What Trump’s exit from the climate deal really means

President Donald Trump declared Monday that he will withdraw once again from the 2015 Paris climate agreement — instantly isolating the U.S. from the global campaign to stem catastrophic warming.

This time, Trump’s repudiation of the worldwide climate effort could bite deeper by taking effect more quickly and at a time when the new president has more far-right allies overseas and at home.

The announcement collides with a rise in climate havoc around the world, including the devastating Los Angeles wildfires and revelations that last year was the hottest ever recorded. It marks the launch of an aggressive agenda to roll back U.S. climate policy, driven by an emboldened president who invites confrontation over the scientific underpinnings of climate change.

The long-promised exit, outlined in a White House press release less than 30 minutes after Trump took his oath of office, will jettison the United States’ Biden-era promise to cut climate pollution by up to 66 percent within a decade. It also calls into question a host of other U.S. commitments, such as providing billions of dollars in support to poorer nations suffering from unprecedented heat waves, floods and rising seas.

Trump’s action also raises the odds that, without U.S. leadership, the world will fall even further behind the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting the Earth’s warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a threshold that could accelerate the pace of climate damage. The U.S. is the second-biggest source after China of the carbon pollution driving up global temperatures.

The U.S. had already been slipping behind its 2030 climate targets, despite efforts that included hundreds of billions of dollars in clean-energy spending by former President Joe Biden. Trump accompanied his new Paris pullout with a barrage of executive orders aimed at squelching Biden’s handiwork, including by declaring a national energy emergency that Trump said would unlock what he called America’s “liquid gold.”

“We will drill, baby, drill,” Trump said in his inauguration address. “We have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have, the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth, and we are going to use it.”

During Trump’s first term, his advisers debated for months about whether the U.S. should pull out of the Paris deal, a decision he finally announced from the Rose Garden in June 2017. The action drew swift condemnation from world and business leaders, including the celebrity multibillionaire Elon Musk, who tweeted at the time: “Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.”

Biden instantly rejoined the pact upon taking office four years ago, allowing much of the world to portray the withdrawal as an aberration from America’s commitment to tackling climate change.

But Trump’s exit this time cements the Republican Party’s opposition toward international climate action and its rejection of decades of dire warnings from scientific academies worldwide. Musk, now a prime Trump cheerleader and adviser, had a prominent seat at the new president’s swearing-in Monday. And Trump’s success in winning the popular vote in November makes it harder to argue that he doesn’t have the support of American voters, however slim — even as much of the nation saw deadly wildfires tear through Los Angeles.

“When the U.S. steps away from the Paris Agreement a week after entire towns in California are erased it says something,” said Frances Colón, senior director for international climate policy at the liberal Center for American Progress.

For many U.S. allies, Trump’s retreat from the deal is a historic breach of trust.

Coalitions of U.S. states, cities and businesses responded to Trump’s move by saying they’ll strive to meet the United States’ abandoned climate targets.

“By leaving the Paris Agreement, this administration has abdicated its responsibility to protect the American people and our national security,” said Gina McCarthy, a climate adviser under Biden who co-chairs America Is All In, a climate coalition. “But rest assured, our states, cities, businesses, and local institutions stand ready to pick up the baton of U.S. climate leadership and do all they can — despite federal complacency — to continue the shift to a clean energy economy.”

The coalition was launched in the wake of Trump’s 2017 Paris exit.

Activists and former Biden officials say the withdrawal would hurt the U.S. by giving China and other competitors a leg up in its race to dominate clean energy manufacturing. While the Paris Agreement is likely to survive the Trump era, keeping dangerous shocks from climate change in check will be harder without U.S. participation, they said.

Unmet goals

After years of negotiations, sealing the 2015 Paris Agreement committed nearly every country on the planet, regardless of their size, wealth or level of pollution, to set increasingly stronger targets to cut carbon emissions. The objective: Keep the rise in temperatures since the preindustrial era “well below” 2 degrees Celsius and ideally no higher than 1.5 C.

Those targets are nonbinding, but the deal has nonetheless helped to slow global warming compared to what could have occurred without Paris, according to analyses by modelers and the United Nations’ climate body. It prodded nations to use cleaner forms of energy — aided by national-level efforts such as Biden’s $1.6 trillion clean energy and infrastructure agenda.

Renewable sources of power, such as solar and wind, are expected to generate 22 percent of U.S. electricity in 2024, up from around 15 percent in 2017. Globally, investments in clean energy were expected to be almost twice as big compared with fossil fuels last year. When Trump first took office in 2017 they were roughly even.

While greenhouse gas emissionshave continued to rise globally, from around 35 billion tons when the agreement was adopted to more than 41 billion tons expected in 2024, they may be close to peaking. Still, that means keeping temperatures below 1.5 C long-term will bevirtually impossible: Global averages in 2024 for the first timeexceeded that thresholdfor a full calendar year.

