I had a hard time writing the annual charts and graphs email this year. We started this tradition at the end of 2017, the end of the first year of Trump’s first term in office. And I think it’s still worth doing, because one of the truisms of the climate crisis is that you can’t fight it if you aren’t honest and informed about the science. And I still think it’s worth visualizing and verbalizing US and international climate emissions, policies, where we need to go, and how we might get there. But the hard part this year was that we also use this to show you how radical, digitally supported, non-violent direct action is making a difference, in the hopes that it will inspire a few of you to make a year end gift.
I write a lot of emails every year, and I don’t mind asking for money when we need help with specific projects – a training or an action or just delivering a bunch of letters to Congress or some other decision maker. But this year I didn’t want to ask for money – not because I think what we’re doing is any less important – but because “general support” contributions feel like a bad joke when we’re operating in a fascist authoritarian petro state.
So here’s my hope and my offer for this year: 2025 sucked and, as we’ll show with charts and graphs, the Trump regime is now the main antagonist to global climate action. The single best thing you can do for the climate and our common home, is to help topple this regime. So we’re going to fight like hell to do that next year – and if you’ve got a little extra cash, or you want to invest in climate action that’s focussed on disruption, movement building, and non violent direct action, please chip in here.
Let’s start with the basics.
As I think everyone knows the Trump regime has pulled out of all international climate pacts and agreements, and is actively attacking the transition to renewable energy here and around the world. While they couldn’t undo all the progress that’s been made over the last few years – US emissions are still down from their peak around 2008- global emissions are still rising. As the next two graphs show.
The policies put in place under President Biden, like the Inflation Reduction Act, were still not enough, but they were bending the curve in the right direction. Trump hasn’t just abandoned those goals, he’s repealed the laws, trashed the supply chains, poisoned International alliances and appears ready to declare war for oil. What’s at stake here isn’t just whether the US says it will act on climate or does so, but whether the US can prevent the entire rest of the world from acting in time. And here at the end of 2025, the jury is still out.
That one piece of good news
The reason we’re framing this as a fight for the future of global emissions as opposed to a domestic policy issue (clearly it’s both), is that the other big storyline of 2025 and climate change has been to explosive growth of renewable energy, especially solar. That’s why we spent so much time fighting alongside Sun Day this year, and pushing pieces of policy and local action to boost renewables where we could. For the first time since the industrial revolution, renewable electricity is genuinely the cheapest, easiest form of energy to produce. And it’s re-shaping global markets, global climate goals, and the power of the global south – literally, in terms of electrons, and politically in terms of who calls the shots and makes investments in our collective future. Just check out this graph from Science magazine:
You could see glimpses of this change through the haze of a million little fires set by the Trump Regime – our disruption of his address to the United Nation’s General Assembly. The Hands off and No Kings protests that drew millions of regular Americans into the streets to protest, even as the Regime flooded our cities with secret police, ICE gestapo agents, and the unsheathed violence of the United States Military. And at the international climate talks in brazil this year where indigenous groups stormed the negotiations, Columbia proposed a side meeting on ending fossil fuels, and activists marched and rallied – briefly disrupting the final plenary – to show that a new world is possible while the Trump refused to even participate.
Hope is still an axe, Panic is still useful
At the end of 2024, I told you that there was probably enough momentum behind solar panels, electric cars and the like that US emissions would keep declining in the years ahead. That was basically right and that’s basically what happened this year.
But I also told you that even if Trump was able to roll back or repeal Biden-era policies, US emissions would keep going down over the next 5-10 years. And that’s the part where things have actively gotten much, much worse than we could have imagined a year ago.
Trump didn’t just repeal all the Biden era programs, he’s attacked science, the rule of law, and the ability of the US Government to function. He took a chainsaw to the very idea that climate change is real, and has broken the law so many times we couldn’t hope to list or count them all. He made bribery so commonplace teachers are having a hard time convincing young people it wasn’t always this way. A big part of the reason we focussed so much of our fight this year on billionaires was just to show people that you could take on the rich and corporations. At the end of the year, the EPA deleted its web page on the causes of climate change erasing decades of charts and graphs like the ones above that prove the consensus that climate change is real, happening now, caused by fossil fuels, and solvable by human action – it barely made a blip in the news.
And he isn’t just repealing the incentives that were creating a global energy transition, he’s attacked clean energy projects here and around the world that were already built or under construction. In the last few days he’s basically declared war (illegally, again) on Venezuela over oil, and bombed militants in Nigeria, claiming to protect christians, but where global oil companies are the real beneficiaries.
I also told you last year that Panic was a reasonable emotion to feel, and I still think that’s right. Everything about the last year has been worse than we feared. And in the face of the resulting scarcity – of hope, of electricity, of agency for decent human beings to do something, ANYTHING to make the cruelty stop – many climate groups are turning on each other. There have been a series of recent opeds and speeches attacking different concepts like abundance, affordability, pragmatism and purity. Each of them has a shred of truth, but taken together I think they’re the cries of an oppressed and desperate people turning on each other when they lose hope. Suffering through the last year as a climate activist has made some of us mean and bitter. As Bill McKibben said in his year end message:
[N]othing is what we have right now, which is why the last year has been so hard—those of us who care about, say, science and economics (or justice) have had to stand there and take it, our hands essentially tied behind our backs.
https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/a-grinding-pivotal-year-ahead
If we’re honest, and we try to be in these year end data missives, then we have to admit that the worst has already happened: The United States of America is a fossil fueled fascist petrostate.
So, as in past years, this is not a time to clutch hope like a lottery ticket, praying for luck. The old world is ending, climate and all. New worlds are possible, but building them will be hard. And since Trump has slammed the door to progress in our face, we’ll have to wield hope like an axe, and break down the damned door again and again.
The most important piece of panic and hope I can leave you with at the end of 2025 is this: the moments when we were united this year – No Kings, corporate boycotts, the big marches and rallies – were the moments when Trump was weakest. And weakening this regime is the key to saving the planet, or what’s left of it. So summon your courage and steady your nerves, because in 2026, we need to do everything possible to disrupt, derail, and weaken this regime. It’s not about voting (or not just about that), it’s about weakening the pillars of power that hold up this whole fossil fueled fascist power structure.
We made cracks in Trump’s pillars of power this year – next year, we aim to topple kings and regimes. If you think so too, we’d be grateful for a donation to support our work. We’d be even more grateful for you just to stay engaged – read the emails we send you and take action where you can.