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supercharging climate denial, boosting fossil fuels.....

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.

 

How MAGA Changed the World in 2025, and What Comes Next
Across the U.S., UK, Europe, and Canada, Donald Trump and his allies worked tirelessly to supercharge climate denial, boost fossil fuels, and foment political chaos.

By Geoff Dembicki

 

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.

Jensen Huang, CEO of the supercomputer chip-maker Nvidia, also accompanied Trump to the UK in September. Huang followed that up in October by praising Energy Secretary Wright’s “passion” for science, despite Wright’s active promotion of climate denial.

DeSmog also reported on Nvidia’s marketing of AI tools to Brazilian oil and gas companies just weeks before the COP30 climate negotiations in Belém.

This was no coincidence, as the fossil fuel industry is increasingly using AI to boost oil and gas production, as executives told the Reuters Global Energy Transition conference in June. In turn, AI advocates including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt are pitching AI energy demand to major oil producing countries as a way to keep fossil fuels alive.

In Texas alone, AI has spurred demand for over 100 new natural gas plants, while in Virginia local communities fought against a data center proposal that would have seen construction of the largest U.S. gas plant in a decade. The data center explosion is also delaying the retirement of at least 15 coal plants across the U.S.

DeSmog reported this year on the growing backlash to data centers in places like rural Georgia, despite a public charm offensive aimed directly at residents. Still, the large corporate backers behind these projects remain confident that they can overcome public opposition.

That includes a real estate arm of Koch, Inc. that has been building data centers in Chicago, Kansas City, and Atlanta, which is pitching itself as having the “expertise and capabilities that major tech companies either don’t have or don’t think would be worth the time.”

At this point, it’s safe to conclude, data centers are inseparable from fossil fuel expansion.

Backing the Rightwing Reform UK

A fair question to ask this year was whether British MP Nigel Farage spent more time cultivating ties to MAGA in the U.S. than actually leading his rightwing political party, Reform UK, back at home. In September, Farage skipped Parliament’s return from summer recess in order to speak at the National Conservatism (NatCon) conference in Washington, D.C., and address the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress.

“Nigel Farage is far more interested in pleasing Trump and jostling for his affections than he is in turning up to Parliament on time or standing up for British values,” one Liberal Democrat source told DeSmog.

Farage in turn is helping MAGA expand into Europe. DeSmog reported in 2024 that he helped set up a UK-EU branch of the Heartland Institute. This year, the pro-Trump group claimed it was spearheading opposition to the EU’s flagship Nature Restoration Law.

Back in February, Farage himself stated at the ARC conference that “I can’t tell you whether CO2 is leading to warming or not, but there are so many other massive factors,” while taking aim at the UK’s net-zero policies. His comments are perhaps not surprising, given the previous donations Reform UK has received from fossil fuel and climate denier interests.

Other party figures also seem to be looking to the U.S. for inspiration. Reform UK Chair Zia Yusuf is an admirer of tech billionaire Musk, and apparently so is Paul Marshall, the right-wing owner of GB News and other outlets, which are key media backers of Reform UK. Marshall, who is also a hedge fund manager, bought a large stake in Tesla, the electric vehicle company led by Elon Musk, prior to the 2024 U.S. presidential election, DeSmog revealed.

Close ties to Trump may have helped smooth the way for massive new tech ventures in the UK. DeSmog reported in September that Trump’s UK ambassador, Warren Stephens, has a family-owned investment firm with large shares in Microsoft, Nvidia, and Alphabet (Google’s parent company), which are planning major UK projects.

The Trump-linked U.S. private equity firm Blackstone is meanwhile building a $13.4 billion (£10 billion) AI data centre in the UK that includes a fleet of massive backup diesel generators.

Fomenting Political Chaos in Canada

DeSmog was in the room at a conservative political event in Alberta where one of the speakers revealed a shocking piece of news. Dennis Modry, the former CEO of a group called the Alberta Prosperity Project, which is pushing for the oil-rich province to separate from Canada, claimed that he’d met directly with members of the Trump administration.

