How Trump’s climate agenda is dismantling science, reversing clean energy, and making the future colder — in every possible way.
This morning, the wind-chill was -6°F, the kind of cold that stings your teeth when you breathe. My dog Sofia wasn’t out long before trading an outdoor romp for a warm bed. The year is ending the way a New England storm begins — deceptively calm. As I look out the window, it’s just gray, nothing’s happening, but out over the Piscataqua the wind is building off the Atlantic, and by the time it reaches shore it’s too late to get a fire going. Maybe I’m tuned to it more this year because I’ve been living inside weather while writing Breach, my book about a polar vortex gone feral. And while we brace for winter here, other Americans are learning that climate damage doesn’t always arrive as snow or ice — sometimes it comes as smoke you can’t see until it’s already filling your lungs.
In Denver, the morning looked harmless — pale-blue horizon, the Rockies faint in the distance — until wildfire smoke rolled back in and filled pediatric waiting rooms with children clutching inhalers. A television in the lobby silently streamed Trump speaking about “energy dominance,” even as his administration accelerated fossil-fuel production through the January 20 directive to “Unleash American Energy”¹ — calling for fast-tracked drilling, weakened environmental permitting, and the retreat of clean-energy standards. Federal action doesn’t cause the smoke that burned those children’s throats, but it does weaken the systems that would have warned them sooner, modeled where the plume would travel, and prepared hospitals before the doors opened.
On the coast of Maine, where tides slap granite and winter wages war on your joints, a lobsterman named Clay told a Portland reporter recently, “We just need reliable power. The price keeps going up, and no one here can tell us why.”² The offshore wind projects meant to power roughly 2.5 million homes and support tens of thousands of jobs³ were abruptly suspended in December — Vineyard Wind,