The Climate Catastrophe advances and may be unstoppable. Trump’s policies contribute to the dire trend

Bob Sheak, April 19, 2026

Arlene Sheak edits

Introduction

In this article I offer an update of evidence on the accelerating climate crisis. We may be at a point where the crisis will continue to advance, as it has, and cause ever-more destruction and death across the planet. It is an existential threat to humanity.

It would take far more effort by nations, especially those in the West and China, to end dependence on fossil fuels and the accompanying torrent of carbon emissions they produce. This appears to be increasingly unlikely, but the only recourse.

Every Key Climate Indicator is Flashing Red

Julia Conley reports on March 23, 2026, on the absence of effective action in the U.S. and across the globe to slow down the climate crisis (https://www.commondreams.org/news/un-report-climate). She writes that “every key climate indicator is flashing red,” referencing the annual State of Global Climate report by the United Nation’s meteorological agency, The World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO). Here’s some of what she reports.

“The annual State of the Global Climate report by the United Nations’ top meteorological agency was released Monday, marking the first time the authors of the report have included the Earth’s energy imbalance as a key indicator of the climate emergency.

“The World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) inclusion of the imbalance only provides more evidence of what scientists have been warning for decades: The continued extraction of fossil fuels is causing heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide and methane to build up in the atmosphere and is causing planetary heating, which is leading to extreme weather including wildfires, drought, and severe hurricanes and cyclones.

“The State of the Global Climate report explains that in a stable climate, incoming solar energy is roughly equal to the amount of energy leaving the Earth.

“But with greenhouse gases at their highest level in the atmosphere in at least 800,000 years, that equilibrium has been thrown off, and the energy imbalance—which has increased steadily over the past two decades—is at its highest since the observational record began in 1960.”

“Last year was the second- or third-hottest year on record, depending on the data set, owing to La Niña conditions that temporarily cooled the planet. Earth was about 1.43°C warmer than the pre-industrial average, and 2024—when hotter El Niño conditions were in effect—remains the hottest year with global temperatures averaging 1.55°C above pre-industrial levels.”

“Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump—whose country is the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases—has taken steps to weaken the world’s ability to respond to the climate emergency, withdrawing from dozens of climate- and energy-related international treaties and slashing climate research and emergency response spending.

“Trump has also pushed for more fossil fuel emissions—investing in the expensive, pollution-causing coal industry; demanding that the Pentagon obtain energy from coal plants; and mandating oil and gas lease sales.”

World Meteorological Organization: Last 10 Years Have Been the Hottest on Record

Eloise Goldsmith reports on this for Common Dreams, March 19, 2025

(https://truthout.org/articles/world-meteorological-organization-last-10-years-have-been-the-hottest-on-record).

A WMO [World Meteorological Organization] report also found that 2024 was the warmest year in a 175-year observational period.

“A report released by the World Meteorological Organization on Tuesday found that not only was 2024 the warmest year in a 175-year observational period, reaching a global surface temperature of roughly 1.55°C above the preindustrial average for the first time, but each of the past 10 years were also individually the 10 warmest on record.

“‘That’s never happened before,’ Chris Hewitt, the director of the WMO’s climate services division, of the clustering of the 10 warmest years all in the most recent decade, told The New York Times.”

World on track for catastrophic 3 degrees Celsius warming, UN warns

Zia Weise and Lucia Mackenzie also consider evidence that documents the rise in global warming, Oct 24, 2024 (https://politico.eu/article/united-nations-emissions-gap-global-warming-data-climate-change-report).

“Current plans and policies will lead to 2.6 to 3.1 degrees Celsius of global warming this century, with zero chance of limiting the temperature increase to the totemic 1.5C target agreed in Paris in 2015, according to a new report out Thursday.

“In fact, existing measures are falling so far short of what’s needed that the world even risks blowing past 2C, the Paris accord’s upper limit, the U.N. warned.

“The severity and frequency of dangerous heat waves, destructive storms and other disasters rise with every fraction of warming. At 3C, scientists say, the world could pass several points of no return that would dramatically alter the planet’s climate and increase sea levels, such as due to the collapse of polar ice caps.”

“In general, the G20 — which comprises industrialized countries such as the EU and U.S. as well as Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia — were responsible for 77 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2023.

In stark contrast, all 55 African Union countries accounted for just 6 percent.”

2025 Ranked as One of World’s Hottest Years Due to Human-Made Climate Crisis

Chris Walker , Truthout, Dec 30, 2025 (https://truthout.org/articles/2025-ranked-as-one-of-worlds-hottest-years-due-to-human-made-climate-crisis). Chris Walker is a news writer at Truthout, and is based out of Madison, Wisconsin. Focusing on both national and local topics since the early 2000s, he has produced thousands of articles analyzing the issues of the day and their impact on the American people. He can be found on most social media platforms under the handle @thatchriswalker.

“Climate change made 2025 heat waves 10 times more likely, a new report finds.

“A new analysis of the world’s climate in 2025 finds that this year was one of the three hottest ever recorded, demonstrating that the threat posed by the human-made climate crisis is not going away anytime soon.

“The analysis by World Weather Attribution (WWA), an organization that examines the likelihood that the climate crisis played a role in severe weather events, also shows that, over the past three years, the world has exceeded the 1.5 degrees Celsius global increase limit outlined in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

“Bottom of Form

Overall, the WWA report published on Tuesday documented 157 extreme weather events throughout 2025, defined as an event that either causes more than 100 deaths in a given area, detrimentally affects more than half that area’s population, or results in a state of emergency being declared.”

Friederike Otto, a co-founder of WWA and a professor of climate science at the Imperial College of London, said the climate crisis and humanity’s role in exacerbating it could not be debated.

