to climate change.

The panel session’s moderator, Michael Thompson, is a senior vice president at CRC Advisors, Leo’s for-profit Virginia-based political and corporate consulting firm. He also sits on ALEC’s Private Enterprise Advisory Council. Hild’s organization, Consumers’ Research, received more than 65% of its funding in 2024 through a dark money group called Donors Trust. The 85 Fund contributed more than $67 million to Donors Trust in 2024. Consumers’ Research also works closely with — and contracted more than $670,000 of work in 2024 to — CRC Advisors. Another panelist, Paul N. Watkins, was a legal fellow at Consumers’ Research. According to tax filings, his law firm received more than $2.2 million in 2024 from the group. As recently as 2024, Skinner was also counsel for Leo’s 85 Fund, according to the nonprofit’s tax filings.

“For decades, the left has leveraged immense resources to capture the institutions that shape our society — the legal system, universities, medical and scientific bodies, the entertainment industry, and our biggest corporations,” Leo wrote to ProPublica in a text message. “That takeover resulted in a radically woke culture that does not reflect the will of the American people, or the pillars of limited constitutional government that made our country great. That is why our enterprise supports organizations that are committed to crushing liberal dominance and restoring balance in the institutions that shape society.”

At the ALEC session, Skinner presented a model bill that would effectively bar cities and towns from bringing public nuisance lawsuits against corporations and others when the issue is a broad public harm like climate change. In several cases, plaintiffs have argued that the impacts of climate change — the buckling of a road from extreme swings in temperature, for example — are a “nuisance” caused by fossil fuel companies.

Nuisance claims are common in the American legal system, giving individuals, companies or communities a way to sue when someone else’s actions damage their property, degrade the health or safety of the environment around them or interfere with their rights. Under these laws, parties can ask for financial compensation or seek court orders to remedy problems, such as pollution. Skinner, however, argues that nuisance laws should only be used to address local, easily fixable problems, like excessive noise from a bar. His bill would curtail the use of public nuisance suits in climate cases by limiting liability for manufacturers and other businesses and giving state attorneys general the sole authority to bring them.

“Think really hard about every lever you have in your states to shut off the ability for this woke lawfare machine to churn,” Skinner told the audience. “The left’s goal is to reshape society around you using the courtroom.”

The second draft law, called the Energy Freedom Act, was produced by the policy nonprofit associated with Hild’s organization. It would, among many provisions, shield businesses from liability related to emissions of greenhouse gases if those releases did not violate the federal Clean Air Act.

Critics of the bills say they subvert the rights of local communities. They send the message that “you can pollute with impunity,” said Carly Phillips, a senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s really a thumb in the eye of places that are affected by climate change.”

The push to block climate suits across the states comes as several of the cases against the oil industry approach, or have already entered, the perilous legal phases of discovery, when plaintiffs will have the opportunity to seek confidential industry documents and depose oil executives. The stakes for oil companies are enormous. By some estimates more than $10 trillion in damages can be attributed to U.S. emissions.

There’s a reason why state and local governments have increasingly brought these suits. The frequency and cost of climate-influenced disasters, including severe storms, drought and flooding, continues to mount — between $350 billion and $450 billion in each of the last three years — stretching government budgets. Significantly, the science that makes it possible to attribute how much any one disaster was influenced by climate change has steadily advanced. To cite one example, the March heat waves across the U.S. would have been virtually impossible without the emissions that have caused climate change, according to the European science group World Weather Attribution, and were about four times as likely to happen as they were a decade ago.

Boulder, Colorado, is among the places facing increasing droughts, more extreme precipitation and larger wildfires — all of which are significantly propelled by climate change linked to the emissions from the use of fossil fuels. The state has estimated the costs of these perils will run into the many hundreds of millions of dollars. In 2018, Boulder County sued Exxon Mobil and the Canadian oil company Suncor Energy, accusing the companies of “intentional, reckless and negligent conduct.”

