NN#6: Backsliding on Climate

Just when we need global ambition to take action on climate change to ratchet up, it’s falling back.

It’s hard to pinpoint a single reason for the faltering resolve. Perhaps the Trump administration’s overt hostility toward the energy transition or even uttering the word “climate” signaled a window of opportunity to pull back from climate commitments. Or perhaps it’s just that we have exited the target-setting phase and are now into the much more difficult target-achieving phase, and those who lack the spine for the fight are looking for a way out.

But there is no doubt that the world is still not acting quickly enough to meet our climate goals. It’s not even moving on the energy transition quickly enough to meet electrification goals, as Jan Rosenow showed in his recent post. “The next decade will show whether policy makers can move from aspiration to implementation,” he observes, but so far, policy makers seem to be making less progress than sheer market forces.

Consider just a few of the recent instances of climate backsliding in the US.

First, there’s been the near-total lack of objection to the CO2 emissions of the data centers proliferating across the country, as we discussed in Nelder Notes #3. It’s not trivial. According to a new report, dozens of planned gas plants to ​directly power data centers in the United States could emit as much greenhouse gas annually as ‌Australia or France.

The Environmental Integrity Project reviewed 74 gas-fired U.S. power plant projects proposed or planned to provide electricity directly to data centers, which would sidestep the process to connect to the ​U.S. electric grid. It estimated that they would generate 143 gigawatts of electricity and result in 662 ​million tons per year of greenhouse gas emissions.

Reporting by Olivia Raimonde and Spencer Soper in Bloomberg confirms the finding. In 2025, Amazon’s emissions were up 16% over 2024. Google’s: 20%. Microsoft’s: 23%. Meta’s: 64%. And yet all of them still have in place net-zero goals by 2030, which are now laughable. Nor are their investors inclined to hold them to account:

This spring, activist investors asked Amazon, Alphabet and Meta in shareholder proposals to explain how they’re reconciling surging electricity demand for AI with their climate commitments. None of the proposals earned majority support.

Institutional commitments to decarbonization have been failing too. Remember when financial institutions were getting on board circa 2020 to do their part on climate? That’s when I interviewed Bob Litterman, Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Climate-Related Market Risk Subcommittee, in Energy Transition Show Ep. 135 about his committee’s recommendations for internalizing climate risk into markets.

Writing in The New York Times in January, David Gelles recalls Larry Fink, the chief executive of BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world, declaring in January 2020:

“Every government, company, and shareholder must confront climate change,” Mr. Fink wrote, calling for “a fundamental reshaping of finance.”

All sorts of financial institutions had joined pledges to do more on climate. But now, as Gelles writes:

The alliances — like the Net-Zero Banking Alliance and the Net-Zero Asset Managers initiative — that were meant to steer investments toward clean energy and away from fossil fuels have largely fallen apart. Investors have withdrawn tens of billions of dollars each quarter from E.S.G. funds.

While U.S. investment in clean energy has boomed in recent years — reaching $279 billion last year — many large corporations have gone silent on climate change. On company earnings calls, mentions of words like climate and sustainability have plunged by 75 percent over the past year, according to a Bloomberg analysis.

And with President Trump back in office and using the presidency to promote fossil fuels and attack the clean energy industry, Wall Street’s retreat from climate action has coincided with American banks doubling down on coal, oil and gas projects.

And how did that happen?

Republican politicians joined conservative activists, including groups funded by the fossil fuel industry, to engineer a sweeping pushback at what they saw as corporate America’s attempt to advance liberal policies.

Their tactics involved filing lawsuits, passing laws, pulling funds out of Wall Street accounts and using social media to tarnish the reputation of individual executives, including Mr. Fink.

In short order, their efforts succeeded in beating back an environmental movement on Wall Street, which from its inception was defined more by idealistic rhetoric than substantive changes to business practices.

They succeeded so much, in fact, that as New York Times journalists Lisa Friedman and Maxine Joselow detailed back in February, Trump administration operatives Russell Vought and Jeffrey Clark, who both contributed to the Project 2025 plan and who “were plotting to obliterate federal climate efforts once Republicans regained control in Washington,” and then served in the Office of Management and Budget in the current Trump administration, have now achieved “‘total victory’ in wiping out U.S. climate regulation.” Getting the Supreme Court to overturn the endangerment finding that had empowered EPA to regulate carbon emissions was the fatal blow.

