Trump’s Juggernaut Smashes the BBC’s Climate Crystal Ball
By
Guest Contributor
February 25, 2025
Guest essay by Charles Rotter – originally published on Watts Up With That?
Six weeks ago, the BBC’s climate soothsayers were gazing into 2025 with their trademark blend of gloom and green idealism. Their January 7 piece, “From Trump to a ‘Game-Changing’ Lawsuit: Seven Big Climate and Nature Moments Coming in 2025,” sketched a year of UN lawsuits, lofty CO2 targets, and global summits—all set to “shift the dial” on warming. They gave Trump’s return a nervous glance, hinting his Paris exit might “hinder climate action,” but banked on technocrats and NGOs to keep the faith. Then the Trump juggernaut roared in, flattening their predictions in under two months. Now, with NGOs in the crosshairs, the rubble’s still smoking. What a difference six weeks make.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250107-the-key-climate-and-nature-moments-to-look-out-for-in-2025However, some experts say momentum is now on the side of the energy transition despite any actions Trump will take. “The result from this election will be seen as a major blow to global climate action,” Christiana Figueres, the former UN climate chief, told the BBC in November. “But it cannot and will not halt the changes under way to decarbonise the economy and meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.”
Global economics have changed significantly since Trump was last president, says Stientje van Veldhoven, regional director for Europe at the World Resources Institute (WRI), a non-profit based in Washington DC, and former environment minister of the Netherlands. “Whereas eight years ago, the economics worked against [the clean energy transition], now they very much start to work in favour of it. That is one thing that has really changed.”
Step one: the BBC’s pre-election bubble. In early January, they listed seven “big moments” for 2025—Trump’s term as a minor snag, followed by a UN climate court case, G20 greenwashing rules, UK CO2 cuts, Brazil’s COP 30, Arctic talks, and some tech fluff. They hedged on Trump, clinging to China’s renewable hype and Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) as lifelines. NGOs, those tireless peddlers of climate dogma, lurked in the background, funded by agencies like USAID to amplify the narrative. The BBC figured the machine would chug along, Trump or not.
https://climaterealism.com/2025/02/trumps-juggernaut-smashes-the-bbcs-climate-crystal-ball/ 
