The first 47 days of Trump administration actions have led directly to more job losses in Boulder County than during the first 47 days of any previous presidential administration. These kinds of losses are not limited to congressional districts that voted majority Democrat in the November 2024 election. Amid the calculated chaos of Trump Administration decisions to lurch back to the 20th-century dirty energy economy, 80% of investments into manufacturing of wind turbines, electric vehicles, solar panels and other tools of the clean energy economy have been coming online or are in plans in Republican congressional districts across the United States.

Recent actions taken by the Trump administration and the newly anointed Department of Government Efficiency have shaken up well-worn pathways to trust and expertise.

Demonstrating that it is much easier to tear things apart than to build them up, many actions taken by members of this newly configured executive branch have rapidly dismantled possibilities to take action to address climate change and environmental challenges facing our communities and our country. Over the past month and a half, we have been living through a time of upheaval as the Trump Administration has weakened many government institutions that have helped to provide insights into climate change and environmental issues over many years.

This will cost us dearly as a nation as we fall behind the technological and economic times of decarbonization. Decarbonization is a process involving decreasing the carbon content of energy-generating fuels that contribute to climate change. Tools to ratchet up decarbonization efforts involve efficiency gains (like switching from coal to natural gas) and mode-switching (like moving to renewable energy sources). Globally, we have been pursuing decarbonization through a combination of economic measures and cultural as well as societal demands. Decarbonization has been seen to have economic benefits and positive impacts on our everyday lives, lifestyles, relationships and livelihoods. Yet we now effectively squander global leadership in a new energy economy in destructive ways that will take years and decades to recover from.

Moreover, these actions have threatened to weaken pathways to understanding as well as trust in government and institutions. Meanwhile, we have habits that define us as “cognitive misers,” meaning we all have tendencies to take mental shortcuts to make sense of the world and to solve problems. Consequently, we often rely on trusted experts or sources of information we read or learn rather than take up investigations ourselves because that takes too much mental work. When it then comes to environmental issues, we often then rely on a mix of these experiential, emotional, affective, visceral, tactile, and aesthetic pathways of knowing and mainly through understanding gained by systematic pursuits of knowledge of the world around us (a.k.a. science) to come to know what we know.

These processes then churn up important considerations of who to trust and who are authorized speakers in the context of climate change, sustainability and the environment. People we trust are often those we identify as having higher legitimacy, reliability and credibility in the public sphere. Consequently, we then more willingly adhere to claims made by these people or organizations that we trust. At the interface of science, policy and society, we routinely rely on “expert” perspectives and advice to make sense of the complexities of climate change, sustainability and the environment. But as experts in government agencies are being fired daily, we risk losses of evidence-based insights and actionable information vital to our very well-being.

Since January 20, the Trump Administration has been called a bull in a China shop while we all are the chinaware. But unfortunately, we are all — including Trump and enablers — the chinaware in this metaphor. In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia has set goals to generate over 50% of its electricity from renewables by 2030. Across the European Union, solar arrays generate more power than coal generates, and the UK closed its last coal plant in September 2024. In Asia, China hosts nearly 67% of the utility-scale solar and wind projects on this planet. Sadly, under the Trump Administration, the U.S. is at present more likely to become the 24th province of China than a leader on the global stage of decarbonization and a new energy economy.

This is a biweekly sustainability and environment column authored by Max Boykoff. Boykoff is a faculty member at the University of Colorado Boulder.