Climate Doesn't Give a Damn About Politics

Nature does not negotiate. The atmosphere is not a parliament, and carbon dioxide has no ideology. Climate change is governed by physics and chemistry. Global atmospheric and oceanic systems operate with relentless consistency whether we acknowledge them or not. What politics influences is only how quickly, or how slowly, we respond. Every year of policy reversal locks in additional warming, additional sea-level rise, additional damage.

Under the Trump administration, that reversal has been deliberate. Congress repealed the $7,500 EV tax credit; U.S. electric vehicle sales stalled in 2025, with most trackers showing a small decline or flat growth even as global sales rose roughly 20 percent, and BloombergNEF projects 14 million fewer cumulative American EV sales by 2030. The administration halted offshore wind leasing, rescinded 3.5 million acres of designated wind areas, and paid developers nearly $2 billion to walk away, surrendering enough power for over 3 million homes, just as U.S. data-center demand is on track to more than double by 2035. The EPA has moved to repeal its endangerment finding which gives it the authority to address climate change, while the Department of Energy uses emergency orders to keep aging coal plants running, despite research in Science attributing roughly 460,000 excess deaths among older Americans between 1999 and 2020 to coal-plant pollution alone.

For a president who casts himself as the consummate dealmaker, this is one of the worst deals in American history. The new energy economy, EVs, batteries, solar, wind, grid storage, critical minerals, is on track to be the largest industrial transformation since the automobile itself. China already controls roughly 80 percent of global solar manufacturing, 75 percent of lithium-ion batteries, and a dominant share, by some measures as high as 85 percent, of critical-minerals processing, and accounted for fifty-five percent of $1.1 trillion in clean-energy manufacturing investment announced globally between 2019 and 2025. In 2025 alone, U.S. clean-energy manufacturing turned net negative for the first time in over a decade, with roughly $22 billion in cancellations outpacing new announcements, even as China announced another $39 billion in fresh clean-energy manufacturing investment. We are not pausing the transition. We are handing it to our principal strategic competitor.

History rhymes. In 1865, the British Parliament, lobbied by horse, stagecoach, and railway interests, passed the Locomotives Act, popularly known as the Red Flag Act, requiring every self-propelled vehicle on a British road to be preceded by a man on foot waving a red flag. For thirty-one years it was effectively impossible to build a serious automobile industry in Britain. By the time the law was repealed in 1896, Germany had Benz, France had Peugeot, and America was about to have Ford. Britain, which had pioneered the steam engine itself, permanently lost the automobile century. Subsidizing buggy whips while taxing the assembly line is not industrial policy. It is a suicide note written in installments.

And there is a deeper damage. When Mr. Trump lost in 2020, the world treated his first term as an anomaly. Allies returned, capital flowed back. The second term proves the reversal was not an accident; it is a feature and liability of the American system. Even if a future administration wants to get back on track, every CEO and every foreign minister will ask the same question: how do we know the rug will not be pulled out again? A battery plant takes three to five years to build and twenty to pay back. An offshore wind farm takes seven to ten years from lease to first power. Capital and credibility, once burned twice, do not return on the same terms. The perception that American climate policy is reversible every four years is now baked in, and that perception, more than any single regulation, is what will keep the new energy century from being an American one.

Climate may not give a damn about politics, but the fossil fuel industry sure does. The oil and gas industry poured an estimated $445 million into the 2024 election cycle, according to Climate Power, including roughly $96 million directly to President Trump’s campaign and aligned super PACs, after Mr. Trump told industry executives at a Mar-a-Lago dinner that a $1 billion contribution would be a “deal” given the regulations they would avoid. Eighty-eight percent of the industry’s direct contributions to incoming policymakers went to Republicans; for coal, the figure was 97.6 percent. The EV rollback, the wind buyouts, the coal revival, the endangerment-finding repeal: these are not the random outputs of an administration searching for a policy. They are the deliverables that were purchased.

History has a name for this posture: the leader who substitutes his preferred reality for the one his experts describe. In the spring of 1941, Joseph Stalin received scores of credible warnings, from his intelligence networks, his border commanders, and British decrypts passed personally by Churchill, that Hitler was about to invade. He dismissed them as provocations, purged the intelligence officials who delivered the bad news, and forbade defensive preparation. Days later, three and a half million German troops crossed the border. The Soviet Union lost millions of soldiers in the opening months. President Trump is not Stalin, and America is not the state Stalin oversaw; our institutions and our press are, for now, still functioning (but, in my opinion, not fully). But the pattern of denial is notable, and the relevant comparison is the cost. Stalin’s self-deception killed millions of his own people. Mr. Trump’s, if it runs its course, will cost more, because it will not be confined to one country or one generation. Stalin’s mistake was paid for by the people he ruled. Trump’s will be paid for by humanity.

I do not write this as a detached observer. As a businessman, philanthropist, and political donor, I have spent the last twenty years “all climate all the time” across all three realms. For two decades that combination felt sufficient: press on capital, science, and policy, and the rest would follow. Over the last two years I have had to reconsider. Without a fully functioning democracy, the fossil fuel industry will continue to buy government policy on a scale that climate philanthropy and investing alone cannot offset. You cannot out-donate hundreds of millions of dollars when the rules themselves are being rewritten by the donors. Climate and democracy, once parallel concerns, have converged. Defending democracy is now, for me, a climate strategy.

We do not get to vote on the laws of physics. We get to decide how intelligently we respond to them, and whether the people doing the deciding actually answer to us. Climate won’t wait—should we?