At that meeting, Modry claimed, U.S. officials offered “a $500 million transition loan that we would only draw down on as necessary as we work with the U.S. to transition from a province to a country.” That wasn’t the only instance of MAGA policies influencing the political discourse in Canada. Alberta premier Danielle Smith revealed in September that she had met with the Heritage Foundation shortly after Trump’s election. Smith had already caused a national uproar months earlier by traveling to Florida to appear on a private panel with conservative U.S. pundit Ben Shapiro, who had previously called Canada “a silly country” that should be annexed by the U.S.

During the federal Canadian election, which was dominated by fears about Trump waging a trade war on the country, Smith told the right-wing U.S. media outlet Breitbart News that Conservative Party candidate Pierre Poilievre “would be very much in sync” with the Trump administration.

And indeed, DeSmog’s careful analysis of Poilievre’s inner circle turned up links to Elon Musk, Koch, Inc, and major oil and gas companies tightly linked to the U.S.

As in the UK, some Canadian conservatives and executives openly expressed admiration for Musk and his work with Trump. DeSmog was at a conservative event in Ottawa where representatives from Amazon and the pipeline builder TC Energy discussed how a right-wing prime minister could replicate elements of Musk’s DOGE effort in Ottawa.

Poilievre ultimately lost the election to his Liberal opponent, current Prime Minister Mark Carney, but now Carney is implementing a pro-oil-and-gas agenda and taking ideas from the billionaire-founded AI and fossil fuel group Build Canada.

As we head into 2026, expect to see MAGA and its allies continue their global assault on climate science and policies to reduce planet-heating emissions.

The Canadian conservative influencer Jordan Peterson was a key organizer of this year’s ARC conference, where Trump officials, European conservatives, tech investors, and climate crisis deniers discussed how to build and implement a global anti-net zero movement.

They will be meeting again in June.

https://www.desmog.com/2025/12/22/how-maga-changed-the-world-in-2025-and-what-comes-next/

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

getting greener....

 

How Climate Change Will Affect Plants

Renée Cho

January 27, 2022

 

We human beings need plants for our survival. Everything we eat consists of plants or animals that depend on plants somewhere along the food chain. Plants also form the backbone of natural ecosystems, and they absorb about 30 percent of all the carbon dioxide emitted by humans each year. But as the impacts of climate change worsen, how are higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and warmer temperatures affecting the plant world?

CO2 boosts plant productivity

Plants use sunlight, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and water for photosynthesis to produce oxygen and carbohydrates that plants use for energy and growth.

Rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere drive an increase in plant photosynthesis—an effect known as the carbon fertilization effect. New research has found that between 1982 and 2020, global plant photosynthesis grew 12 percent, tracking CO2 levels in the atmosphere as they rose 17 percent. The vast majority of this increase in photosynthesis was due to carbon dioxide fertilization.

Increased photosynthesis results in more growth in some plants. Scientists have found that in response to elevated CO2 levels, above-ground plant growth increased an average of 21 percent, while below-ground growth increased 28 percent. As a result, some crops such as wheat, rice and soybeans are expected to benefit from increased CO2 with an increase in yields from 12 to 14 percent. The growth of some tropical and sub-tropical grasses and several important crops, including corn, sugar cane, sorghum, and millet, however, are not as affected by increased CO2.

Under elevated CO2 concentrations, plants use less water during photosynthesis. Plants have openings called stomata that allow CO2 to be absorbed and moisture to be released into the atmosphere. When CO2 levels rise, plants can maintain a high rate of photosynthesis and partially close their stomata, which can decrease a plant’s water loss between 5 and 20 percent. Scientists have speculated that this could result in plants releasing less water to the atmosphere, thus keeping more on land, in the soil and streams.

But other factors count

Elevated levels of CO2 from climate change may enable plants to benefit from the carbon fertilization effect and use less water to grow, but it’s not all good news for plants. It’s more complicated than that, because climate change is also impacting other factors critical to plants’ growth, such as nutrients, temperature, and water.