“‘Each year, the risks of climate change become less hypothetical and more brutal reality,’ Otto said.

“‘The heat waves we have observed this year are quite common events in our climate today, but they would have been almost impossible to occur without human-induced climate change,’ Otto explained.

“WWA called for rapid and deep reductions in the use of fossil fuels, stating that extreme weather will continue to intensify without immediate changes.

“Globally, the world isn’t doing enough to slow, let alone reverse, the trend. China, for example, is investing in renewable energy sources, but also still heavily invests in coal. And in the U.S., the Trump administration is ending once-planned renewable energy projects in favor of fossil fuels.”

“‘A lot of policymakers [are] very clearly making policies for the interest of the fossil fuel industry rather than for the populations of their countries,’ Otto opined.”

New Climate Reports Show ‘Unprecedented Run of Global Heat’

Bob Berwyn, Inside Climate News, Jan 13, 2026 (https://insideclimatenews.org/news/13012026/multiple-reports-show-2025-extreme-global-heat)….

“Data from multiple international agencies shows the reality of a rapidly warming world.

“Several annual international climate reports released Tuesday indicate that relentless human-caused warming continued in 2025, especially in the oceans and at the poles.

“For the third year in a row, Earth’s average temperature ran close to 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than the climate that sustained human civilizations as the 20th century began, before fossil-fuel pollution started damaging the atmosphere.

“Avoiding more than that level of warming is also the key long-term temperature goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement. Research shows that warming by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the baseline will spell the end of nearly all global glaciers and coral reefs and mark a dangerous red zone for damage and destruction of ecosystems, food supplies, human health and infrastructure.”

The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service report released Tuesday ranked 2025 as the third-warmest year on record, just a hair cooler than 2023 and within striking distance of 2024, the hottest year on record. Together, the past three years have averaged more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, the first time any three-year stretch has crossed that threshold.

“‘Emissions simply haven’t come down as fast as people believed they would,’ Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Copernicus, said when asked about crossing the Paris Agreement limit so soon.

“‘And the extreme temperatures of 2023, 2024 and 2025 will be seen as cooler than average in just a few years, Burgess said, warning that continued fossil-fuel emissions are rapidly resetting what the world considers normal.”

“‘By far and away, the high global temperatures of the last three years have been due to the record amount of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere,’ Burgess said. Other factors can have regional impacts, such as reductions in industrial and shipping pollution that reflect heat away from Earth, especially over oceans, and can also nudge the global average by about 0.1 degrees Celsius.

“Major climate monitoring centers around the world are releasing their annual assessments in coordinated fashion Tuesday and into early Wednesday, including the World Meteorological Organization, NASA and the United Kingdom’s Met Office.

“The reports’ exact global temperature figures differ by a few tenths of a degree, reflecting slightly different datasets and analytical methods, but they all point in the same direction: Global warming is accelerating, driven overwhelmingly by human emissions.”

“‘We’re all very consistent in the near term, because our planet is better observed than it has ever been,’ said Burgess.”

“A separate analysis released last week by Climate Central quantifies the damage caused by climate extremes in the United States. The group found that the country experienced 23 weather and climate disasters in 2025, from destructive storms and floods to heat-driven wildfires, that each caused at least $1 billion in damage, totaling about $115 billion in losses.”

“Climate Central is a nonprofit organization of scientists and journalists that researches and communicates climate science and impacts. After the Trump administration cut NOAA’s billion-dollar disaster database, the group revived it to keep long-term loss tracking publicly available using the same scientific methods.

“In addition to the disaster database, the Trump administration last year reduced weather balloon launches, said it would shut down the National Center for Atmospheric Research and cut thousands of positions at science-focused agencies. Experts warn that weakening or sidelining science leaves communities more vulnerable.

“Several groups of former federal scientists are working outside the government to ensure critical information continues to flow. The American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union are teaming up to publish a series of peer-reviewed papers to help fill the gap left by the discontinuation of the National Climate Assessment. Other former federal officials are building Climate.us as a replacement for a federal website that the Trump administration shut down last year.”

“For the contiguous U.S., 2025 was the fourth-warmest year on record, according to the annual State of the Climate report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, also published Tuesday. The NOAA report highlights that heat was concentrated in the West, with Nevada and Utah recording their warmest years in the 134-year record. As part of that report, the U.S. Climate Extremes Index ranked 2025 as the 12th-highest on record, particularly for maximum and minimum temperatures and for dry conditions.”

Arctic sea ice hits lowest winter level as unprecedented heat smashes records all over Earth

NBC News March 27, 2026 (https://www.nbcnews.com/science/climate-change-artic-sea-hits-lowest-winter-level-unprecedented-heat-records-rcna265501).

“The sea ice is crucial to Earth’s climate because without it reflecting sunlight, more heat energy goes into the oceans. Ice of all kinds around the poles acts as Earth’s refrigerator.

“Vital Arctic sea ice shrank to tie its lowest measured level for the winter, the season when ice grows, as a warming Earth shattered records across the continents.”

“The shrinking Arctic sea ice was announced Thursday as temperatures broke March heat records across the United States, all over Mexico, in Australia, across Northern Africa and through parts of Northern Europe. Climatologist and weather historian Maximiliano Herrera, who tracks extreme temperatures, called the extreme March temperatures ‘by far the most extreme heat event in world climatic history’ and said on social media that the next few days would be ‘much worse.’

“Sixteen states broke March temperature records in the past week or so, said weather historian Christ Burt. Twenty-seven locations had temperatures in the past week high enough to tie or surpass the hottest April day on record, including St. Louis, meteorologists said. Mexico has had thousands of records shattered, some of them warmer than the hottest May temperatures, but that’s nothing compared with what’s happening in Asia, where “dozens of thousands of monthly records” were smashed by 30 to 35 degrees (17 to 19 degrees Celsius) margins, Herrera said.