Among its claims, the county alleged the oil companies engaged in a conspiracy to mislead the public and violated consumer protection rules by mischaracterizing the dangers of their products. They accused the oil companies of creating a public nuisance by altering the environment and leaving the county to pay to abate growing hazards such as the flooding that tests roads and bridges. Exxon Mobil and Suncor Energy have never filed a response in Colorado but asked for the case to be dismissed.

Ever since, the lawsuit has been mired in a dispute over whether Colorado courts were the correct venue, with the state Supreme Court ultimately ruling last May that they were. Suncor filed to the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider, and this fall it will weigh the company’s petition asking whether federal environmental law preempts the state law.

The high-profile national court case is just one facet in an increasingly tense fight over liability for the fossil fuel industry. In January, the American Petroleum Institute, the largest fossil fuel industry group in the United States, said fighting the climate liability lawsuits was one of its top priorities in 2026. Lobbying records for the group from last year show that it advocated for legislation to protect oil producers from climate lawsuits at the state level. The Trump administration; other industry groups, including the Chamber of Commerce; and several of the nonprofit advocacy groups associated with Leo have argued that state courts are the wrong venue for claims that ultimately concern emissions that drift widely across borders, and they wish to see other cases moved or dismissed. They say that because the federal government already has the authority to regulate those emissions, the federal courts, not the states, should hear the claims.

In an interview, Hild told ProPublica that he sees the suits as an illegitimate effort to enact policy through the courts and to “regulate the entire U.S. economy from a single state.”

In an email, Skinner wrote: “Our effort is not one focused on climate change. But it is true that left-wing activists and their dark money donors have put vast sums of money and years of groundwork into pushing a coast-to-coast campaign of climate-focused public nuisance lawsuits.”

Neither Watkins nor Thompson responded to requests for comment.

When Skinner and Hild finished their presentation at ALEC they made a QR code available to download the language of the model bills and directed the audience to a woman named Catherine Gunsalus, who was in the back of the room. She would be able to answer any questions, they said.

Gunsalus until recently worked for the Heritage Action Fund, the political and lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation, the Trump-aligned think tank that is most recently known for promoting the Project 2025 agenda. Records show that Gunsalus has also lobbied in collaboration with another Leo-affiliated group, Americans for Public Trust.

In April 2025, she formed a lobbying firm called Varidon Strategies and began registering in states almost immediately afterward, according to records. By mid-summer, Varidon was representing Alliance for Consumers Action Fund; Consumers’ Research; The Honest Election Project, an affiliate of The 85 Fund; as well as other Leo entities in 25 states. In the majority of those filings, Varidon used an email address at the domain of Holtzman Vogel, a Virginia-based law firm that is often retained by Leo’s organizations.

Gunsalus did not reply to a detailed list of questions.

In the four months since the ALEC summit, there has been substantial activity in the states where Varidon has registered. On Jan. 5, representatives in Missouri introduced the loosely related Eliminate Criminal Profiteering Act, which could stop revenues flowing to law firms from settlements in the sort of nuisance suits often used in climate cases. Two days later, legislators took up the Public Nuisance Reform Act, which proposes narrowing the definition of what could be considered a nuisance.

That same month, similar bills were introduced in Indiana, Oklahoma and Tennessee. In February, eight more followed in Oklahoma, Iowa, South Carolina, Utah, Louisiana and Kansas. Skinner, who is registered to lobby in Kansas, was invited to testify in a hearing about that state’s bill and launched a new “End the Lawfare” website targeting the “left-wing” agenda. As of April 2, versions of the model legislation offered at the ALEC meeting have been introduced across 11 states altogether. In Utah, the governor has signed two related bills into law, and in Tennessee and Indiana, bills are awaiting their governors’ signature.

The more states there are with some sort of waiver in place, the narrower the pathway for cities and states to seek redress as environmental conditions worsen, and the costs continue to rise. Hild and Skinner and the Leo network’s bills also serve another purpose: teeing up a conflict that pits states against one another, a conflict that only the Supreme Court or Congress can finally resolve.

