By the time this issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is published, the mid-term elections will have been conducted and—hopefully—a decision will have been reached. But as of this writing, no one really knows what will happen, except that the elections will have been, in part, a referendum on the actions of this presidential administration over the past two years. And arguably, no area has been affected more than climate action. Regardless of who wins or loses on Election Day, November 3, it will have been time to take stock.
With that in mind, the Bulletin reached out to authors to find out what, exactly, has been the effect of the president’s activities on the effort to restrain global warming.
This issue of the magazine starts with Adam Sobel, a climate scientist at Columbia University, who gives an insider’s look at the impacts of DOGE on research in his field. In the essay “Cuts, evictions, and job losses: A view from the trenches of climate science in 2026,” Sobel argues that the impacts of the actions of the Trump 2.0 era have been detrimental, and stretch far beyond his field alone, to profoundly shake the foundations of all American science. “The post-World War II traditions that have made American science so successful—generous funding, awarded based on merit via peer review; academic freedom; openness to foreign talent; and most of all, systems of funding and executing science that are largely run by scientists, rather than by politicians—are under siege,” he writes.
Echoing his take is Marc Abrahams, founder of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, a usually lighthearted get-together that celebrates the unusual, honors the imaginative, and aims to spur interest in science. For 35 years, it’s been held in the United States—but no more. In his piece, “Why the annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony is now in Europe,” Abrahams says that winners of the prize were so intimidated by the draconian actions of federal authorities that they are afraid to visit this country. He can understand their position, and writes: “During the past year, it has become unsafe for our guests to visit this country. The annual Ig Nobel Prize could not in good conscience ask the new winners, or the international journalists who cover the event, to travel to the United States.”
Trump’s approach colors much of this country’s climate agenda, but its impact is not limited to the United States—and it was aided by the fact that a retreat was already occurring in a number of other fossil fuel superpowers, writes Sydney-based climate researcher David Spratt. “In Australia, corporate attention on climate was already waning even before the second Trump election victory—something which was also true on a global level. So was media coverage, and public opinion. But Trump has legitimized and encouraged backsliding.” In the Trump era, many big Australian companies have continued to backpedal and procrastinate on taking serious climate action. This is of vital concern, given that Australia is the world’s largest coal exporter, accounting for one-third of the global trade in the commodity in 2025, and the fifth-largest gas exporter. “ ‘Greening’ the country was always going to be an uphill slog, but Trump’s influence has arguably made it harder,” says Spratt in his essay “Trump looms large over Australia’s climate agenda. But retreat was already underway.”
And the prospects for the much-ballyhooed solutions of geoengineering are greatly over-rated, say folks such as Tim and Emma Flannery, as can be seen from the title of their book “A Brief History of Climate Folly.” Book reviewer Eric Trump (no relation) writes that “The history of geoengineering is a litany of fantasies blossoming on the ground, under the water, in the air, and in outer space that were, to put it mildly, ‘highly imperfect.’ From dancing to bloodletting to diverting trillions of gallons of river water at a cost of trillions of dollars to seeding clouds with tons of salt to bombing hurricanes to damming the Bering Strait to redirect ocean currents and melt Arctic ice, dreams of geoengineering were Ozymandian in scale.”
These ideas included one called “Project Znamya,” which aimed to provide northern Russia with more sunlight by creating a second so-called “moon” in the form of giant space mirrors that would “extend daylight hours, providing Soviet citizens with additional warmth and savings in energy.” (Speaking of the moon, he writes in his book review about how an “…idea in the 1990s called for blowing the moon to bits to relieve Earth of its tilted axis and pesky seasons.”)
There was also a plan to dam the Strait of Gibraltar, the Dardanelles, and the stretch of water between Sicily and Tunisia to lower the Mediterranean Sea by 656 feet, thus creating new farmland, and joining Africa to Europe and providing hydroelectricity to both. And the Congo River would be diverted to create freshwater lakes in the Sahara Desert.
Rather than fantasize about space mirrors or adding tons of sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere, there are other, low-cost, tried and true solutions: planting trees, adding more renewables in the form of solar farms and wind (with battery backup), and switching to electric vehicles—all of which would cut down on the amount of carbon that is thrust into the atmosphere.
These solutions have another advantage as well: They provide greater energy security, at a time when Trump’s attacks on Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz—a passageway for a quarter of the world’s oil and a fifth of its natural gas trade—have made the transition away from fossil fuels more urgent. As Bulletin editor Jessica McKenzie notes in “The Trump effect on Europe’s climate goals,” many observers “think the war underscores the longer-term importance of transitioning to renewables to avoid price shocks in oil and gas markets.” More attention is being given to how to ramp up alternative forms of energy and electrification—in the name of energy security and lower costs.
And such hard-nosed, bottom-line analyses are in line with the traditions of American private enterprise, writes Tom Steyer, who is a climate activist, a hedge fund founder, and a former California gubernatorial candidate. In his op-ed “How capitalism can solve the climate problem,” Steyer writes that climate change has already become a condition of economic life, affecting the cost and reliability of power, the value of property, public health, national security, and the durability of infrastructure. He argues that refusing to address the problem does not make its costs disappear; it simply pushes them onto families, communities, and future taxpayers. In his words: “The current political moment is dangerous. The federal government has moved to cancel clean-energy projects, weaken environmental protections, and directly obstruct state efforts to reduce pollution. Those actions directly delay projects, destroy jobs, raise financing costs, and discourage investment. They give our competitors time to build the industries that will shape the next century . . . The Administration can’t repeal the declining cost of technology, the need for more electricity, the demand for better infrastructure, or the competitive pressure facing American companies. The rest of the world keeps moving on.”
The question is whether the United States will be a part of it.
Source: thebulletin.org