Steady decline of sea ice

“This year’s sea ice area was about 525,000 square miles (1.36 million square kilometers) lower than the 1981 to 2010 winter average peak. That’s about twice the size of Texas.

Americans Are Concerned About Climate Change—but They Should Be Afraid

Mark Hertsgaard makes this point in The Nation, July 17 2025

(https://thenation.com/article/environment/covering-climate-now-americans-afraid).

Mark Hertsgaard is the environment correspondent of The Nation and the executive director of the global media collaboration Covering Climate Now. His new book is Big Red’s Mercy: The Shooting of Deborah Cotton and A Story of Race in America.

Americans still don’t comprehend how imminent, dangerous, and far-reaching the threat is—and journalists are partly to blame.

“Anthony Leiserowitz, the executive director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, said Yale’s latest survey found that only 29 percent of Americans are ‘very worried’ about climate change—a remarkably low number, considering that climate change is already killing people and devastating communities around the world and threatens much worse if left unchecked.

“‘I constantly make the point that only 29 percent are very worried, when it should be 100 percent,’ Leiserowitz told Covering Climate Now. ‘This reflects [climate change’s] lack of salience for most Americans. There are many who are not deniers, but do not adequately understand the risks, that the impacts are here and now, and the urgency of action.’”

“In the United States, the percentage of people supporting stronger climate action is 74 percent. Why, then, are significantly smaller percentages ‘greatly worried’ about climate change?

“‘There’s a big difference between general support for stronger climate action and prioritizing climate action,’ Leiserowitz said. He invoked a concept from political science, the issue public, defined as ‘a relatively small proportion of the general public that is both passionate about an issue and directly engaged in taking political and personal action.’ He added, ‘While it’s important to have a large majority of the public supporting action (e.g., 89 percent), most issues also need an organized, powerful ‘issue public’ that is loudly demanding policy change and implementing personal change.’”

“The fact that less than half of the public is ‘greatly worried’ about climate change shows that most Americans still don’t comprehend how imminent, dangerous, and far-reaching the threat is. There is a ‘critical need for better climate communications,’ Leiserowitz said, ‘especially quality media reporting.’”

Trump to World: Green Energy Is a Scam and Climate Science Is From ‘Stupid People’

Somini Sengupta and Lisa Friedman quote Trump in this, New York Times, Sept 23, 2025, article (https://nytimes.com/2025/09/23/climate/trump-climate-energy-united-nations-unga.html).

“President Trump went on a rant against climate change at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, calling it the ‘greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world’ and saying that the scientific consensus on global warming was created by ‘stupid people.’ He also berated countries, including close allies of the United States, for adopting renewable energy.

“It added up to an extraordinary diatribe that ignored the human suffering exacted by the heat waves, wildfires and deadly floods that are aggravated by the burning of fossil fuels and, at the same time, stood at odds with the rapid expansion of renewable energy all over the world.”

“‘Trump continues to embarrass the U.S. on the global stage and undermine the interests of Americans at home,’ Gina McCarthy, who served as the United States climate policy director in the Biden administration, said in a statement. ‘He’s rejecting our government’s responsibility to protect Americans from the increasingly intense and frequent disasters linked to climate change that unleash havoc on our country.’”

“On his first day in office, Mr. Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement, a voluntary pact among nearly 200 nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It is the only country to have done so. His administration also has thwarted renewable energy projects, stripped federal incentives for wind and solar power and removed climate-science data from government websites. It has also commissioned a report downplaying the consequences of climate change.”

“The United States is already the world’s leading exporter of natural gas and the biggest producer of oil, and the Trump administration is encouraging new development. Mr. Trump has also signed executive orders to expand the burning and mining of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel.”

“He referred to global warming as ‘the greatest con job ever perpetrated’ and upbraided world leaders for sticking to an international agreement to limit global temperature rise and transition away from fossil fuels. The moment was all the more remarkable because the United States is responsible for the largest share of global emissions since the Industrial Revolution.”

“Jennifer Morgan, who has served as Germany’s climate change envoy, said European countries saw clean energy as a way to ensure their energy security and to expand their economies. To build a strong Europe, she said, it is necessary to ‘tackle climate change to avoid people having to leave their homes.’”

Trump orders USDA to take down websites referencing climate crisis

Gabrielle Canon, The Guardian, Jan 31, 2025 (https://theguardian.com/2025/jan/31/trump-orders-usda-websites-climate-crisis).

“On Thursday, the Trump administration ordered the US agriculture department to take down its websites documenting or referencing the climate crisis.

“By Friday, the leading pages on the United States Forest Service website for key resources, research and adaptation tools – including those that provide vital context and vulnerability assessments for wildfires – had gone dark, leaving behind an error message or just a single line: “You are not authorized to access this page.”

“The government website was one of many that were affected on Friday by new directives from the Trump administration on what information federal agencies can publish.”

The changes at the Forest Service website followed a directive issued by the United States Department of Agriculture’s office of communications. In the memo, which was reviewed by the Guardian, officials instructed website managers across the agency to ‘identify and archive or unpublish any landing pages focused on climate change.”

Trump Administration Erases the Government’s Power to Fight Climate Change

Lisa Friedman considers this issue in the New York Times

(https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/climate/trump-epa-greenhouse-gases-climate-change.html).

“The Environmental Protection Agency rejected the bedrock scientific finding that greenhouse gases threaten human life and wellbeing. It means the agency can no longer regulate them.

“President Trump on Thursday announced 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.

“The action is 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.”

