As Donald Trump assaults the legal foundation of America’s ability to regulate global warming emissions, climate deniers have been privately celebrating what they claim is the “silent” acquiescence of billionaires, Democrats, climate activists and even reporters to the president’s aggressive pro-fossil-fuel agenda.
“In my 26 years of being focused on climate, I’ve never seen anything like this. Trump is gutting everything they ever stood for,” Marc Morano, a long-time climate denier, said in January at the World Prosperity Forum, a five-day event in Zurich, Switzerland, billed as a rightwing alternative to the World Economic Forum in Davos.
The event’s sponsor was The Heartland Institute, a conservative thinktank that has been at the forefront of spreading climate disinformation for decades, and was also a contributor to Project 2025, the policy blueprint for Trump’s second administration.
“Billionaires are silent. Democrats in Congress have been silent. Climate activists. There has been no pushback on this,” Morano said – and he may have a point, according to some experts who research the climate denial movement.
“The Trump administration just marched in and destroyed the crown jewel of climate science in the United States,” Robert Brulle, a professor of environment and society at Brown University, told me, referring to the Trump administration’s dismantling of the country’s premier climate research center, National Center for Atmospheric Research, in December.
“And nothing happened. There wasn’t even a whimper. I never thought I’d ever say this: Marc Morano is correct.”
double quotation markElimination of the endangerment finding had long been a core goal of the climate denial movement
Last month, the Trump administration repealed the 2009 “endangerment finding” establishing that greenhouse gas pollution endangers public health. It was a determination that undergirded the federal government’s authority to limit climate-heating pollution from automobiles and power plants.
Elimination of the endangerment finding had long been a core goal of the climate denial movement.
Its repeal is just the latest in a long line of Trump’s climate-related destruction. Since taking office in January 2025, his administration has significantly curtailed the country’s weather forecasting organizations and climate science research facilities, published reports denying established climate science, and made deep cuts to funding for climate-related energy and community projects.
Under the leadership of Trump’s appointee Chris Wright, the Department of Energy last year all but banned its key renewable energy department from using terminology like “climate change”, “green”, and “sustainability.”
“Trump overturned Biden’s climate agenda at breakneck speed,” Morano said at the Heartland Institute’s Zurich forum.
Instead of pushing back on this blitz, many Democratic party representatives have retreated from talking directly about the climate crisis across social media, podcasts, speeches, and in Congress. The party is now embroiled in a debate about whether affordability is a better message than climate action, despite polling suggesting that 63% of the American public believes the president and Congress should prioritize clean energy.
This trend hasn’t gone without resistance in the party, however. “Anyone who cares about what fossil fuel pollution is doing to Earth’s natural systems needs to ignore these so-called ‘climate hushers’ – people who think Dems should stop talking about climate,” Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse posted on social media in January.
Genevieve Guenther, a climate communications expert and founding director of the advocacy group End Climate Silence, largely agrees. “The Democrats’ climate hushing is politically foolish,” she said in an email. “It only benefits the Trump regime’s agenda.”
At the Heartland Institute event, Morano expressed delighted “shock” over the “flips on climate” of the tech moguls Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, the founders of Amazon and Microsoft respectively, whose companies have abandoned once-ambitious climate promises as they confront the soaring energy demands of their AI businesses.
Gates, whose foundation has donated millions of dollars to a thinktank run by the climate crisis denier Bjorn Lomborg, published a controversial memo in October arguing that climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise” and advocating for ending climate funding in favor of direct humanitarian aid.
Microsoft and Amazon, which had donated large sums to Trump’s inauguration fund, have both recently embraced fossil-fuel powered AI data centers alongside Trump energy officials and fossil fuel industry players.
In early February, Bezos, who is also the owner of the Washington Post, reportedly making significant cuts to the venerated paper’s climate desk. Just weeks later, the Post published an editorial board opinion, “EPA is right to reverse Obama overreach,” praising Trump’s repeal of the endangerment finding.
Morano noted that overall, journalists have been reporting less aggressively about Trump’s fossil fuel agenda. “When you have Lee Zeldin, the EPA chief, calling climate a cult, a scam, religion, he doesn’t even get pushback from reporters,” Morano said.
During Trump’s first term, by contrast, environmental officials like Scott Pruitt, who led the Environmental Protection Agency from February 2017 to July 2018, “would have to be very careful on climate”, Morano said. Otherwise “they would be beaten and browed by the media.”
The growing “climate hush” is not limited to the U.S. – a silence about the climate crisis has expanded across the globe.
At Davos in January, world leaders across business and government talked noticeably less about addressing climate change than in previous years.
Why? “In today’s deeply polarizing U.S. political stance, climate discussion has come to feel so radioactive that many leaders would rather avoid it,” Anjali Chaudhry, a business sustainability researcher at Dominican University, wrote in Forbes.
Even the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, who once served as a United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance, limited his mentions of climate change at Davos to a quiet reference to the COP climate summit and a simple “Canadians remain committed to sustainability”.
Despite all this quiet, the vast majority of people worldwide, 89%, support climate action, even if they underestimate how much others care – a misperception that has added fuel to a “spiral of science”.
What can be done to counteract the trend towards silence? “In this time of ‘climate hushing,’ having conversations about climate change is more important than ever,” Katherine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and climate communications expert, advised in her influential blog.
For Brulle, the environmental sociologist, addressing the growing hush around climate must go beyond talking.
“I think the climate movement in the United States has failed. It has flat failed, and that means we need to rebuild this movement in a completely different manner,” he said.
The environmentalist Bill McKibben is more optimistic. “I think [the Trump administration] is whistling past the graveyard of their fossil-fueled dreams,” he said in an email. “The real story of the last year is how politicians, movements, entire nations are moving fast towards clean energy. They’re not all doing it in the name of ‘climate’, but we’re making faster climate progress than we have at any point in the last 40 years.”
McKibben added a caveat: “Fast enough? Of course not. The deniers have delayed change and that continues. But it’s going far faster than they want it to – hence their resort to political gamesmanship.”
