In just a few short months, Donald Trump has laid waste not only to U.S. climate policy, but also to the political, legal, intellectual, and physical infrastructure that underpins it. In doing so, he has sent shockwaves through public and private markets, and upended the industrial and energy strategies of most—if not all—nations. More critically, he has steered our collective trajectory onto a faster, more dangerous collision course with a warming planet.
This is a two-part series on the impact of Trump on climate. In this first part of The Homing Bird, we unpack everything the new U.S. administration has said and done on climate—and how it has reverberated across US policy, administration, companies, and consumers;
We will cover:
Donald Trump’s position on climate has always been clear. Less known is how deeply rooted and ideologically coherent it is. His anti-climate stance draws from a mix of tech-right broligarchy, Bannon-style nationalist populism, and the neo-fascist Dark Enlightenment.
This is no surprise. Long before inauguration day, playbooks like the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 spelled out exactly what the Trump administration would do. That’s the first lesson of this presidency: behind the chaos lies a structured, methodical plan to dismantle climate action across the board.
The second lesson is the brutal speed, scope, and audacity with which this plan is being implemented. It’s a textbook application of Bannon’s “flood the zone” strategy—overwhelming the system with action to paralyze opposition and blur accountability. As the New York Times puts it, this is “full-on Fight Club.” And the consequences are immediate, for policymakers, companies, NGOs, and consumers alike.
Within days of taking office, Trump signed three key executive orders:
By declaring an energy emergency, he gave himself extraordinary powers to fast-track pipelines, mines, power plants, and fossil fuel infrastructure. It’s a manufactured crisis: the U.S. is already the world’s top oil producer and the largest gas exporter in history. The "emergency" is simply a cover to bypass environmental checks and accelerate fossil fuel expansion.
The victims are clean energy projects—offshore wind, heat pumps, energy efficiency— now stalled or shelved. And ironically, the push for more drilling risks creating a supply surplus that could hurt U.S. producers themselves.
Regardless of market logic or investor appetite, U.S. policy is now locked into unconditional support of fossil fuel companies and extractive industries.
Next in line: Biden’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Trump has already revoked the 50% EV target for 2030, and scrapped state waivers that allowed local limits on gas-powered cars.
A full repeal of the IRA would gut federal support for clean tech industries that are still scaling—especially green hydrogen, carbon capture, and offshore wind. These are sectors where public investment is critical to crossing the economic viability threshold.
Here, the miscalculation from the Trump administration is profound. The U.S. is ceding future innovation and competitiveness to others. This leaves a huge financing and innovation gap to be filled by rivals.
Finally, Trump’s third climate pillar is a deep hostility to international coordination. On his first day in office, he pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, leaving it in the company of just four other non-signatories. The U.S. International Climate Plan was also cancelled.
This is within a broader rejection of the post-WWII multilateral order. Under Trump, the U.S. no longer sees itself as a steward of the global commons. Instead, it is embracing a doctrine of climate isolationism, where cooperation is sacrificed in favor of short-term national gain.
But climate change doesn’t recognize borders. A U.S. withdrawal from international frameworks will reverberate across global negotiations, financing structures, and technology cooperation—and undermine the coordinated effort needed to limit warming.
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Having reset the policy, Trump fleshed it out in America’s administration and institutions. Frustrated from his first term’s experience and continuously frightened by the prospect of a deep state resistance, the overhaul of the administration was the natural second step. In his first months began a sweeping campaign to hollow out the very agencies designed to safeguard the environment, public health, and scientific integrity.
From the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to NOAA and dozens of smaller federal and state offices, a purge is underway. Talks of simplification, waste cutting, or streamlining are smokescreens. It is a strategic disabling of America’s climate response infrastructure, unfolding at every level of government.
The newly appointed EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, wasted no time redefining the agency’s mission. No longer about protecting human health and the environment, the EPA’s new objective is simple: make it cheaper to heat your home, buy your car, and run your business.
This populist framing masks an aggressive rollback of the EPA’s core functions, with programs like the Clean Water Act that are weakened, environmental groups defunded and threatened with legal action, scientific research arm dismantled, over 1,000 scientists fired, and budget cuts targeting a 65% reduction in the EPA’s capacity.
