Global warning: Trump’s war on the planet heats up

High up on the northern flank of the world’s largest volcano, Mauna Loa on Hawaii’s Big Island, lies an observatory that was first scraped into the black basalt by a young scientist, David Keeling.

Every hour since it was established in 1958, scientists have deployed their instruments to sip the clean air from the trade winds that flow across the Pacific, and they have tested the samples for carbon dioxide content. The chart they have so painstakingly built over those decades is now known as the Keeling Curve. It shows how during the northern summer, as plant life grows thicker and fuller, carbon dioxide concentrations reduce, only to rise again in the winter. Keeling’s observatory showed us how the earth itself draws breath.

And it shows us each year as we keep burning fossil fuels the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases, from 313 parts per million when the observatory was established, to 426 ppm on the day of US President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, to 430.67 ppm on Wednesday, as Australia’s east coast reeled from compounding fires and floods of the sort predicted by climate scientists using, in part, data from Mauna Loa.

Married to readings of average temperatures, which lag but waltz ever upwards in harmony, the Keeling Curve is the world’s most simple and transparent illustration of climate change. The curve, and the field of climate science it accelerated, is not only one of the US’s great achievements and gifts to the world, but a demonstration of the efficacy of long-term and dedicated scientific practice.

Naturally, the Trump administration wants to destroy it.

In March, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency said it could save $US150,000 by ending the observatory’s lease on an office and in the administration’s midyear budget proposal, it flagged ending the organisation’s funding. The assault on the Mauna Loa Observatory is part of a far wider attack on climate science and action mounted by the Trump administration over the past year.

Some highlights: In April, the administration disbanded the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which had once been home to the climatologist James Hansen, whose 1988 testimony before Congress was key to introducing the world to the climate threat.

In August, Trump ordered a halt in the construction of the near-complete $US4 billion Revolution Wind project, a wind farm of 114 turbines off the coast of Rhode Island that by next year would have been providing enough electricity for 350,000 homes if the developer had been allowed to finish the job. Courts intervened, though days before Christmas, Trump again sought to force a halt to Revolution, and a second project called Empire Wind, also nearing completion.

Trump has raged against wind energy ever since turbines were built near his golf course in Scotland. “I’ve studied it better than anybody I know,” he said in a 2019 speech. “I never understood wind. You know, I know windmills very much. They’re noisy. They kill the birds.”

In September, Trump’s address to the United Nations General Assembly devolved into a rant against climate science and renewable energy. “This ‘climate change’, it’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” Trump said. “All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong.”

Trump told world leaders, who listened in silence: “I’m really good at predicting things. I don’t say that in a braggadocious way, but it’s true. I’ve been right about everything. And I’m telling you that if you don’t get away from this green energy scam, your country is going to fail.

“Radicalised environmentalists,” he said, wanted to “kill all the cows.“

In October, Trump’s diplomats bullied the 100 member states of the World Maritime Organisation into dumping the agreement they had forged over years of negotiations to tax pollution from shipping. This was such an egregious act of sabotage that Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse said it should have served as a warning to the wider world that the Trump White House, and the oil industry that funded his election campaign, had effectively merged.

“It’s pretty evil stuff,” Whitehouse told Bloomberg. “[It] ought to be a lesson to them that the fossil fuel administration is desperate and engaged in evil behaviour constantly, unless you think climate denial, fraud and dark money corruption are fine. And they have the United States government right now as their tool to bring pressure to bear.”

In November, a decade after the signing of the Paris Agreement – the high watermark of global co-operation to tackle climate change – UN COP climate talks went ahead in Brazil without the US in attendance. If anyone walked away from the talks a winner, it was the army of oil industry lobbyists, who managed to stave off any mention of the phasing out of fossil fuels in its final agreement. At recent COPs, the diplomatic weight of the US State Department had curbed them.

In December, Trump moved to dismantle the globally esteemed National Centre for Atmospheric Research. That same month, environmentalist and author Bill McKibben declared in the New Yorker that the efforts of Trump and his minions over the year had constituted the greatest collective act of scientific vandalism in recent American history.

“It would be easy, and accurate, to call 2025 the low point of human action on the climate crisis,” he wrote.

That may yet turn out to be the case, but the new year is young and Trump is apparently indefatigable. On January 7, Trump withdrew the US “from International Organisations, Conventions, and Treaties that Are Contrary to the Interests of the United States”.

They included the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, under which the Paris Agreement was negotiated, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which provides scientific assessments on climate to the UN.

It had been a busy time for Trump, who, days earlier, had orchestrated the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country,” said Trump, no longer bothering to talk up the illegal drug trade.

The impacts of Trump’s attack on climate science are profound but as yet unquantifiable. Appetite for ambitious climate policy is also waning in Europe. The COP is faltering and multilateralism itself is under threat. But the voice of Trump and the fossil fuel-funded think tanks that helped draft his climate and energy policies has metastasised to Australia too, where it has cluttered our crucial climate and energy policy debate with dingbattery and cant.

Matt Kean, the former NSW Liberal treasurer who now serves as chair of the Climate Change Authority, responsible for providing reliable climate policy advice to the government, has seen this first hand.

“Even in Australia [Trump’s] language has bled into politics, making it harder to find pragmatic solutions in the national interest despite all the economic momentum behind clean energy,” he told me this week. By undermining science, he says, the Trump administration has amplified tribalism.

Commentators and not a few politicians in this country rage against subsidies to renewable energy but not those to fossil fuels, all the while pining for a fantastical state-funded nuclear power industry. They fret about the thousands of tonnes of pollution spent on turbine blades and solar panels, but not the billions of tonnes of coal ash and carbon dioxide. They rail against car battery fires as though petrol was not combustible. Men better known as champions of broadscale land clearing fuss about the harm that wind turbines might cause whales and birds. (Not much.)

They insist it is not worth acting on climate until China does, even as China strides ahead of the West in every green industry. China, it turns out, is as determined to dominate the coming century’s technologies as Trump is wedded to those of the past.

This matters not just because we are wasting crucial time, but because it leaves the opposition impotent in prosecuting the government’s faltering climate efforts. There is no serious debate on the impact of a carbon tax, even though economists see it as a crucial policy tool. The government’s hydrogen strategy – branded as vital to the national interest as recently as 2024 – diffused at speed months later and nobody really noticed.

Analysts at the Grattan Institute say the government might miss both its renewable energy and its  emission reduction targets. Rather than hold the government to account on this, the opposition is relentlessly focused on a political effort to cast renewables as the culprit for electricity price rises, despite an avalanche of domestic and international evidence showing that new wind and solar is the cheapest form of energy, and that it is only growing cheaper.

Whitehouse fears the debate will get worse as fossil fuel industries fight more desperately. The International Energy Agency believes coal demand has peaked, and that oil and gas will follow. The last energy giants standing are likely to make a killing, but the end is in sight.

“It’s a survival thing for them. They’re attacking everything that they can that is a threat to the continued dominance of fossil fuel,” Whitehouse says.

Nick O’Malley is national environment and climate editor for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.