Bill McKibben opens a welcome window on the successes of renewable energy, despite the ignorance of this Administration. “A Low Point of Human Inaction on Climate Change? Not really.” T

The New Yorker
2025 in Review

A Low Point of Human Inaction on Climate Change

The second Trump Administration’s assault on the environment has been as damaging as expected, but other developments this year give at least some hope for the future.

By Bill McKibben

December 9, 2025

Events now move at a pace so exhausting that it’s hard to remember that 2025 began with an epic climate-fuelled disaster: large portions of the nation’s second-biggest city, Los Angeles, burned in a firestorm that lasted days, after a record-dry autumn. A succession of such tragedies followed—for instance, the killer floods along the Guadalupe River, in Texas, where atmospheric moisture off an overheated Gulf of Mexico had hit record levels. Or Hurricane Melissa, where wind gusts reached two hundred and fifty-two miles per hour, faster than ever measured in a tropical cyclone at sea, thanks to the superheated waters of the Caribbean. The same day that Melissa hit Jamaica, a storm dropped five feet of rain on central Vietnam in twenty-four hours, the second-biggest deluge in recorded history, and the start of a truly sodden autumn across Southeast Asia which has left more than a thousand people dead.

The year 2025 seems nearly certain to enter the books tied with 2023 as the second-hottest ever measured, trailing only 2024. Since both of those earlier years were influenced by a strong El Niño event, this one will have the dubious distinction of being the hottest without such an extraneous force. This is apparently what business as usual looks like for a planetary climate carrying our atmosphere’s current load of carbon dioxide and methane. On the three-year moving average by which we measure such things, the Earth is now inching ever-closer to the 1.5-degree-Celsius increase in temperature set out as a goal to avoid just a decade ago at the Paris climate talks. And diplomatic events in 2025 did little to ease fears about what’s coming. The thirtieth Conference of the Parties (COP) global climate talks in Belem, Brazil—which no one from the Trump Administration attended—just concluded, and the Times described the final document in unusually straightforward terms as “a victory for oil producers like Saudi Arabia and Russia.”

None of this should shock anyone. International climate diplomacy, since its high-water mark at Paris, in 2015, has been besieged by the fossil-fuel industry and its proxy governments, which now include, of course, the United States, historically the Earth’s chief producer of CO₂. I’m going to quote at some length from the speech the American President delivered to a silent U.N. General Assembly in September, because it sums up perfectly both his own imperviousness to fact and the assertiveness of the oil-and-gas world after his Inauguration this year.

Describing, for instance, his understanding of climate science (invented arguably in its modern form in the United States, whose scientists first tracked the gases accumulating in the atmosphere and then built the computer models allowing us to predict our fate), Donald Trump said, “It used to be global cooling. If you look back years ago in the nineteen-twenties and the nineteen-thirties, they said, Global cooling will kill the world. We have to do something. Then they said, Global warming will kill the world. But then it started getting cooler. It’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion.” Then, with regard to modern environmentalism, one of America’s greatest contributions to the world—a consciousness that allowed our air and water to be cleaned up dramatically over recent decades—Trump said, “In the United States, we have still radicalized environmentalists, and they want the factories to stop. Everything should stop. No more cows. We don’t want cows anymore. I guess they want to kill all the cows. They want to do things that are just unbelievable.”

In service to his vision of the world, the President has spent the year undoing every environmental law he can find. The zeal of his lieutenants—Lee Zeldin, at the Environmental Protection Agency; the former fracking executive Christopher Wright, at the Department of Energy; and others—has been remarkable. They’ve unleashed oil drilling along the coasts, opened up vast new stretches of the interior for coal mining, scrapped laws that attempted to staunch the flow of methane from gas wells into the air. Here’s Wright, on climate science, “Like, it’s a real physical phenomenon. It’s worth understanding a little bit. But to call it a crisis and point to disasters and say that that’s climate change, that’s to say, I’m not going to do my homework.”

Indeed, he and his colleagues are working hard to make it impossible for anyone to do their homework. They’ve shut down NASA’s upper Manhattan Goddard Institute for Space Studies, where James Hansen and other scientists first documented our plight, proposed to shut down the satellites that watch the climate changing, and even planned, in next year’s budget, to shut down the monitoring stations at Mauna Loa and elsewhere which keep track of how much carbon is pouring into the atmosphere. It is almost certainly the greatest collective act of scientific vandalism in recent American history. It would be easy, and accurate, to call 2025 the low point of human action on the climate crisis.

