What you will find on this page: climate change a political phenomenon; what happens when the politcally powerful are hardline deniers? What is project 2025? Why should this matter to the rest of the world? Blow back

climate change denial and the political agenda

GOOGLE AI: Climate change denial is a political phenomenon, often tied to right-wing and conservative ideologies that prioritize traditional values, free markets, and limited government intervention, according to the provided sources. This resistance is driven by motivations to protect the existing social order, avoid international cooperation, and maintain the economic status quo, particularly the fossil fuel industry’s interests. Powerful actors, including think tanks and lobbyists, actively promote misinformation to undermine public trust in climate science and delay action, creating a major barrier to addressing the climate crisis.

What happens when the politically powerful are hardline deniers?

2020: What does Trump actually believe on climate change?

23 September 2025: In his Presidential Address at the UN General Assembly he also attacked climate policies and renewable energy, stating “windmills are pathetic,” and calling carbon footprint “a hoax.” Source

President Donald Trump spent a lot of time denying science in his first term. This time around, his administration is taking a more backhanded approach: baking climate denial into how federal agencies conduct their basic duties. From attacking the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) endangerment finding on climate emissions to thwarting the growing renewable energy industry and brazenly gutting federal institutions and grant programs that have played critical roles in advancing climate action, the Trump administration is trying to stop progress in its tracks. He is now openly dancing to the playbook of PROJECT 2025. Read more here

3 October 2025, PBS: Amid shutdown fight, Trump no longer distancing himself from Project 2025. President Donald Trump is openly embracing the conservative blueprint he desperately tried to distance himself from during the 2024 campaign, as one of its architects works to use the government shutdown to accelerate his goals of slashing the size of the federal workforce and punishing Democratic states. In a post on his Truth Social site Thursday morning, Trump announced he would be meeting with his budget chief, “Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent.” The comments represented a dramatic about-face for Trump, who spent much of last year denouncing Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation’s massive proposed overhaul of the federal government, which was drafted by many of his longtime allies and current and former administration officials. Read more here

5 March 2025, TIME: Here Are All of Trump’s Major Moves to Dismantle Climate Action: Since taking office, President Donald Trump has been implementing a slew of actions and executive orders that stand to have wide-reaching impacts on climate policies. During Trump’s first term, the administration put climate on the back burner—rolling back more than 125 environmental rules and policies. When former-President Joe Biden took office, he led the U.S. forward on climate action, signing the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest federal climate change investment in American history. Now, the Trump administration stands to dismantle much of the momentum it has inherited—curbing progress to reduce fossil fuel emissions, the largest contributor to climate change, just as the world surpassed 1.5°C of warming in 2024—the hottest year on record. Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law’s “Climate Backtracker,” has logged nearly 100 efforts to scale back or eliminate federal climate mitigation and adaptation measures since the administration took office at the end of January—ranging from boosting fossil-fuel production to withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accords. Here are some of the major ways the Trump Administration is undoing climate action. Read more here

What is Project 2025?

The Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project is a well-funded (eight-figure) effort of the Heritage Foundation and more than 100 organizations to enable a future anti-democratic presidential administration to take swift, far-right action that would cut wages for working people, dismantle social safety net programs, reverse decades of progress for civil rights, redefine the way our society operates, and undermine our economy. A central pillar of Project 2025 is the“Mandate for Leadership,” a 900+ page policy playbook authored by former Trump administration officials and other extremists that provides a radical vision for our nation and a roadmap to implement it. For more details of what this means, access here The People’s Guide to Project 2025.

This Project 2025 Tracker allows you to track all the Project 2025’s policy proposals that Trump and his administration is implementing for them. Access Tracker here.

Some of the actions taken, to date – October 2025 – regarding the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) and the Department of Commerce (includes NASA & NOAA) that have ramifications for mitigating emissions / adapting to climate change outcomes.  

Why should this matter to the rest of the world?

The latest data for world carbon emissions (2022) by country has the USA as the 2nd largest emitter behind China. Note also the carbon footprint of its population is 14.21 tons per person compared to China’s 8.89 tons per person. 

 

21 Jan 2025, CAP:  The Trump Administration’s Retreat From Global Climate Leadership

President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement marks a deliberate weakening of the multilateral system, jeopardizing global efforts to combat the climate crisis and risking America’s economic and environmental future. As climate disasters grow in frequency and intensity, from devastating wildfires to relentless hurricanes to record-breaking heat waves, the Trump administration has once again taken a step that threatens to deepen the climate crisis: formally announcing the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. In the midst of an escalating climate crisis that’s upending livelihoods and lives, this decision raises urgent questions about the future of national and global progress. Namely, what does it mean for the international climate effort to combat climate change when the world’s largest historical emitter steps away from the table? And what are the implications for Americans already grappling with the mounting costs of a warming planet?

