There’s no doubt that 2025 was 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.
A team of investigative reporters, editors, and researchers spent the last 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 extensively reported, and 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 (ARC) conference, Wright called 2050 net zero targets “a sinister goal.”
In interviews at the London event, prominent climate crisis deniers praised Wright for his opposition to regulating CO2 as a pollutant. Overturning these regulations is a long-time goal of groups such as the CO2 Coalition and the Heartland Institute.
The energy secretary convened a panel of climate deniers, including the Canadian 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 (EPA) 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 US 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.)
The administration also relied on climate crisis deniers to help craft legislation, 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. It was found that over 50 high-level Trump administration officials were linked to Project 2025, including many of the president’s closest advisors, 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 programmes, laid-off employees and diminished bureaucratic expertise. Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) effort was revealed to be partly the result of a concerted effort – led behind the scenes by conservative groups – to tilt the US towards 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
In November, the White House published a National Security Strategy that outlined US policy goals in Europe. “Our broad policy for Europe,” the strategy stated, “should prioritise 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, threaten the United States, and subsidise our adversaries.”
At a private event 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 hard-line European conservatives for a meeting in Washington where they discussed how to dismantle the European Union.
In April, it was revealed that the Heritage Foundation was actively trying to shape an upcoming national election in Albania in favour 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 (CPAC) 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 ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies, Chevron, and Koch, Inc. Documents obtained by the research group SOMO 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 said.
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 US 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.
During an April AI conference in Washington, D.C., 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 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 centres, despite renewables remaining the cheapest and quickest-to-install electricity source worldwide.
OpenAI this year hired a new head of global energy policy who is a dedicated champion of natural gas, and was a senior energy advisor in the first Trump administration. In September, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman joined Trump on an official state visit to the UK, where the company is planning a massive new AI infrastructure project.
Jensen Huang, CEO of the supercomputer chip-maker Nvidia, also accompanied Trump. Huang followed that up in October by praising Energy Secretary Wright’s “passion” for science, despite Wright’s active promotion of climate denial.
Nvidia marketed AI tools to Brazilian oil and gas companies just weeks before the COP30 climate negotiations in Belém. 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 centre proposal that would have seen construction of the largest US gas plant in a decade. The data centre explosion is also delaying the retirement of at least 15 coal plants across the US.
There has been a growing backlash to data centres 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 centres in Chicago, Kansas City and Atlanta, which 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 centres are inseparable from fossil fuel expansion.
Backing Reform UK
A fair question to ask is whether Nigel Farage spent more time cultivating ties to MAGA in the US than actually leading 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 addressed the Republican-controlled US 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 has said.
Farage in turn is helping MAGA expand into Europe. In 2024 he helped set up a UK-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.
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 UK’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 US for inspiration. Reform’s 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. Marshall, who is also a hedge fund manager, bought a large stake in Tesla, the electric vehicle company led by Elon Musk, prior to the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
Close ties to Trump may have helped smooth the way for massive new tech ventures in the UK. It was reported in September that Trump’s UK ambassador, Warren Stephens, has a family-owned investment firm with large shares in Microsoft, Nvidia and Alphabet (Google’s parent company), which are planning major UK projects.
The Trump-linked U.S. private equity firm Blackstone is meanwhile building a $13.4 billion (£10 billion) AI data centre in the UK that includes a fleet of massive backup diesel generators.
Fomenting political chaos in Canada
At a conservative political event in Alberta, 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, US officials offered “a $500 million transition loan that we would only draw down on as necessary as we work with the US 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 travelling to Florida to appear on a private panel with conservative US pundit Ben Shapiro, who had previously called Canada “a silly country” that should be annexed by the US.
During the federal Canadian election, which was dominated by fears about Trump waging a trade war on the country, Smith told the right-wing US media outlet Breitbart News that Conservative Party candidate Pierre Poilievre “would be very much in sync” with the Trump administration.
And indeed, careful analysis of Poilievre’s inner circle turned up links to Elon Musk, Koch Inc and major oil and gas companies tightly linked to the US.
As in the UK, some Canadian conservatives and executives openly expressed admiration for Musk and his work with Trump. At a conservative event in Ottawa, 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 organiser 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.
This article is republished with kind permission of DeSmog. Read the original here.
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