As Hild put it at the ALEC gathering, “This is economic civil war.”

In contrast to states that are reliably Democratic or reliably GOP, Pennsylvania continues to act like the consummate swing state. Pennsylvania presently has a moderate Democratic governor (Josh Shapiro), a conservative Republican U.S. senator (Dave McCormick) and a Democratic U.S. senator who sometimes bucks his party on key votes (John Fetterman) — and Donald Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016 and lost it in 2020 only to win it a second time in 2024.

Republicans who win statewide in Pennsylvania typically need a strong turnout in the rural parts of the state. But according to National Public Radio (NPR)'s Rebecca Hersher, rural Pennsylvania towns are being imperiled by the Trump Administration's failure to adequately fund disaster preparedness and the Federal Emergency Management Agence (FEMA).

"The current round of funding includes extra assistance for 'small impoverished communities,' promising that the federal government will pay a larger share of the total project costs if those communities win grants," Hersher explains in an article published on March 30. "But in the last year, agency leaders have reversed most initiatives put in place under the Biden Administration, including changes that were meant to ensure that such communities could compete with large, densely populated cities and states, which often have teams of full-time grant-writers and emergency managers. Rural communities and smaller towns, by comparison, often struggle to apply for large federal grants."

One Pennsylvania town that is increasingly vulnerable to flooding from the Lackawanna River, according to Hersher, is Duryea.

"Since the 1970s," Hersher reports, "a tall earthen levee has protected Duryea from floodwaters. But the river gets higher than it used to. Changes in the river due to development, combined with the effects of climate change, which makes heavy rain more common, mean that Duryea faces more water now than in the past."

Laura Holbrook, director of flood protection for Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, told WHYY that Duryea's levee needs to be raised by about three feet in order to adequately protect the town against severe flooding.

"However, getting the Duryea levee fixed has been impossible so far," Hersher notes. "Local authorities sank hundreds of thousands of dollars into designs for the levee upgrades, in the hopes of quickly applying for $11 million in federal funds to complete the repairs. But there's been no way to access federal grants for such projects over the last year because the Trump Administration has withheld billions of dollars for disaster preparedness and prevention that local governments, especially those in rural areas, rely on…. And the current administration's hostility to projects related to climate change also raises questions about what types of infrastructure will get the green light for federal funding in the future."

Hersher adds, "For example, sea walls and wildfire-related home protection efforts address the effects of sea level rise and more extreme wildfires, which are directly linked to climate change."

Within Christianity, talk of Armageddon is especially prominent among far-right evangelical fundamentalists — many of whom are obsessed with the New Testament's Book of Revelation. Mainline Protestants and Catholics also read the Book of Revelation, but not in the obsessive way that evangelical fundamentalists and white Christian nationalists do. And they don't have the evangelical fixation on Armadgeddon and the End Times.

But in an op-ed published by The Hill on March 25, researcher John Mac Ghlionn observes that fear of Doomsday is growing among Americans who aren't necessarily End Times evangelicals.

This fear, he notes, is highlighted in a new report by the American Psychological Association (APA).

"America used to reserve Doomsday talk for the guys who stored beans in their backyard and argued about the Book of Revelation on AM radio," Ghlionn explains. "Now, according to a recent paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, one-third of the country quietly suspects that the end will arrive before they get the chance to draw down their 401(k) plans. Historically, apocalyptic thinking had a specific address…. The end of the world was a conviction reserved for a certain kind of Christian, who awaited it with a feeling somewhere between dread and satisfaction."

Ghlionn adds, "These were the kind of people for whom catastrophe would finally settle an argument they had been having for decades. Everyone else just changed the channel and went back to refinancing their mortgages."

But now, according to the researcher, that "separation is gone."