And now the Trump administration is advancing its war on climate action. On June 29, Reuters reported:

The World Bank Group said on Monday it will "retire" its previous goal ‌to devote 45% of its annual lending resources to projects with climate co-benefits, but extend its longstanding Climate Change Action Plan that was due to expire on Tuesday.

The development lender, which had been under pressure from the Trump administration to abandon the climate lending ​target adopted during the Biden administration in 2023, said in a statement it would complete a shift to ​focusing on lending outcomes rather than input goals.

And:

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in 2025 had ordered the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to return to their core missions of development and financial stability, arguing ​they had strayed too far ​into climate, gender and ⁠other areas opposed by the Trump administration. In April, he said the bank's "myopic" focus on climate financing targets had to go.

The president has repeatedly described climate change as a "con job" and his administration has removed references to climate change from government websites. Now, it’s trying to scrub terms such as "climate change" from a report on the rapid and abrupt changes that climate change is wreaking on the Antarctic.

Many other officials have since followed his lead. For just one example among many, New York Governor Kathy Hochul, who is up for reelection this November, made an about-face last year on her support for a cap-and-invest program which would have charged polluters for each unit of emissions and used the proceeds to pay for decarbonization projects, and instead pursued a campaign to water down the state’s 2019 climate law, claiming that it would cost New Yorkers too much. She also put the state’s all-electric building standard—which would have helped immensely with accelerating electrification—on hold. And she approved a controversial, Trump-backed interstate gas pipeline for which New York had previously denied permits. As Ysabelle Kempe observed in her May 27 piece for Canary Media:

But the climate law’s softening also speaks to a nationwide trend: In an era when concerns about energy affordability are reaching a fever pitch, clean energy and energy efficiency have become scapegoats.

It’s a remarkable failing of climate communications that it’s even possible to advocate for more natural gas usage and blame energy efficiency and renewable energy for higher prices when that’s the literal opposite of reality. Renewables and efficiency are, in fact, the way to reduce electricity prices that are in many cases being driven up by oil and natural gas prices. I thought Ryan Cooper said it well in his June 22 piece in The American Prospect:

In short, backing away from renewable energy and climate policy is exactly the opposite of what should happen. The longer we dither and procrastinate, the longer we will be stuck paying through the nose for filthy fossil fuel energy, and at the mercy of oil shocks whenever a Republican gets into the presidency and starts one of their patented insane wars of aggression in the Middle East, like they always do.

Weak-kneed support for the energy transition and climate change in the face of an all-out assault by the global fossil fuel industry is increasingly evident all over the world.

For just a few examples:

In January, Indonesia backed away from a much-touted plan to retire a major coal-fired power plant, after years of promising to do so. The government claimed that its backpedaling was “based on technical considerations” but the obvious reality is that it was about the same thing it’s always about: Somebody stood to lose money on the deal.

[E]nergy analysts and civil society groups say the decision reflects deeper political and financial resistance to moving away from coal — resistance that could undermine Indonesia’s energy transition at a time when global climate finance is becoming harder to secure.

The failure of the early retirement plan for Cirebon-1 exposes how government policies that continue to protect and subsidize coal make it costly to shut plants early, they warn, even as Indonesia seeks international funding to do so.

Over in the UK, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero abandoned proposals in May to require solar photovoltaic canopies on new car parks. Why? Because a consultation process to evaluate the feasibility of a one-size-fits-all mandate would not deliver the anticipated return on investment for all properties. Again: The government’s longstanding ambition to accelerate its decarbonization fell before the supreme objective of ROI. The UK’s Future Buildings Standard still permits voluntary installation, but there is no longer an ambition to follow France’s lead in setting mandates for solar canopies on parking lots.

Right-wing foes of the energy transition in the UK are also peddling outright lies about the country’s net-zero goal while its advocates are merely explaining about the “benefits” and “security” considerations of their next carbon budget—pleading when they should be demanding climate action with their whole hearts. 

For just one particularly galling recent example, in Europe, Lex Coors, the president of the European Data Centre Association, which lobbies the EU on behalf of data center companies, asserted that it should be okay to “temporarily” rely on gas-fired generation to power AI data centers until more clean power and grid capacity is available:

For Coors, the challenge extends beyond energy policy. He argued policymakers are trying to maximize four competing objectives simultaneously: “Competitiveness, sovereignty, sustainability and speed."

