The Trump Climate Crisis

27 Jul 2025 •

In enacting the Project 2025 agenda he previously disavowed, Trump has already set environmental progress back by decades.

Global temperatures keep rising.

Icecaps keep melting.

AI data centers make the problem worse.

But Trump insists climate change isn't real.

So he's encouraging more pollution.

He's going "all-in" on AI acceleration.

Using AI to slash 100,000 regulations.

Encouraging data centers to mushroom across America.

Zapping jobs.

Putting new stresses on the grid.

Enriching himself and his new tech bro buddies.

While increasing energy prices for everyone.

In his planet-destroying, asthma-causing, carcinogen-spreading policies, Trump has the full backing of conservative "Christians" who long-ago abandoned God's Biblical command to be good stewards of His creation.

These Christians would prefer to eliminate the estate tax for the top 0.1% than to let the rest of us inherit a livable planet.

Save 60%—support for just $1/month

By gleefully enacting the Heritage Foundation's extreme "Project 2025" agenda — along with anything else his new tech-and-crypto-bro buddies ask of him — Trump is now accelerating the climate crisis and making the future more perilous for us all.

"This is not your grandmother’s heat wave"

A late July heatwave is putting millions of Americans at risk, reports USA Today, which notes:

An analysis by Climate Central, published July 21, concluded human-caused climate change made the recent excessive heat at least three times more likely for nearly half the population of the United States.

"As the earth gets warmer, we see more extremes and it's the extremes that get us. They kill us. They make us sick," Max Holmes, said president and CEO of the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

July 2025 weather map shows extreme temperatures in Midwest and Northeast

"This is not your grandmother’s heat wave," said Kristina Dahl, Climate Central's vice president of science. (Source: USA Today.)

"We have been too cautious with our climate warnings."

Temperatures are also rising in Svalsbard, Norway, a locale at the front line of the climate crisis where things are "warming at six to seven times the global average rate."

Meltwater in Svalbard, February 2025. Image: James Bradley via 404 Media — *Meltwater in Svalbard, February 2025. Image: James Bradley* *via 404 Media*

The scientific team that observed "the thaw event of February 2025" says it is "not an isolated occurrence," and that "witnessing it in real time served as a reminder of the accelerating pace of change, and made us wonder if we have been too cautious with our climate warnings.” (Source: 404 Media.)

"Out, out, damned science!"

Trump and his EPA administrator/anti-science hatchet man Lee Zeldin (aka "Sleazy Lee Z") made EPA godfather Richard Nixon spin in his grave this week with a proposed rule to rescind the federal government’s 2009 "endangerment finding," that concluded carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases are harming the health of Americans.

Smokestacks in Wyoming via Photo by Documerica on Unsplash

As The Guardian puts it:

The finding has underpinned the US government’s legal authority to deal with the climate crisis under the Clean Air Act and its removal would effectively dismantle limits on the pollution coming from cars, trucks and power plants that is dangerously heating the world.

Abolishing the finding means ignoring "clearcut science," said Jason Burnett, who was associate deputy administrator of the EPA during George W. Bush’s administration but is now, apparently, a woke libtard tree-hugging communist. (Source: The Guardian.)

Tech giants want more "gas guzzlers"

In 2007, The International Herald Tribune described "the extremely air-conditioned computer farms known as data centers" as "the gas-guzzling automobiles of the technology world. Some require 40 or 50 times more power than comparably sized office space."

Today, "the boom in AI and data centers" is "overwhelming the grid," reports Canary Media:

From the mid-Atlantic down to Texas, tech giants and data center developers are demanding more power as soon as possible.

If utilities, regulators, and policymakers move too rashly in response, they could unleash a surge in fossil-gas power-plant construction that will drive up consumer energy costs — and set back progress on shifting to carbon-free energy...

Hundreds of billions of dollars in near-term AI investments are in the works from Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft as well as private equity and infrastructure investors... under current rules, power plants and grid infrastructure simply can’t be built fast enough to provide what data center developers say they need.

