Despite a year of record-setting heat, devastating climate-generated wildfires, floods, and extreme weather around the world, action to mitigate the climate crisis languished during 2025, especially in the United States. In a blatant quid pro quo, President Trump is rewarding coal, oil, and gas companies for the estimated $450 million they contributed to get him elected. To shore up their profits the Trump administration is increasing subsidies, providing special tax breaks, removing pollution controls, denying funding for alternative clean energy projects, and opening-up large public areas for drilling. This tragic assault on our health and environment, however, is not the only climate story of 2025. The year has also provided hope for the future through phenomenal increases in clean, renewable energy.

In the United States the reversals in efforts to mitigate the climate crisis have been vicious and disingenuous. More than 40 people who have directly worked for oil, gas, or coal companies have been installed in key administrative positions where they have proceeded to undo as many environmental laws as possible – all to shore up fossil fuel companies and to discourage the expansion of clean energy. 

Donald Trump’s often-repeated assertion that climate change is a hoax has led his administration to seek ways to undermine climate science. They’ve produced a spurious report from a few contrarian scientists to confuse the public about the science that underpins how carbon pollution from burning fossil fuels overheats the atmosphere (global warming) and causes extreme weather (climate change). They have removed from government websites any mention that climate change is caused by human actions, such as driving gasoline-burning vehicles or heating our homes with gas or generating electricity with coal.

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, where James Hansen and other scientists first documented the connection between increasing atmospheric temperatures and burning fossil fuels, has been shut down. The National Center for Atmospheric Research, which since 1960 has played a key part in the rise of modern weather and climate forecasting, is being defunded. Next year the monitoring stations at Mauna Loa and elsewhere, which keep track of how much carbon is pouring into the atmosphere, are due to be closed.

To counter the inevitable swing in the marketplace to cheaper renewable energy, President Trump has utilized illegitimate emergency injunctions to shut down or defund clean energy projects. Nearly 2,000 renewable energy projects, mostly solar, wind, and battery storage installations, have been cancelled.

Internationally, 2025 was also a good year for fossil fuel interests. More than 1,600 fossil fuel lobbyists dominated the 30th annual meeting of the United Nations climate talks, recently concluded in Brazil, significantly outnumbering every single country’s delegation apart from the host, Brazil. The conference ended in disappointment, its final document failing to even mention fossil fuels. The New York Times described it as  “a victory for oil producers”.

Author and climate activist, Bill McKibben, characterizes these recent setbacks as “the greatest collective act of scientific vandalism in recent American history.” He goes on to say that it would be easy, and accurate, to call 2025 the low point of human action on the climate crisis.

Fortunately, however, the gaslighting and self-dealing by fossil fuel interests and their political enablers, is not the only story of 2025, nor is it the most important. Thanks mostly to the vision and industrial leadership of China, the economics of energy systems has changed forever. Over the last decade, China’s huge investment in the innovation and production of solar, wind, and battery storage technologies has effectively made clean energy cheaper than coal, oil, or gas, making the transition to a clean energy future inevitable. The only thing delaying the transition is the greed and machinations of Big Oil and its enabling Petrostates, including the United States, the world’s largest producer of fossil fuels and historically the biggest contributor to carbon pollution.

Indicative of hope, the journal, Science, chose as its 2025 “science breakthrough of the year” the remarkable surge of renewable energy around the planet. This is the year that renewables surpassed coal as a source of generating electricity worldwide, and solar and wind grew fast enough to cover increases in global electricity use. The journal noted that China makes 80 percent of the world’s solar cells, 70 percent of its wind turbines, and 70 percent of its lithium batteries, at prices no competitor can match. 

China’s burgeoning exports of clean energy technology are already transforming the rest of the world. In Africa and South Asia people are realizing that inexpensive rooftop solar can power lights, cellphones, and fans. Solar, wind, and battery storage are giving developing countries, particularly the vast number of nations that have to import oil and gas, the opportunity to become energy independent. Even in the United States, despite Trump’s prioritization of fossil fuel projects, about 90% of new U.S. electrical generating capacity added to the grid in the first seven months of 2025 was solar or wind.

The Trump administration is desperately stacking the deck for an oil industry that is in decline and soon to be overtaken by clean energy. This dynamic is playing out right here in Santa Barbara County. A brash Texas oil company, Sable Offshore, is defying local authorities to resurrect a failed oil pipeline and eke out some dwindling profit. Emboldened by Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” policy, despite the health and environmental risks, and regardless of local government plans to phase out oil and gas and pursue a clean energy future for its residents, Sable Oil persists.

Fossil fuel interests paid handsomely to exploit this moment under President Trump, but their days are numbered. A clean energy future is irrepressible.