"There’s no doubt that 2025 has been one of the most politically chaotic years of the 21st century"

Amid the domestic and geopolitical mayhem unleashed by Donald Trump’s return to the White House, powerful interests were busy enacting a radical anti-democratic agenda that has already changed our world and will continue shaping it for years to come.

DeSmog’s team of investigative reporters, editors and researchers have spent the past year tracking the fossil fuel companies and tech giants seeking private gain from MAGA, along with the climate deniers and right-wing political operatives attempting to export the movement globally. Here are some of their most consequential achievements.

Supercharging Climate Denial

For years, the widely held belief in the community of people advocating for aggressive climate action was that outright denial of the science was becoming a marginal relic of the past. That was never accurate, as DeSmog has extensively reported, but the second Trump administration has shattered the illusion for good.

Trump’s secretary of energy, Chris Wright, is a former fracking executive. During a February speech to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference, Wright called 2050 net zero targets “a sinister goal.” In exclusive interviews with DeSmog at the London event, prominent climate crisis deniers praised Wright for his opposition to regulating CO2 as a pollutant. Overturning these regulations is a longtime goal of groups such as the CO2 Coalition and the Heartland Institute.

Trump’s secretary of energy, Chris Wright, is a former fracking executive.

The energy secretary this year convened a panel of climate deniers, including the Canadian economist Ross McKitrick, to author an official Department of Energy report questioning the link between humans and global temperature rise. More than 85 actual climate experts released a scathing rebuttal describing the report as “junk science.”

Nevertheless, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency drew on Wright’s report to initiate its effort to rescind the agency’s own “endangerment finding” on CO2 and other carbon emissions, which provides the legal foundation for many major U.S. climate regulations. (It was perhaps not the most far-sighted strategy, as the administration’s strident climate denial is now creating potential legal hurdles for the EPA’s repeal effort.)

To help craft legislation, the administration also relied on climate crisis deniers such as Alex Epstein, who was credited with shaping sections of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” that eliminated tax credits supporting wind and solar energy. That legislative effort got an assist from Americans for Prosperity, a political advocacy group backed by oil and gas billionaire Charles Koch.

These assaults on climate science and renewable energy had already been laid out in Project 2025, the reactionary blueprint for a second Trump administration created by the Heritage Foundation. DeSmog found that over 50 high-level Trump administration officials were linked to Project 2025, including many of the president’s closest advisers, such as Elon Musk.

Although Musk and Trump eventually had a bitter falling out, the consequences of Musk taking a power saw to the federal government will be felt for years in terms of shuttered climate programs, laid-off employees and diminished bureaucratic expertise. DeSmog revealed that Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency effort was partly the result of a concerted effort — led behind the scenes by conservative groups — to tilt the U.S. toward hard-line Christian nationalist and libertarian ideology.

In the process, the climate denial movement appeared to gain a powerful new ally. “We welcome Elon Musk into the climate red pill group,” Climate Depot executive director Marc Morano stated in late 2024.

Undermining European Democracy

This November, the White House published a national security strategy that outlined U.S. policy goals in Europe. DeSmog has been reporting on these goals throughout the year.

“Our broad policy for Europe,” the strategy stated, “should prioritize cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” The strategy “reject[s] the disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘Net Zero’ ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threatened the United States, and subsidize our adversaries.”

At a private event that DeSmog attended during February’s ARC conference, Kevin Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation, seemed to articulate these same principles, rejecting climate science as “fiction” and urging “our friends from Europe” to oppose international institutions. The following month, the Heritage Foundation convened hardline European conservatives for a meeting in Washington, D.C., where they discussed how to dismantle the European Union.

Trump-aligned groups were trying meanwhile to hollow out European climate legislation.