But he said Europe must make a "trade off" between sustainability and the other three objectives. "If AI falls behind, it means that we will have to buy it forever rather than build it now."

But if there is such a trade-off (and I would argue that unsustainable choices that worsen an existential threat are by definition not something you can ‘trade off’), it hasn’t been proven. These assertions that every country must be competitive in AI are just that—assertions. They haven’t been proved at all. They’re just convenient arguments that manufacture consent for reckless increases in climate damage resulting from big tech companies pushing their product on the public.

If data center operators were as constructive on supporting the grid and effective action on climate change as they claim, they would commit to using carbon-free energy on a 24/7 basis, no excuses, no backsies. Instead, they are fiddling with dodgy carbon offsets and carbon accounting methods that create room for them to do whatever it is they want to do without appearing to be backsliding on their previous climate commitments:

“The current standards obscure companies’ exposure to fossil fuels and make it difficult to assess their resilience to the energy transition,” says Jackie Garton, interim head of Corporate Climate at ShareAction. In addition, “they hamper investment into the additional renewables and new technologies that we need, such as battery storage and transmission networks.”

And now the White House is trying to export its war on the energy transition. On July 1, Energy Secretary Chris Wright issued a veiled threat against the EU, implying that the US might divert cargoes of its LNG away from Europe if the EU proceeds with implementing a climate law due to take effect on January 1. The law will require that fossil-fuel imports have been subject to equivalent monitoring and reporting standards that limit methane leaks in Europe. Bloomberg’s John Ainger has a pretty good guess where that will end up:

In the end, the EU may come up with a compromise. Despite trying to save face on its climate ambitions, energy security is likely to trump all other considerations.

It’s not that the science is any less clear, or that taking action is any less urgent. It’s just that advocates of climate action seem to believe that if they can just avoid exposing any attack surfaces to opponents, they’ll be able to quietly continue advancing toward their objectives. So what if fossil fuel interests manage to tuck a few goodies for themselves into the bill—like funding for another CCS boondoggle, or su pport for expanding natural gas pipelines—it's no big deal. Renewables will eventually beat fossils on price alone on a level playing field.

But as we have seen since the beginning of the second Trump administration, this is absolutely not a level playing field. To the long list of attacks it has mounted on the energy transition (see Energy Transition Show Ep. 269), we can add a new one: Buying back the leases for four wind farms to prevent them from getting built. The Trump administration has now spent nearly $2.6 billion of taxpayer money to not produce more energy, not because we don’t need it, but specifically because it’s wind and not fossil fuels:

By buying back leases, the Republican administration is stopping offshore wind farms that President Donald Trump does not support, and redirecting the money to fossil fuel projects that he does. It adopted this strategy after federal courts thwarted Trump’s efforts to stop offshore wind development through executive action. Trump has frequently talked about his hatred of wind power and calls turbines ugly.

It's possible that some of Trump’s deals will be reversed by the courts, but as we have seen, delay alone can be sufficient to kill a project.

We absolutely should not believe that the lower cost of clean renewable energy is sufficient to beat the fossil fuel competition. The opposition always retrenches if it can, sometimes in direct opposition to the economic reality, as Leah Stokes documented in her 2020 book, Short Circuiting Policy: Interest Groups and the Battle Over Clean Energy and Climate Policy in the American States, which we discussed in depth in Energy Transition Show Ep. 121.

The fossil fuel industry and its lobbyists in the White House now feel emboldened to test the courts’ limits. In so doing, they signal to everyone else that it’s now OK to flaunt the law and ignore the climate imperative, if you can get away with it.

And yet many observers and advocates of the energy transition are reluctant to even mention these bald-faced attacks. They soft-pedal the extreme hostility of the administration toward the energy transition, as if calling it out clearly and loudly were somehow poor form.

Or they just shoot the messengers. As I wrote in Transition Times #8 on the challenges facing climate communications, media coverage of climate has been in full retreat. Susan Lamontagne of the Public Interest Media Group offered a roundup of what she called a “bloodbath” in media coverage of health and climate reporting. In 2026 alone, most or all of the climate reporters have been cut at NPR, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, CBS News, Environmental Health News, and E&E News.