“Led by a president who refers to climate change as a ‘hoax,’ the administration is essentially saying that the vast majority of scientists around the world are wrong and that a hotter planet is not the menace that decades of research show it to be.”

Trump to World: Green Energy Is a Scam and Climate Science Is From ‘Stupid People’

Somini Sengupta and Lisa Friedman, New York Times, Sept 23, 2025

In a remarkable United Nations address, the president lashed out at wind turbines, environmentalists and allies around the world while dismissing the dangers of climate change.

Against Humanity’: Leaders Denounce Fossil Fuel-Loving Trump as He Skips Out on Global Climate Summit

Stephen Prager writes this in a article for Common Dreams, Nov 7, 2025

(https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-skips-cop30).

“Every fraction of a degree means more hunger, displacement, and loss—especially for those least responsible,” said UN Secretary General António Guterres on Thursday. “This is moral failure—and deadly negligence.”

“As world leaders gathered in Brazil for this year’s global summit on the accelerating climate crisis this week, many took note of the absence of US

President Donald Trump.

“”This year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) summit comes on the tenth anniversary of the Paris Climate agreement, in which nations committed to adopting policies intended to keep global temperature increases below the threshold of 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, considered a tipping point at which many of the worst ravages of climate change will become irreversible.

“Ten years later, progress has fallen far short of the mark, with leaders scrambling to keep the deal’s goals intact—an aim that is likely untenable without the cooperation of the US, the globe’s largest historical emitter of carbon.

“America’s president has not only once again pulled the US out of the Paris agreement, but also sought to turn climate denial into public policy and spent his term in office thus far grinding American investment in renewable energy to a halt—actions viewed as extraordinary abdications of responsibility at a time when the globe is ever more rapidly approaching the point of no return for warming.

“Every fraction of a degree means more hunger, displacement, and loss—especially for those least responsible,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres on Thursday. “This is moral failure—and deadly negligence.”

“Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has emerged as one of the world’s leading climate defenders from the heart of the Amazon rainforest, began the conference by delivering an indirect but unmistakable shot at Trump.

“He denounced the “extremist forces that fabricate fake news and are condemning future generations to life on a planet altered forever by global warming.”

“Other Latin American leaders were more direct. Colombian President Gustavo Petro, whom Trump recently hit with sanctions and threatened with military action, denounced the US president as ‘against humanity,’ as evidenced by ‘his absence’ at the conference.”

“‘The president of the United States at the latest United Nations General Assembly said the climate crisis does not exist,’ added Chilean President Gabriel Boric. ‘That is a lie.’”

“In Trump’s stead, over 100 other state and local figures from US politics have traveled to Brazil to take part in the conference: Among them are California Gov. Gavin Newsom, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, and Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers.”

“Even without Trump present, COP30 is crawling with fossil fuel lobbyists seeking to stymie progress. A report released Friday from the climate advocacy group Kick Big Polluters Out found that over 5,350 fossil fuel lobbyists have attended UN climate negotiations over the past four years. The corporations they represent are responsible for more than 60% of global emissions.”

2 Weeks of Iran War Released More Carbon Emissions Than 84 Countries Do Yearly

Sharon Zhang reports on this fact for Truthout, Published March 23, 2026

(https://truthout.org/articles/2-weeks-of-iran-war-released-more-carbon-emissions-than-84-countries-do-yearly

“The first two weeks of the U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran released a deluge of carbon emissions equivalent to the combined yearly climate warming pollution output of the lowest 84 emitters in the world, a new analysis finds.

“Researchers for progressive think tank Climate and Community Institute found that the first 14 days of the assault released over 5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions. This is more than the annual emissions of mid-sized economies like Iceland or Kuwait, and roughly the same as dozens of the lowest emitters together.

“‘No matter which of the many reasons Trump has since provided for attacking Iran, the US intervention in Iran is now clearly about oil, plunging the Middle East into another crisis and deepening the social, economic, and environmental costs of war,’ wrote researchers Patrick Bigger, Benjamin Neimark, and Fred Otu-Larbi in a newsletter post about the analysis.

“Bottom of Form

For their analysis, researchers examined reports from the media, international organizations and other independent institutions in order to gather data on factors like munitions quantities, fuel consumption, and infrastructure destruction. They then used that information to determine the volume of emissions based on prior research on emissions from the U.S. invasion of Iraq and from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“The largest cause of emissions in the report is the destruction of homes and buildings, which has resulted in nearly 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions, the analysis found. Researchers based this estimate on data from the Iranian Red Crescent Society, which says that 20,000 units were damaged or destroyed in the conflict, including dozens of medical facilities and schools.”

“The emissions from building destruction alone are equal to those of 1.1 million gas-powered cars yearly, the group said.

“The second largest contributor was the attacks on oil facilities by Israeli and Iranian forces in areas across Iran and the Middle East, as well as strikes on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, amounting to 1.9 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

“The remaining emissions came from fuel used by military warships, fighter jets, and support vessels and vehicles; the loss of equipment like the U.S.’s and Iran’s downed aircraft, lost naval vessels, and destroyed missile launchers; and the intensive use of drone and missile attacks.

“‘The carbon costs of the war will continue to rise dramatically as it drags on’ the Climate and Community Institute researchers wrote.

“‘However, the most significant climate impact of the attack on Iran will not be the emissions of the conflict itself, but from its aftermath,’ they went on. ‘As the US continues to press on in its ill-conceived quest for ‘energy dominance,’ fossil fuel production will be expanded in the name of energy security, locking in emissions from extraction infrastructure for decades.”

But the climate emissions from the war, which has no end in sight, will affect the entire world.