"When the U.S. and Israel chose to attack Iran and kill that country's supreme leader, the phrase 'World War III' began trending on the phones of mechanics in Des Moines and software engineers in Austin," Ghlionn writes. "The researchers found that more than 100 million Americans expect the world to end in their lifetime. This not some vague anxiety, but a concrete belief that colors how these people think about climate change, nuclear war, economic collapse, and artificial intelligence. That is your neighbor, your barista, your Uber driver, and the manager at work who just updated the remote‑work policy."

In 2026, according to Ghlionn, the "Doomsday crowd" includes not only fundamentalist evangelicals, but also, ranges from "climate activists convinced we have blown past every tipping point" to "AI researchers gaming out scenarios where the machine stops taking instructions."

"Americans have always flirted with the end of the world," Ghlionn notes. "But now, for the first time, the preppers, the prophets, the climate modelers, the AI-worriers and the geopolitical realists can all point to different dashboards flashing red at the same time."

During his speech at the 2026 World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland in January, U.S. President Donald Trump berated European countries for using green energy — claiming, without evidence, that wind turbines are a health hazard and climate change is a "hoax." European countries use a combination of fossil fuels, green energy and nuclear power, but Trump's message was that they shouldn't be using green energy at all.

Liberal economist Paul Krugman examines Trump's vehement opposition to green energy in a column published on his Substack page on April 14. And he argues that Trump is dropping the ball from both an environmental standpoint and an economic standpoint.

"Donald Trump wants to stop the renewable energy revolution," Krugman observes. "But he can't — it will continue to advance around the world because the economics and the science are compelling. Trump can, however, ensure that the revolution passes us by. And the big geopolitical winner from Trump's hostility to the energy revolution will be China, which dominates the production of renewable-energy infrastructure."

The former New York Times columnist continues, "Furthermore, the China-led energy future will arrive ahead of schedule thanks to the debacle in Iran. Soaring oil and gas prices, combined with the threat of shortages, have driven home the riskiness of relying on fossil fuels."

Citing recent New York Times reporting on the effect that Trump's war with Iran is having on energy prices in Europe, Krugman noted that the more reliant European countries are on fossil fuels, the more they are hurting when their bills arrive.

"France and Spain, which mostly generate electricity from non-fossil sources —

including nuclear power in France — have been partially insulated from the war's side effects," Krugman explains. "Italy, heavily reliant on gas, has suffered badly. Also, Trump's decision to counter Iran's blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by blockading the Strait of Hormuz surely adds to the perception that relying on U.S. oil and LNG (liquefied natural gas), which is what countries will have to do if they don't turn to solar and wind, isn't safe. Who can guarantee that an erratic America won’t try to weaponize other countries' dependence on our energy?"

Krugman adds, "So Trump's adventurism in Iran has sparked a global rush to invest in solar power, wind power, and the batteries that make renewable energy work 24/7. And where will the world procure most of the renewable energy equipment it seeks? From China…. It's sad to watch this country sabotage itself and cede the most important industry of the future to China. In doing so, we make ourselves poorer, technologically backward, and less influential in a world that is speeding towards the energy revolution. In the end, we aren't just burning fossil fuels; we’re also burning our future."

I grew up with a vision of a possible instant apocalypse, inspired (if, under the circumstances, such a word can even be used) by the nuclear obliteration of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II. It could happen at any moment, even if you were “ducking and covering” under your school desk, as I did in those years. And I was hardly alone. That was a genuine generational nightmare of the 1950s and early 1960s — the possibility of a nuclear war between my country and the Soviet Union that might devastate my city, New York (or your city, FILL IN THE BLANK), and our world. But in those years what I never could have imagined was that, even without an atomic blast, I might already be living through the extremely slow-motion equivalent of just such an apocalypse, which should, of course, be the definition of climate change.

