On Sept. 23, 2025, President Trump addressed the 80th United Nations General Assembly in a nearly-hour long speech that was originally scheduled to last 15 minutes. In addition to touting his administration’s accomplishments and criticizing the UN for what he claimed to be its institutional ineffectiveness, Trump attacked European countries for their efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. He claimed that European nations’ expansions of renewable energy to mitigate climate change precipitated the “failures” of their countries.
Trump’s rant against climate change runs counter to the widely established scientific consensus on global warming and climate science. In his address, Trump called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” claimed the idea of a carbon footprint is “a hoax made up by people with evil intentions,” accused environmentalists of wanting to “kill all the cows,” argued that the scientific consensus on global warming was created by “stupid people,” and called green energy a “scam.” For these reasons, he encouraged European countries to invest in traditional energy sources rather than continue transitioning to clean energy.
This speech comes at a time when the renewable energy industry is rapidly expanding across the globe. In 2025, worldwide investments in renewable energy exceeded investments in coal, oil and gas. While global solar generation increased by 31% in the first half of the year and wind generation grew by 7.7%, total fossil fuel generation dropped slightly by less than 1%, according to the energy think tank Ember.
Trump’s claims are not just at odds with the global expansion of renewable energy, but also with American public opinion regarding climate change. 79% of Americans consider climate change an important threat, compared to 21% who do not, according to a poll conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
Despite widespread concern about climate change and increasing global use of renewable energy, Trump and the GOP’s agenda pose an extreme threat to the future of the renewable energy industry in the United States. Trump has a long history of climate denial and opposition to the development of renewables, especially wind energy, but his efforts to destroy the industry have escalated during his second term.
Since the beginning of this term, Congress has rolled back federal incentives for wind and solar installations, cancelled grants that support renewable energy development, and made it much harder for companies to claim federal tax credits for renewable energy projects. The Interior Department has also placed wind projects under additional layers of political review that will stall their construction. They have also withdrawn millions of acres of federal waters from availability to lease them to offshore wind companies.
As the Trump administration increasingly creates barriers to climate action, many are left wondering if it is possible to continue on a path towards clean energy.
Professor Michael Vandenbergh, director of Vanderbilt’s Energy, Environment, & Land Use Program, emphasized that one of the main challenges when it comes to climate action in the U.S. is our country’s reliance on public environmental governance. Vandenbergh believes that our dependence on the federal government to take action against climate change, rather than being open to the possibility of expanding private environmental governance initiatives, makes it harder for us to protect the environment.
“There’s a growing recognition about the importance of private governance, but many advocates and lawyers are still suffering from the mindset that asks what the government can do when facing environmental problems,” Vandenbergh said. “Many environmental law professors are wishing that the federal government would adopt laws or policies or programs that would protect the environment and have a difficult time expanding their mental model to include incentives for the private sector as well as the public.”
Another way in which Vandenbergh suggests we can bypass political polarization over environmental action is by ensuring better information disclosure to the public about threats to the environment. Vandenbergh’s research in “The Energy and Environmental Footprint of AI” demonstrates that proper disclosure of the environmental impacts of AI can reduce the harm it causes without slowing down innovation. Beyond AI, information disclosure has enabled policymakers in the US to make informed decisions about environmental protection for decades.
But, in an era when the Trump administration often downplays, dismisses, or outright denies climate change, as he did in his UN address, it’s questionable whether information disclosure still has the power to drive policy change. Vandenbergh believes it is still a useful tool in that it may help speed up the transition to private environmental governance in the face of federal inaction.
“[Information disclosure] is not a panacea, but it is still remarkably powerful, and that is because customers, employees, managers, investors, lenders, insurers, all respond to information,” Vandenbergh said. “Even if the federal government does not respond to climate change, the rest of the world will, and most of the American population will, and that will put pressure on companies to respond as well.”