It's no wonder that, as Eric Roston observed in his June 25 column for Bloomberg, people reporting “very serious” concerns about climate change are diminishing in number, while also vastly underestimating how many of their fellow citizens feel the same way:

The polling results support previous research into Americans’ incorrect beliefs about what their compatriots think. A 2022 study in the journal Nature Communications found that Americans support climate policy by a ratio of two to one — but they assume the opposite is the case.

Americans are so reluctant to talk about climate change socially or at work that “you never hear what others are actually talking about,” Elke Weber, an expert in energy, environment and psychology at Princeton University, said at the time.

The fact is that fragmenting political support for the energy transition, and climate change more broadly, ultimately translates to reduced funding and slower deployment of solutions, which in turn results in infrastructure bottlenecks and geopolitical tension. Where we need global unity of purpose to really meet the moment as the perils of global warming continue to mount, we are seeing self-interest, divergent objectives, and weakening policy certainty. That is the warning embedded in the new Energy Transition Index 2026 report from the World Economic Forum:

Energy transition progress is fragmenting and becoming increasingly uneven. In this year’s Energy Transition Index (ETI), only 24% of countries improved simultaneously across security, affordability and sustainability, while the enabling conditions that drive future progress, policy, finance, innovation and infrastructure have weakened for the first time in over a decade.

Their recommendations are straightforward:

Three priorities will define the next phase of the transition. The first is strengthening security, affordability and resilience as foundations of progress, extending across fuels, grids and supply chains. The second is unblocking delivery by streamlining permitting and closing the gap between deployment and system integration. The third is increasing investability through stable policy, credible regulation and better risk-sharing to direct capital where it is most needed.

Sustaining progress will depend as much on strengthening enabling conditions as on scaling technology. Stable policy frameworks, credible delivery pathways and stronger institutions will be critical to mobilize capital, accelerate infrastructure development and support innovation. Execution, including grid access, permitting, supply chains and affordability, is becoming as important as technology and capital. Countries that can align policy, investment and system capability, while embedding resilience and maintaining affordability, will be best positioned to sustain momentum.

To be fair, not everyone is backsliding. Some are increasing their ambition, as befits the urgency of the climate challenge—even countries that are reducing their ambition elsewhere.

On June 24, the UK Parliament set a new, legally binding climate target to cut emissions by around 87% below 1990 levels by 2040. That target will be the basis for the country’s Seventh Carbon Budget, covering the period 2038-42.

Nigel Topping CMG, Chair of the Climate Change Committee, called the new target “ambitious but achievable” and emphasized the importance of action:

“The priority now is delivery. As we set out today in our latest progress in reducing emissions report, accelerating electrification across the economy is critical. The government must turn this commitment into action at pace so we can realise the economic, environmental, and societal benefits available to us all.”

In typical fashion, Carbon Brief’s Simon Evans prepared a very helpful explainer detailing how the new budget will deliver the touted £865 billion in economic benefits, which I have linked to in the notes.

I am also encouraged at the launch of “Electrify Now,” which is described as:

a global platform to accelerate the electrification of the global economy. We do so, convinced that rapidly increasing electrification of our homes, industries and transport systems, supported by resilient, modern and flexible grids and storage, powered by clean energy sources, is an immediate strategic and economic priority and a lasting response to the current energy crisis. We invite others to join us in this shared endeavour.

Electrify Now brings together a large coalition of business groups, think tanks and civil society organizations uniting to accelerate electrification and the energy transition:

This multi-year initiative, backed by governments including the European Commission, UK, Australia, Turkey and Ethiopia, and led by more than 40 organisations and alliances from around the world, aims to galvanise global support for faster electrification, with the mission of increasing electricity's share of final energy consumption from around 21% per cent today to 35% by 2035.

As the Electrify Now website points out:

·      75% of the world’s energy demand could be met with electricity

·      92% of countries have 10 times more renewable potential than they need to power their economies with clean electricity

·      Electricity is three times more energy efficient than combustion-based energy

·      Failing to electrify means we’ll incur as much as $1 trillion in additional costs to the global economy from exposure to fossil fuel price spikes.

Since it is abundantly clear that transitioning away from burning fossil fuels and toward using clean renewable electricity instead is cheaper, more efficient, and able to meet the vast majority of our energy needs, there is no good reason not to do it. The only reason we’re not doing it is because those who stand to lose money from the transition are trying to derail it. We should never forget that basic and self-evident fact, especially when the losers of the energy transition are blanketing the world with propaganda designed to distract and confuse us. And we should repeat that fact in every single story about backsliding on climate policy.