The report comes as the U.S. goes through a record heat wave, with eight states setting an all-time high heat record in March. The heat wave would have been ‘virtually impossible’ without changes caused by the climate crisis, research group World Weather Attribution said. More heat may be yet to come, as weather and climate experts predict an extremely strong El Niño this year, which typically means hotter temperatures across the globe.”

Concluding thoughts

This record of a continuing dependence on carbon dioxide emitting fossil fuels, especially in the U.S., where Trump celebrates it, is causing the planet’s temperature to continue rising, with increasingly disastrous consequences.

If Trump, the Republicans, and their corporate allies remain in power, the U.S. contribution to this existential calamity will not be reversed. Unfortunately, it is not a sure eventuality that Democratic administrations would be willing to do enough. Americans are understandable concerned with “affordability” and getting by. The issue of the climate crisis remains an abstraction or non-issue.

Trump will likely pay little attention to the climate crisis, and it will get worse

Bob Sheak, Nov 14, 2024

Introduction

The U.S. remains the second largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, behind China. The Biden administration has done some things in attempts to reduce such emissions, but, despite these efforts, emissions in the US have continued to increase. Indeed, 2024 is the hottest year on record.

Trump, a climate-crisis denier, will as president exacerbate the problem and give open-ended support to fossil fuel production and consumption and the industries that benefit from them. Rising emissions and the rising temperatures they produce represent an existential problem that will likely threaten to generate massive dislocations of people and threaten the survival of millions, if not billions, of people in America and around the globe.

There are plenty of books that tell this cataclysmic story. Here are a few examples. Mark Lynas’ book examines in detail the effects of rising temperatures (Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency). Abrahm Lustgarten focuses on the “uprooting of America” and the millions of people who will be forced to move, as their communities become too hot to continue (On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America). Jeff Goodall zeros in on the effects of Americans of rising heat levels (The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet).

I – Biden’s record on the climate crisis has bright spots

Mike Ludwig reports that Biden made steady progress on climate, but adds that Trump is poised to dismantle it (https://truthout.org/articles/biden-made-slow-but-steady-progress-on-climate-trump-is-poised-to-dismantle-it). On Biden’s climate record, Ludwig writes:

“While politicians and the media obsessed about the economy and immigration under President Joe Biden, his administration has been running the most robust Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in a generation, making modest but steady progress on vexing problems such as environmental racism, toxic chemical contamination and updating infrastructure to run on cleaner energy.

“Flush with nearly $29 billion in Inflation Reduction Act funding, the EPA is stewarding billions of dollars in grants for upgrading water infrastructure, reducing climate-warming pollution and expanding renewable energy.

Other government agencies are involved in climate-related work. Ludwig points out,

“The climate work goes beyond the EPA, with multiple agencies implementing an expansive plan to drastically reduce industrial releases of methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide. For the first time, federal regulators are questioning whether permitting private companies to export vast quantities of fossil gas produced in the U.S. — including on publicly owned land — could be harmful to both the environment and consumers struggling to pay energy bills.”

Wikipedia has further details on Biden’s Inflation Adjustment Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate-change-policy-of-the-United-States).

“The Inflation Reduction Act was a reconciliation bill that was the largest investment in climate change mitigation in US history to date, setting out provisions to invest in increasing renewable energy and electrifying areas of the US economy. The legislation, signed into law by Biden on August 16, 2022, invests approximately $400 billion to climate-related projects, primarily in the form of tax credits for consumers and private businesses. The majority of these investments is intended to increase the amount of wind and solar energy in the United States grid by providing tax incentives to renewable energy producers, as well as companies that manufacture batteries and wind and solar power components.[145][146][147][148] The Act may also invest $28–48 billion in building retrofits and energy efficiency, $23–436 billion in clean transportation, $22–26 billion in environmental justice, land use, air pollution reduction and resilience, and $3–21 billion in sustainable agriculture.[149][150][151]”

II. Withal, Global warming continues to rise

Despite the efforts of the Biden administration, Austyn Gaffney reports that researchers find that 2024 temperatures are on track for a record high (https://nytimes.com/2024/11/06/climate/2024-temperatures-hottest-year.html). He writes,

“This year [2024] will almost certainly be the hottest year on record, beating the high set in 2023, researchers announced on Wednesday [Nov. 6].

Gaffney cites the research done by “the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the European Union agency that monitors global warming,” and has forecast “that 2024 would be the first calendar year in which global temperatures consistently rose 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.

“That’s the temperature threshold that countries agreed, in the Paris Agreement, that the planet should avoid crossing. Beyond that amount of warming, scientists say, the Earth will face irreversible damage.

“Greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are dangerously heating up the planet, imperiling biodiversity, increasing sea level rise and drought and making extreme weather events more common and more destructive.

Gaffney quotes Samantha Burgess who refers to recent storms like Hurricanes Helene and Milton and the flooding in Spain to exemplify just how devastating weather intensified by warming can be.”

“A report issued by the United Nations last month found that the world’s current climate plans are inadequate, only providing a 2.6 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 compared to 2019 levels. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that reduction needs to be an order of magnitude larger: at least a 43 percent reduction by 2030 and 60 percent by 2035.”

“The reality is, every fraction of a degree matters,” Dr. Burgess said. “The sooner globally we cut emissions, the sooner our climate will stabilize.”

“If President-elect Donald J. Trump withdraws the United States from the Paris accord, as he has promised and as he did during his first administration, it would be ‘very bad news,’ according to Diana Urge-Vorsatz, a professor at Central European University and vice chairwoman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N. body that provides governments with scientific information to develop climate policies.”

