\n<\/p>\n
A<\/span>s Donald Trump assaults the legal foundation of America\u2019s ability to regulate global warming emissions, climate deniers have been privately celebrating what they claim is the \u201csilent\u201d acquiescence of billionaires, Democrats, climate activists and even reporters to the president\u2019s aggressive pro-fossil-fuel agenda.<\/p>\n \u201cIn my 26 years of being focused on climate, I\u2019ve never seen anything like this. Trump is gutting everything they ever stood for,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n The event\u2019s 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\u2019s second administration.<\/p>\n \u201cBillionaires are silent. Democrats in Congress have been silent. Climate activists. There has been no pushback on this,\u201d Morano said \u2013 and he may have a point, according to some experts who research the climate denial movement.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Trump administration just marched in and destroyed the crown jewel of climate science in the United States,\u201d Robert Brulle, a professor of environment and society at Brown University, told me, referring to the Trump administration\u2019s dismantling of the country\u2019s premier climate research center, National Center for Atmospheric Research, in December.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd nothing happened. There wasn\u2019t even a whimper. I never thought I\u2019d ever say this: Marc Morano is correct.\u201d<\/p>\n double quotation markElimination of the endangerment finding had long been a core goal of the climate denial movement<\/p>\n Last month, the Trump administration repealed the 2009 \u201cendangerment finding\u201d establishing that greenhouse gas pollution endangers public health. It was a determination that undergirded the federal government\u2019s authority to limit climate-heating pollution from automobiles and power plants.<\/p>\n Elimination of the endangerment finding had long been a core goal of the climate denial movement.<\/p>\n Its repeal is just the latest in a long line of Trump\u2019s climate-related destruction. Since taking office in January 2025, his administration has significantly curtailed the country\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Under the leadership of Trump\u2019s appointee Chris Wright, the Department of Energy last year all but banned its key renewable energy department from using terminology like \u201cclimate change\u201d, \u201cgreen\u201d, and \u201csustainability.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cTrump overturned Biden\u2019s climate agenda at breakneck speed,\u201d Morano said at the Heartland Institute\u2019s Zurich forum.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n This trend hasn\u2019t gone without resistance in the party, however. \u201cAnyone who cares about what fossil fuel pollution is doing to Earth\u2019s natural systems needs to ignore these so-called \u2018climate hushers\u2019 \u2013 people who think Dems should stop talking about climate,\u201d Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse posted on social media in January.<\/p>\n Genevieve Guenther, a climate communications expert and founding director of the advocacy group End Climate Silence, largely agrees. \u201cThe Democrats\u2019 climate hushing is politically foolish,\u201d she said in an email. \u201cIt only benefits the Trump regime\u2019s agenda.\u201d<\/p>\n At the Heartland Institute event, Morano expressed delighted \u201cshock\u201d over the \u201cflips on climate\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cwill not lead to humanity\u2019s demise\u201d and advocating for ending climate funding in favor of direct humanitarian aid.<\/p>\n Microsoft and Amazon, which had donated large sums to Trump\u2019s inauguration fund, have both recently embraced fossil-fuel powered AI data centers alongside Trump energy officials and fossil fuel industry players.<\/p>\n In early February, Bezos, who is also the owner of the Washington Post, reportedly making significant cuts to the venerated paper\u2019s climate desk. Just weeks later, the Post published an editorial board opinion, \u201cEPA is right to reverse Obama overreach,\u201d praising Trump\u2019s repeal of the endangerment finding.<\/p>\n Morano noted that overall, journalists have been reporting less aggressively about Trump\u2019s fossil fuel agenda. \u201cWhen you have Lee Zeldin, the EPA chief, calling climate a cult, a scam, religion, he doesn\u2019t even get pushback from reporters,\u201d Morano said.<\/p>\n During Trump\u2019s first term, by contrast, environmental officials like Scott Pruitt, who led the Environmental Protection Agency from February 2017 to July 2018, \u201cwould have to be very careful on climate\u201d, Morano said. Otherwise \u201cthey would be beaten and browed by the media.\u201d<\/p>\n The growing \u201cclimate hush\u201d is not limited to the U.S. \u2013 a silence about the climate crisis has expanded across the globe.<\/p>\n At Davos in January, world leaders across business and government talked noticeably less about addressing climate change than in previous years.<\/p>\n Why? \u201cIn today\u2019s deeply polarizing U.S. political stance, climate discussion has come to feel so radioactive that many leaders would rather avoid it,\u201d Anjali Chaudhry, a business sustainability researcher at Dominican University, wrote in Forbes.<\/p>\n Even the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, who once served as a United Nations Secretary-General\u2019s 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 \u201cCanadians remain committed to sustainability\u201d.<\/p>\n Despite all this quiet, the vast majority of people worldwide, 89%, support climate action, even if they underestimate how much others care \u2013 a misperception that has added fuel to a \u201cspiral of science\u201d.<\/p>\n What can be done to counteract the trend towards silence? \u201cIn this time of \u2018climate hushing,\u2019 having conversations about climate change is more important than ever,\u201d Katherine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and climate communications expert, advised in her influential blog.<\/p>\n For Brulle, the environmental sociologist, addressing the growing hush around climate must go beyond talking.<\/p>\n \u201cI 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The environmentalist Bill McKibben is more optimistic. \u201cI think [the Trump administration] is whistling past the graveyard of their fossil-fueled dreams,\u201d he said in an email. \u201cThe real story of the last year is how politicians, movements, entire nations are moving fast towards clean energy. They\u2019re not all doing it in the name of \u2018climate\u2019, but we\u2019re making faster climate progress than we have at any point in the last 40 years.\u201d<\/p>\n McKibben added a caveat: \u201cFast enough? Of course not. The deniers have delayed change and that continues. But it\u2019s going far faster than they want it to \u2013 hence their resort to political gamesmanship.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As Donald Trump assaults the legal foundation of America\u2019s ability to regulate global warming emissions, climate deniers have been privately celebrating what they claim is the \u201csilent\u201d acquiescence of billionaires, Democrats, climate activists and even reporters to the president\u2019s aggressive pro-fossil-fuel agenda. \u201cIn my 26 years of being focused on climate, I\u2019ve never seen anything<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45842,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[360,872,10289,6771,23539,23540,81,3199,8085],"class_list":{"0":"post-45841","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-assault","9":"tag-environment","10":"tag-launched","11":"tag-pushback","12":"tag-rei","13":"tag-takver","14":"tag-trump","15":"tag-unprecedented","16":"tag-wheres"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45841"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45841\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/45842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}