A top researcher into the politics of climate change is calling out President Trump and his MAGA base for abandoning the Republican Party’s past commitment to hunting, fishing and camping. In the process, he claims, he is endangering the natural environment itself.

“Since the rise of the MAGA movement, many Republican elites no longer seem interested in riding horses in the Rockies or fly fishing in the Adirondacks,” writes Dr. Stephen Lezak in The New York Times. Lezak is a researcher into the intersection between climate change and politics at the University of Oxford and the University of California, Berkeley.

“Jackson Hole is out. Palm Beach is in,” Lezak writes.

The scholar explains that, prior to President Trump's administration, Democratic and Republican environmentalists agreed on the need to conserve outdoor spaces for recreational purposes like hunting, fishing and camping, forging common ground on an issue where they otherwise disagree (such as on issues like man-made climate change). Lezak specifically cites President Theodore Roosevelt as an example, since Roosevelt was a Republican and is widely regarded as the first president to be an aggressive environmentalist.

“Leaders of several nonpartisan and right-of-center nature conservation groups — the de facto representatives of the nation’s hunters and recreationists — told me they have spent decades building rapport with federal officials who admired the conservation groups in the same way Roosevelt admired Muir,” Lezak writes. “In the past year, those partnerships have mostly eroded.”

Lezak added that many of these same officials are disappointed that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who as North Dakota governor had sympathized with conservationist goals, instead has proved to be a "yes man."

"The few conservative elites who are still fighting to protect cherished trout creeks and bird habitats are outnumbered and outgunned," Lezak concludes. "If this momentum continues and resistance fails for three more years, some of our nation’s unique and sensitive landscapes, from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to Bears Ears National Monument, will be even more endangered than they are today."

Since assuming office in his second term, Trump’s anti-environmental policies cost America $35 billion in clean energy projects over a one-year period and ordered an unneeded Michigan coal-fired plant to stay open despite it costing taxpayers more than $100 million.

Speaking with this reporter for Salon last year, former EPA head Christine Todd Whitman — who served under a Republican president, George W. Bush — discussed how Trump’s environmental policies are deterring career public servants with whom she worked from doing their jobs.

“Should they trust they will actually be paid or risk getting fired?” Whitman said when explaining their plight. “People who have given their careers to serve the American people are now between a rock and a hard place because an unelected, unappointed, unconfirmed rich man [Tesla CEO Elon Musk] with no security clearance is dismantling the federal government.”

As the head of the fifth-largest economy in the world, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calf.) had a conversation with the leaders of the U.K. over climate measures they could coordinate on. Now, President Donald Trump is furious.

Last week, Trump revoked a landmark ruling that greenhouse gases endanger public health. While science might verify one thing, the Trump government will rule on belief.

Trump spent the weekend at Mar-a-Lago, where Politico asked him about the meeting between the U.K. and Newsom.

“The U.K.’s got enough trouble without getting involved with Gavin Newscum,” Trump told Politico, using his nickname for Newsom. “Gavin is a loser. Everything he’s touched turns to garbage. His state has gone to hell, and his environmental work is a disaster.”

Trump added that it was “inappropriate” for Newsom to strike such agreements and “inappropriate for them to be dealing with him.”

Moments after, Newsom signed a memorandum of understanding in London with those same U.K. leaders, saying that California would cooperate on clean energy technologies, which is a huge business in Europe and the U.K., in particular. Trump hates windmills. That could have come from his fight with officials in Scotland, where an offshore wind farm was being built near his Trump Turnberry golf club.

Energy Secretary Ed Miliband intends to coordinate with California and British energy firms to boost collaboration on clean energy research.

Trump has been in an ongoing conflict with many European leaders, so seeing Newsom travel the region getting a warm welcome appears to be triggering the president. Newsom has promised leaders that all of Trump's policies are "temporary." While Newsom hasn't announced whether he intends to run for president, there is considerable speculation about his candidacy in 2028.

The U.S. has withdrawn from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, but California remains committed to the goal of net-zero emissions.

“People are leaving,” Trump said of California. “The worst thing that the U.K. can do is get involved in Gavin. If they did to the U.K. what he did to California, this will not be a very successful venture.”

Trump appeared to believe there was a business deal between the two rather than an educational and research collaboration.

Trump then needled Newsom on the funding of the high-speed rail project between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The long-delayed project had federal funding on its way, until Trump killed it.

“How has he done with the railroad?” Trump asked. “How has he done with the various things he’s building?”

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

This month, President Donald Trump announced the United States would temporarily increase the amount of beef the nation imports from Argentina — by 80,000 more metric tons this calendar year.

In an executive order, the president stated these beef imports would not be subject to tariffs, and that he came to the decision after discussion with Brooke Rollins, U.S. agricultural secretary. The White House described the move as part of its push to lower beef prices at the grocery store for American consumers. But almost as soon as the trade deal was announced, Trump was met with backlash from key allies and constituents, including ranchers who say that buying more beef from Argentina hurts U.S. producers.

“The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and its members cannot stand behind the president while he undercuts the future of family farmers and ranchers by importing Argentinian beef in an attempt to influence prices,” Colin Woodall, head of the trade group, said in a statement. Deb Fischer, a Republican senator from Nebraska, also stated that the trade deal will “sideline” cattle ranchers in the U.S.

Trade groups, lawmakers, and economists agree that the increased imports from Argentina are unlikely to lower the record-high beef prices in the U.S. That’s partly because Americans already consume so much beef, according to David Ortega, professor in the Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics department at Michigan State University.

