This was a year of extremes when it came to both climate change and climate policy. The weather statistics speak for themselves: 2025 is virtually certain to be the second or third hottest year on record. Record greenhouse gas concentrations continue to drive higher temperatures across the globe, and sea ice and glaciers are retreating. Extreme weather events are causing massive social and economic disruption, and the three-year average for 2023-2025 is on track to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius for the first time. Cop30 was another missed opportunity to build momentum for a fossil fuel phase-out.
At the top of the 2025 naughty list is the US, now officially in climate denial. This matters because of the abiding geopolitical and economic influence of the US, notwithstanding Trump’s distaste for multilateralism.
On his first day in office, Trump announced that he would withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement. That decision pretty much set the tone for his approach to climate policy, and since then his administration has cancelled offshore wind projects, doubled down on fossil fuel extraction on federal lands, ended the Biden-era subsidies for renewables, pushed scientifically inaccurate statements about the causes of climate change, and rolled back thousands of environmental regulations. Climate scientist Michael Mann was reported by the Guardian as describing the US Department of Energy’s plan to relax climate pollution controls as “if you took a chatbot and you trained it on the top 10 fossil fuel industry-funded climate denier websites”.
Legal challenges might yet work to block Trump’s most irrational decisions. Seventeen Democratic-led states have objected to Trump’s decision cancelling wind projects and a federal judge struck down his order for the time being, offering a faint glimmer of hope that the courts will slow the damage he is doing to the US renewables sector and uphold the EPA’s role in regulating climate pollution.
READ MORE
Despite Trump’s efforts to undo the modest achievements of global climate co-operation, the energy transition has continued to pick up pace. China is now the world’s leader in manufacturing the decarbonisation and clean technologies at affordable scales that will ultimately overshadow the Trump-era’s back-pedalling. Some of the countries benefiting from the renewables boom led by China include Pakistan, which has witnessed one of the most rapid and surprising transitions to clean energy, driven largely by rooftop solar panels. By 2026, it is expected that 20 per cent of the country’s grid will be powered by solar.
Even in the US oil and gas hotspot state of Texas, renewables flourished under former president Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) subsidies. Utility-scale solar capacity in Texas jumped from about 5 gigawatts in 2020 to 27.5 gigawatts by the end of 2024, and 24-29 per cent of the state’s electricity is met by wind power. (For reference, Ireland’s target for installed solar capacity by 2030 is 8 gigawatts). As a windy and sunny state with a deregulated electricity sector where companies compete to sell electricity to the grid, Texas is a fascinating example of why renewables are cheaper, faster and more attractive to investors to build than gas plants.
[ ‘Too small to matter’ is the laziest-possible excuse in climate debateOpens in new window ]
Much of the investment has gone to Republican districts represented by members of the US Congress who voted against Biden’s subsidies. Politics and economics seem to be increasingly detached. As we scratch our heads in disbelief at what is happening in the US, we should take note of the corrosive impact of disinformation spread by unregulated news outlets and social media platforms, and the influence exerted by fossil fuel interests on political parties and candidates.
There are important lessons here for the EU as it plans to implement a 2040 emissions reduction target of 90 per cent compared with 1990 levels. For climate policies to work, political mandates and market dynamics need to be aligned. However, the EU is failing to hold its nerve under pressure from the US and Qatar to weaken corporate sustainability requirements so they can supply Europe with LNG to replace imports of Russian gas. In the midst of a climate crisis, where the continent of Europe is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, the EU is embarking on a spree of deregulation using "omnibus” procedures that will weaken environmental and consumer protections.
Climate leadership was not much in evidence from the Irish Government in 2025, though on paper at least, it remains committed to the 2030 climate targets. The unseemly campaign to retain the nitrates derogation and the lack of funding to implement the Nature Restoration law suggest that the coalition Government will be prioritising business-as-usual over water quality improvements and land use reforms. Public pressure is likely to build over Ireland’s basic environmental quality standards: deteriorating water quality, poor public transport services and increasingly expensive energy are on no-one’s Christmas wish list.
