But the story of retreat from climate politics is larger than Trump or his desire to make America more of a petrostate and is more worryingly global than merely MAGA. Just a few years ago, worldwide climate concern seemed to be reaching new peaks almost monthly, with cultural momentum growing and policy commitments following. Then came Covid, inflation and higher interest rates, which made the cost of living and global debt crises worse — and above all, perhaps, a new accommodation to the brutal realities of climate change that some call pragmatism and some normalization. Surveys still show widespread climate concern; in a poll covering 130,000 people in 125 countries, 89 percent of respondents said they wanted stronger action. But at the highest levels of discourse and policy debate, just a few years since the Inflation Reduction Act and Boris Johnson declaring, “It’s one minute to midnight on that Doomsday Clock,” the tide is going out on climate alarm. In truth, it has been for a while.
In Europe, leaders have spent the years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reckoning with the energy crisis that it produced and, in part, rethinking the commitments of the continent’s landmark Green Deal. In Britain officials are debating dropping legally binding commitments to reach net-zero carbon emissions. In Mexico its climate scientist president, Claudia Sheinbaum, is building fossil-fuel infrastructure, and in Canada the new prime minister, Mark Carney, chose as his first official act the repeal of the country’s landmark carbon tax.
None of these moves are back breakers for climate action, and some may even be defensible to climate campaigners on the basis of political necessity. But tellingly, each would have been very hard to imagine five years ago. From 2019 to 2021, governments around the world added more than 300 climate adaptation and mitigation policies each year. In 2023 the figure was under 200. In 2024 it was under 50.
Carney is a former central banker who’s spent years rallying the financial world in support of climate goals, as part of what is called the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero. In the year after it was announced in 2021, the alliance’s industry-led banking arm added nearly 100 signatories. Over the past year, the group has added fewer than 10 members, and since December, it has lost BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. The S&P Global Clean Energy Transition Index has been in steady decline, the energy analyst Nat Bullard recently noted, with its value falling by more than half since 2021. This month a symposium sponsored by the People’s Forum in New York raised the prospect that just a few years past its much-ballyhooed heyday, we had already reached the end of green capitalism.
Perhaps the phrase was always an alibi for business as usual, an opportunity for the profit-minded to surf the zeitgeist and lay claim to ecological beneficence. But even so, there has been an undeniable change. When Bloomberg recently analyzed earnings calls of S&P 500 companies going back to 2020, it found that the companies talked about the environment in the first quarter of 2025, on average, 76 percent less than they did three years ago.
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