Eleven years after the publication of “Ladauto Si’,” the seminal encyclical from Pope Francis on care of creation and integral ecology, the Trump administration in 2026 continues a broad retrenchment of national energy and environmental policy. Since his return to the White House in January 2025, President Donald Trump has pursued regressive policies that threaten to unravel progress on renewable energy as well as diminish environmental and safety standards for domestic industrial pollution and agricultural pesticides.

The White House has deliberately, almost provocatively, sought to reverse efforts to address climate change, a climatological phenomenon the president repeatedly dismisses as a “green scam,” and is seeking to restore the prominence of fossil-fuel-burning energy production—even a moribund coal-burning sector that electric utilities have largely abandoned. Mr. Trump has withdrawn from the Paris climate accords and reneged on U.S. obligations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The president has also taken aim at national regulatory bodies, gutting the budget at the Environmental Protection Agency and dismissing thousands of researchers, scientists and other professional staff, neutralizing restraints on water and air pollution, and vaporizing automobile fuel consumption standards that had protected the environment and American lungs.

His great antipathy to sustainable energy development, particularly wind power, has set back the U.S. renewable energy sector, handing the lead in the emerging industry to China, now the world’s largest producer, consumer and innovator of sustainable energy.

For Dan Misleh and other environmental advocates, it has been a discouraging time. Mr. Misleh is the executive director of the Catholic Climate Covenant.

“I would describe this as an ‘all or nothing’ administration. There’s no nuance,” Mr. Misleh says. “‘We’re going to decimate the E.P.A.,’ ‘We’re going to roll back [the Paris climate agreement],’ 
’We’re going to abandon fuel standards.… ‘We’re going to slash regulations.’”

“It’s really discouraging that work that has been done by previous administrations, Republican and Democrat, is suddenly just being torn apart.”

Other administration policies add to the significant new threats to the care-of-creation agenda outlined in “Laudato Si’.” In the European Union, modest regulatory barriers are being raised to slow the advance of the artificial intelligence industry while the potential social and environmental harm of the new technology is assessed. But the Trump administration has taken significant steps to block regulatory authority over A.I. and to prohibit individual states from creating their own standards.

A.I. carries grave implications for family life and employment, but the industry also generates new vistas of environmental hazards that require attention. The vast data centers contemplated as the backbone of the new technology require “the energy of a small city,” Mr. Misleh says, representing an “enormous resource suck on local communities.”

“Can we [develop the A.I. industry] differently? Can we do this better? Can we require that A.I. centers generate their own power and mandate that it be [based on] renewable energy, as opposed to fossil fuel energy or even natural gas?” he asks.

One of the less observed aspects of the Trump administration’s antipathy to efforts to respond to climate change has been the reversal of financial aid commitments from the United States to low-income nations already grappling with the phenomenon’s harshest climatological effects. Under the Biden administration, an effort had been made to fund commitments established by United Nations “loss and damage” covenants that acknowledge the heightened responsibility of affluent nations to respond as the greatest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.

Many of the nations least responsible for climate change face increasingly arid conditions, if not outright droughts, that have caused significant disruption of domestic agricultural production. Other nations already experience the cataclysmic weather events predicted by climate change models, and the least fortunate experience both.

The dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development has meant “hundreds of thousands of lives” have unnecessarily been placed in jeopardy, Mr. Misleh says, but it has also meant the interruption of aid intended to finance climate adaptation programs in low-income states, which the administration has dismissed as “climate grift projects.”

One of the primary contemporary drivers of migration, he points out, has been climate change. And “when you begin to eliminate all of these mitigation and adaptation measures, as well as continue to dump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it’s only going to accelerate that trend of migration in low-income countries.”

If there is any good news to report as the global church celebrates “‘Laudato Si’ week” (May 17-24), Mr. Misleh says, it is that more and more people have been coming around to accept the reality of climate change and its real-world impacts. Unfortunately, for many U.S. Catholics, that acceptance has been the result of painful personal experience.

They have survived wildfires in the South and West or endured superstorms on the East Coast in recent years. Others are finding out in a particularly direct way how real the crisis is when insurance companies order double-digit increases to homeowners’ rates in response to the hazards of climate change.

Catholic Climate Covenant outreach and education efforts are proving less of a hard sell than they had been to the nation’s Catholics, according to Mr. Misleh, as climate change skepticism declines. “We had over 250 pilgrimages, tens of thousands of people walking to a place of beauty or environmental destruction and practicing those three relationships that Francis talked about in ‘Ladauto Si’’—a relationship with God, with God’s creation and a relationship with each other.”

Among other signs of hope, he says, is an ongoing effort sponsored by the Catholic Extension Society and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Laudato Si’ Leadership Training, to create a national cohort to assess how U.S. dioceses are executing adaptation and sustainability strategies at church sites and properties.

It also does not hurt that the new American-born pope ​​appears “absolutely” determined to follow in the footsteps of Francis, Mr. Misleh says. He points to Leo XIV’s speech at the opening ceremony of a climate conference last October, commemorating the 10th anniversary of “Laudato Si’.”

“The challenges identified in ‘Laudato Si’’ are in fact even more relevant today than they were 10 years ago,” the pope said. Francis’ encyclical had laid the spiritual groundwork, Leo stressed, but now a time for action has begun.

“God will ask us if we have cultivated and cared for the world that he created, for the benefit of all and for future generations, and if we have taken care of our brothers and sisters,” he said. “What will be our answer?”

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Kevin Clarke is America’s chief correspondent and the author of Oscar Romero: Love Must Win Out (Liturgical Press).