President Donald Trump’s decision to again withdraw does not reflect a failure of the Paris Agreement, but rather signals a profound abdication of leadership. The United States now joins Iran, Libya, and Yemen as the only countries in the entire world not party to the agreement. The question now is whether global momentum can overcome the absence of U.S. federal leadership—and what role subnational actors, international partners, and everyday citizens can play in ensuring climate progress continues, even as the clock ticks ever louder. Read more here

29 July 2025, The Conversation As US climate data-gathering is gutted, Australian forecasting is now at real risk. But even as damage from climate change intensifies, political change overseas is threatening Australia’s ability to track what’s happening now, and predict what will happen next. The United States has historically been a world leader in earth observation systems and freely sharing the gathered data. Sharing of data, expertise and resources between scientists in the US and Australia makes possible the high-quality weather, climate and ocean monitoring and forecasting we rely on. But this is no longer guaranteed. Under the Trump administration, key US scientific institutions and monitoring programs are facing deep cuts. These cuts aren’t just cosmetic – they will end essential data gathering. Australia has long relied on these data sources. When they dry up, it will make it much harder for scientists to look ahead.

Forecasting weather and climate isn’t simple. To produce accurate forecasts, scientists rely on earth observation systems which monitor changes to Earth’s land, atmosphere, ocean and ice. Much of this vital data is gathered by satellites, augmented by ocean data from thousands of robotic ARGO floats which capture data on ocean temperatures and salinity. Using this data to model the complexity of the Earth system requires research expertise and supercomputers.  Read more here

Note: this applies to a mjority of other countries also relying on the same data sets.

 

Blow back

24 April 2025, BBC: Inside the desperate rush to save decades of US scientific data from deletion. Swathes of scientific data deletions are sweeping across US government websites – with decades of health, climate change and extreme weather research at risk. Now, scientists are racing to save their work before it’s lost. Some of them are in the US. Others are scattered around the world. There are hundreds, many even thousands of people involved across multiple networks. And they keep a damn close eye on their phones. No one knows when the next alert or request to save a chunk of US government-held climate data will come in. Such data, long available online, keeps getting taken down by US President Donald Trump’s administration. For the last six months or so, Cathy Richards has been entrenched in the response. She works for one of several organisations bent on downloading and archiving public data before it disappears. This rush to safeguard vital environmental data is part of a broader movement to rescue all kinds of scientific data published online by the US government. Biomedical and health researchers working with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for example, have been frantically searching for ways to back up important data following executive orders issued by Trump about what information on gender and diversity may be published by federal bodies. Scientists have expressed fears about a wide range of resources that might go next – from historical weather records to data gathered by Nasa satellites.

On 16 April, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) announced that a list of datasets regarding ocean monitoring were now scheduled to be removed in early May. Scientists are also worried that efforts to gather new climate data will fall by the wayside. A government report in March suggested that the Trump administration was considering cancelling the lease of the support office for a major carbon dioxide (CO2) monitoring research station in Hawaii. The Mauna Loa observatory has been tracking atmospheric CO2 concentrations since 1958 and just last year recorded the largest jump in such levels since records began. “Climate science is only possible because of long-term datasets,” says Lilian Dove, a US Noaa climate and global change research fellow at Brown University. “Without continuing to collect that data, preserve that data, our field is in really big trouble.” Read more here

Debunking “junk science”

STEP 1: 29 June 2025: Department of Energy Issues Report Evaluating Impact of Greenhouse Gasses on U.S. Climate, Invites Public Comment

The U.S. Department of Energy today released a new report evaluating existing peer-reviewed literature and government data on climate impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions and providing a critical assessment of the conventional narrative on climate change. Link to access full report. The Department of Energy (DOE) published a report entitled A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate, evaluating existing peer-reviewed literature and government data on climate impacts of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions and providing a critical assessment of the conventional narrative on climate change. Among the key findings, the report concludes that carbon dioxide (CO₂) -induced warming appears to be less damaging economically than commonly believed, and that aggressive mitigation strategies could be more harmful than beneficial. Additionally, the report finds that U.S. policy actions are expected to have undetectably small direct impacts on the global climate and any effects will emerge only with long delays. The report was developed by the 2025 Climate Working Group, a group of five independent scientists assembled by Energy Secretary Chris Wright with diverse expertise in physical science, economics, climate science and academic research. See also this link. 