The US and most world governments are not doing enough

Zia Weise and Lucia Mackenzie provide more details on global warming and how, according to the UN, the world is on track for catastrophic 3 degrees Celsius warming (https://politico.eu/article/united-nations-emissions-gap-global-warming-data-climate-change-report). The article was published on Oct. 24, 2024. Here’s some of what they write.

“The world is already 1.3C hotter than before the Industrial Revolution.

“In fact, existing measures are falling so far short of what’s needed that the world even risks blowing past 2C, the Paris accord’s upper limit, the U.N. warned.

“The severity and frequency of dangerous heat waves, destructive storms and other disasters rises with every fraction of warming. At 3C, scientists say, the world could pass several points of no return that would dramatically alter the planet’s climate and increase sea levels, such as due to the collapse of polar ice caps.

Weise and Mackenzie continue: “If nations do not implement current commitments, then show a massive increase in ambition in the new pledges, followed by rapid delivery, the Paris Agreement target of holding global warming to 1.5C will be dead within a few years and 2C will take its place in the intensive care unit,” said Inger Andersen, the U.N. environment chief.”

“Andersen said that worldwide, measures to reduce emissions will require a ‘minimum six-fold increase’ in investment, ‘backed by reform of the global financial architecture and strong private sector action.’” Such investment is not in the cards during a Trump administration.

“After all, while the entire G20 accounted for 77 percent of last year’s global emissions, the largest six polluters among them were responsible for more than 60 percent. The U.N. report doesn’t name and shame, but authors are referring to China (30 percent), the United States (11 percent), India (8 percent), the EU (6 percent), Russia (5 percent) and Brazil (2 percent).”

“Progress among the G20 is a mixed bag: China’s emissions grew 5.2 percent in 2023, while the EU’s fell 7.5 percent; and while China is much more populous, its per-capita emissions in 2023 were 11 tons to the EU’s 7.3 tons.

“U.S. emissions fell by 1.4 percent, but American per-capita emissions remain the second-highest at 18 tons after Russia’s 19 tons. India’s are just 2.9 tons — even though its emissions rose by 6 percent last year.”

U.N. environment chief Andersen urges rich nations like the US to phase out greenhouse gas emissions at a much faster rate than at present.

III. Trump and his administration will reverse the limited achievements of the Biden presidency on climate.

One of Trump’s signature slogans is “drill baby drill,” which means, as he has told us, his upcoming government, once installed after January 20,2025, will (1) increase government support for fossil fuels, (2) reduce support for solar, wind, and geothermal, (3) encourage more export of fracked natural gas, (4) eviscerate or close the Environmental Protection Agency, (5) open up public land to drilling; and (6) serve as an international model for other countries to follow his example.

Mike Ludwig (cited previously) reminds us that “Trump is threatening to unleash pollution, increase emissions and incapacitate the most robust EPA in a generation (https://truthout.org/articles/biden-made-slow-but-steady-progress-on-climate-trump-is-poised-to-dismantle-it). And he will have the power to do it, as result of being chosen to be president by millions of American voters in the recent election.

“…efforts to meet international climate commitments,” Ludwig writes, “seem certain to stall, if not end abruptly, after Donald Trump is reinstalled in the White House and Republicans take over the Senate if not all of Congress. According to the most recent information, as of Nov. 12, Republicans will control the White House, both branches of the U.S. Congress, and the Supreme Court when Trump and his party come into power after January 20, 2025.”

With such political power, Ludwig continues, “[t]he damage will go far beyond global warming. If Trump’s rhetoric and first-term record are any indication of what is ahead, the president-elect and the industries willing to curry his favor are poised to make the U.S. a more polluted and dangerous place to live.”

Trump will move to make “steep budget cuts” in the EPA, and perhaps move the agency out of the capitol, “as enforcement of clean air and water standards plummets. Career public servants are expected to be replaced with loyalists from the private sector. Back in 2017, Trump appointed a former coal lobbyist to lead the EPA.” Trump is also expected to dissolve the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, the “agency tracks climate change for policy makers and the public.”

Climate scientists at the United Nations are worried. They view the climate crisis with words like “catastrophic” to describe our future without swift action.

“Trump and the Republicans have told a convenient lie to voters, accusing the Democrats of throttling domestic oil and gas production and sending gas and energy prices through the roof. In reality, fossil fuel prices are set by global forces the U.S. president has little control over. The U.S. is already the world’s top producer of oil and gas, and domestic prices would likely come down if the industry didn’t export so much overseas.

“The consequences of this election are clear for those on the frontlines of the climate crisis,” said Jennifer Krill, executive director of the environmental justice group Earthworks, in a statement. “Low-income communities and communities of color will bear the brunt of impact, from poisoned air and water to extreme weather events and rising sea levels, all within our lifetimes.” But the effects will be everywhere.

Fossil fuel companies will profit

Evan Halper, Maxine Joselow and Chico Harlan delve into this issue
(https://washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/11/06/trump-win-climate-change-oil-gas).

The journalists report, “Trump’s plans have the potential to send fossil fuel companies’ profits soaring while threatening the world’s climate goals.”

“President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House could reverse the gains the United States has made in fighting global warming, experts said, by cementing his plans to unleash domestic fossil fuel production, dismantle key environmental rules and scale back federal support for renewable energy and electric vehicles.

“It has also raised fears among U.S. allies and even some major energy executives who warn that a U.S. exit from global climate efforts will hurt American industry as the rest of the world shifts away from fossil fuels.

“Trump’s election creates ‘a very long pathway for fossil fuels,’ Ben Cahill, an energy scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, said in a phone interview Wednesday. ‘Investors will feel the outlook is brighter. The industry will be under less pressure.’”