And with that in mind, let me start this piece with a distinctly slow-motion apocalyptic moment some seven decades later, one I’m living through not as a young kid under that desk at school but as an old man under the presidency of Donald J. Trump. Recently, in a White House ceremony, the president was crowned the “undisputed champion of beautiful clean coal” by the Washington Coal Club, an event attended by Environmental Protection Agency (or do I mean Environmental Destruction Agency?) administrator Lee Zeldin, as well as Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, both, as the Guardian reported, “staunch coal advocates.” The ceremony was in honor of the “signing of an executive order directing the defense department to secure long-term power purchase agreements with coal plants for military installations and other ‘mission-critical facilities.’”

And honestly, you don’t need to know much more to grasp that this world — as the Guardian also reported recently — is heading for a potential “point of no return” on the way to becoming an all too literal (if still reasonably slow-motion) hell on Earth, a genuine “hothouse planet.” Imagine that! And imagine that, in the future, the Trump administration is working so energetically to make far hotter, far faster, there will be no desks to duck under. And imagine as well that the man “we” chose to elect to a second term in office in November 2024 is now working all too feverishly to ensure that he’ll be remembered as the president of no return and that, before he’s done, it won’t just be the East Wing of the White House that he will have turned into rubble.

In that context, let me tell you just whom I feel bad for: the reporters on the beat in Washington, D.C., covering… yes, that genuine nightmare, President Donald J. Trump, the second time around. I often dream about trying to tell my parents (who died in 1977 and 1983) about this world of ours and You Know Who. But there would honestly be no way to do so. If they were to appear now, I’d be at a complete loss and, in any case, they would never believe me. Whatever I told them would, from the perspective of their ancient American world, seem like the most ludicrous form of fiction imaginable, not even a good (or bad) joke. A president like Donald J. Trump? Dream on. (Or more pointedly, of course, nightmare on.)

And yet here we indeed are. No question about it. And imagine this: the American people, or at least 49.7% of us, elected for a second time a man whose most essential goal remains the literal fossil-fuelization of planet Earth. Though all too few of us say so, Donald J. Trump as president of the United States should distinctly be considered the nightmare of our age, or possibly of any age. Once upon a time, you couldn’t have made such a thing up and yet, unbelievably enough, he wasn’t just elected president once (after all, anyone can make a mistake, even a truly grim one) but — yes! — twice! How could that have been possible, especially for a candidate so intent on taking our world down with him? Indeed, in November 2024, the American public reelected a former president who seemed to be itching to turn the United States into his personal property, while working all too literally to incinerate this planet. Just try to imagine that!

Can Donald Trump Flip American Democracy on Its Behind?

And that should indeed be considered a nightmare and a half. In this piece, then, let me offer both my pity and compassion to the reporters who have to cover Donald J. Trump for at least the next three years. Yes, hard as it might be to believe, barring a health disaster, always possible for someone who is going to turn 80 in July, we indeed do have (almost) three more years of him — and I should undoubtedly add “at least” to that. After all, he’s already clearly thinking about how to flip the more than two-century-old American political system on its head (or do I mean its butt?) and turn it into something else entirely — transform it, in fact, into his personal property. (Exactly what he and his associates have recently been trying to do with this country’s elections, which the president would now like to “nationalize.”) And to hell with the Constitution or anything or anyone else who might try to stop him! (As he wrote at one point on Truth Social, “RECORD NUMBERS ALL OVER THE PLACE! SHOULD I TRY FOR A FOURTH TERM?”) And don’t forget that the Trump Organization is already selling “Trump 2028” hats for a mere $55.

So, make that possibly five, six, seven, or more flaming years of him working to shut down (or at least endlessly stall) wind and solar projects in this country while continuing to fossil-fuelize the United States (and, naturally, the planet) in a striking fashion.

Of course, I’m perfectly aware that all of that might indeed not happen. Despite this ever eerier present we’re now living through, it might only be my grim fantasy of our future. Even Donald J. Trump might not be able to literally flip the American system on its ass. But given what we’ve gone through so far, don’t count on it not happening either.

