There’s no doubt that 2025 has been one of the most politically chaotic years of the 21st century.
Amid the domestic and geopolitical mayhem unleashed by Donald Trump’s return to the White House, powerful interests were busy enacting a radical anti-democratic agenda that has already changed our world and will continue shaping it for years to come.
DeSmog’s team of investigative reporters, editors, and researchers have spent the past year tracking the fossil fuel companies and tech giants seeking private gain from MAGA, along with the climate deniers and right-wing political operatives attempting to export the movement globally.
Here are some of their most consequential achievements.
Supercharging climate denial
For years, the widely-held belief in the community of people advocating for aggressive climate action was that outright denial of the science was becoming a marginal relic of the past. That was never accurate, as DeSmog has extensively reported, but the second Trump administration has shattered the illusion for good.
Trump’s Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, is a former fracking executive. During a February speech to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference, Wright called 2050 net zero targets “a sinister goal.”
In exclusive interviews with DeSmog at the London event, prominent climate crisis deniers praised Wright for his opposition to regulating CO2 as a pollutant. Overturning these regulations is a long-time goal of groups such as the CO2 Coalition and the Heartland Institute.
The energy secretary this year convened a panel of climate deniers, including the Canadian Ross McKitrick, to author an official Department of Energy report questioning the link between humans and global temperature rise. More than 85 actual climate experts released a scathing rebuttal describing the report as “junk science.”
Nevertheless, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) drew on Wright’s report to initiate its effort to rescind the agency’s own “endangerment finding” on CO2 and other carbon emissions, which provides the legal foundation for many major U.S. climate regulations. (It was perhaps not the most far-sighted strategy, as the administration’s strident climate denial is now creating potential legal hurdles for the EPA’s repeal effort.)
The administration also relied on climate crisis deniers to help craft legislation, such as Alex Epstein, who was credited with shaping sections of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” that eliminated tax credits supporting wind and solar energy. That legislative effort got an assist from Americans for Prosperity, a political advocacy group backed by oil and gas billionaire Charles Koch.
These assaults on climate science and renewable energy had already been laid out in Project 2025, the reactionary blueprint for a second Trump administration created by the Heritage Foundation. DeSmog found that over 50 high-level Trump administration officials were linked to Project 2025, including many of the president’s closest advisors, such as Elon Musk.
Although Musk and Trump eventually had a bitter falling out, the consequences of Musk taking a power saw to the federal government will be felt for years in terms of shuttered climate programs, laid-off employees, and diminished bureaucratic expertise. DeSmog revealed that Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) effort was partly the result of a concerted effort—led behind the scenes by conservative groups—to tilt the U.S. towards hard-line Christian Nationalist and libertarian ideology.
In the process, the climate denial movement appeared to gain a powerful new ally. “We welcome Elon Musk into the climate red pill group,” Climate Depot executive director Marc Morano stated in late 2024.
Undermining European democracy
This November, the White House published a National Security Strategy that outlined U.S. policy goals in Europe.
DeSmog has been reporting on these goals throughout the year.
“Our broad policy for Europe,” the strategy stated, “should prioritize cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.”
The strategy “reject[s] the disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘Net Zero’ ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threaten the United States, and subsidize our adversaries.”
At a private event that DeSmog attended during February’s ARC conference, Kevin Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation, seemed to articulate these same principles, rejecting climate science as “fiction” and urging “our friends from Europe” to oppose international institutions.
The following month, the Heritage Foundation convened hard-line European conservatives for a meeting in Washington, D.C., where they discussed how to dismantle the European Union.
In April, DeSmog revealed that the Heritage Foundation was actively trying to shape an upcoming national election in Albania in favor of a Trump-aligned candidate.
The following month, key MAGA influencers, including Trump administration Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, descended on eastern Europe for the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) Poland conference. According to audio of CPAC Poland obtained by DeSmog, speakers made calls to “liquidate” the European Commission, while pushing for the election of far-right Polish presidential candidate Karol Nawrocki. (Nawrocki won in a June runoff election.)
Trump-aligned groups were trying meanwhile to hollow out European climate legislation. The Heartland Institute set its sights on the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), a law requiring companies to address human rights and environmental issues in their operations.
Also fighting the CSDDD: A coalition of companies called the Competitiveness Roundtable whose members include ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies, Chevron, and Koch, Inc. Documents obtained by the research group SOMO and seen by DeSmog showed that this corporate campaign deliberately supported far-right groups in Europe in service of its goals.
It’s now clear that combating EU climate rules was essential to carving out a market in Europe for American gas exporters. “The industry and the State Department are putting a lot of pressure on the EU [to] commit to our dirty LNG,” one climate advocate told DeSmog.
Forging anti-climate alliances with Big Tech
During the first Trump administration, the world’s biggest tech companies pledged to fight for climate action even as the U.S. exited the Paris climate treaty and rolled back key environmental laws.
This time around, those same tech companies are actively supporting Trump’s climate denial.
DeSmog revealed that during an April AI conference in Washington, D.C., Google president and chief investment officer Ruth Porat called a preceding speech by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum “fantastic,” even though Burgum used his appearance to attack the so-called “climate extremist agenda” and push expanding the use of coal.
Porat’s praise seemed at odds with her own company’s ambitious 2020 pledge to power all its operations with carbon-free energy by 2030.
Google’s shift wasn’t an outlier, but part of a trend within Big Tech to go along with the Trump administration’s embrace of fossil fuels to power its energy-hungry data centers, despite renewables remaining the cheapest and quickest-to-install electricity source worldwide.
DeSmog revealed that OpenAI this year hired a new head of global energy policy who is a dedicated champion of natural gas, and was a senior energy advisor in the first Trump administration. In September, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman joined Trump on an official state visit to the UK, where the company is planning a massive new AI infrastructure project.
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