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Considering the history of United States‘ climate policy, not many people headed for the United Nations’ COP29 climate talks in Azerbaijan will be surprised that Donald Trump won the presidential election and is likely to once again pull the country out of the Paris Climate Agreement and pursue policies that will further warm the planet.
U.S. climate policy has whipped to and fro in ideological winds at least since 2001, when then-President George W. Bush announced early in his administration that the United States would not honor the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the first global pact to cut emissions, which was partly crafted by Al Gore and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1998.
So in their early assessments, many international climate experts said Trump’s election will slow, but not stop, international efforts to halt global warming, because most other countries recognize it’s in their self-interest to cut emissions. In the long run, some experts said, the United States will take an economic hit if it lags behind the rest of the world, potentially even facing costly carbon tariffs on nearly every trade path.
“If Trump follows through with his threat to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, the biggest loser will be the United States,” said Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, an international think tank. “We have been there before. The U.S. withdrawal in the first Trump presidency did not cause the agreement to collapse, as some pundits predicted.”
“If Trump follows through with his threat to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, the biggest loser will be the United States.”
By some estimates, Trump’s plans to promote fossil fuels could add about 4 billion tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere by 2030, about equal to the amount produced annually by the world’s 140 lowest-emitting countries.
Hare said those emissions would make it harder, but not impossible, to limit long-term global warming close to 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level as targeted by the Paris Agreement, a goal that was already in doubt before the election. The outcome will “ultimately hinge on the level of action taken by all other countries in the next few years and also on what the U.S. does following the Trump presidency’s conclusion,” he said.
Even if the result is at first seen as a major blow to global climate action, it can’t “halt the changes underway to decarbonize the economy and meet the goals of the Paris Agreement,” said Christiana Figueres, former executive director of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
“Standing with oil and gas is the same as falling behind in a fast moving world,” she said. “Clean energy technologies will continue to outcompete fossil fuels. … Meanwhile, the vital work happening in communities everywhere to regenerate our planet and societies will continue, imbued with a new, even more determined spirit today.”
The world is in a very different place than last time Trump was in power, said Friederike Otto, a climate researcher at Imperial College London’s Centre for Environmental Policy.
“The world is moving on,” she said. “The U.S. has never been a great team player at COPs, regardless of which party is in government. People don’t go to COPs expecting the U.S. to push for more ambition. Trump can deny climate change all he wants, but the laws of physics don’t care about politics. Extreme weather will keep getting worse in the U.S. as long as the world burns fossil fuels.”
U.S. greenhouse gases are about 13 percent of the global total, so there is still plenty of room to cut emissions, even if a Trump administration retreats from the nation’s climate commitments. But the U.S. election results still show that reason and facts are not enough to win a majority in times of simultaneous ecological, political and economic crises, which is bad news for Earth’s climate future, said Reinhard Steurer, an associate professor and climate policy expert at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna.
“The majority wants fairy tales, myths, irrationality, fake news and denial,” Steurer posted on X. The desire to face the future with a comfortable denial of reality is a problem not just in the United States but also in Germany and Austria, where right-wing parties promoting climate denial have also made political gains recently, he added.
Trump’s policies can perpetuate excessive fossil-fueled consumption for a few more years. But the fall after that, he said, “Will, of course, be all the more brutal. Because in the end, physical reality always wins.”
U.S. election effects on COP29
The United States will still be represented by the Biden administration’s team, led by climate policy adviser John Podesta and several cabinet members, at the COP29 climate talks that begin next week in Baku, Azerbaijan. Senior administration officials said they aim to solidify commitments to a global clean energy transition made last year at COP28, to keep pushing for a global end to the use of coal, and to reduce methane and other climate super-pollutants as quickly as possible.
But it will be difficult for other countries to take the U.S. positions seriously, knowing that many of them are likely to be reversed in a few months. And those changes will ripple into the future, said Teresa Eder, foreign and security policy program director at the nonprofit Heinrich Böll Foundation in Washington.
“I would argue that what Trump will set in motion will probably affect the world even more than it will the U.S. itself,” she said, adding that the United States has always had an outsize role in global climate talks by the sheer weight of its economy, because it’s the world’s biggest historical emitter of greenhouse gases and because it’s been the one country in recent history that has been able to get other countries to work together on crucial global issues, including climate.
A renewed Trump presidency will leave a void in global climate leadership. Eder said she can’t see any other country to credibly fill the vacuum.
