A handful of conservative energy and climate groups released a report outlining the top 10 challenges that rocked climate change activism in 2025, as President Donald Trump returned to the White House with a mandate to unleash American energy this year.
Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has signed a series of executive orders and legislation to scale back America’s green energy efforts. Now, a group of prominent conservative energy groups are declaring 2025 as the year of the cultural departure from climate activism.
‘This year has proven to be an unexpected tipping point for climate realism,’ the conservative groups declared in a report shared exclusively with Fox News Digital.
The American Energy Institute, The Energy & Environment Legal Institute, Truth in Energy & Climate, The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and The Heartland Institute signed the ‘2025: Climate Hysteria’s Surprising Tipping Point,’ outlining 2025 as a pivotal year in trading climate activism for energy production and economic realism.
‘This is the great climate tipping point the radicals never saw coming,’ American Energy Institute CEO Jason Isaac told Fox News Digital. ‘The world is waking up to the reality that net-zero was never achievable, never affordable, and never honest. Governments, investors, and even climate activists are abandoning the hysteria and choosing energy security, affordability, reliability, and common sense. President Trump led this shift by putting America’s energy strength first.’
According to the United Nations, net-zero is the global effort to cut carbon emissions to ‘a small amount of residual emissions that can be absorbed and durably stored by nature and other carbon dioxide removal measures, leaving zero in the atmosphere.’
‘As of June 2024, 107 countries, responsible for approximately 82 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, had adopted net-zero pledges either in law,’ or through other policy commitments, according to the U.N.
President Barack Obama led efforts to reach the Paris Climate Agreement on Dec. 12, 2015, a nonbinding accord in which nearly 200 nations pledged to curb greenhouse gas emissions in an effort to limit the impacts of climate change.
Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement during his first administration, while his successor, President Joe Biden, quickly rejoined and pursued policies to expand federal climate and clean energy initiatives during his four-year tenure.
After returning to office this year, Trump immediately rolled back restrictions on domestic energy production and began reversing U.S. participation in global climate commitments.
Trump signed an executive order ‘unleashing American energy’ on his first day back in office.
He also signed his marquee domestic policy legislation, The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, into law on July 4. It included a series of tax provisions that unwind clean energy credits from the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act and ease federal incentives for renewable energy, while prioritizing fossil fuel development.
‘2025’s ‘tipping points’ are the product of President Trump’s energy dominance agenda and 35 years of valiant work by ‘cancelled’ climate realists who knew from the start that climate alarm was a hoax,’ Steve Milloy, senior fellow at the Energy and Environment Legal Institute and a former member of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team, said in a statement to Fox News Digital.
The report itself outlines 10 instances of shifting rhetoric from legacy media outlets and climate change activists, explaining why 2025 was the year of ‘climate hysteria’s surprising tipping point.’
In the first instance, the conservative signatories cite The New York Times reporting on ‘why global momentum on climate action is faltering, even as clean energy technology rapidly advances.’
The signatories also cited The New York Times’ reporting on the final document from the U.N. COP-30 climate conference not mentioning ‘fossil fuels.’
In another instance, the conservative energy groups referenced the resurgence of ‘climate denial’ at the annual U.N. climate talks, citing another article by the Times.
‘When nearly 200 nations signed the 2015 Paris Agreement, acknowledging the threat of rising global temperatures and vowing action, many hoped that the era of climate denial was finally over. Ten years later it has roared back, arguably stronger than ever,’ journalists Lisa Friedman and Steven Lee Myers wrote in the article cited in the report.
More reporting from The New York Times included in the report pointed to Gov. Kathy Hochul, D-N.Y., backing away from New York’s 2019 climate law and quoting her as saying, ‘We need to govern in reality.’
The ‘tipping points’ also included Reuters’ reporting on ExxonMobil questioning the feasibility of net-zero efforts and The New York Times Magazine reporting that ‘the world has soured on climate politics.’
Additionally, the report pointed to The Washington Post’s reporting that political priorities are shifting from climate activism to energy affordability, and The Guardian reporting that a ‘dramatic slowdown in melting of Arctic sea ice surprises scientists.’
And the report cited The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board arguing that billionaire climate activist Bill Gates has reversed course on his earlier ‘doomsday’ view of climate change.
Fox News Digital reached out to Hochul and Gates for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
