In place of paralysis or bland positivity, this is the moment for an honest reckoning with where we stand, what we are up against, and where, already, resistance is underway.
We knew it would be bad. Since lifting his hand off the Bible on 20 January 2025, Donald Trump has launched headlong into disabling or undoing long-standing US government institutions, commitments and obligations. Notably, this has included a spectacular hostility to anything related to, or even mentioning, climate change and its impacts.
Casualties have included the United States’ withdrawal (again) from the Paris Agreement; a “Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements” order that instantly rescinded the Biden administration’s International Climate Finance Plan; devastated budgets, programmes and staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) and USAID; the erasure of scientific data and reference to climate change from government websites and publications; the repeal of key elements of the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s landmark industrial policy legislation; and the launch of what the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) itself calls the “Biggest Deregulatory Action in US History.” (This, of course, is to speak only of climate policy, saying nothing of a renewed and increasingly violent onslaught against students, activists, migrants and many others.) Viewed together, it is tempting to despair that in a few short weeks, the Trump administration has undone US, and by extension global, climate progress.
In this inaugural issue of The BREAK—DOWN, our contributors make the case, among other things, for resisting this temptation. While dissecting this moment in climate politics, they locate it in a longer trajectory. Certainly, the second Trump administration represents something new. But amid the chaos it is vital to reflect on the nature of the political consensus, including on climate, that this administration and similar parties and movements around the world seek to upend: its assumptions, its compromises, its failures. Only in doing so can we recognize where the contradictions of an ascendant new right create the opportunities to build something radically different, and how we can grasp them.
The Impossibility of the Present
Climate change has always had a scale problem. This is true in both the physical and the temporal sense. Unlike many other objects of knowledge and political struggle, climate change is widely understood as a global problem first, with second order (if by no means minor) impacts at smaller scales. The general sense is that its overall reality is planetary, and its effects cascade down upon the sub-planetary worlds in which we live, generating a perceived mismatch between what must be done, and what can be done—in other words, it often seems like the “most important” scale is the one at which we have no capacity to act.