(Photo courtesy of Getty Images) “President Trump shows his executive order to leave the Paris Climate Agreement.”

Tristin Henson

Connector Staff

Climate change, also called global warming, is the long-term changes in weather patterns and temperature on Earth due to natural or man-made causes. Due to a greater increase in greenhouse gasses, thanks to man-made causes like cutting down forests, increasing farmland for animals, and using fossil fuels, climate change has rapidly sped up in the past few years. This has caused major changes to our temperatures, with last year, 2024, being the hottest year on record (BBC, 2025). Massive hurricanes, floods, and wildfires have also had a major impact on the public, much of which can be attributed to climate change. However, Trump and many of his associates, do not believe climate change exists, and thus he has started to try to cut back on climate change initiatives. One of the first things Trump did was sign an order for the U.S. to resign from the Paris Agreement, something he also did during his last presidential term. The Paris Agreement, an international treaty signed between nearly 200 countries around the world in 2015, is an agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions to try and lessen the impacts of climate change. He states that he wants to pull out of the deal because it does “not reflect our country’s values or our contributions to the pursuit of economic and environmental objectives” and “unfairly burden[s] the United States”.

 Juliette Rooney-Varga, Co-Director for the Rist Institute for Sustainability and Energy, Director of the Climate Change Initiative, and a professor at UMASS Lowell in Environmental Earth and Atmospheric Sciences spoke on this matter. Trump’s administration doesn’t want to spend money on “evidence-based climate action”, but despite this, she said that she and other members of the Climate Change Initiative “will continue to work for that climate action, which most Americans support.”

 Professor Rooney-Varga also brought up the topic of jobs and the hiring process coming to a halt because of federal funding possibly coming to a halt. “Massachusetts Gateway Cities Climate Resilience Center was funded with money appropriated by Congress to the Department of Energy through a competitive, technical, merit-based review process. We don’t yet know what the full effect of the administration’s actions will be on that funding. But we do know that the administration has threatened to ‘terminate’ federally funded work to address climate change, despite the fact that the US Constitution gives Congress, not the president, power to appropriate funds.” This was a topic Mathew Barlow, a professor at UMASS Lowell in the Environmental Earth and Atmospheric Sciences department, and also a part of the Climate Change Initiative, also touched on. “We don’t want the weather to get worse, we don’t want people to get hurt by it, but we also don’t want people to lose jobs, to not have clean air and water, and they go hand-in-hand. The increase in wind energy was going to be a huge job boost for Massachusetts.” Professor Barlow is specifically talking about Trump’s executive order to “withdraw from disposition for wind energy leasing all areas within the Offshore Continental Shelf”. This prevents new or renewed wind energy leasing to generate electricity. Professor Barlow also mentioned that people have a lot to gain by trying to implement climate change measures as “a lot of the planned pieces of the energy transition, transitioning away from fossil fuels to renewables, that can lead to increased public transportation, lower energy costs…a lot of those things go hand-in-hand, environment and quality of life.”

Despite all this, Professor Rooney-Varga mentioned how other countries will continue to try to lower global warming, but with the U.S. being the 2nd largest emitter of planet-warming gases, and with possible new U.S. executive orders turning into policy and law, this could make it very difficult for other countries to combat. Something that has many people’s minds, though, with climate change is the recent flooding in Florida and wildfires in California. More specifically, on how insurance companies have backed out of these states or increased their rates for homeowners in the area. This is a more immediate impact of climate change, along with the natural disaster itself, that insurance companies will see the increased risk of where certain people live due to climate change and decide it’s too risky. Both professors agreed that this was a possibility that could very well happen in Massachusetts and that there are many areas already seeing this impact, areas along the coast more specifically. However, Professor Barlow mentioned how it wasn’t only the coast that needed to worry about increased homeowners insurance, as flooding has also been happening all over Massachusetts due to heavy rains, along with higher wildfire possibilities. He mentioned how wildfire insurance was also a personal concern of his due to where he was living. Both professors agreed that this issue is something that shouldn’t just be an ‘only worry about myself’ type of situation, and instead insisted on how people need to work together to push back on these possible and focus on the planet as a whole when it comes to global warming. Professor Rooney-Varga’s parting words encapsulated this as she stated a call to action and that “we need policy and action that are grounded in science and driven by the needs of people to create a livable future for ourselves, our students, or our communities.”