“He (Trump) is expected to ease a suite of restrictions on the oil industry’s emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. And he will probably cancel the Biden administration’s pause on permits for new liquefied natural gas export projects, clearing the way for the industry to build billions of dollars worth of infrastructure that could increase U.S. emissions and keep gas flowing to other nations for decades to come.”

“Trump is expected to take aim at these investments by targeting President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, which he has repeatedly called a ‘green new scam.’ But he would likely need Congress to repeal the law, and some Republican lawmakers may balk.

“Cahill said that the law’s tax credits for consumers, including those for EVs, rooftop solar panels and heat pumps ‘will definitely be on the chopping block’ but ‘the investment incentives for wind, solar and battery storage have proven to be quite popular with big business.’”

Nonetheless, “[t]he incoming president will have much more latitude to reverse dozens of environmental rules that oil and gas executives find burdensome. During an April dinner at his Mar-a-Lago Club, Trump asked oil executives to steer $1 billion toward his campaign while promising to relax industry regulations.

“The oil industry responded by donating tens of millions of dollars to his campaign and crafting a playbook for the new administration. It includes draft executive orders that would end restrictions on drilling on public lands and shift the Interior Department’s priorities away from protecting vulnerable species and ecosystems.”

“Trump has argued that unshackling oil companies from environmental rules could drive the price of gasoline below $2 per gallon. But energy analysts are skeptical. Prices at the pump typically have little connection to White House policies, and are largely driven instead by the coalition of oil-producing nations led by Saudi Arabia and Russia. And Trump will take office at a time when the United States is already producing more oil and gas than any country ever has.

Trump’s record is bad. “During his first term, Trump weakened or wiped out more than 125 environmental rules and policies touching everything from toxic chemicals to endangered species.”

When Trump withdrew from the Paris agreement for the first time, a group called America Is All In announced that dozens of states, cities and corporations were still committed to the pact. Gina McCarthy, the former White House climate czar under Biden and the managing co-chair of America is All In, vowed in a statement Wednesday to continue that fight.

“‘No matter what Trump may say,’ she said, ‘the shift to clean energy is unstoppable and our country is not turning back.’

“If Trump pulls the United States from the Paris agreement, it will deal a symbolic blow to the international efforts, given America’s place as the largest historical emitter of planet-warming pollution. Under Biden, the United States has produced record amounts of oil, but it had also positioned itself as a climate leader. Last year, minutes after nations agreed to a historic pledge to transition away from fossil fuels, then-climate envoy John F. Kerry addressed delegates, touting a moment of ‘multilateralism’ and unity, and expressing a sense of ‘awe.’ His remarks drew loud applause.

“Collins Nzovu, who served until recently as Zambia’s green economy and environment minister, said in a recent interview that the global climate process is less credible if the ‘superpower is not at the table for discussing an existential threat.’

“Poorer countries are…depending on the United States to help finance plans that are essential to the world’s climate goals.

“‘No mitigation efforts can work without America at the table,’ Nzovu said.”

Experts discuss the problem

Jenni Doering, Steve Curwood, and their colleagues at Inside Climate News also consider what climate and environmental policies will look like in Trump’s second administration (https://insideclimatenews.org/news/09112024/climate-and-environmental-policies-during-second-Trump-administration). Here are excerpts from the article, which features a discussion among well-informed analysts.

From our collaborating partner Living on Earth, public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by Jenni Doering and Steve Curwood with Inside Climate News’s Washington bureau chief Marianne Lavelle and executive editor Vernon Loeb, about what the election of Donald Trump may mean for the environment.

STEVE CURWOOD: What’s your view of how the world is going to look at us now that we have chosen a leader who denies climate change when we’ve been seeing temperatures going up and storms and such are getting worse and worse?

VERNON LOEB: Well, I think the world has seen this before. When Trump was in office the first time, one of the first things he did was take the country out of the Paris Agreement. Clearly, the world is expecting he’ll do that again.

Climate action didn’t stop when he did that the first time. It won’t stop this time. But I think clearly, world leaders feel like progress on climate is going to be a lot harder to achieve with Trump in office and with the U.S. out of the official agreement. It’s not a good moment for the climate. I don’t think progress is going to grind to a halt, but it’s not a good moment.

LAVELLE: President-elect Trump has made clear that he is going to roll back the regulations that are meant to nudge the auto industry toward electric vehicles over the next decade. He says he is going to repeal that on day one, and that is going to make a big difference.

My colleague Dan Gearino and I have been working all year on writing about the politics of electric vehicles, and one of the analysts we’ve talked to says that there is going to be 40 percent less demand for EV batteries and EV technology under a Trump administration than there would have been under a Harris administration. Those kinds of changes in policy are bound to make a huge difference in how quickly we make the transition—that’s already going on all over the world—to electric vehicles.

LOEB: There’s a long description in Project 2025 about how the EPA’s enforcement capability should be pulled way back. And instead, the agency should move to something called “compliance assistance,” which is working more closely with corporations.

Project 2025 also talks about dismantling NOAA, which is the National Weather Service—the agency that tracks hurricanes—and the National Hurricane Center. Project 2025 even calls for the repeal of the EPA efficiency ratings for appliances, the Energy Star efficiency ratings. So Project 2025 could be a real disaster for environmental protection, if it is indeed the Trump blueprint.

LAVELLE: One of the things Project 2025 says to do is to eliminate EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice. It definitely is in the sights of the team around Trump to really redirect this initiative to address environmental justice.

One thing I noticed is that House Republicans this week put out a report on environmental justice grants by the Biden administration, and they’re very critical of those grants because they’re going to groups that, for example, oppose the natural gas export terminals on the Gulf Coast. What this report does is kind of gives a blueprint for the incoming Trump administration on what grants to withdraw, and also kind of a basis for withdrawing the program altogether. That report came out very much with an awareness that Trump is coming into the White House with an eye to cutting back the support for these communities that are overburdened with pollution, and have been for a long time.