The EPA used to be a pioneer in climate action and has literally shaped American cities, waterways, industries, and air quality for decades. The EPA was behind the launch of the Acid Rain Program, the world’s first large scale emissions trading scheme in the 1990s which inspired Europe’s greenhouse gas Emissions Trading Scheme. To see it slowly wither is a climate catastrophe in itself, which will weigh heavily on US taxpayers.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), long considered the gold standard in climate science and weather prediction, is also being disbanded.
In recent months, 1,000 employees have been laid off, atop the 880 probationary staff dismissed earlier. That’s a 20% workforce reduction for an agency tasked with tracking extreme weather, ocean temperatures, and climate change.
The ripple effects are global. NOAA operates a vast infrastructure of satellites, ocean buoys, weather ships, and forecasting stations that scientists and governments around the world rely on. Its data feeds into insurance models, disaster preparedness protocols, shipping logistics, and agricultural planning.
Now, insurers warn that NOAA’s decline is threatening the availability of trusted climate risk data, making it harder to price risk and plan for catastrophe. The U.S. isn’t just losing scientific capacity—it’s weakening a key pillar of global climate intelligence.
Beyond the EPA and NOAA, a broader administrative purge is underway. Trump’s team is executing what amounts to an internal witch hunt, aimed at erasing any trace of climate action within the federal apparatus.
Agencies have been ordered to rescind all orders, directives, rules, regulations, guidance documents, funding agreements, and programs related to climate change, greenhouse gas emissions, environmental justice, or clean energy transition.
At the same time, laws like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)—a 55-year-old cornerstone of environmental review—are being quietly bypassed by using emergency powers traditionally reserved for disaster response, and channeling permits through the Army Corps of Engineers. These permits, normally used to rebuild roads and bridges after hurricanes or earthquakes, are now fast-tracking pipelines, drilling platforms, and coal terminals—with no environmental review.
This strategy is devastatingly effective. It allows climate-damaging infrastructure to be greenlit at breakneck speed while silencing bureaucratic resistance under the guise of legal normalcy.
The Trump administration’s aggressive climate rollback is rippling out across the U.S. economy, plunging clean energy sectors into chaos, drying up funding for innovation, and throwing long-term industrial strategy into reverse.
The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) had ignited a once-in-a-generation surge in climate tech and advanced manufacturing. Hundreds of billions of dollars were flowing into battery factories, electric school bus production, wind and solar infrastructure, green hydrogen and carbon capture. The IRA was the backbone of an industrial renaissance.
Trump’s reversal has brought this momentum to a halt. His administration has frozen congressional funds earmarked for clean energy development, stopped approvals for wind farms on public lands and federal waters, threatened to block projects even on private land if connected to federal programs, eliminated any federal funding with climate-linked objectives.
The result is a climate investment winter. Projects are being canceled or delayed, factories are going idle, and companies are scrambling to understand a playing field that has been flipped overnight. Confidence in the U.S. as a stable base for clean tech investment is evaporating.
At the same time, we saw that Trump is doubling down on fossil fuels as a matter of policy. The stated goal: reduce inflation, end the cost-of-living crisis, and restore “energy dominance.” Trump calls it “Unlocking the liquid gold of America ”.
But here’s the paradox: According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), global oil supply is expected to outpace demand in 2025, leading to potential oversupply and price volatility. Expanding production and driving down prices could eat into the profits of Big Oil, and make future investments less economically viable.
In short, the Trump strategy may undermine its own goals. Flooding the market with fossil fuels could crash prices, squeeze U.S. producers’ margins, and destabilize long-term energy markets—while doing nothing to future-proof American energy competitiveness.
For environmental NGOs, the hostility is unprecedented. Dozens of groups have seen their federal grants frozen or revoked, particularly if their work touches on climate, environmental justice, or clean energy advocacy. Some are facing legal threats, politically motivated IRS audits, or restrictions on speech. This is part of a broader campaign to defund dissent, targeting organizations that act as watchdogs or policy accelerators in the climate space.
And for consumers, the effects are no less real. Projects aimed at lowering home energy bills, expanding public transit, electrifying school buses, or retrofitting public housing for efficiency have all been frozen, canceled, or defunded.
The shift toward cheaper, cleaner energy and mobility is no longer a national strategy—it’s now a patchwork of state and private initiatives trying to survive in hostile federal terrain.
In part 2, we decript how Europe and China are adapting to this new paradigm and the reaction of the markets.
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