At the end of September, President Trump used his UN speech to call climate change a ‘hoax’ and a ‘con job’. Well, as American author, Upton Sinclair, once said: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
A couple of weeks later, during a speech to the Senate floor, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse openly criticised President Trump for taking money from big “fossil fuel mega donors” during his presidential campaign.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, Trump asked oil and gas executives in 2024 to raise $1bn for his Presidential campaign and told them he would grant their policy wish list if he won. Months after his victory, oil and gas moguls have continued to pump money into his Super PAC, which now holds a war chest of $200m to support a President that is not allowed to run for a third term.
The total amount of money given to Trump over the years by the fossil fuel industry, or any industry/country for that matter, is not known, because his cryptocurrency ‘meme coin’ serves as a way for favour-seekers to enrich him while remaining anonymous to the public. But for the fossil fuel industry it is already looking like money well spent as the Trump administration has added nearly $40bn in new federal subsidies for oil, gas, and coal in 2025, according to a recent report by Oil Change International. At the same time, Trump has declared war on renewable energy sources like wind and solar, much to the delight of ‘big oil’.
Meanwhile, of course, the planet continues to warm at a frightening pace. Summer 2025 was the UK’s warmest since records began in 1884 and included four separate heatwaves. The mean temperature (including both day and night temperatures) for the season was 16.1°C, up from the previous record of 15.8°C in 2018.
A summer as hot as this is now 70 times more likely than it would have been without human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Met Office, and the UK’s five hottest summers have all occurred since 2000. This summer followed the warmest spring in the UK on record, and the driest spring in more than 50 years, added the Met Office.
