For those of us who care about the health of our planet, 2025 has indeed been a tough year. The U.S. presidential election brought a swift end to American leadership on climate for the next several years. This development is all the more disconcerting given that this is the very timeframe on which we must make substantial progress if we are to avert catastrophic planetary warming. Is there any hope of meaningful climate action with the world’s biggest legacy climate polluter now on the sidelines? The answer, surprisingly, is a yes.

First of all, it is still possible for the U.S. to make progress on decarbonization even in the absence of federal governmental incentives. This requires taking advantage of efforts that are underway at the state and local level. Thanks to incentives put in place by the previous administration, 45 of the 50 states and most of the large metropolitan regions have climate action plans. Moreover, thirteen states—that account for roughly one third of the population and more than a third of the U.S. economy—have carbon pricing policies.

In the U.S., carbon emissions declined in 2024 even in the face of substantial economic growth, evidence of the ongoing downward trend in carbon emissions and decoupling of fossil fuel burning and economic growth in America. Government incentives sharply in favor of fossil fuels could change all of this with promises to save the coal industry. This effort seems little more than performative sloganeering, intended to appease fossil fuel CEOs, than real change. The reality remains that there is little that can be done about the structural changes in the global energy economy that decreasingly favors coal and increasingly favors renewable energy.

A bigger concern is that the lack of U.S. engagement in global efforts will dissuade other major carbon-polluting nations from the commitments they’ve made. The implementation of the polluter, petrostate, and plutocrat-driven assault on American climate policy codified in “Project 2025” has (once again) withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement. The response of the rest of the world—at least so far—seems to be, “fine, we’ll take over.” China now has the opportunity to earn leading nation status. And stepping up its game on climate appears to be one way they are seeking to do so.

China’s emissions appear to have now peaked, thanks to the rise in electric vehicles and the massive deployment of solar energy and battery storage technology. But the progress extends far beyond China—it is worldwide. Globally, electricity demand and fossil fuel generation have begun to decouple. Renewables generated more than 40% of power generation in 2024, a new record (though fossil fuel generation showed a small increase due to summer heatwave-related demand spike). In the U.S., 90% of added power generation capacity last year was from renewables, and there is little reason to believe that something can be done to reverse the structural changes in our energy economy that have led to a steady, long-term decline in coal.

So the good news is that we’re turning the corner. The bad news is, we’re not doing it fast enough. This is the year that carbon emissions must peak if we are to have any hope of stabilizing warming below 1.5°C. Carbon emissions had roughly peaked through the pandemic but have now risen several years in a row as the global economy rebounded and energy and transportation has increased. Current policies alone are likely headed toward a disastrous 2.7°C warming of the planet, so substantial additional action is necessary even to limit warming to 2.0°C.

Moreover, we potentially have a more fundamental political obstacle ahead of us that we will have to confront in the longer-term. We must recognize that what has transpired in the U.S. is no fluke. It is instead the logical consequence of a long-term assault on Democrat governance by the very plutocrats and petrostates that are behind the war on climate action (and behind a larger war on science itself, the subject of my forthcoming book, Science Under Siege, with public health Scientist Peter Hotez).

The banning of federally funded research in my own field of climate science, and the normalization of antiscience in our government agencies, as well as the massive layoffs of career scientists at NIH, NSF and EPA, are among the most disturbing of the recent developments. 

Just as disturbing is the lack of leadership on climate, or indeed any of the great crises we face in the absence of functional American governance.

I teach at Benjamin Franklin’s university, the University of Pennsylvania. Franklin was a statesman, a diplomat, a public intellectual, an inventor, a scientist—and in fact, a climate scientist (he produced the first known depiction of the Gulf Stream). Now I’m no Ben Franklin—and I’m not speaking for the university—but I do often ask myself, what would Ben think? I think that he would –as he did back in colonial times—reach out to our friends abroad for help.

If the U.S. continues down this road, joining Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the handful of other petrostate bad actors who have sought to hijack and sabotage global negotiations to reduce carbon emissions, it will be up to the other nations who are still fighting, in good faith, for a livable planet to continue and build on the climate progress that has been made. Equally important, they will need to punish (rather than appease) bad actors with increasingly stiff border adjustments, and increasingly harsh and painful sanctions. For the stakes couldn’t be any greater, they are no less than the future of human civilization.