Inside the U.S. reversal on climate change action

This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. Much of the country this week has experienced heavy snow, sleet, and ice, and some regions will contend with sub-freezing temperatures for many days to come. Scientists say extreme weather events have become more frequent and punishing with global climate change, so we thought this would be a good time to take stock of how U.S. policy on climate issues has changed under the second Donald Trump administration.

Trump is a longtime climate change skeptic, known to refer to global warming at times as a hoax or a con job. His administration has moved aggressively to reverse the Biden administration's climate policies on many fronts. Our guest today is David Gellis, a reporter on the New York Times climate team who leads the paper's climate forward newsletter. Before joining the climate team, Gellis spent eight years as a business reporter at The Times. covering chief executives, tech, media, Wall Street, and other issues.

Gillis has written three books, including The Man Who Broke Capitalism about influential corporate executive Jack Welsh, and most recently Dirtbag Billionaire, published last fall, about Yvonne Chenard, founder of the firm Patagonia. David Gellis has just returned from the World Economic Forum at Davos, where he spoke to leaders of business and government about climate policy and other issues. We recorded our conversation yesterday. David Gellis, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thanks for having me.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (45 minutes, 6,719 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.