STEP 2: 12 August: Two leading science and environment groups are going to court to challenge the Trump administration’s use of a secretively convened group of climate skeptics to prepare a now widely disparaged report in its attempt to undo the Endangerment Finding. Environmental Defense Fund and Union of Concerned Scientists are challenging the secret formation and hidden activities of the “Climate Working Group,”  Access article here

STEP 3: 14 August 2025, RealClimate: Critiques of the ‘Critical Review’. The first somewhat comprehensive reviews of the DOE critical review are now coming online. First out of the gate is a nice interactive from CarbonBrief based on direct input from scientists whose papers were cited, sometimes in misleading or false ways. They have a nice color-coding for which is which. Access article here

STEP 4: 27 August 2025, Statement of the American Meteorological Society: The Practice and Assessment of Science: Five Foundational Flaws in the Department of Energy’s 2025 Climate Report

Here we (AMS) identify five foundational flaws in the Department of Energy’s (DoE’s) 2025 Climate Synthesis report^[1]. Each of these flaws, alone, places the report at odds with scientific principles and practices. For the report to accurately characterize scientific understanding and to be useful as a basis for informed policy and decision making, the DoE must first rectify all five flaws and then conduct a comprehensive assessment of scientific evidence. Were DoE to do so, the result will almost certainly be conclusions that are broadly consistent with previous comprehensive scientific assessments of climate change, such as those from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM); American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS); Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), American Meteorological Society (AMS), and a wide-range of other scientific organizations. The Department of Energy’s recent attempt to synthesize climate science has five foundational flaws as a scientific effort: Access statement here

STEP 5: 30 August 2025: Re: A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate, Docket ID No. DOE-HQ-2025-0207 Access review here More than 85 experts contributed to this Climate Experts’ Review of the DOE Climate Working Group Report, with over 430 pages of comments and background. Note: the public comment period was only open to the 2 September. 

STEP 7: 10 September 2025: Trump administration dissolves climate skeptic panel after legal challenge. The Trump administration has officially disbanded a controversial climate research panel following mounting legal pressure and widespread scientific criticism of its work questioning established climate science consensus.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright confirmed the dissolution of the five-member climate working group in a September 3 letter to participating researchers. The decision came after environmental organizations filed a lawsuit alleging violations of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, specifically citing failures to properly disclose the group’s formation and activities. The Environmental Defense Fund and Union of Concerned Scientists argued that the working group’s creation violated federal transparency requirements by operating in secrecy for months before public disclosure. Additionally, the lawsuit challenged the deliberate selection of members known for contrarian views on climate science, arguing this approach undermined balanced scientific assessment. The disbanded group included prominent climate skeptics John Christy and Roy Spencer from the University of Alabama at Huntsville, Steven Koonin from Stanford’s Hoover Institution, Georgia Tech professor emeritus Judith Curry, and Canadian economist Ross McKitrick. Wright had personally selected these researchers earlier this year to author a report challenging mainstream climate science conclusions.

The report triggered unprecedented pushback from the scientific community. More than 100 climate scientists coordinated efforts to submit over 400 pages of critical public comments to the Energy Department last week, systematically challenging the working group’s methodology and conclusions.

A court filing (from 9/4) from DOE has noted that the Climate Working Group has been disbanded (as of 9/3). This was done to make the EDF/UCS lawsuit moot, but it also means that DOE is withdrawing the report, no-one will respond appropriately to the comments submitted, and (possibly) it becomes irrelevant for the EPA reconsideration of the Endangerment Finding.

HOWEVER IT IS ALL ABOUT SPIN! 

Despite disbanding the working group, the Department of Energy will not withdraw the controversial report. A DOE spokesperson stated that the document and subsequent public comments “achieved the purpose of the CWG, namely to catalyze broader discussion about the certainties and uncertainties of current climate science.” Wright defended the group’s work in his dissolution letter, stating that their efforts “excited the much-needed debate in this area” despite facing resistance from scientific orthodoxy. He expressed satisfaction that the resulting discourse “exceeded my expectations” and created space for diverse scientific viewpoints. The administration simultaneously removed previous National Climate Assessment reports from government websites and terminated scientists working on future assessments, drawing additional alarm from the climate science community. Access more details here

GOODNESS… WAIT A MOMENT … IT LOOKS LIKE IT IS NOT OVER YET!

Update: Via Andy Revkin, the EDF/UCS’s blistering response to the DOE filing. Pass the popcorn…

INTRODUCTION
“For months, Defendants brazenly violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act. They constituted the Climate Working Group (CWG) in secret, had it meet in secret to produce a
report with advice and recommendations for policymakers, and then provided the report to EPA in secret for use in a proposal to rescind EPA’s Endangerment Finding. Defendants present no serious argument that they did not violate FACA in taking all of these actions. Instead, when these actions were challenged in court, Defendants purported to dissolve the CWG the day before their opposition was due, and in their filing the next day, they argued that the dissolution mooted the case and left the Court powerless to provide relief for their many legal violations.

But the rule of law is not a game of catch me if you can. DOE, EPA, and the CWG violated FACA with every action they took producing and utilizing the CWG Report, and those
unlawful actions continue to harm Plaintiffs in myriad ways. Indeed, Defendants do not dispute that the CWG lacked fairly balanced views—including views representative of those held by Plaintiffs—and was subject to inappropriate influence from Secretary Wright. The continued existence and use of the CWG Report produced with these legal infirmities significantly harms Plaintiffs, and there are multiple forms of declaratory, injunctive and Administrative Procedure Act relief that this Court may enter to redress these injuries…”

WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT?? Watch this space…