Nitrogen limitations

Researchers that studied hundreds of plant species between 1980 and 2017 found that most unfertilized terrestrial ecosystems are becoming deficient in nutrients, particularly nitrogen. They attributed this decrease in nutrients to global changes, including rising temperatures and CO2 levels.

Nitrogen is the most abundant element on Earth, making up about 80 percent of the atmosphere. It is an essential element in DNA and RNA and is needed by plants to make carbohydrates and proteins for growth. However, plants cannot use the nitrogen gas found in the atmosphere because it has two atoms of nitrogen triply bonded together so tightly that they are difficult to break apart into a form plants can use. Lightning has enough energy to break the triple bond, a process called nitrogen fixation. Nitrogen is also fixed in the industrial process that produces fertilizer.

But most nitrogen fixation occurs in the soil, where certain kinds of bacteria attach to the roots of plants, such as legumes. The bacteria get carbon from the plant and in a symbiotic exchange, fix the nitrogen, combining it with oxygen or hydrogen into compounds plants can use.

Kevin Griffin, a professor in Columbia University’s Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, explained that most living things have a relatively fixed ratio between carbon and nitrogen. This means that if plants take up more CO2 to create carbohydrates because there’s more CO2 in the atmosphere, the amount of nitrogen in the leaves may be diluted, and a plant’s productivity depends on having enough nitrogen. “If you increase the CO2 around a leaf or around the plant or around the plot of forest, usually the productivity goes up,” he said. “But whether or not that increase in productivity lasts and is permanent, can be a function of whether you have [enough] nitrogen. So if nitrogen is limited, it could be that a plant just cannot use that extra CO2 and its boost in productivity can be short lived.”

Trees currently absorb about a third of human-caused CO2 emissions, but their ability to continue to do this depends on how much nitrogen is available to them. If nitrogen is limited, the benefit of increased CO2 will be limited too.

Earlier research on nitrogen fixation, based on measurements of free-living bacteria, had predicted that the fixation process works fastest at 25°C, and that as temperatures rose above 25°C, the rate of fixation would go down. In a warming world, this would have meant a runaway scenario where nitrogen fixing would decrease as temperatures rose, resulting in less plant productivity. Plants would then remove less CO2 from the atmosphere which would cause further warming and less nitrogen fixing, and so on. In a new paper, Griffin describes how he and his colleagues developed an instrument that enabled them to measure the temperature response of nitrogen on the bacteria that formed an association with the roots of plants, as opposed to on free-living bacteria.

“What we found with our new instrument looking at whole-plant symbioses in temperate and tropical trees, was that the optimal temperature for nitrogen fixation was actually about 5°C higher than any of these previous estimates, and in some cases as much as 11°C higher. This needs to be tested over a huge number of plants, but if it holds, it means that the likelihood of nitrogen fixation decreasing is much lower than we thought, which means that plants could stay more productive and prevent the runaway scenario.”

Rising temperatures

Griffin’s work also found that the temperature response of nitrogen fixation is independent from the temperature response of photosynthesis, which involves enzymes made with nitrogen. Higher temperatures can make these enzymes less efficient. Rubisco is the key enzyme that helps turn carbon dioxide into carbohydrates in photosynthesis, but as temperatures go up, it “relaxes” and the shape of its pocket that holds the CO2 gets less precise. Consequently, one fifth of the time, the enzyme winds up fixing oxygen instead of carbon dioxide, lowering the efficiency of photosynthesis and wasting the plant’s resources. With an even greater temperature increase, Rubisco can completely deactivate. Since plants respond to nitrogen fertilizer by increasing the amount of Rubisco they have and growing more, the finding that nitrogen fixation can be sustained at higher temperatures than previously thought offers the possibility that it could compensate for the decreasing efficiency of Rubisco at higher temperatures.

Rising temperatures are also causing growing seasons to become longer and warmer. Because plants will grow more and for a longer time, they will actually use more water, offsetting the benefits of partially closing their stomata. Contrary to what scientists believed in the past, the result will be drier soils and less runoff that is needed for streams and rivers. This could also lead to more local warming since evapotranspiration—when plants release moisture into the air—keeps the air cooler. In addition, when soils are dry, plants become stressed and do not absorb as much CO2, which could limit photosynthesis. Scientists found that even if plants absorbed excess carbon for photosynthesis during a wet year, the amount could not compensate for the reduced amount of CO2 absorbed during a previous dry year.

