By April last year it had taken President Trump’s energy dominance agenda less than 60 days to put the entire climate juggernaut, more than 30 years in the making, at risk of collapse. Bloomberg was then lamenting that “years of climate action” were being “demolished in days”, and sceptics were permitted a little schadenfreude. For a second term US President working to seal his legacy, nothing can be taken for granted until the midterm elections. Last Tuesday, those elections arrived, and American voters handed the Democrats both the House and the Senate. Liberal tears have turned to champagne. The UN climate hydra, with energy-policy tentacles reaching into every ministry, central bank and development agency on the planet, has been spared what looked like an extinction-level event.
For almost two years, the Trumpian counter-revolution cut off the beast’s heads one after another. America’s second exit from the Paris Agreement took effect on January 27th 2026. Washington then withdrew from 66 international organisations, the UNFCCC and the IPCC among them, after the President had told the UN General Assembly that climate change was the “greatest con job“ ever perpetrated on the world. In February, the EPA rescinded the 2009 endangerment finding, the legal keystone of federal greenhouse gas regulation. Now the climate industrial complex, from Turtle Bay to Brussels to the NGO war rooms of Washington, is breathing a great collective sigh of relief. A lame-duck President without the power of the purse is one whose agenda can be slowed, harassed and litigated. What the relief is not, however, is a mandate.
A cost-of-living revolt rebranded as a climate victory
Exit polls had Trump’s approval at 38%, historically low for a president at the midterms, and 89% of voters told CBS that the cost of living was a major or crucial factor in their vote. Nor were voters enamoured of the victors: the Democratic Party, which stands at 29% approval in the latest NBC poll, below even than the 38% for the Republican Party. The Associated Press named the drivers of the blue wave as high prices, the Iran war and concerns over Government corruption. As Charles Rotter noted at Watts Up With That, divided government “may slow some of Trump’s energy rollbacks, but it is just not a climate referendum”.
That has not stopped the green press from treating it as one. Climate Home News, in its COP31 briefing, declared that the mood ahead of the Antalya talks had been “sweetened somewhat by Lula’s surprise re-election in Brazil and American voters delivering a thumbs down to climate change-sceptic Donald Trump”. Grist announced that the sweep “will have profound consequences for climate action”. Scientific American handed its headline to the Union of Concerned Scientists: “It’s a new day in Washington.” The League of Conservation Voters, whose Victory Fund boasts of pouring over $125 million into the campaign, called Trump’s energy agenda “a political disaster for Republicans”. The Sierra Club hailed a “clear rejection” of the Republican “war on affordable clean energy”. And the Sunrise Movement, celebrating the election of its co-founder William Lawrence in Michigan, tweeted “Green New Deal, here we come.”
