Climate hysteria, which was always about power and money, finally seems to have peaked, and President Trump helped lead the way.
There has been a huge shift within the public and private sectors on climate change as it has dawned on governments and companies that the United States, under President Donald Trump, will no longer be a patsy to a cabal of international elites who seek to impose costly climate restrictions upon American businesses and international climate boondoggles upon nations.
Trump’s actions are draining the climate swamp of resources, supporters, spirit, and momentum. These include defunding climate boondoggles across federal agencies, pulling the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, withdrawing the United States from dozens of climate-monitoring and wealth-transfer organizations (most importantly the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change), and rescinding the greenhouse gas endangerment finding.
With America no longer playing the fool, public and private entities are withdrawing from or reducing their climate commitments and reembracing fossil fuels. Of course, this would not happen if they really believed the hype that the world faces a pending climate catastrophe that can be stopped exclusively by eschewing fossil fuels. They are tacitly admitting Trump is right and climate change is a scam/hoax.
Examples of the rapid decline of the climate alarmism narrative are all around us. For example, the UN IPCC recently held its 64th meeting of the science committee, at which it failed to set a date for the production of the next IPCC Assessment report. It’s not just that they can’t agree on who will write the report or what its scope will be, they can’t even decide on a deadline for when to produce and publish it.
At an international meeting in Colombia this April, 60 countries agreed on the need to phase out fossil fuels — sounds like a big move forward until one realizes that is less than a third of the countries (more than 200) that had previously agreed to timelines for emission reductions in the Paris climate agreement. Importantly, none of the world’s top emitters signed on. China, the United States, India, Russia, and 140 other countries didn’t bother joining Colombia’s anti-fossil fuel crusade. That’s a step backward, not forward, as the media tried to portray it.
In another blow to the climate scam, researchers warned in an article in The Lancet, one of the preeminent medical journals, that the European Union was truncating the reach and scope of its emission-reporting requirements. The proposed regulatory change would exempt an estimated 80 percent of organizations previously bound by law to report emissions and work toward reductions from doing so.
Then there is the case of Germany, where grim electoral prospects seem to be forcing the government to end its enforced adoption of certain green technologies and fuels.
“In a shock move, the German government will allow citizens to use oil and gas to heat their homes again, even though this might increase global temperatures by a thousandth of a degree in 80 years time,” reports Jo Nova. “The government or rather, the taxpayers, will still be forced to subsidize 30 to 70% of the cost of a new heat pump, but won’t actually fine anyone or put them in jail if they buy an oil or gas heater.”
Moving on to the private sector, industries are quickly abandoning their emission-reduction targets. Shortly after Trump was elected but before he took office,
hundreds of banks and other companies began abandoning various UN-sanctioned or -endorsed climate groups, which set reporting requirements for carbon dioxide emissions and goals for emission reductions. By early in 2025, big tech companies, fearing a lack of energy for their AI data centers, began to embrace nuclear power, natural gas, and to a lesser extent even coal in some locations. They want whatever is needed to power the burgeoning AI industry and their tech reliably, climate concerns be damned.
More recently, 18 major automobile manufacturers, including major brands like Ford, Honda, Nissan, and Volkswagen, dramatically scaled back their electric vehicle goals, in some cases abandoning entire lines of electric vehicles and programs entirely. Demand for electric vehicles flattened in 2025, only to take “a dive off a cliff after federal tax credits phased out at the end of September,” as Autoblog reports.
And it’s not just car companies. Bloomberg NEF reports that oil companies, which never should have jumped on the suicidal climate-alarmism bandwagon in the first place, are also reducing their emission-reduction goals, with the world’s largest oil and gas companies cutting spending on low-carbon technologies by more than a third over the past year, to $25.7 billion from more than $38 billion in 2024. It’s the first time in eight years their spending on climate change has decreased.
The power sector is not immune to the gravitational pull of Trump’s common sense climate agenda, either. Environment America has reported that as of March, 8.1 GW of coal capacity, consisting of 33 fossil fuel generating units across 15 power plants, that had been scheduled for closure by the end 2025, have been kept online to maintain grid reliability and power AI expansion. Most recently, the two largest coal power plants in Pennsylvania agreed to stay in operation through 2032, four years beyond their planned retirement date, specifically to ensure grid stability in the face of growing AI data center demand. Even Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, approved the plan to keep the plants open.
Climate change just isn’t the political or economic draw it once was, which is a good thing. Now the world’s companies and governments can get back to their real jobs of protecting individual rights and advancing economic prosperity for the poor and rich alike. Thank you, President Trump!
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D. (hsburnett@heartland.org) is director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute, a non-partisan, non-profit research organization based in Illinois.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 