This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.

The years leading up to 2025 were marked by a rare optimism that the United States would finally do something about climate change. Former president Joe Biden called the crisis an “enormous opportunity,” and during his term, Congress passed the biggest climate law in the country’s history.

It felt like the U.S. was on the cusp of a greener future, Grist writes—until that momentum came to a sudden halt.

As soon as Donald Trump took office in January, he brought a swift end to that era with an all-out assault on his predecessor’s policies, unravelling environmental protections and cancelling climate research. Trump abandoned global climate commitments while aggressively promoting fossil fuels at home, even as the rest of the world installed more solar panels and wind turbines than ever before.

There’s a word for this kind of reactionary response: greenlash, a social and political backlash against efforts to rein in emissions. In Trump’s second term, climate change became a politically radioactive word: Phrases including “clean energy,” “climate science,” and “pollution” began disappearing from U.S. government websites.

And people across the country took the cue. Corporations got quiet about their climate plans. Democratic politicians steered clear of phrases like “planetary emergency.” Media coverage of the climate crisis thinned. That all trickled down to everyday Americans, who say they’re hearing less than they used to about climate change on social media and from the people they know.

While greenlash might sound like a very American phenomenon, it actually took off in Europe. The EU was an early adopter of comprehensive climate policies, and also saw the first big wave of greenlash. That opposition was mainly driven by specific economic burdens—Germany’s plan to switch to energy-efficient heat pumps caused an uproar as homeowners worried about the costs, for example. In the United States, the greenlash gathered more fuel from Trump-style populism and the culture wars.

With a tumultuous 2025 coming to an end, dictionary editors have been digging through the lexicon for words that capture its spirit. Their picks—“AI slop,” “rage bait,” and the essentially meaningless phrase “6-7”—point to a world that’s very online, and not doing much better for it. For the team at Grist, greenlash stood out as the word of the year, marking a moment when climate change was yanked off the political priority list.

The mood might have shifted, but people in the U.S. are about as concerned about climate change as they’ve ever been, with roughly two-thirds saying they’re worried. The consequences of a warming planet were on full display this year, in the U.S. as everywhere else—from the horrific fires that burned through Los Angeles neighbourhoods in January to the rains that drenched Texas in July, causing the country’s deadliest flash flooding in half a century.

Visit Grist for more words that captured the zeitgeist of the year.