“I’m assuming some countries will try to take advantage of that, including China, but it will be a different world.”
“I would argue that what Trump will set in motion will probably affect the world even more than it will the U.S. itself.”
Ripple effects could include less emphasis on the energy transition and climate policy in the European Union, as its member countries scramble to address what they think are more immediate security issues raised by Trump’s win, like the ongoing Russian aggression in Ukraine.
The U.S. election result could also embolden newly empowered far-right parties in Europe to try to slow or even roll back policies to reduce emissions, Eder said.
She sees more danger ahead for global climate policy from rising extreme right-wing forces, including figures like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a Trump ally in the heart of the European Union.
Orbán recently announced a new European Parliament grouping of right-wing parties that share Trump’s ideological aversion to global collaboration. Shortly after Hungary took over the rotating European Union presidency last summer, Eder pointed out, Orbán traveled to Ukraine to meet with its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, then to Moscow to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin, then via China to Washington, D.C., where he attended the NATO summit and met with Trump.
“Not to overblow the impact that a small country like Hungary can have, but it shows you how these far-right actors are increasingly cooperating and connected,” she said. “And I feel like we’re just standing by and throwing our hands in the air.”
And some of the same factors that helped bring Trump to power are also a concern in other countries, including what she called the “epistemic crisis of various groups of people not living in the same reality anymore.
“The far-right echo chambers have been beating people with propaganda nonstop since [U.S. President Joe] Biden got into office. There is disinformation everywhere,” Eder said. “Who can even say what’s true anymore? I think that is one of the big factors where people just sign on to someone who is breaking down very complex issues into us-versus-them solutions.”
In terms of U.S. climate policy, she said she thinks the Biden administration could try to make one last push by putting out a new national emissions reduction plan, the nationally determined contributions to cutting greenhouse gases required by the Paris Agreement, before January.
Since those plans are voluntary to begin with, a new one from the United States wouldn’t mean much given the election result. But the Biden team should still submit an ambitious new plan aligned with the global 1.5-degree goal to show what is possible and how it could be done, said Alden Meyer, a senior adviser with the E3G climate policy think tank.
A more dangerous world
Under a Trump presidency, other countries might start competing for more influence rather than collaborating for the common global good, said Rod Schoonover, a former climate and security expert in the Obama administration. The impacts of Trump’s win in 2016 rippled into his personal life.
“It could have been a ‘Saturday Night Live’ skit,” he said. “My wife and I were hosting a dinner party, lots of people, lots of women wearing white, and right around 7:30, people were, like, ‘What’s going on?’ For two or three years, a lot of people associated our house with the election. It was like PTSD. They wouldn’t come here because they were here on election night.”
Even without wild ideological swings on climate policy, Schoonover said, the United States is ill-equipped to face the globally escalating impacts of the current ecological, economic and political crises.
A new Trump administration would be likely to ignore those linked threats and probably make them worse, he said, slowing or reversing what little progress has been made.
“We’ve kicked the can so far down the road, and now we’re seeing things get serious.”
“I’ve been very worried about what is really an incrementalist approach, particularly in the security community, about really coming to terms with what reality is showing us,” he said. “We’ve kicked the can so far down the road, and now we’re seeing things get serious.”
Trump’s election is a signal to the international community, both partners and adversaries, that the United States is withdrawing from international climate policies, he said, which will bring the nation consequences on the global stage.
“It’s hard to overestimate the hit that the United States took by pulling out of Paris,” he said. “We did a lot of damage to the United States and its relations with other countries.”
The latest U.S. political swing comes at a crucial moment in the Paris Agreement process, said policy researcher Sonja Thielges of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.
Trump’s policies could be a more destructive influence this time around because his new administration is likely to move more aggressively against climate policy than in the early part of his first term, she said.
“They won’t just sit back and do nothing,” she said. “They’ll actively try to push different ideas and different values, and also different technologies, than what the rest of the climate-ambitious countries are thinking.”
But the outcome of the U.S. election won’t change basic European climate policy, which has survived previous U.S. government changes.
“The EU still overwhelmingly has an interest in climate protection, as other countries should have as well,” she said. “And many, many countries have agreed to reach climate neutrality by around mid-century.”
Thielges said she is also concerned by proposals that could emerge under Trump to reorganize U.S. development aid “to focus it entirely on fossil fuel development, especially in African countries.” Locking hundreds of millions of people into fossil fuel infrastructure for decades would be an absolute climate disaster, she added.
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