In 2025, data centers are still "gas guzzlers." Increased energy efficiencies are largely offset by the massive upscaling of "compute." That means facilities are still at least 10X more energy-intense than comparable office spaces, while the least efficient can still hit the 40-50X range, according to the Department of Energy.

Data centers also drain resources in water-stressed communities as they consume millions of gallons of potable water annually and treat it in ways that remove it from the local water cycle.

Trump's "Build, Baby, Build!" plan will accelerate pollution—and inflation

In front of Big Tech leaders and with AI Czar/Paypal Mafia Consigliere David Sacks at his side, Trump this week unveiled "America's AI Action Plan," which, reports Inside Climate News, will give companies "a free pass" to loot and pollute the nation "with minimal federal oversight."

Among the actions outlined: waiving some environmental regulations for data centers and determining in concert with the industry any other rules that “unnecessarily hinder AI development or deployment.”

Simply put, we need to ‘Build, Baby, Build!’” an introduction to the 23-page plan said.

Environmental advocates warn that Trump's plan could prolong the reliance on fossil fuel infrastructure, undermine recent gains in environmental justice, and position vulnerable communities as the primary victims of unchecked AI infrastructure growth.

Make Our Planet Great Again protest sign

In effect, all companies will now be allowed to follow Musk's lead in poisoning Americans, straining local resources — and driving energy costs for consumers higher.

And while AI is expected to help corporations eliminate millions of jobs in the years ahead, the construction of each new data center will only create a handful of permanent jobs.

Beyond the damage he's already done, Trump also plans to use an unproven AI tool, developed as part of Musk's DOGE project, to slash 100,000 additional government regulations, reports the Washington Post. Given Musk's track record of exploding things on the launchpad, this new effort seems likely to add to, not decrease, America's pollution woes. (Gift link.)

In six months, Trump's war on the planet has already set us back decades

By Earth Day 2025, three months into the new Trump administration, it was already clear that all of the momentum Biden had created in the climate fight had been reversed, Frances Colon, senior fellow of international climate at the Center for American Progress, told ABC News.

Six months in, as Peter Stone wrote in The Guardian on 20 July, "Trump's skewed and unscientific energy priorities" based on "an 'invented' national energy emergency" have done far more damage, setting environmental progress back by decades.

Trump has pushed for more fossil-fuel production, rhapsodized about “beautiful coal,” dubbed climate change a “hoax” and invoked his “drill, baby, drill” mantra to promote more oil and gas projects after receiving $75m in campaign donations in 2024 from fossil-fuel interests.

Earlier in July, more than 170 EPA employees raised the alarm in a letter declaring Trump's policies "undermine the EPA mission of protecting human health and the environment."

As the Los Angeles Times reported in May, Trump is religiously following the anti-science agenda laid out in Project 2025, delivering on:

Action items like rolling back air and water quality regulations; canceling funds for clean energy projects and environmental justice grants; laying off scientists and researchers in related fields; and withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord, an agreement among nearly 200 countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions driving global warming.

While it was obvious to many that religious zealots were hiding behind the sinful Trump in order to act their extremist agenda, this isn't what candidate Trump himself promised. And it's not what America voted for.

Last September, Trump declared in his debate with Kamala Harris: "I have nothing to do with Project 2025."

But in January, he set to work making the 900-page plan a reality, with particular attention to Project 2025's detailed and expansive schemes to destroy the planet.

By May, reports the Los Angeles Times, Trump had already "initiated or completed about 70% of Project 2025's environmental agenda."

And his aggressive pushback on climate action doesn't just harm America.

Trump is also cutting US funding for virtually all international climate initiatives.

Which guarantees that, as the Trump climate crisis worsens, the whole world will pay the price.

Thanks for reading! Please feel free to share and comment. All content to Unprecedented is free—there's no paywall. But if you do enjoy the content, please support if you can...

Free signup - never a paywall!

Save 60%—support for just $1/month

Leave a one-time tip

Further reading:

May 2025: The Trump Weather Crisis