“The added volume is rather small relative to what Americans consume each year, under 1 percent of total supply,” Ortega said in an email, adding that this “probably won’t move retail prices much.”

But regardless of how unpopular the trade deal is, it almost certainly will spell trouble for the environment, especially in Latin America.

“I don’t see how Argentina can meet its climate commitments by expanding its beef production for the United States,” said Stephanie Feldstein, the population and sustainability director at the Center for Biological Diversity.

Raising cattle — ruminants that emit methane as part of their digestive process — for human consumption has a huge climate footprint, both in terms of land use and greenhouse gas emissions. Whether the additional cattle Trump is seeking are raised in North or South America, it will still lead to more methane and other emissions in the atmosphere. “By importing Argentina’s beef to the U.S., this administration is exporting its disregard for the climate crisis,” said Feldstein.

Around the world, climate change has scrambled the economics of growing food and raising livestock. In Argentina and the U.S. alike, cattle ranches have been hit hard by unprecedented droughts and rising temperatures. These factors, along with producers facing higher prices for inputs like fertilizer, labor, and machinery have caused the U.S. supply of cattle to plummet to a 70-year low.

Javier Milei, the far-right Argentinian president, spoke highly of the trade deal, saying it signaled the nation’s trustworthiness as a trade partner. But boosting beef production in Argentina to meet Trump’s new quota will force ranchers in the Latin American country to make difficult decisions.

Currently, Argentina devotes a tremendous amount of land to raising cattle in pasture-based systems. Unlike the confined animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, found in the U.S. and other parts of the world, these pasture-based systems allow cattle to graze on a variety of grasses until the “finishing” stage, when they are fed corn- and soy-based feed before they are slaughtered.

Even despite the role it plays in deforestation, raising cattle on pasture is often considered to be a more sustainable practice than feedlots. But Silvia Secchi, natural resource economist and professor at the University of Iowa, pointed out that how you measure sustainability depends on how you define it — and when it comes to beef, both pasture-based and CAFO systems come with drawbacks for the planet.

CAFOs, which are also referred to as factory farms due to how little space livestock are afforded, pollute nearby air and waterways; local communities will often report manure and fertilizer runoff as well as noxious odors. These feeding operations are terrible for both the farmed animals and the laborers who work there. However, CAFOs are sometimes touted as climate-efficient — in essence, because the livestock have such short lifespans before slaughter that they emit less methane relative to cattle who live longer grazing on pasture.

Producing more beef means choosing between two flawed systems, noted Secchi. “To me, the only answer is, we need to eat less beef,” she said.

The evolving trade relations between the U.S. and Argentina demonstrate some uncomfortable truths about animal agriculture, and our food systems more broadly. First, it shows how farming and ranching are industries that are both on the frontlines of the climate crisis and contributors to it.

Second, it reflects the toll that meeting the rising demand for animal protein has on critical ecosystems. In addition to its impact on ranchers, drought in Argentina has also slashed soybean production. Feldstein added that this has forced Argentinian farmers to import soybeans from Brazil, where their production is a driver of deforestation, particularly in the Cerrado, a savannah heralded for its biodiversity.

These knock-on effects have implications for the planet as a whole, as areas like the Cerrado are major carbon sinks.

As the Trump administration and MAHA leaders gear up to promote even higher animal protein consumption in the U.S., Feldstein agrees with Secchi’s assessment that consumers should strive, actually, to do the opposite. “There is no form of beef production that can be considered sustainable at our current consumption levels,” she said.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/trump-beef-trade-deal-is-a-lose-lose-gamble-that-wont-lower-prices/.

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."

A collapsed sewage pipe in January has resulted in over 250 million gallons of raw sewage being poured into the Potomac River. While the Army Corps of Engineers are at work building a new wall to hold back the increase of water in the era of climate change, that same department hasn't even heard from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on the toxic sludge floating by the nation's memorials and monuments.

Former CNN Pentagon reporter Barbara Starr commented on X, "Why has @SecWar not called in Army Corps of Engineers for what may be biggest spill in history of US? This is a huge story and a national security imperative!"

Indeed, the infrastructure of Washington D.C. can be a serious issue, given that national and world leaders rely on the river as a water source. Thus far, testing has found E. coli levels 12,000 times above safe limits, as well as dangerous levels of Staph bacteria and MRSA, reported WUSA9.

"Officials say the river remains partially frozen, but with highs climbing into the 50s this week, bacteria trapped in the ice could soon be released into the water, posing risks to people who live, work, or recreate along the river," reported WUSA9 in another report.

President Donald Trump entered the White House complaining that Washington D.C. was a dump and he was willing to deploy the National Guard and spend millions to clean up city parks and squares.

Aside from a security issue, Trump is planning a huge 250th-anniversary celebration for the country, with events all over the city. Officials are telling residents not even to touch the water, much less fish in it.

It will take another nine months for DC Water to fix the sewer pipe, ABC7News reported. It means almost all of Trump's events for 2026 will be surrounded by sewage.

“You can visibly see all this raw sewage and toilet paper,” said Dean Naujoks with the Potomac Riverkeeper Network.

Ironically, the department that runs the Army Corps of Engineers doesn't appear to want engineers anymore, quipped digital consultant Andy Barr.

A Friday CNN report revealed that they will no longer provide tuition assistance for some colleges and universities, Hegseth said, that have “troublesome partnerships with foreign adversaries.”