The fourth lecture of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025 featured Professor Daniel Fiorino, a leading expert on environmental policy at American University. Professor Fiorino examined how right-wing populism—characterized by distrust of expertise, nationalism, and hostility to multilateralism—combined with entrenched fossil fuel interests to undermine climate mitigation efforts in the United States during the Trump administration. He highlighted the geographic and partisan divides that shape US climate politics and explained how Republican dominance in fossil fuel-dependent states reinforces skepticism toward climate action. Professor Fiorino’s lecture underscored the vulnerability of US climate policy to political polarization and partisan shifts, warning that right-wing populism poses an enduring challenge not only to American climate governance but to global efforts to address the climate crisis.
Reported by ECPS Staff
The fourth lecture of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025, held online under the theme “Populism and Climate Change: Understanding What Is at Stake and Crafting Policy Suggestions for Stakeholders” (July 7–11, 2025), featured Professor Daniel Fiorino, one of the United States’ most respected scholars on environmental and energy policy. His lecture, titled “Ideology Meets Interest Group Politics: The Trump Administration and Climate Mitigation,” explored how right-wing populism and entrenched fossil fuel interests intersect to shape and undermine climate policy in the United States—a subject deeply relevant not only for US politics but for global climate governance more broadly.
Professor Fiorino is currently based at American University’s School of Public Affairs in Washington, DC, where he serves as the founding director of the Center for Environmental Policy. Prior to his academic appointment in 2009, he had a distinguished career at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), where he worked in policy development and environmental governance. Professor Fiorino’s work is both theoretically rigorous and policy-relevant, addressing some of the most pressing governance challenges posed by the climate crisis.
His published books include Can Democracy Handle Climate Change? (Polity Press, 2018), which examines the compatibility of democratic systems with effective climate action; A Good Life on a Finite Earth: The Political Economy of Green Growth (Oxford, 2018), which explores pathways toward sustainable prosperity; and The Clean Energy Transition: Policies and Procedures for a Zero-Carbon World (Polity, 2022). Professor Fiorino is also currently writing a book on the evolution of the EPA, further cementing his authority on American environmental policy.
In this lecture, Professor Fiorino provided participants with a critical framework for understanding how the Trump administration became emblematic of the global rise of right-wing populism and its impact on climate policy. He contextualized his analysis by drawing attention to the defining characteristics of right-wing populism—namely, distrust of scientific expertise, skepticism of multilateralism, and nationalist economic priorities—and how these traits directly contradict the requirements for effective climate mitigation, which depends on science, international cooperation, and long-term policy consistency.
Through this lens, Professor Fiorino examined how the Republican Party’s longstanding relationship with the fossil fuel industry became fully aligned with right-wing populist ideology during the Trump years. His lecture traced not only the Trump administration’s concrete policy reversals—such as rolling back EPA regulations and undermining international climate agreements—but also the broader cultural and institutional dynamics that entrench resistance to climate action in the US.
Professor Fiorino’s contribution offered participants a nuanced and empirically grounded insight into one of the most acute cases of populism’s challenge to climate governance today, setting the stage for a wider discussion on how democratic societies can respond to these intersecting threats.
Here is the report of Lecture IV of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025.