And, of course, we’re not just talking about the man who wants to flip the system on its butt, we’re talking about the guy who seems all too intent on doing the same thing to planet Earth. Someday, Donald Trump may be known as the end-times president, since he and his Republican confederates (and I use that word advisedly) seem remarkably intent on ensuring that this planet will indeed become a hellhole for our children and grandchildren. At some level, it should be considered beyond remarkable that even 49.7% of Americans voted for a presidential candidate intent, perhaps above all else, on burning this planet to the ground.

Giving Imperial Decline a New Name

I mean, just imagine that, in Donald Trump’s world (as well as Vladimir Putin’s and Benjamin Netanyahu’s, since there’s nothing like a good war to drive staggering amounts of planet-heating fossil-fuel gasses into the atmosphere), this planet is his birthday cake and he’s intent on lighting the candles (most recently, of course, with his war in Iran).

After all, 2023, 2024, and 2025 were, as a threesome, already record-setting when it came to the (over)heating of our world. They were the three warmest years on record, and undoubtedly 2026 won’t be an anomaly when it comes to heating the Earth to the boiling point. In short, to make a particularly depressing point, whether you’re talking about fires, floods, droughts, or heat waves, what once would have been considered extreme weather is becoming ever less so, year by grim year. In the United States in 2025, there were 23 — yes, 23! — extreme climate-related disasters, each of which cost us more than a billion dollars. In short, the extremity of climate change is slowly becoming the norm.

In other words, we’re already on a different planet — and one only becoming ever more so thanks to those wars and world leaders like Donald Trump who remain so committed to the use of fossil fuels. And sadly, by the time they’re done, the resulting slow-motion apocalypse will be one where children won’t even be able to imagine ducking under their desks for protection.

In short, President Donald J. Trump is bringing us ever closer to “a point of no return” when it comes to climate-tipping points. Even in his own terms, by emphasizing fossil fuels the way he does, and trying to put the — yes, torch! — to anything associated with green energy, including electric vehicles, he’s turning whatever future we still have on this planet over to the Chinese in a fashion that should give imperial decline a new meaning. After all, despite the fact that China is still using staggering amounts of fossil fuels, the leaders of that country are also putting no less staggering financial resources and effort into creating green-power systems of every sort, which they’re already selling around the world. Meanwhile, they’re producing and exporting Electric Vehicles, or EVs, in a dramatic fashion. In fact, for the first time last year, the Chinese deployed more clean power in their country than fossil-fuel generating capacity.

On this planet right now, if you want a sign of imperial rise and decline, just check out the opposite ways China and the U.S. are dealing with clean energy. In the end, Donald Trump and crew would rather blow up boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Eastern Pacific Ocean, militarily seize the president of Venezuela, plan for taking control (in whatever fashion) of Greenland, and… well, do I really need to keep going? But climate change? No change there, just more of the same.

In short, President Trump remains remarkably intent on fossil-fuelizing our climate (and us) to death. Just the other week, in fact, he announced that, as the New York Times reported, he was “erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet… a key step in removing limits on carbon dioxide, methane, and four other greenhouse gases that scientists say are supercharging heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and other extreme weather.” And count on this: for the next three years, that’s only the beginning when it comes to the president who has all too bluntly called the very idea that climate change might be a threat to public health “a scam.”

And count on something else as well: blowing up boats will prove to be nothing compared to setting fire to this planet.

Once upon a time in the previous century in this country, “red” was short for communist. In 2026, however, red should be short for fire, for the burning of this planet. Though Donald Trump is certainly no commie, he stands every chance of turning himself into the reddest president ever (and I’m not just thinking of those blazing red ties and hats he wears). Someday, his name will undoubtedly be synonymous with wildfire, drought, and unbearable heat, while “Trumping the planet” will mean heating it to the weather version of the boiling point.

In some fashion, give him credit. Donald Trump is all too literally intent on making himself into the president from hell, the president of no return, while ensuring that the rest of us will be living on one hell of a planet.

