• Climate Change
• United States

August 6, 2025, 6:00 AM View Comments ()

In April 2024, U.S. President Donald Trump convened a group of oil and gas executives at Mar‑a‑Lago. According to multiple accounts, he offered them what he called “a deal”: donate $1 billion to his reelection campaign, and the second Trump administration would dismantle U.S. climate policy.

The fossil fuel industry delivered plenty of cash, although untraceable dark money makes a full accounting impossible. Since January, Trump has moved with startling speed to keep his side of the tainted bargain. The administration has launched an all‑out assault on climate action: repealing clean-energy tax incentives, freezing funding for renewable programs, dismantling America’s climate science capacity, unwinding clean air regulations, and even scrapping the legal foundations that enable future administrations to regulate greenhouse gases.

Internationally, Trump pulled the United States from the historic and widely supported Paris Agreement, cut off climate aid to developing nations, declined to send American diplomats to U.N. climate talks (even those outside the Paris Agreement), and shuttered the State Department’s climate office—firing all its professional staff in the process.

None of this is in the long-term interest of the United States or the world, of course. Climate science is overwhelming, and major intelligence agencies and global business organizations agree: Climate change threatens international peace and security through economic shocks, disruptions to the global food system, and other disasters. All that brings mass migration, lower standards of living, and the undoing of decades of global progress against poverty. The likely financial cost? Double-digit losses in global economic output compared to what could have been and at a price tag of more than a hundred trillion dollars over a few decades. But that isn’t the most consequential fallout. Trump’s climate war will produce three bigger, lasting geopolitical changes.

The most immediate casualty of Trump’s climate war is the U.S. emissions trajectory. Never an easy lift, former President Joe Biden’s pledge to cut greenhouse gas pollution by roughly 50 percent by 2030, relative to 2005 levels, is now unattainable.

Since 2005, American emissions have fallen approximately 17 percent. Now, analysts warn U.S. emissions will plateau—or even rise—through the remainder of the decade. Trump’s policy reversals will translate into hundreds of gigawatts of lost clean power capacity and billions of tons of additional carbon pollution compared with Biden‑era policies.

Unfortunately, there’s another big impact: Trump’s policies are already pushing the world toward China—and away from the United States.

Whereas the Cold War had its arms race, the 21st century is defined by a different race: the quest for dominance in the clean-energy economy, shaped in part by the growing importance of energy-hungry artificial intelligence.

Until recently, the U.S. and China were positioned to benefit from the clean-energy revolution. China already dominates manufacturing of solar panels, batteries, and wind turbines, and controls much of the rare earth minerals required to produce those clean technologies. Historically, the U.S. has led in research, innovation, and software, though China has overtaken us in many of these areas, such as electric vehicles and patents.

Now, Trump is ceding the field entirely, which amounts to nothing short of unilateral disarmament. His tax cuts have gutted U.S. clean‑energy incentives. He has withheld financial support for renewable energy and used red tape to kill off existing projects. Meanwhile, China’s investments in green solutions continue.

China will soon hold—if it does not already—an insurmountable lead in the technologies that will power the new clean global economy. When the world gets serious about climate change, and when clean solutions are more cost-effective than fossil fuels (arguably true already in most of the world), U.S. allies will have no choice but to turn toward China for the green technology they need. Washington might reenter the race late, but without the homegrown capacity to compete.

The benefits to China don’t stop there. With the U.S. pulling back, Beijing faces less pressure to cut its own emissions or help poorer nations deal with the climate crisis that China helped create. China is the world’s largest emitter, and this century China has been responsible for a staggering 60 percent of global emissions growth.

Admittedly, China is doing a great deal to adopt clean-energy solutions at home. One in two new vehicles sold in China today, for example, is plug-in electric, five times the rate of adoption in the United States. In 2024, China accounted for 64 percent of global renewable installation.

Yet, despite all this, China’s prior climate pledges were not stretch goals, and its next target, expected this fall, may also underwhelm. To do its part to meet global climate goals, China should reduce its climate emissions in the range of 30 percent by 2035. Instead, it is expected to pledge only half that reduction at best. In 2024, China builds 93 percent of the new coal plants globally. China should be rapidly phasing down new coal construction instead.

China has also gotten away with doing little for developing nations even though China has the wealth and financial markets to lead the world in raising capital for deploying renewable energy, preserving carbon-rich forests, and adapting to adverse climate impacts.

Thanks to Trump, China will once again escape scrutiny and criticism for its insufficient climate action. Beijing will plausibly ask, why should China shoulder those burdens if America, the world’s largest historical polluter, refuses?

Trump has also given Beijing freer rein to torque climate diplomacy to its advantage. For decades, China has allied with Saudi Arabia, Russia, and other petrostates to slow progress in global talks. It has worked with India and other emerging economies to shift obligations onto developed countries while deflecting scrutiny of its own rising emissions and continued construction of coal plants. Previous U.S. administrations—Republican and Democratic alike—pushed back, rallying other nations to demand more of China and resisting its efforts to water down global rules that create transparency about climate action (or lack thereof). With Washington now absent, Beijing will have far greater latitude to write the rules for the international system in a way that benefits China to the detriment of the entire planet.

