In the fall of 1925, agronomist Trofim Lysenko arrived on the dusty plains of what is now Azerbaijan, hoping to keep cows from starving to death over the winter. The young scientist, who learned to read as a teenager during the Russian Revolution, dismissed the rapidly advancing field of genetics. He believed nature could be bent to human will.
Lysenko denounced the idea that genes pass traits down as a “degradation of bourgeois culture,” and couldn’t understand why cows bred to produce more milk did so simply because they had “advantaged ancestors.” He attempted to “educate” crops by soaking them in freezing water, thinking that could force them to sprout in winter, and insisted that orange trees would grow in Siberia if exposed to the right stimuli.
Such ideas catapulted Lysenko to the head of Soviet agriculture under Stalin. In the midst of the famine his catastrophic policies helped create, Lysenko banned fertilizers and demanded farmers sow seeds close together, believing that plants of the same species wouldn’t compete.
Lysenko’s pseudoscientific ideas outraged his peers. Nikolai Vavilov, a Russian botanist who founded the world’s first seed bank, openly challenged his rejection of genetics. Lysenko denounced him, and the secret police arrested him in 1940. Vavilov, who had worked to prevent famines, starved to death in jail three years later.
This kind of scientific misinformation and the consequences it can bring now sound eerily familiar to U.S. climate experts like Shaina Sadai. She has been stunned by how quickly politics have overshadowed science since President Trump took office. The most recent government climate report, which the Department of Energy released last month, for instance, so drastically misrepresented the studies it cited that the researchers whose work it drew from publicly decried it. “I’m just really having a hard time with the barrage of apocalypses every day,” she said.
Sadai spent the last several years working international court cases, including a climate case law students from the South Pacific brought to the International Court of Justice. Over 130 countries signed on, and many outlined the existential threats they face from extreme heat, flooding, and other weather phenomena. Some, like Palau — which could see large portions of its land vanish beneath rising seas this century — argued that failing to curb emissions violates human rights under international treaties. Meanwhile, the United States urged the court not to overreach. This galled Sadai, who advised several of the countries supporting Vanuatu’s case, including Sierra Leone and Namibia. “I want so desperately for my country to be on the right side of things,” she said. Instead, Judge Yuji Iwasawa delivered the court’s decision that countries must act on climate change the same day the U.S. moved to weaken one of its primary tools to do just that.
The timing underscored a growing global divide: As the world moves toward greater climate accountability, the United States is pulling back, once again exiting the Paris agreement and undercutting decades of environmental regulations. This retreat comes amid a broader weakening of democratic norms, said Timothy Frye, a professor of post-Soviet politics at Columbia University. When power becomes heavily concentrated, protections begin to fray, something seen with recent revisions to the Endangered Species Act or key provisions of the Clean Water Act. “The U.S. democratic erosion is happening much faster, and along a much wider array of fronts, than a lot of the more recent cases,” like Turkey or Venezuela, he said.
One hallmark of this backsliding is how seemingly small changes can accumulate into a system that becomes far more autocratic. The piecemeal approach often borrows the most authoritarian elements from otherwise democratic governments, though each policy may appear initially defensible — a form of governance political scholar Kim Scheppele coined “the Frankenstate.” The Trump administration, for example, has declared an “energy emergency” which allows federal agencies to bypass environmental reviews and fast-track fossil fuel projects. The move is now facing a lawsuit from 15 states, who claim the emergency is fake.
This patchwork strategy makes it easier for politically connected companies to sidestep or shape laws to serve their interests. After soliciting $1 billion in campaign funding from oil and gas companies, for example, Trump has signed $18 billion in tax incentives for the industry and granted at least $6 billion in tax breaks. “The lack of constraints on the executive allow politically connected companies to either get around existing laws or to write laws in such a way that they’re toothless,” Frye said.
Autocratic leaders, he explained, like to build their economies around natural resources because they are easier to control than service or technology industries. Oil and gas firms, for instance, tend to be less transparent and less mobile, making them more susceptible to political pressure. At the same time, Frye noted, the economic clout of natural resource companies often turns into a political advantage.
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