A longtime conservation advocate warned on Saturday that President Donald Trump’s recent park policies will likely take a toll on an innocent party — Yosemite Park wildlife bears.

Recalling a 2021 incident in which a mother bear stayed by her dead cub for hours after it was hit by a car, conservation advocate Beth Pratt wrote for the San Francisco Gate that Trump’s new Yosemite Park superintendent, Ray McPadden, has imposed a new policy which makes it likely future incidents like that will occur much more often.

McPadden recently claimed that there is “zero evidence” crowds adversely impact Yosemite’s ecosystem or landscape in “any consequential way” to explain removing the park’s reservation system.

“As someone who has spent the past 30 years documenting and studying Yosemite’s remarkable wildlife, I was astounded by the claim of ‘zero evidence,’” Pratt wrote. “I have witnessed it firsthand. And decades of park research and rigorous planning efforts demonstrate that there is substantial evidence that overcrowding in Yosemite has a profound impact on the park — and the bears and other wildlife that call it home.”

Pratt continued, “Sadly, dozens of bears are hit, and sometimes killed, on park roads each year. Vehicle strikes are now one of the leading causes of death for bears in Yosemite. The park has posted warning signs at hot spot collision areas, attempting to compel visitors to slow down for the wildlife, typically to no avail. And as visitation increases, the chance of a bear being hit by a vehicle also typically increases, according to my analysis of visitation trends and bear collisions. Keep adding more cars, and you’ll likely be causing the death of more bears.”

McPadden is not alone in claiming there will be no harm to wildlife in increasing tourism to Yosemite. Pratt also quoted Congressman Tom McClintock, who wrote on Facebook that the closure “is good news … for the gateway communities that depend on Yosemite commerce for their livelihoods.” Pratt begged to differ.

“Despite these misguided celebrations over the reversing of our reservation system in pursuit of greater business profits, in Yosemite, overcrowding can mean a wild bear who once frolicked in a meadow is mangled and killed by a car,” Pratt wrote. “Shouldn’t reducing overcrowding and saving the lives of the park’s bears be what we celebrate in our national parks?”

Trump’s opposition to strict conservation policies at Yosemite is consistent with his larger anti-environmentalist philosophy. Writing for The Guardian earlier this week, Damian Carrington reported that Earth is passing a “point of no return” toward becoming a “hothouse planet” due to climate change. Trump, like most of the Republican Party, denies the scientific reality of climate change and supports enriching the fossil fuel industry.

Additionally, Trump has used his power over the Interior Department to take down hundreds of signs, merchandise and presentations by the National Park Service that run counter to the administration’s ideological agenda. This includes content about climate change, slavery and Native American issues were among the subjects to come under scrutiny. For this reason, the Interior Department is currently being sued by the National Parks Conservation Association.

President Donald Trump’s billionaire ally and military technology supplier, Palantir CEO Peter Thiel, says he is an expert on the Antichrist — but actual experts disagree.

“Thiel’s evangelism is another example of how the right has strategically co-opted Christian religious teachings to provide support for their autocratic tendencies, as well as their fears about technology being limited through ‘woke’ beliefs,” Anthea Butler, chair of the University of Pennsylvania Department of Religious Studies, wrote in a Tuesday editorial for MSNOW.

Earlier in the piece, Butler broke down the components of Thiel’s religious philosophy, identifying them as a “mishmash of his political and personal beliefs about technology, civilization, race and democracy. And his views on the antichrist range from the disturbing to the nonsensical.”

Thiel, a businessman in the military-industrial complex, “believes the antichrist will push the world toward peace using the fear of war” and “use peace to slow down or even stop technological advances,” including the AI technology in which Thiel has invested billions.

“He’s said it’s possible that climate change activist Greta Thunberg and other critics could be ‘legionnaires of the Antichrist,’” a notable position given AI’s disproportionate impact on climate change.

