2025: The Year Big Oil's Investment In Trump Paid Off
Also the year Trump outlawed science, Project 2025 happened to the planet, and China became the climate's best hope.
As we slouch towards 2026 to see what horrors a second year of Trump bring (in general, but specifically in terms of climate and energy), we’re looking back at what we wrote two days after the election about where we thought climate policy would go in a second Trump term. Oh, Dok, you sweet summer child. By last year’s New Year’s Wrapup, I’d gone and leased an EV, assuming correctly that Trump would kill the EV tax credits, which went away at the end of September this year. To get in on the credit before it vanished, Americans bought EVs in record numbers (except for Tesla Cybertrucks, because nobody wants those).
But we seriously underestimated just how happy red-state Republicans would be to roll over and let die Biden clean-energy policies that were already bringing a manufacturing boom to their states. We also thought the auto industry would put up more of a fight to preserve the tax credits that were helping them open new assembly lines for EVs and batteries. At the very least, we thought, they’d want “regulatory certainty” instead of a partisan seesaw of policy changes. Instead, both the industry and Republicans who liked all those new jobs let Trump roll right over them, possibly fearing that even trying to negotiate would result in far worse backlash from King Tinydick.
We would like to apologize for ever thinking there would be any limits to how far the fucker would go, or how far Republicans would bend over backwards to let him go there. Silly us! Hey, maybe the courts will still save us [HOLLOW MORDANT LAUGHTER].
The Fucking Fuckers Fuck Up (Almost) Everything
Right out of the gate, with the help of executive orders literally written for him by Big Oil lobbyists, Trump declared war on Joe Biden’s impressive climate agenda, withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement on Day One. In July, Trump’s EPA moved to eliminate its mandate to regulate greenhouse emissions, and the Energy Department pretended that some hired cranks had disproven the science (they hadn’t), not just freezing funds for clean energy, but also eliminating jobs in the National Weather Service and other agencies that acted like science was real, a trashing of America’s science infrastructure that hasn’t let up. Even grants to plant more trees were cancelled, because trees are DEI.
Legislatively, Republicans in Congress used the Big Blowjobs for Billionaires Bill to gut most of the good stuff in the Inflation Reduction Act, although there were one or two bright spots: Grid-scale batteries and enhanced geothermal will continue to get tax credits. A few manufacturing-side tax credits for EVs and batteries survived, too, although without the consumer-side incentives, demand has dropped off. And some of the very worst amendments to that bill failed. Very much a “could have been worse” situation, but those will all be important factors for getting the US back on track with fighting climate change in whatever post-Trump future we face.
And here’s a surprise: Somehow the Bugfuck Ugly Bill didn’t actually repeal the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s program to build out the EV charging network, although Trump froze funding for the program for months until forced by a lawsuit to resume funding. Several states are even getting back the funding Trump froze. More widely, blue states and cities are continuing to pursue climate goals and coming together to cooperate on interstate action, too. It’s no replacement for having a functioning federal government, but it’s a start.
Now The Good News
Trump can’t change the fact that climate change is real, no matter if the EPA no longer says humans are causing it by burning fossil fuels. And he also can’t change another fact: Clean energy is just plain more efficient and economical than fossil fuels, and clean energy development is booming in the rest of the world, especially in China. Just yesterday, The New York Times ran a major report on how cheap electricity from Chinese solar panels is transforming Africa (we’re out of gift links this month; here’s an archive link). Geopolitical stuff aside, one great thing about widespread solar from anyplace is that it powers, and empowers, local economic development without the same exploitation and ecological disaster oil does. You can’t embargo the sun. Unless you’re Mr. Burns.
Renewables are still booming in the US because they make economic sense, despite Trump’s efforts to halt the energy transition and prop up fossil fuels. Ninety-six percent of new US power plants in 2024 were carbon-free, and while Trump’s attempts to kill offshore wind and industry attempts to ramp up new gas plants to run data centers put a ding in that in 2025, the vast majority of new electric plants this year were still clean: Half were solar, nearly a third were battery storage, and a tenth were wind. Fossil gas plants made up just 7.7 percent of new power plants from January through November, and although a number of coal plants will stay online past their scheduled shutdowns, nobody in the US is even thinking of building new ones. Batteries keep coming onto the grid (remember, there are still significant tax advantages for them) and wind and solar keep meeting more and more of our energy needs, both here and around the world.
And while EV demand dropped after the tax credits were killed, the rest of the world is adopting electric transportation (not just cars, but trains and buses) like crazy. Thanks to Trump, there may or may not be a US auto industry in another two decades, depending on whether US manufacturers figure out how to build affordable small EVs. Ford quietly discontinued its F-150 Lightning EV pickup in December because while Americans like big trucks, the truck-buying market wasn’t in the mood for a very expensive electric pickup. Ford will try again with a midsized EV pickup, and there are a whole lot of small, affordable EVs expected to debut in 2026, including Chevy’s revived Bolt compact; the slightly bigger Equinox EV is the third-best-selling EV in the US (and the top not-a-Tesla electric). Sometime in late 2026, the stripped-down economy-model Slate truck will arrive, with a price starting in the mid-$20,000 range. If you want an entertainment system, it’s extra.
So while Mad King Donald tries to fight a rearguard war to protect fossil fuel profits for another decade or two — at potentially devastating cost to the climate and to humanity — Bill McKibben is still right, just as he was in 2021: The future is electric, and fossil energy is doomed. The question, more pressing than ever, is how much damage we’ll continue to do to the planet and its ability to sustain civilization before we reach that future.
Here’s a reason to cautiously take heart: Science magazine named “the seemingly unstoppable growth of renewable energy” its 2025 Breakthrough of the Year. US voters from the local to the national level will decide how quickly we rejoin the rest of the world on that path.
[Canary Media / Clean Technica / Grist / Financial Times / NYT (archive link) / Science]
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Even the Saudi's know there's no future in oil.
There is some hope at least, because in the end clean renewables really do pencil out. There's people who believe that just wasting fuel with inefficiency is "manly" and "cool," but their pocketbooks won't agree.