If we want a habitable planet, the energy transition is not optional. It’s squarely in the critical path. And energy solutions are merely the largest chunk of the climate mitigation challenge. Other sectors, like agriculture and land use and industrial decarbonization, are even harder to solve.

Of course the opposition gets fiercer and digs in harder when the demand to decarbonize becomes an imminent requirement and not a distant possibility! But that opposition means that it’s time to fight harder, not to back down. The planet is still heating up, whether we face up to the task or fail. The only acceptable response is to fight like hell to preserve our one and only home.

Not later. Not when it’s easier. Not when there aren’t bullets flying at you. Now.

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Sources

Jan Rosenow, “Is electrification happening fast enough?” Bright Spots, June 14, 2026.

Valerie Volcovici, “Gas plants for US data centers to be major source of climate change-linked emissions, report says,” Reuters, July 1, 2026.

Olivia Raimonde and Spencer Soper, “Big Tech’s Carbon Emissions Spike With Runaway Growth of AI,” Bloomberg, July 1, 2026.

Episode #135 – Internalizing Climate Risk (with Bob Litterman), Energy Transition Show, November 25, 2020.

David Gelles, “How Wall Street Turned Its Back on Climate Change,” The New York Times, January 17, 2026.

Lisa Friedman and Maxine Joselow, “Trump Allies Near ‘Total Victory’ in Wiping Out U.S. Climate Regulation,” The New York Times, February 9, 2026.

David Lawder, “World Bank to abandon goal to devote 45% of lending resources to climate change projects,” Reuters, June 29, 2026.

Jano Gibson, “US accused of trying to 'edit out' climate change in Antarctic report,” ABC News, June 18, 2026.

Ysabelle Kempe, “New York state gives up on its most ambitious climate targets,” Canary Media,  May 27, 2026.

Ryan Cooper, “Better Affordability Through Climate Policy,” The American Prospect, June 22, 2026.

Hans Nicholas Jong, “Indonesia backs away from coal exit test case amid financial and political pushback,” Mongabay, January 15, 2026.

Janet Wood, “Ministers scrap proposal to require solar photovoltaic canopies on public car parks after industry consultation raises cost concerns,” Freight Carbon Zero, May 28, 206.

Simon Evans, “Factcheck: Why Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch is wrong about UK’s net-zero goal,” Carbon Brief, March 18, 2025.

Elena Giordano, “Europe must choose between AI and climate goals, data center lobby says,” PoliticoPro, June 17, 2026.

Mike Scott, “Big Tech splits over proposed shake up of clean energy accounting,” Reuters, May 26, 2026.

John Ainger, “Trump’s White House Takes Aim at EU Emissions Law,” Bloomberg, July 1, 2026.

Episode #269 – Trump’s War on the Energy Transition, Energy Transition Show, Februrary 11, 2026.

Jennifer McDermott, “Trump administration to buy back another energy company’s offshore wind leases for 4 more projects,” Associated Press, June 17, 2026.

Jennifer McDermott, “Federal judge strikes down some Trump administration actions that have slowed clean energy projects,” Associated Press, April 21, 2026.

Leah Stokes, Short Circuiting Policy: Interest Groups and the Battle Over Clean Energy and Climate Policy in the American States, Oxford University Press, 2020.

Episode #121 – Winning and Losing the Policy Game, Energy Transition Show, February 11, 2026.

Susan Lamontagne, “This is the wrong time for major media to shut down environmental coverage,” The New Lede, June 22, 206.

Eric Roston, “What Americans Who Worry About Climate Change Are Getting Wrong,” Bloomberg, June 25, 2026.

Energy Transition Index 2026, World Economic Forum, June 2026.

“Response to Parliament passing the Seventh Carbon Budget into law,” Climate Change Committee, June 24, 2026.

Simon Evans, “Q&A: How UK’s seventh carbon budget will deliver ‘£865bn’ in economic benefits,” Carbon Brief, June 3, 2026.

Electrify Now

Press release: “Governments' Joint Statement on the launch of Electrify Now,” European Union, June 22, 2026.

Press release: “The age of electricity has arrived,” Electrify Now, June 23, 2026.