This article is published in partnership with The Guardian.
As President Donald Trump attacks the legal foundations of America’s ability to regulate global warming emissions, climate change deniers are secretly celebrating the billionaires, Democrats, climate change activists, and even reporters they claim have “tacitly” acquiesced in the president’s aggressive pro-fossil fuel policies.
“In the 26 years I’ve been focused on climate change, I’ve never seen anything like this. President Trump is trying to gut everything they’ve ever stood for,” longtime climate change denier Mark Molano said in January at the five-day World Prosperity Forum in Zurich, Switzerland, billed as a right-wing alternative to the World Economic Forum in Davos.
The event was sponsored by the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank that has been at the forefront of spreading climate misinformation for decades and was a contributor to Project 2025, the policy blueprint for President Trump’s second administration.
“Billionaires are silent. Democrats in Congress are silent. Climate change activists too. There has been no resistance to this,” Morano said. But some experts who study the climate change denial movement say he may have a point.
“The Trump administration just marched in and destroyed the crown jewel of American climate science,” said Robert Brühl, a professor of environmental society at Brown University, referring to the Trump administration’s dismantling of the country’s premier climate research center, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in December.
“And nothing happened. There wasn’t even a cry. I never thought I’d say this: ‘Marc Morano is right.'”
Last month, the Trump administration withdrew the 2009 Endangerment Study, which established that greenhouse gas pollution endangers public health. This decision affirmed the federal government’s authority to limit climate-heating pollution from automobiles and power plants.
Eliminating the discovery of endangered species has long been a core goal of the climate change denial movement.
The repeal is just the latest in a long line of climate-related destruction by President Trump. Since taking office in January 2025, the administration has slashed the nation’s weather forecasting agencies and climate science research facilities, published reports denying established climate science, and slashed funding for climate-related energy and regional projects.
Under the leadership of President Trump appointee Chris Wright, the Department of Energy last year largely banned major renewable energy sectors from using terms like “climate change,” “green” and “sustainability.”
“Trump has reversed Biden’s climate policies at breakneck speed,” Morano said at the Heartland Institute’s Zurich Forum.
Instead of pushing back against this blitz, many Democrats are retreating from social media, podcasts, speeches, and speaking directly about climate change in Congress. The party is currently embroiled in a debate over whether affordability is a better message than climate action, even though polls show 63% of Americans think the president and Congress should prioritize clean energy.
However, this trend was not without resistance within the party. In January, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) posted on social media: “Those who care about the impact fossil fuel pollution is having on the Earth’s natural systems need to ignore the so-called ‘climate change calmers’ – those who think Democrats should stop talking about the climate.”
Genevieve Guenther, a climate communications expert and founding director of the advocacy group End Climate Silence, largely agrees. “Democrats’ efforts to curb climate change are politically foolish,” she said in an email. “It only benefits the Trump administration’s policies.”
At a Heartland Institute event, Morano expressed gleeful “shock” over the “climate change” agenda of tech moguls Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates (founders of Amazon and Microsoft, respectively). Their companies have abandoned once-ambitious climate pledges in the face of the burgeoning energy demands of their AI businesses.
Gates’ foundation, which has donated millions of dollars to a think tank run by climate crisis denier Bjorn Lomborg, released a controversial memo in October arguing that climate change “will not lead to the extinction of humanity” and calling for an end to climate funding in favor of direct humanitarian aid.
Microsoft and Amazon, big donors to President Trump, recently joined Trump’s energy officials and fossil fuel industry officials in hosting fossil fuel-powered AI data centers.
In early February, Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post, cut at least 14 reporters from the paper’s respected climate desk. Just a few weeks later, the Post published an editorial board opinion that said, “EPA was right to reverse President Obama’s overreach,” praising President Trump’s decision to rescind the endangered status finding.
Morano noted that journalists overall have not been very active in reporting on President Trump’s fossil fuel policies. “When EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin calls climate change a cult, a scam, a religion, he doesn’t even get pushback from reporters,” Morano said.
By contrast, during President Trump’s first term, environmental officials like Scott Pruitt, who led the Environmental Protection Agency from February 2017 to July 2018, “were going to have to be very careful about climate,” Morano said. Otherwise, “they will be beaten and frowned upon by the media.”
Growing “climate silence” is not limited to the United States; silence about climate change is growing around the world.
At Davos in January, world leaders from business and government spoke less about tackling climate change than in previous years.
why? “With American politics so polarized today, the debate about climate change has come to feel so radioactive that many leaders would rather avoid it,” Anjali Chaudhary, a business sustainability researcher at Dominican University, wrote about the silence in Forbes magazine.
Even Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who previously served as the UN Secretary-General’s special envoy on climate action and finance, limited his mentions of climate change at Davos to a quiet reference to the COP climate change summit and a simple statement: “Canadians remain committed to sustainability.”
Despite this quiet, the vast majority of people around the world, 89 percent, support climate action, even if they underestimate how much other people care. This misunderstanding fueled the “scientific spiral.”
How can we counter the trend towards silence? Climate scientist and climate communications expert Katherine Hayhoe advised in her influential blog: “In this era of ‘climate silence’, it is more important than ever to talk about climate change.”
For Brühl, an environmental sociologist, addressing the growing silence around climate requires more than just talking.
“I think the U.S. climate movement has failed. It has completely failed, and that means we need to rebuild this movement in a very different way,” he said.
Environmental activist Bill McKibben is more optimistic. “I think the[Trump administration]is clattering past the graveyard of the fossil fuel dream,” he said in an email. “The real story of the last year is how rapidly politicians, campaigners and entire nations are moving towards clean energy. They’re not all doing it in the name of ‘climate change,’ but we’re moving faster on climate change than at any point in the past 40 years.”
McKibben added: “Fast enough? Of course not. The naysayers have been slowing down change and are continuing to do so. But change is happening much faster than they would like. So they are relying on political gamesmanship.”