The next major geopolitical consequence of Trump’s climate war is the hobbling of the multilateral response to the climate crisis.

Without U.S. leadership, climate negotiations are likely to move forward rapidly—and, more dangerously, countries may fail to meet even their existing, inadequate pledges. America has been both an architect and saboteur of the climate regime: helping forge the Kyoto Protocol, then abandoning it; shaping the Paris Agreement, then twice withdrawing.

Importantly, however, when Washington wasn’t blocking progress, it drove it. The United States pioneered large parts of the multilateral climate regime, including emissions trading, markets for forest carbon, and crackdowns on super‑pollutants like methane and climate-busting refrigerants. American diplomats crafted the Paris Agreement’s flexible structure and worked with climate-vulnerable nations to compel all nations, including China and India, to adopt emissions targets for the first time.

U.S. global leadership also mattered for momentum. In 2020, the last year of Trump’s first term, countries were expected to strengthen their climate pledges; few did. In 2021, Biden pledged to halve U.S. emissions, and a number of major economies followed by upgrading their targets.

Today, the opposite is true. America’s backsliding makes another diplomatic breakthrough unlikely. Europe and vulnerable nations in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific have urged China to fill the leadership vacuum left by the United States. But Beijing is ideologically opposed to stronger climate multilateralism, which it sees as constraining its freedom and self-determination. Thus, international negotiations will hobble along for now. By not stepping up during this critical decade, China—which would benefit economically from a faster global clean-energy transition requiring the technologies that China controls—will share responsibility for the global failure to make that transition happen fast enough to avoid irresponsible and unmanageable global warming.

U.S. climate policy is increasingly seen abroad as selfish, immoral, and dangerously shortsighted. The growing backlash could soon become tangible. In July 2025, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an advisory opinion affirming the obligations under international law of polluting nations to pay reparations for climate harms. While non‑binding, the ICJ’s ruling will fan political demands that America and other wealthy nations compensate developing countries for climate losses. This would be hugely expensive. Climate-fueled disasters and extreme weather alone already cost the world over $300 billion annually, and that figure is rising rapidly. The Trump administration’s indifference to the climate risks and harms faced by other countries and communities erodes the United States’ moral authority and will make international claims for reparations harder to manage.

Regrettably, Trump will probably continue ratcheting up his war on climate policy. Yet Americans who want a science‑based, forward‑looking approach can limit the damage—and lay the groundwork for future U.S. leadership—in these four ways.

First, mobilize subnational action. Governors, mayors, and community leaders can keep the U.S. clean-energy transition moving ahead. Past estimates suggest that subnational climate action can deliver half of what the United States has pledged. Forward-thinking companies and civil society organizations should partner with subnational leaders to harness the power of local governments to reduce emissions. Internationally, our message to the world must be clear: Even if Washington doesn’t, most of America supports ambitious climate measures, and America is not turning its back on the climate issues or the goals of the Paris Agreement.

Second, lean on China to do more. Although the Trump team has ceded global leadership, the United States still has many foreign-policy, business, and climate leaders with international credibility. They need to speak up to draw attention to the inadequacy of China’s efforts, particularly when it comes to continuing to build coal power plants and failing to sufficiently scale up financial assistance to developing nations for the clean-energy transition. Global success in addressing the climate crisis depends more on what China does this next decade than on any other factor. We cannot allow Beijing to skate along with a half-hearted effort.

Third, go beyond Paris. While the Paris Agreement remains necessary, it is not sufficient. An enormous gap exists between today’s climate action and what’s needed to avoid unmanageable climate change. One big problem is that most trade policies do not favor products that were made with less climate pollution. Another is that governments and the private sector have failed thus far to mobilize sufficient financing for a rapid energy transition. And in these regards, the U.S. government has been the weakest link among advanced nations thanks to a recalcitrant Congress. While the next president must pursue policies to reduce U.S. domestic emissions, we must also remember that the United States now accounts for scarcely more than 11 percent of global emissions. What the world really needs from America more than anything is bold yet politically realistic ideas about how to scale up financing global action and harness the power of international trade policy to decarbonize international supply chains. Coming up with a workable plan to raise capital from financial centers around the world (including in China, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, and others), while also aligning trade policy with climate goals, would address the biggest shortcomings in the Paris Agreement, reestablish U.S. climate leadership, and improve America’s standing in the world.

Fourth, defend the multilateral system. U.S. allies, lawyers, and advocates should work now to block “poison pills” in climate negotiations—provisions pushed by China, Saudi Arabia, and others that would enable emerging economies to avoid ambitious climate action or require the world to compensate petrostates for lost oil revenue from climate policies—a demand OPEC members assert regularly. Toxic measures of this sort would make it impossible for the next administration to reengage in U.N. climate talks and could slow international cooperation for decades.

Rebuilding U.S. climate credibility won’t be easy. But the longer Washington abdicates leadership, the more ground it cedes—to China, to rising instability, and to a future where America’s power and influence diminish with the planet it helped warm.