Trump's war on the climate demands resistance

Trump’s war on the climate demands resistance
The antidote to climate despair is collective defiance

By Troy Farah
National Affairs Editor
Published December 31, 2025 6:30AM (EST)


(Salon) The biggest story of the year was, once again, among the least talked about. I’m of course referring to climate change, a topic embedded with some sort of Pavlovian trigger that immediately gets most people to tune out as soon as it is mentioned. Maybe it’s the level of finger-wagging associated with environmental talking points. Maybe it’s the overwhelming despair and helplessness about a problem that is still devouring our globe. Maybe people really just don’t care that our home planet is becoming less habitable for humans.

There’s no denying how serious climate change is. Every year, things get just a little worse and 2025, tied with 2023 as the second-hottest year on record, was no exception. From devastating floods in Southeast Asia that killed more than 1,800 people to the wildfires that plagued Los Angeles to record-breaking Hurricane Melissa that slammed Jamaica, it was another year of colossal disaster fueled by our overreliance on petrochemicals and factory farming. And that barely scratches the surface of how bad things are going to get as our planet cooks and our ecosystem collapses. Don’t forget Canada’s zombie wildfires, the Texas floods, the late autumn Southwest heat waves, the calving Doomsday glacier and on and on.

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Climate change is what philosopher Timothy Morton calls a hyperobject: something that so massively occupies space and time that our puny primate brains have trouble fathoming them. The baby galaxies spied by the James Webb Space Telescope and the Greater Tokyo area are hyperobjects too — we can picture them but can barely wrap our heads around them. Climate change is so massive, so slow-moving, so viscous and non-local that it passes through everything in a way that we can’t fully perceive or escape from, despite the fantasies of the ultra-rich. Plenty of us do realize the problem is all around us and bigger than we could possibly solve alone. “There is no exit,” Morton has written, comparing our plight to waking up and realizing that one has been buried alive.

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The Trump administration doesn’t want you to think about any of this and spent much of this year deleting data and shutting down facilities that study climate change. Most recently, the administration announced its intent to dismantle the nation’s premier atmospheric science center, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. Before that, it was the closure of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, not to mention the shutdown of climate.gov, a primary public resource for this crisis. “It is almost certainly the greatest collective act of scientific vandalism in recent American history,” environmental journalist Bill McKibben wrote in The New Yorker in December. “It would be easy, and accurate, to call 2025 the low point of human action on the climate crisis.” .....................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/12/31/against-trumps-climate-sabotage-a-different-future-is-still-possible/