Some 89% of people worldwide say they want more action on the climate crisis. Nearly seven in 10 note they would donate 1% of their income to help. In the US, two-thirds are at least somewhat worried about global warming.

And yet, Americans hear remarkably little about a crisis reshaping the global economy, displacing populations, worsening extreme weather, and affecting nearly every facet of daily life. More than half say they receive news about climate change several times a year or less, according to a 2025 Yale Program on Climate Change Communication report.

"If the media's not reporting the issue of climate change, it's out of sight and out of mind for people," said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale program.

The problem has become even more acute at a time when the US president is openly hostile to the scientific consensus on climate change. Donald Trump and his allies have pushed misleading narratives about the trade-offs of green energy, drawing reporters into covering false controversies instead of facts and making the job of reporting harder.

"The Trump administration is playing reporters like a fiddle on the issue of trade-offs" by bringing up red herrings and sending reporters down rabbit holes, Jael Holzman, a climate reporter at Heatmap News, told DW.

Trump administration spreading clean energy disinformation

Among President Trump's misleading claims is that offshore wind projects are "driving the whales crazy" and are the hidden cause of the marine mammals washing up dead.

Scientists, however, say there is no known link between the two, noting that vessel strikes and fishing-gear entanglements are the primary causes. Nonetheless, numerous stories still give airtime to unsubstantiated concerns from politicians and community groups, understandably worried about whales.

A similar dynamic emerged after the major fire at California's Moss Landing battery facility when Lee Zeldin, administrator of the EPA, the federal agency tasked with protecting the environment, visited Long Island to criticize New York's push for battery storage infrastructure.

But remarks by Trump-appointee Zeldin, and much of the subsequent reporting, omitted context that the incident likely stemmed from outdated technology, not representative of much of the country's newer battery-storage facilities.

"The impact of the Trump administration on the coverage is intentional," said Holzman, adding that tactics to delay progress on climate change have overtaken 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."

Scientific data missing, no longer updated

Beyond spreading misleading claims, the administration has made it harder for reporters to access the data needed to provide accurate context in the first place.

Holzman described how a government dashboard she used to track progress on environmental regulations mysteriously went dark for more than a month.

"There's just a lot of unexpected chicanery and shenanigans," she said.

The team behind climate.gov, a popular federal clearinghouse for climate information about weather, sea level and temperature rise, was fired this summer and users were redirected to a new site, which is no longer being updated. The previous team has since been attempting to relaunch the site.

The EPA has also erased references to human activity being the main driver of climate change, instead focusing on "natural processes" such as volcanic eruptions and variations in solar activity. 

"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 that are devoted to climate change," said Leiserowitz at Yale, referencing the Orbiting Carbon Observatories, a pair of NASA missions that monitor greenhouse gas emissions, and which the administration wants to cancel.

"The US has been a major source of climate information, climate modeling, and so on, and that is having a chilling effect," he added.

Why climate coverage is shrinking

Still, Trump's return to office is not the only reason for a global dip in climate news coverage. It was on a steady-if-rocky incline throughout the 21st century before peaking in 2021 around the time the Biden administration was debating its landmark climate law.

But coverage fell precipitously the next year and has continued to slide downward, according to the Media and Climate Change Observatory, which monitors mentions of the issue in five major American newspapers, seven television stations, two radio networks and two wire services.

Several reasons are at play. Traditional media outlets have been in long-term decline over the last two decades, consistently losing money and readers. Since 2005, close to 3,500 local newspapers have vanished, according to a Northwestern University study.

Corporate consolidation and evaporating ad 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 found the network's climate desk and wrote that other layoffs had left it "fundamentally dismantled" with no dedicated staff covering the issue.

And even when the media does cover climate change, stories must navigate an algorithm-driven information ecosystem that filters news through partisan biases and amplifies disinformation before it ever reaches readers.

That ecosystem rewards Trump's stream of provocative statements — what reporters call a "fire hose of attention" strategy — frequently drowning out climate coverage.

Climate change is competing with "news and entertainment and sports and your kid saying they want ice cream, and everything else going on in our lives that's demanding our attention," said Leiserowitz.

Climate coverage endures

Despite the downturn, climate journalism has come a long way over the last few decades.

Sadie Babits remembers the early years of climate journalism well. She filed her first environmental story in 2000 as an intern at Boise State Public Radio, reporting on Montana wildfires when the science linking extreme weather to human activity was still emerging. Back then, any story about climate change required both scientific voices and climate change deniers in the name of 'both-sidesism.'

Today, Babits is the senior supervising climate editor at NPR — a position that did not exist at the start of her career — joining legacy outlets like ​The New York Times, ​​The Washington Post and ​The Associated Press in building and maintaining dedicated climate desks. New niche outlets such as Holzman's ​Heatmap News, Canary Media, ​Latitude Media, ​​The Cool Down and more have sprouted up in the last five years.

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

Even in a year when Congress cut all federal support for NPR over accusations of liberal bias, Babits said the outlet has not changed its approach.

"We see this as a critical story of our time," she said. "We have not backed down from the kind of work that we would be doing in any other year."

Edited by: Jennifer Collins