Climate Coverage Declines as Trump Spreads Clean Energy Misinformation

Americans in the Dark: Climate Coverage Falters Under Trump Administration

Nearly 89% of people worldwide want more action on the climate crisis, with seven in ten willing to donate 1% of their income to help address it. In the United States, two-thirds of Americans report being at least somewhat worried about global warming.

Yet despite this concern, Americans receive remarkably little information about a crisis that is reshaping the global economy, displacing populations, intensifying extreme weather, and affecting nearly every aspect of daily life. According to a 2025 Yale Program on Climate Change Communication report, more than half of Americans say they encounter news about climate change only several times a year or less.

“If the media’s not reporting the issue of climate change, it’s out of sight and out of mind for people,” explained Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale program.

The information gap has grown even more pronounced during a presidential administration openly hostile to the scientific consensus on climate change. Donald Trump and his allies have pushed misleading narratives about green energy trade-offs, often drawing reporters into covering manufactured controversies instead of established facts.

“The Trump administration is playing reporters like a fiddle on the issue of trade-offs” by introducing red herrings and sending journalists down investigative rabbit holes, according to Jael Holzman, a climate reporter at Heatmap News.

Among President Trump’s more notable misleading claims is that offshore wind projects are “driving the whales crazy” and causing marine mammals to wash up dead on beaches. Scientists have repeatedly stated there is no known link between the two phenomena, pointing instead to vessel strikes and fishing gear entanglements as the primary causes of whale deaths. Despite this scientific consensus, numerous news stories continue giving airtime to unsubstantiated concerns from politicians and community groups.

A similar dynamic emerged after a fire at California’s Moss Landing battery facility. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, a Trump appointee, used the incident to criticize New York’s push for battery storage infrastructure during a visit to Long Island. However, Zeldin’s remarks and much of the subsequent reporting omitted crucial context that the incident likely stemmed from outdated technology not representative of newer battery storage facilities nationwide.

“The impact of the Trump administration on the coverage is intentional,” said Holzman, noting that tactics to delay progress on addressing climate change have largely replaced outright denialism. “They don’t need everyone to deny the existence of climate change — they just need enough people to deny the importance of dealing with it now.”

Beyond spreading misleading claims, the administration has restricted access to data that journalists need to provide accurate context. Holzman described how a government dashboard she relied on to track progress on environmental regulations mysteriously went offline for over a month.

The team behind climate.gov, a widely-used federal clearinghouse for information about weather, sea level, and temperature rise, was dismissed this summer. Users were redirected to a new site that is no longer being updated. The former team is now attempting to independently relaunch the resource.

The EPA has also removed references to human activity as the main driver of climate change from its website, instead emphasizing “natural processes” like volcanic eruptions and solar activity variations. “Climate change has been scrubbed from government websites, they’ve taken down a number of major data sets, they are killing off programs at NASA devoted to climate change,” said Leiserowitz, referencing the administration’s plans to cancel the Orbiting Carbon Observatories, NASA missions that monitor greenhouse gas emissions.

Trump’s return to office isn’t the only factor behind diminishing climate news coverage. Media attention to climate issues had been on a rocky but generally upward trajectory throughout the early 21st century before peaking in 2021 during debates over the Biden administration’s climate legislation. Coverage has declined sharply since then, according to the Media and Climate Change Observatory, which monitors climate mentions across major American news outlets.

Several factors contribute to this decline. Traditional media outlets have experienced long-term financial challenges over the past two decades, consistently losing revenue and readership. Since 2005, nearly 3,500 local newspapers have disappeared, according to Northwestern University research. Corporate consolidation and evaporating advertising revenue have forced tighter budgets and repeated layoffs, squeezing coverage of complex beats like science and climate.

In 2023, CNBC laid off Cat Clifford, who helped establish the network’s climate desk. She later wrote that additional layoffs had left the desk “fundamentally dismantled” with no dedicated staff covering climate issues.

Even when media does cover climate change, stories must navigate an algorithm-driven information ecosystem that filters news through partisan lenses and amplifies misinformation. This environment rewards Trump’s stream of provocative statements—what reporters call a “fire hose of attention” strategy—frequently drowning out substantive climate coverage.

Despite these challenges, climate journalism has evolved significantly in recent decades. Sadie Babits, who filed her first environmental story in 2000, recalls when climate reporting required quoting both scientists and climate deniers in the name of “both-sidesism.” Today, Babits serves as NPR’s senior supervising climate editor—a position that didn’t exist at the start of her career—joining legacy outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Associated Press in maintaining dedicated climate desks.

New specialized outlets including Heatmap News, Canary Media, Latitude Media, and The Cool Down have emerged in the past five years, suggesting a growing audience for climate coverage despite broader media trends.

“If people weren’t interested in these topics, then I wouldn’t have a job,” Holzman noted. “I have readers so religiously interested in every word that I write that I have fans that come up to me in bars.”

Even as Congress cut federal support for NPR amid accusations of liberal bias, Babits emphasized that the organization has maintained its commitment to climate reporting: “We see this as a critical story of our time. We have not backed down from the kind of work that we would be doing in any other year.”