Trump fossil-fuel push setting back green progress decades, critics warn [View all]

Source: The Guardian

Sun 20 Jul 2025 08.00 EDT
Last modified on Sun 20 Jul 2025 11.42 EDT


Ever since Donald Trump began his second presidency, he has used an “invented” national energy emergency to help justify expanding oil, gas and coal while slashing green energy – despite years of scientific evidence that burning fossil fuels has contributed significantly to climate change, say scholars and watchdogs.

It’s an agenda that in only its first six months, has put back environmental progress by decades, they say.

Trump’s skewed and unscientific energy priorities have come even as climate-change related weather disasters from huge floods in Texas to giant California fires have increased, and as Trump regulators are clamping down on spending for alternative fuels and weather research.

As the death toll from the Texas floods rose to over 100 on 7 July, Trump signed an executive order that added new treasury department restrictions on tax subsidies for wind and solar projects. That order came days after Trump signed his One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which included provisions to gut big tax credits for green energy contained in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act legislation Congress passed during Joe Biden’s presidency

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/20/trump-energy-environment-agenda