The line of destructive executive action on climate was entirely predictable on President Trump’s Day 1: withdrawal from the Paris agreement, a threat to clean-energy subsidies, a promise to ban offshore wind and radically accelerate the energy permitting process (though that last one contains, potentially, some upside). It’s not yet clear how all this will net out — executive actions are memos in search of policy, and the slow decline of emissions has proved pretty stubborn lately. But it isn’t likely to be salutary, and the symbolism is undeniably grim.
Grimmest, perhaps, was the withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement — which, though it is a rerun of what he did in 2017, takes place in a very different global environment.
Eight years ago, when Trump made a show of exiting Paris while “Summertime” played in the White House Rose Garden, it helped kick off a remarkable period of worldwide solidaristic backlash — the global climate equivalent of the liberal “resistance.” We owe much of the climate progress of the last decade to that resistance — to climate protesters, sympathetic prime ministers and presidents and legislators, entrepreneurs and banks and asset managers who understood the urgency of action clearly enough to see it as a financial opportunity, too.
It is early, but there are not obvious signs of anything like that on the horizon now — no large-scale protest movements adding adherents and gaining steam, few major global leaders treating the climate crisis in existential terms or pushing policy that would make decarbonization a core goal of economic development, and a rapidly dwindling number of corporate leaders even paying lip service to climate urgency.
Instead, though money continues to flow into green energy, the global mood seems, as it does domestically, exhausted, distracted and capitulant. Only four countries in the world are now not party to the Paris agreement: Iran, Libya, Yemen and the United States. This is ugly company, but it no longer feels so exceptional that the United States has abandoned the principle of climate cooperation; other countries have taken advantage of the voluntary, enforcement-free framework to simply drag their feet. The question is whether emissions trends will continue in the absence of the old cultural and political momentum.
Warming and decarbonization were receding from politics almost everywhere, even before the global rightward shift of 2024. According to some analysts, no single country in the world is decarbonizing in line with the more ambitious goals of the Paris agreement, and over the last few years, disappointed in the rate of progress, several of its most prominent architects have called on major reforms to the process that produced it.
The agreement was in many ways the culmination of a decades-long effort, beginning in 1992, to organize a cooperative, positive-sum approach to a maddening challenge of global governance — a throwback tribute to the liberal international order, if one often honored in the breach. Today that whole project appears in tatters — not just because of Trump, though his return to the most powerful office in the land confirms the trend. It is what Tim Sahay, a climate policy expert and an analyst of geopolitics, recently called the most important worldwide development of 2024: “the total collapse of global cooperation and multilateralism in favor of the law of the jungle and ‘might makes right.’”
“Total” is probably too strong, but the direction of change is inarguably dark, and not just for climate.