Warmer winters and a longer growing season also help the pests, pathogens, and invasive species that harm vegetation. During longer growing seasons, more generations of pests can reproduce as warmer temperatures speed up insect life cycles, and more pests and pathogens survive over warm winters. Rising temperatures are also driving some insects to invade new territories, sometimes with devastating effects for the local plants.

Higher temperatures and an increase in moisture also make crops more vulnerable. Weeds, many of which thrive in heat and elevated CO2, already cause about 34 percent of crop losses; insects cause 18 percent of losses, and disease 16 percent. Climate change will likely magnify these losses.

Many crops start to experience stress at temperatures above 32° to 35°C, although this depends on crop type and water availability. Models show that each degree of added warmth can cause a 3 to 7 percent loss in the yields of some important crops, such as corn and soybeans.

In addition, an increase in temperature speeds up the plant lifecycle so that as the plant matures more quickly, it has less time for photosynthesis, and consequently produces fewer grains and smaller yields.

Plants are also on the move in response to warming temperatures. Species that are adapted to certain climatic conditions are gradually moving north or to higher elevations where it is cooler. In the last several decades, many North American plants have moved approximately 36 feet to higher elevations or 10.5 miles to higher latitudes every 10 years. The Arctic tree line is also moving 131 to 164 feet northward towards the pole each year. New environments may be less hospitable for the species moving into them as there might be less space or more competition for resources. Some species may have nowhere left to move and ultimately, certain species will be disadvantaged by the changes while others will benefit.

Extreme weather

Climate change will bring more frequent and severe extreme weather events, including extreme precipitation, wind disturbance, heat waves, and drought. Extreme precipitation events can disturb plant growth, particularly in recently burned forests, and make plants more vulnerable to flooding and soils to erosion. More frequent high winds can stress tree stands.

Climate change is also expected to bring more combined heat waves and droughts, which would likely offset any benefits from the carbon fertilization effect. While crop yields often decrease during hot growing seasons, the combination of heat and dryness could cause maize yields to fall by 20 percent in some parts of the US, and 40 percent in Eastern Europe and southeast Africa. In addition, the combination of heat and water scarcity may reduce crop yields in places like the northern US, Canada, and Ukraine, where crop yields are projected to increase because of warmer temperatures.

Other effects of increased CO2

While some crop yields may increase, rising CO2 levels affect the level of important nutrients in crops. With elevated CO2, protein concentrations in grains of wheat, rice and barley, and in potato tubers decreased by 10 to 15 percent in one study. Crops also lose important minerals including calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, iron, and zinc. A 2018 study of rice varieties found that while elevated CO2 concentrations increased vitamin E, they resulted in decreases in vitamins B1, B2, B5 and B9.

And, counterintuitively, the CO2-fueled increase in plant growth may result in less carbon storage in soil. Recent research found that plants have to draw more nutrients from the soil to keep up with the added growth triggered by carbon fertilization. This stimulates microbial activity, which ends up releasing CO2 into the atmosphere that might otherwise have stayed in the soil. The findings challenge the long-held belief that as plants grow more due to increased CO2, the additional biomass would turn into organic matter and soils could increase their carbon storage.

Plants face an uncertain future 

Many of the studies into the response of plant life to climate change seem to suggest that most plants will be more stressed and less productive in the future. But there are still many unknowns about how the complex interactions between plant physiology and behavior, resource availability and use, shifting plant communities, and other factors will affect overall plant life in the face of climate change.

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2022/01/27/how-climate-change-will-affect-plants/

 

ALTHOUGH THIS EXPOSE IS MORE THAN TWO YEARS OLD IT IS MORE RELEVANT THAN EVER....

MANY GARDERNERS HAVE NOTICED SOME CHANGES: USUALLY SUN-RESISTANT PLANTS ARE GETTING SUN-BURNT SUDDENLY. 

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.