Deafening Silence Proves They Were Never Serious About Climate Change

Since taking office in January 2025, Donald Trump has dismantled nearly every major federal climate initiative. He pulled the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement, scrapped core funding for green subsidies under the Inflation Reduction Act, and resumed oil and gas leasing on federal lands. Trump ended ESG influence over federal pensions, shut down federal climate research programs across multiple agencies, halted new NOAA climate modeling projects, and redirected funding away from academic climate partnerships. He reinstated permitting reforms to speed up infrastructure projects, including pipelines and refineries. Trump s second-term climate agenda represents the most sweeping regulatory rollback in American history.

And yet, climate protests against Trump have been nearly nonexistent. No national marches have filled the streets of Washington, as they did when 200,000 joined the People s Climate March in 2017, or when the Fridays for Future movement, inspired by Greta Thunberg, mobilized more than 7 million people across 150 countries in a week of coordinated strikes. No occupations of bank lobbies or fossil fuel headquarters. No die-ins, no chain-yourself-to-the-gate stunts, no mass arrests outside congressional offices. The kinds of actions that defined the climate movement just a few years ago, from gluing hands to paintings to dumping milk in supermarket aisles to camping out at pipeline construction sites, have vanished. Social media feeds that once overflowed with fiery rhetoric, countdown clocks, and images of burning forests now scroll silently past Trump s climate rollbacks with barely a word. The teenagers who shut down traffic in 2019 are now in their twenties and have moved on. The sense of emergency, once performed with almost religious intensity, has dissipated without explanation.

via www.public.news

Michael Shellenberger.

This is good if infuriating. But don’t get infuriated.