Trump allies argue that his moves are justified because the rest of the world has not done its part, pointing to rising global emissions and new coal-fired power coming online in China. They also claim that the Paris withdrawal frees the new government to reverse Biden’s clean energy tax breaks and other climate policies — even though the U.S. is not legally obligated to meet its Paris targets and Biden’s policies were just as much about boosting industrial and economic growth.

“It just removes another impediment to undoing what Biden and the Democratic Congress have wrought,” said Myron Ebell, an outspoken critic of climate science who backed Trump’s first exit.

The Biden administration’s efforts to unleash clean energy spending through a raft of regulations, tax breaks and other incentives have helped fuel a green transition, even as the U.S. became the world’s leading oil and natural gas producer. Reversing or even softening some of those efforts, as Trump has vowed he will, could deliver a blow to global climate action.

The U.S. departure will be effective one year from the day the Trump administration formally notifies the United Nations. Even after the exit is complete, the U.S. can still participate in annual climate negotiations — if Trump chooses to send a delegation — but it probably would have less influence.

The yearlong exit period will take place as other countries finish their national climate plans for cutting pollution by 2035, the focus of this November’s COP30 global climate talks in Brazil. Many of those countries’ 10-year climate strategies — which will guide how sharply they can curb warming — will depend on funding from wealthy nations, a process the U.S. is now certain to sit out.

Expectations of Trump’s policies began affecting climate diplomacymonths before he took office, including what diplomats and activists widely panned as a deflating end to last fall’s U.N. climate talks in Azerbaijan.

“The diplomatic market has priced this in,” R. David Edelman, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center, said of the U.S. exit from Paris at an event last week in Washington. “It’s obviously not great for the signaling that it has for the broader climate projects and particularly countries sort of on the fence.”

‘Very difficult period’

Two weeks after Trump’s election victory, nations at the COP29 climate talks in Azerbaijan failed to reiterate their year-old pledge to transition away from fossil fuels as quickly as possible. Officials at the talks said Trump’s return had emboldened oil, gas and coal boosters such as Saudi Arabia, Russia and China, weakened trust in U.S. promises, and made it harder for climate-vulnerable nations to hold out for a better deal.

“We’ve seen decisions becoming more and more difficult to take, not in the least because countries like Saudi Arabia feel increasingly threatened and they don’t really care what the rest of the world thinks of them,” said a Northern European diplomat, who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. “So we will lose a strong diplomatic partner, but even with that partner it was always going to be a very difficult period for us.”

The U.S. withdrawal compounds an already growing reluctance among governments normally seen as climate leaders to cut into the use of fossil fuels and the profits of the companies and nations that produce them, said the diplomat. At the same time, climate commitments are fraying in some Western governments that embraced green-energy policies only to see their voters swing rightward politically.

Some officials in Europe and the United Kingdom also fear a broader trade war could hamper the green transition and harm economic growth.

“If you asked which part of the world is being driven by climate, it’s Europe. And Europe has its limitations in how far climate can drive policy — and I think we are bumping into that limit right now,” said George David Banks, who led international climate diplomacy in Trump’s first term.

Still, the refrain at COP29 was that the Paris Agreement wouldn’t crumble if the U.S. pulled out. Argentina, whose president, Javier Milei, is a Trump admirer, has mulled leaving the deal, but many other countries have vowed to stay in and urged the U.S. to do the same.

“The leadership of the United States is critical in mobilising climate finance, advancing clean energy transitions, and ensuring the equitable implementation of global climate goals,” Ali Mohamed, Kenya’s climate envoy and chair of the African Group of Negotiators, said in a statement. He urged the U.S. to “work constructively” within U.N. frameworks and other international platforms.

As the U.S. government recedes from the global climate stage, advocates have highlighted the importance of states, cities and businesses in tackling climate change. The U.S. Climate Alliance, a coalition of governors from 24 states that represent nearly 60 percent of the American economy, has pledged to meet Biden’s latest climate target of cutting emissions up to 66 percent by 2035.

But those responses will struggle to negate the effects of Trump’s push for more fossil fuels, his moves to roll back climate regulations, and his disregard for international cooperation, according to analysts.

U.S. carbon emissions fell just 0.2 percent last year, even with Biden’s green spending in full swing, and Trump has vowed to expand fossil fuel production. Trump has also railed against wind power, attacked programs to expand electric cars and promised to unravel rules aimed at limiting power plant pollution.

Cracks are forming outside of the U.S., too — because political leaders have failed to allay concerns related to job security and the cost of living as nations strive to meet their climate goals, said Kaveh Guilanpour, vice president for international strategies at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, a think tank.

That has challenged the promise of the Paris pact, he said.

“The [Paris Agreement] regime needs to be much better at speaking to the causes,” Guilanpour said. “From my perspective, the problem now isn’t the Paris Agreement. The problem is the political space to do what is necessary.”