DOERING: What do you think is going to happen now that the Trump administration is coming back in and has 20-something natural gas projects which it can potentially give the green light to?

LOEB: The Biden administration put a hold on those projects as it considered the climate implications. My hunch is that that will be one of the first things Trump does away with and basically gives those plants the green light as part of his energy dominance, “drill, baby, drill” approach. Of all the industries, none has fared better under Trump than the fossil fuel industry. I would expect a real explosion of LNG exports over the next four years under Trump, too.

DOERING: Remind us why are climate activists so concerned about those terminals?

LOEB: The terminals just lead to more fracking. We’re already the leading oil and gas nation in the world, and if we can continue to frack and start exporting our natural gas as liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe, which is still somewhat smarting from the loss of Russian natural gas, it just means more fracking. And when you’ve got more fracking, you’ve got more air pollution, more greenhouse gas emissions, more produced water piling up with no place to dispose of it. LNG exports means more fracking across the nation.

CURWOOD: I’ve seen some research that says that the actual carbon footprint of exported natural gas can even exceed that of burning coal.

LAVELLE: As somebody who’s been writing about this for a long time, I usually focus on the stories I’m telling and what I’m working on, not looking out at the big picture that much. This forces you to look at the big picture. And anyone who has young people in their lives, you think, what kind of world are we leaving for them? The way I deal with it is just focus on the importance of the work we’re doing, trying to explain the science and tell people really that there are things that can be done to address climate change, and we know what they are, and it’s going to take all of us to do something about it.

CURWOOD: Talk to me about what some people call the glimmer of hope: the states and localities.

LOEB: Voters in Washington firmly rejected a measure on the ballot that would have overturned the state’s signature climate law. In California, the voters approved a $10 billion bond fund for projects that focus on resiliency and coastal adaptation and response to floods and wildfires. And similarly, in Honolulu, voters also approved a climate resiliency fund there. So kind of a mixed result, right?

While the national vote was going for Trump, who’s someone who’s sort of avowedly almost a climate denier, you’ve got majorities in these states clearly voting for climate change measures to fund things like adaptation and resiliency.

Concluding thoughts

The Trump/Republicans win in a blow-out “red” wave defeat of Democrats in the recent elections. At the same time, some Americans will continue their struggles to combat the sources of the problem, namely, fossil fuel companies and their economic and political allies, including Trump and the Republican Party.

Members of the World Resources Institute contend that “all hope is not lost” (https://wri.org/insights/trump-climate-action-setbacks-opportunities-us). The authors, Cristina DeConcina, Jennifer Rennicki, and Gabby Hyman, identify “several pathways remain to keep momentum for climate action alive.”

“For one, there are bipartisan climate-friendly opportunities to seize, such as continued clean energy development, which has already delivered tremendous economic benefits in both red and blue states. There is also support from both sides of the aisle for next-generation geothermal energy and from the business community for decarbonizing heavy industries and strengthening international supply chains to ensure U.S. competitiveness and security. These initiatives would bolster U.S. manufacturing and national security, while also benefitting the climate.

DeConcina and her colleagues continue.

“In addition, subnational actors like states, cities, businesses and tribal nations boldly stepped up during Trump’s first term in office. They can — and early signs show they will — take up the mantle of leadership again in the climate fight.
Some of the major opportunities include:

“When President Trump announced in 2017 that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement, American communities, states, tribal nations and business leaders quickly coalesced to form America Is All In. More than 4,000 mayors, governors, university presidents and business leaders signed the We Are Still In declaration, committing to meet the emissions-reduction targets set in the Paris Agreement and continue engaging with the international community. The 2019 Accelerating America’s Pledge report found that bottom-up leadership from states, cities, businesses and other subnational actors would reduce U.S. emissions by up to 37% by 2030, even without federal intervention.

“And since the first Trump administration, subnational climate action initiatives have only grown in strength and commitment. Managing Co-Chair of America Is All In and former EPA administrator Gina McCarthy said recently, ‘No matter what Trump may say, the shift to clean energy is unstoppable, and our country is not turning back.’”

“Many states have enacted ambitious climate policies. For example, the 24 states and territories that comprise the bipartisan U.S. Climate Alliance, representing 54% of the U.S. population and 57% of the U.S. economy, have committed to achieving net-zero emissions no later than 2050.

“Some states are poised for even greater action before Trump takes office. In California, voters overwhelming approved Proposition 4, a $10 billion bond measure that will help the state prepare for the impacts of climate change. Just after the election, California’s Governor Newsom announced a special session of the state legislature to take steps “to safeguard California values”— including the fight against climate change — ahead Trump’s second term. A day later, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) approved updates to the state’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS), designed to accelerate the development of cleaner fuels and zero-emission infrastructure to help the state meet legislatively mandated air quality and climate targets.

“At the same time, voters in Washington state upheld a new law that forces companies to cut carbon emissions while raising billions to support programs such as habitat restoration and climate preparation. Maryland’s Governor Moore issued a wide-ranging executive order earlier this year directing state agencies to develop climate implementation plans to ensure the state could continue working towards its ambitious climate change targets, which aim for net-zero carbon by 2045.

“In parallel, cities have long played a crucial role in advancing climate policies and will continue to do so. Climate Mayors, which started as a network of 30 mayors in 2017, is now a bipartisan network of nearly 350 U.S. mayors driving climate action in their communities. These cities continue investing in public transportation, green infrastructure and local emissions-reduction initiatives — all of which will continue to mitigate the impacts of climate change and build more sustainable urban environments with or without federal action on climate.”