“It’s a belief structure built on fear — and Thiel’s fear appears to be that western civilization will be crushed by a myriad of people and forces that don’t adhere to his interpretation of technocratic Christian beliefs,” Butler explained. Other top Catholic scholars agree with her, including Italian theologian Father Paolo Benanti, who denounced Thiel’s beliefs as “a sustained act of heresy,” and the Jesuit priest Antonio Spadaro, who said Thiel misunderstands what the Antichrist actually is.

“The Antichrist, rather than a theological figure, is a concrete, identifiable historical possibility,” Spadaro said. “This is the point at which the Gospel is transformed into an instrument of geopolitical analysis.”

Butler also pointed out that Thiel’s potential belief that humanity should cease to exist are equally troubling and “should give us all pause.”

“The next time Thiel embarks on his lecture tour to tout his teachings about the Antichrist, remember that his lectures are the musings of a man who wants technology to overtake the emotional connections that humans have,” Butler wrote. “The New York Times’ Ross Douthat asked Thiel in a June 2025 interview, ‘I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?’ After a long hesitation, Thiel replied, ‘There’s so many questions implicit in this,’ before eventually offering a ‘Yes.’”

In addition to supplying the Pentagon, Thiel was also connected to Israel through the convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who helped Palantir expand into the Middle East.

Ultimately Epstein’s theology seems to be motivated less by a consistent core belief system than a hodgepodge of ideas united mainly by their convenience to Thiel’s various business and political interests.

"Peter Thiel's Armageddon speaking tour has — like the world — not ended yet," Wired reporter Laura Bullard explained in September. "For a full two years now, the billionaire has been on the circuit, spreading his biblically inflected ideas about doomsday through a set of variably and sometimes visibly perplexed interviewers…. Depending on who you are, you may find it hilarious, fascinating, insufferable, or horrifying that one of the world's most powerful men is obsessing over a figure from sermons and horror movies. But the ideas and influences behind these talks are key to understanding how Thiel sees his own massive role in the world — in politics, technology, and the fate of the species."

As gas prices skyrocket due to the energy crisis caused by President Donald Trump’s war on Iran, the White House has agreed to pay almost $1 billion to halt the construction of wind farms off the East Coast.

In a deal the New York Times called “unusual,” the Trump administration has compelled the French energy conglomerate TotalEnergies to forfeit its lease for wind farms that were to be built off the coasts of New York and North Carolina by promising to reimburse the company the $928 million it paid during the previous administration.

As the Times notes, the deal comes at a moment when the United States is grappling with its most substantial energy crisis in half a century,

“The deal is an extraordinary transfer of taxpayer dollars to a foreign company for the purposes of boosting the production of fossil fuels, a main driver of climate change, while throttling offshore wind power,” says the Times. “It comes as the war in the Middle East has shocked global oil markets, prompting concerns about energy supplies.”

The project’s cancellation puts a fine point Trump’s stated ire toward wind farms, which he has espoused frequently over the past decade.

“I’m proudly telling you that we’re going to try and have no windmills built in the United States during my” administration, Trump said last week.

Since retaking office, Trump has spearheaded numerous attempts to roll back efforts to develop wind energy, including ending subsidies and attempting to block new construction. While TotalEnergies decided to accept the billion-dollar deal, other projects have successfully sued the administration to have their permits reinstated.

As the Times points out, “Some experts have argued that investments in renewable energy, including wind and solar power, can help countries protect against the volatility of oil prices, particularly during wartime.”

Trump has long borne a public hatred for wind energy, making wide-ranging, baseless claims that they cause cancer, are loud eyesores, kill “all the birds,” and are “driving whales crazy.” He has spoken against wind turbines since at least 2012, when he attempted to prevent the construction of a wind project off the coast of his Scottish golf course by claiming they would hurt the country’s tourism. When asked what evidence he had to support such a claim, his response was characteristic.

“I am the evidence,” he told the Scottish Parliament.