On its face, 2025 looks like a year of relentless backsliding in the fight against climate change.
President Trump signed a bill that will eliminate most federal funding for clean energy, and he is blocking wind and solar projects and attacking climate science institutions. Five of the states most committed to action on climate change, including Connecticut and Massachusetts, have scaled back or are contemplating ways to scale back their pledges to cut their greenhouse gas emissions. Europe, long the leader in global action, is softening many of its commitments, including its plan to replace all cars with internal combustion engines with electric vehicles. So many banks have walked away from their promises to make their lending practices greener that an alliance of bankers committed to reducing emissions collapsed in the fall.
These shifts appear to be signs of a widespread weakening of resolve and a capitulation to lobbyists fighting action on climate change. But another, more important trend emerged this year as well: Policymakers and investors are pursuing what’s feasible rather than promising the impossible.
Policy debates on climate change have long been focused on abstract ideas. For investors, the obsession with bold, unachievable goals make it hard to know where to put their capital.
We need to recognize that many of our old climate goals, such as slashing global emissions to zero very soon or eliminating sales of gas-powered cars, were never attainable. Admitting that is the first step to a new, more mature phase of climate action — one more anchored in reality and thus better equipped to focus debate on real trade-offs.
Take Pennsylvania. Its governor, Josh Shapiro, announced in November he was abandoning an emission trading scheme that linked Pennsylvania to 11 other states and required modest limits on climate pollution. Most climate activists, attuned to any whiff of backsliding, sounded the alarm. In reality, the scheme was mired in legal troubles, and Republicans had convinced many voters it was a tax on already costly energy. It had little chance of working politically in Pennsylvania over the long haul.
Mr. Shapiro is pushing a politically smarter plan that would focus on producing more energy in the state, lowering costs and using tax revenues to attract clean industries. Pennsylvania has continued to move away from conventional coal, the dirtiest way to make electricity, while encouraging competition among cleaner energy suppliers — wind and solar, but also nuclear power and natural gas plants fitted with pollution control equipment. More competition between them can drive down costs for consumers and also benefit the environment. Indeed, forcing dirtier coal to compete with cleaner rivals is the main reason emissions from the U.S. power sector are going down.
Connecticut and North Carolina have also both softened their mandates to buy clean power because the politics are shifting. In both cases, voters (and experts) saw links between ambitious plans for adding more renewable power to the grid to higher energy costs.
Climate action is also maturing in the tech sector. By 2020, the four biggest companies, including Amazon and Google, made bold pledges to slash their emissions to zero or below by 2030 (2040 for Amazon). Then came the artificial intelligence revolution with its power-hungry data centers. Today, none of these companies have officially walked away from their old goals, but they are seemingly not on track to meet them either.
Rather than abandoning climate commitments, Big Tech is pouring money into wind and solar systems along with enormous batteries to power its data centers. It is also helping to push the United States to embrace nuclear power again. Microsoft, for example, with help from the Department of Energy, is funding a project that will reopen one unit at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania.
Looking beyond nuclear, Google is pledging to buy electricity from natural gas plants with equipment to capture carbon pollution before it goes into the atmosphere. For data centers, nuclear and natural gas with carbon capture offer the potential for inexpensive and reliable power that runs around the clock.
In effect, these technology companies that remain committed to reducing their emissions but aren’t yet sure of the best way to power their data centers are running enormous experiments to see what kinds of clean power can keep up with demand. This is great news for the country because these experiments are funding the projects that, when they are adopted more widely, will help make clean energy reliable and affordable. This same logic helps explain why, around the world, investment in clean electricity is soaring despite political upheaval.
In many other industries, companies are also doubling down on clean energy investments even as that becomes politically fraught. Indeed, The Harvard Business Review found that the trend of companies walking away from old climate goals isn’t, for the most part, backsliding. It is the recognition that changes in big, expensive industrial systems take time. Early pledges were long on hope and short on reality.
To be sure, some governments and companies really have stopped taking climate change seriously; one of the most important tasks for climate activists will be to separate the backsliders from the realists.
Climate action has been slow, which means that the world is in for considerable warming, more extreme weather and more harm for people who already do not have the resources to make themselves more resilient. Those consequences will affect us all and may, in time, create more pressure for action on climate.
In the meantime, governments and firms must now focus on actions that can have quick benefits for the climate. Most important, we should welcome talk about what’s practical. Fantasy is no way to bend the curve on a warming planet.
David G. Victor is a professor of innovation and public policy at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of “Fixing the Climate: Strategies for an Uncertain World.”
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