Bill McKibben: “Trump … assault on environmental norms is more shrill than confident”

Essay by Eric Worrall

“… When historians look back at 2025, … the story they will tell is … the U.S. … surrendered … primacy to its … adversary …”

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

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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.”

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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. …

Similar transitions have been occurring almost everywhere …

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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. …

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

Let me see if I got this right. It’s a “Low point of Human Inaction on Climate Change”, but renewable energy “set every kind of record in 2025”.

Which is it Bill?

The proof that President Trump is right about renewables being horribly expensive and in no way the future is the cost of electricity in California.

If the cost of electricity in hardline green places like California was to fall substantially, to become the cheapest electricity in the USA, I’d be interested in how they did it. We all would. But the reality is once you add the cost of maintaining an entire second generation system, whether that be gas turbines which are kept on standby most of the time, or enormous overcapacity and days or weeks of battery backup capacity, renewables are insanely expensive. And will remain so for the foreseeable future.

Bill also managed to ignore the AI climate action wrecking ball in his article. You can’t just close your eyes and wish it would all go away Bill, energy guzzling AI is here to stay. My prediction, by 2030 even California will cave. If California wants to remain a tech center, they’ll have to embrace cheap energy, just like everyone else.

It is Bill McKibben and his fellow greens who are becoming desperate and shrill. Thanks to AI, our energy sanity victory is now inevitable. But it’s going to be fun watching the green Kabuki show, as those who have inflicted so much punishment on our society with their promotion of incoherent energy ideas are forced to watch the final collapse of all their grandiose Net Zero dreams.