In April, DeSmog revealed that the Heritage Foundation was actively trying to shape an upcoming national election in Albania in favor of a Trump-aligned candidate. The following month, key MAGA influencers, including Trump administration Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, descended on Eastern Europe for the Conservative Political Action Committee Poland conference. According to audio of CPAC Poland obtained by DeSmog, speakers made calls to “liquidate” the European Commission, while pushing for the election of far-right Polish presidential candidate Karol Nawrocki. (Nawrocki won in a June runoff election.)

Trump-aligned groups were trying meanwhile to hollow out European climate legislation. The Heartland Institute set its sights on the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), a law requiring companies to address human rights and environmental issues in their operations.

Also fighting the CSDDD: a coalition of companies called the Competitiveness Roundtable whose members include Exxon Mobil, TotalEnergies, Chevron and Koch, Inc. Documents obtained by the research group SOMO and seen by DeSmog showed that this corporate campaign deliberately supported far-right groups in Europe in service of its goals.

It’s now clear that combating EU climate rules was essential to carving out a market in Europe for American gas exporters. “The industry and the State Department are putting a lot of pressure on the EU [to] commit to our dirty LNG,” one climate advocate told DeSmog.

Forging Anti-Climate Alliances With Big Tech

During the first Trump administration, the world’s biggest tech companies pledged to fight for climate action even as the U.S. exited the Paris climate treaty and rolled back key environmental laws. This time around, those same tech companies are actively supporting Trump’s climate denial.

DeSmog revealed that during an April AI conference in Washington, Google President and Chief Investment Officer Ruth Porat called a preceding speech by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum “fantastic,” even though Burgum used his appearance to attack the so-called climate extremist agenda and push expanding the use of coal.

Porat’s praise seemed at odds with her own company’s ambitious 2020 pledge to power all its operations with carbon-free energy by 2030. Google’s shift wasn’t an outlier, but rather part of a trend within Big Tech to go along with the Trump administration’s embrace of fossil fuels to power its energy-hungry data centers, despite renewables remaining the cheapest and quickest-to-install electricity source worldwide.

DeSmog revealed that OpenAI this year hired a new head of global energy policy who was a senior energy adviser in the first Trump administration and is a dedicated champion of natural gas. In September, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman joined Trump on an official state visit to the United Kingdom, where the company is planning a massive new AI infrastructure project.

OpenAI this year hired a new head of global energy policy who is a dedicated champion of natural gas.

Jensen Huang, CEO of the supercomputer chipmaker Nvidia, also accompanied Trump to the U.K. in September. Huang followed that up in October by praising Energy Secretary Wright’s “passion” for science, despite Wright’s active promotion of climate denial.

DeSmog also reported on Nvidia’s marketing of AI tools to Brazilian oil and gas companies just weeks before the COP30 climate negotiations in Belém, Brazil. This was no coincidence, as the fossil fuel industry is increasingly using AI to boost oil and gas production, as executives told the Reuters Global Energy Transition conference in June. In turn, AI advocates including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt are pitching AI energy demand to major oil producing countries as a way to keep fossil fuels alive.

In Texas alone, AI has spurred demand for over 100 new natural gas plants, while in Virginia, local communities fought against a data center proposal that would have seen construction of the largest U.S. gas plant in a decade. The data center explosion is also delaying the retirement of at least 15 coal-fueled power plants across the U.S.

DeSmog reported this year on the growing backlash to data centers in places like rural Georgia, despite a public charm offensive aimed directly at residents. Still, the large corporate backers behind these projects remain confident that they can overcome public opposition.

That includes a real estate arm of Koch Inc. that has been building data centers in Chicago, Kansas City and Atlanta and is pitching itself as having the “expertise and capabilities that major tech companies either don’t have or don’t think would be worth the time.” At this point, it’s safe to conclude, data centers are inseparable from fossil fuel expansion.

Backing the Right-Wing Reform UK

A fair question to ask this year was whether British Member of Parliament Nigel Farage spent more time cultivating ties to MAGA in the U.S. than actually leading his right-wing political party, Reform UK, back at home. In September, Farage skipped Parliament’s return from summer recess in order to speak at the National Conservatism (NatCon) conference in Washington and address the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress.

