Days into Trump’s second presidency, the dismantling of the climate agenda has begun

After the Village People had performed YMCA, Elon Musk had delivered his controversial salute and Donald Trump returned as US president and got down to work, there was a certain, leaden sense of deja vu.

America will, once again, exit the Paris climate agreement. Even though the US is already extracting more oil and gas than any country has ever done in history, this isn’t enough, and more land and ocean must be drilled, including Arctic Alaska. “We will be a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it,” as Trump put it.

Any regulation with the word “climate” in it will be excised, wind turbines and electric vehicles stymied, gas exports ramped up. The federal government will be mobilised to salve the new president’s fury at energy efficiency measures for somehow worsening toilets, showers and washing machines.

And there will be more to come over these next four, long years. More, if you can bear it, after this week’s most important reads.

For environmental advocates, Trump’s re-election was something like the return of a nightmare they never thought they’d experience again. “No one in American history has shown more disdain for the environment,” says Kierán Suckling, executive director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “His anti-environment agenda is overwhelmingly unpopular and truly a threat to life on Earth.”

Coming on the heels of the hottest year ever recorded, having a man who calls the climate crisis a “giant hoax” in the world’s most powerful office is an ominous sign. Governments are already failing to meet their own targets to cut planet-heating pollution and backtracking by the US, the globe’s second largest emitter, will further gum up progress and winnow away financial aid for developing countries suffering the brunt of heatwaves, floods and other climate-driven calamities.

But while the world is still not doing enough to avert dangerous global heating and the impact of climate activism has faltered since the heady days of Greta Thunberg prior to the pandemic, some other things have changed since Trump was last president.

Global investment in renewable energy now eclipses that of fossil fuels, electric cars are now the vehicle of choice from China to Norway and, even in the US, record investments are being made in solar, wind, batteries and other clean energy technologies in places where manufacturing was considered moribund.

None of this is happening fast enough to head off climate disaster, but it has changed the calculus. More than 80% of clean energy activity is happening in Republican-held districts of the US, bringing hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Trump’s attempts to turn the clock back to an era of untrammelled fossil fuels will be more awkward to achieve this time and is set to encounter resistance even from some in his own party.

“This is the first of what will be many attempts to ignore reality and try to stall the world’s unstoppable and irreversible move to a clean energy economy,” former vice-president Al Gore said of Trump’s first executive orders. “But these proclamations are not reflective of our political and economic reality. These efforts to roll back progress – particularly the hugely popular clean energy investments in the Inflation Reduction Act – will be met with opposition from both political parties.”

One analysis has even found that if states, cities and businesses in the US step up their climate ambitions – perhaps optimistic given banks are retreating from their green pledges and tech billionaires’ new fealty to Trump – the US could still slash its emissions in half this decade and get to net zero by 2050.

As the new US president sets about dismantling environmental rules and calling for “drill baby drill”, the emergence of this greener economy and people willing to fight for it and against polluting industries will face a severe stress test. The direction of travel may not change, despite Trump’s efforts, but the climate emergency was always a timed challenge. Four years may become a long, lost stretch.

Read more:

The good news

The bad news

Down to Earth readers on the eco-friendly changes they made for the planet

Instead of a traditional Down to Earth reader submission, this week we give space to journalist Sam Pyrah, who wrote for the Guardian series The One Change That Worked on how getting stuck in and volunteering to clean up her local park helped quell her fatalist feelings about the environment.

“It was the counsellor I was seeing who switched me on to the idea of volunteering,” Pyrah writes. “As I sobbed in front of my computer screen during one of our online sessions, mumbling about turtle doves (the bird most likely to be the next extinction in the UK), he said: ‘Do something.’ He gave me three rules: make it simple, immediate and collaborative.

“That’s how, a week later, I found myself in Victoria Park in Ashford, Kent, fishing old carrier bags out of the river. In subsequent sessions, our band of volunteers put up bat-boxes, created new paths, renovated the dried-out pond and surveyed for amphibians.”

Let us know the positive change you’ve made in your life by replying to this newsletter, or emailing us on downtoearth@theguardian.com

Profiling the Earth’s most at-risk animals

Population: 115,000-130,000
Location: sub-Saharan Africa
Status: vulnerable

The hippopotamus is one of the heaviest land animals after the elephant. Not that the land is what they seek: water is their sanctuary during the heat of the day in sub-Saharan Africa, leaving only in the cool of night to feed on grasses. While the hippo has a fairly high population, it is at serious risk from habitat destruction and hunting.

For more on wildlife at threat, visit the Age of Extinction page here

One image that sums up the week in environmental news

Credit: Musuk Nolte

In this stark photo essay, photographer Musuk Nolte visits the Brazilian Amazon, which in 2024 endured some of the worst droughts for 120 years.

From floating houses run aground to withered forests and isolated fishing communities in Manacapuru, Nolte captures a deeply worrying climate crisis, which saw river levels drop to record lows. Above, he captures a group of river dwellers transporting supplies across a dried Solimoes river.

For more of the week’s best environmental pictures, catch up on The week in wildlife here