And yet, it’s at least possible that Trump and company’s assault on environmental norms is more shrill than confident. Because something else happened this year that gives at least some hope for the future: the remarkable rise in clean, renewable energy, which set every kind of record in 2025. In May, in a rush to get solar farms up before a subsidies-for-growth policy ended, China was installing an average of three gigawatts of solar capacity a day—the U.S. installed a total of twenty-one gigawatts in the first three quarters of this year. China, which is currently at the center of the renewable revolution, broke its own records with ease: after surpassing its 2030 targets in 2024, it set new targets for 2035 this year, including a renewable-electricity share exceeding thirty per cent. It’s not alone: India met a 2030 target early, too. As Reuters reported in July, fifty per cent of installed electric capacity in the world’s most populous country ran on something other than fossil fuels. That’s not the same thing as saying it generated half its power from the sun and wind, but India was definitely trending in the right direction: coal use dropped nearly three per cent in the first half of the year.

Similar transitions have been occurring almost everywhere: in November, the Energy Information Administration reported that California used seventeen per cent less natural gas to produce electricity than it had the year before. Pakistan, which has seen a rapid solar buildout in the past two years, reached an agreement with Qatar to divert twenty-four liquified natural-gas cargoes in 2026 after domestic demand fell—with Pakistan bearing the loss if Qatar sells the cargoes below contract price. They simply don’t need the imports anymore. All told, through September, we generated almost a third more energy from the sun this year than last.

All this flies in the face of Trump’s call for U.S. “energy dominance” from oil and gas. He’s tried, with some success, to build that dominance on the back of tariffs—when the E.U. and Japan agreed to buy hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of liquefied natural gas, he cut their threatened tariff rates substantially, in what could be described only as a shakedown. He’s also done his best to wreck the prospects of clean energy, not only gutting President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which was designed to help America catch up with China’s green-tech lead, but also trying to halt work on nearly completed wind farms off the Atlantic seaboard. Just weeks ago, he put the kibosh on what would have been America’s largest solar array, in Nevada. And he’s tried to take his case around the world, lecturing leaders about the folly of clean energy.

Here he is again, at the U.N., offering his definitive take on solar and wind power: “By the way, they’re a joke. They don’t work. They’re too expensive. They’re not strong enough to fire up the plants that you need to make your country great. The wind doesn’t blow. Those big windmills are so pathetic and so bad, so expensive to operate, and they have to be rebuilt all the time and they start to rust and rot. Most expensive energy ever conceived. And it’s actually energy. You’re supposed to make money with energy, not lose money. You lose money, the governments have to subsidize. You can’t put them out without massive subsidies.” And this is how he summed up the situation: “And I’m really good at predicting things. . . . I don’t say that in a braggadocious way, but it’s true. I’ve been right about everything. And I’m telling you that if you don’t get away from this green-energy scam, your country is going to fail.”

Or maybe it’s America that’s in trouble. When historians look back at 2025, I think the story they will tell is that, in the course of just a few months, the U.S. voluntarily surrendered technological and economic primacy to its theoretical chief adversary in the course of just a few months. China’s green-energy exports this year, through July, were one and a half times the size of American oil and gas exports in the same period. From Belem, the view seemed fairly clear. As the Times put it, “Countries like Brazil, India, and Vietnam are rapidly expanding solar and wind power. Poorer countries like Ethiopia and Nepal are leapfrogging over gasoline-burning cars to battery-powered ones. Nigeria, a petrostate, plans to build its first solar-panel manufacturing plant. Morocco is creating a battery hub to supply European automakers. Santiago, the capital of Chile, has electrified more than half of its bus fleet in recent years.”

Crucial to this global shift was China, which was selling the technology and often providing the financing. “Green and low-carbon transition is the trend of the time,” the Chinese Vice-Premier, Ding Xuexiang, told the COP 30 delegates. “We need to stay confident, balance such goals as environmental protection, economic development, job creation, and poverty eradication.” China is far from a benign world power, but countries that buy green tech from it will not depend on it going forward, as they would depend on a supplier of gas or coal. Instead, they’ll depend on the sun, which has an enviable record of rising most mornings.

Americans, too, are starting to worry about the domestic effects of relying on fossil fuels. Electricity prices are spiking around the country, up ten per cent as the Trump Administration simultaneously green-lights the endless expansion of juice-sucking data centers and constricts the supply of the cheapest forms of energy. Election results from last month—especially in New Jersey, where the victorious Democrat in the gubernatorial race, Mikie Sherrill, made a strong commitment to renewable power—suggest that voters have woken up to this economic reality. Expect Sherrill’s colleagues across the country to start making much of the new data indicating that some of the states with the lowest power rates, such as Iowa and North Dakota, can often be those with the most wind, sun, and hydropower.

None of this is happening fast enough. But there’s definitely a wild card in what has often seemed like a stacked deck, and it’s increasingly coming into play. Another year will give us a sense of how much the game has been changed. ♦

Bill McKibben is a contributing writer at The New Yorker focussing on climate policy. His books include “Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization” (August, 2025).

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/2025-in-review/climate-change-donald-trump