“Nigel Farage is far more interested in pleasing Trump and jostling for his affections than he is in turning up to Parliament on time or standing up for British values,” one Liberal Democrat source told DeSmog. Farage in turn is helping MAGA expand into Europe. DeSmog reported in 2024 that he helped set up a U.K.-EU branch of the Heartland Institute. This year, the pro-Trump group claimed it was spearheading opposition to the EU’s flagship Nature Restoration Law.

Farage in turn is helping MAGA expand into Europe.

Back in February, Farage himself stated at the ARC conference that “I can’t tell you whether CO2 is leading to warming or not, but there are so many other massive factors,” while taking aim at the U.K.’s net-zero policies. His comments are perhaps not surprising, given the previous donations Reform UK has received from fossil fuel and climate denier interests.

Other party figures also seem to be looking to the U.S. for inspiration. Reform UK Chair Zia Yusuf is an admirer of tech billionaire Musk, and apparently so is Paul Marshall, the right-wing owner of GB News and other outlets, which are key media backers of Reform UK. Marshall, who is also a hedge fund manager, bought a large stake in Tesla, the electric vehicle company led by Musk, prior to the 2024 U.S. presidential election, DeSmog revealed.

Close ties to Trump may have helped smooth the way for massive new tech ventures in the U.K. DeSmog reported in September that Trump’s ambassador to Britain, Warren Stephens, has a family-owned investment firm with large shares in Microsoft, Nvidia and Alphabet (Google’s parent company), which are planning major U.K. projects. The Trump-linked U.S. private equity firm Blackstone is meanwhile building a $13.4 billion AI data center in the U.K. that includes a fleet of massive backup diesel generators.

Fomenting Political Chaos in Canada

DeSmog was in the room at a conservative political event in Alberta where one of the speakers revealed a shocking piece of news. Dennis Modry, the former CEO of a group called the Alberta Prosperity Project, which is pushing for the oil-rich province to separate from Canada, claimed that he’d met directly with members of the Trump administration.

At that meeting, Modry claimed, U.S. officials offered “a $500 million transition loan that we would only draw down on as necessary as we work with the U.S. to transition from a province to a country.” That wasn’t the only instance of MAGA policies influencing the political discourse in Canada. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith revealed in September that she had met with the Heritage Foundation shortly after Trump’s election. Smith had already caused a national uproar months earlier by traveling to Florida to appear on a private panel with conservative U.S. pundit Ben Shapiro, who had previously called Canada “a silly country” that should be annexed by the U.S.

Carney is implementing a pro-oil-and-gas agenda.

During Canada’s federal election, which was dominated by fears about Trump waging a trade war on the country, Smith told the right-wing U.S. media outlet Breitbart News that Conservative Party candidate Pierre Poilievre “would be very much in sync” with the Trump administration. And indeed, DeSmog’s careful analysis of Poilievre’s inner circle turned up links to Musk, Koch Inc. and major oil and gas companies tightly linked to the U.S.

As in the U.K., some Canadian conservatives and executives openly expressed admiration for Musk and his work with Trump. DeSmog was at a conservative event in Ottawa where representatives from Amazon and the pipeline builder TC Energy discussed how a right-wing prime minister could replicate elements of Musk’s DOGE effort in Ottawa.

Poilievre ultimately lost the election to his Liberal opponent, current Prime Minister Mark Carney, but now Carney is implementing a pro-oil-and-gas agenda and taking ideas from the billionaire-founded AI and fossil fuel group Build Canada.

As we head into 2026, expect to see MAGA and its allies continue their global assault on climate science and policies to reduce planet-heating emissions. The Canadian conservative influencer Jordan Peterson was a key organizer of this year’s ARC conference, where Trump officials, European conservatives, tech investors and climate crisis deniers discussed how to build and implement a global anti-net zero movement. They will be meeting again in June.

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