If U.S. President Donald Trump has it his way, the United States won’t be alone in its campaign to unleash more fossil fuels and abandon key environmental regulations.
The Trump administration has for months championed the U.S. fossil fuel industry, crushed federal climate research efforts, dismantled regulations aimed at curbing pollution, and dismissed the scientific consensus on climate change.
But it’s also now taking its crusade abroad with a flurry of moves aimed at turning up the pressure on international organizations and other countries to follow in its footsteps.
Climate change is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” Trump declared to an audience of world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly in New York City on Tuesday. “If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.”
By embracing fossil fuels, the leader is boosting an industry that has long helped power the U.S. economy. The United States is the world’s biggest oil producer and natural gas exporter, and the Trump administration has prioritized pumping up domestic oil and gas production in its bid to achieve what it has called U.S. “energy dominance.” Stoking global demand for fossil fuels is a part of that plan.
“It is in their interest to convince as many countries as possible to maintain reliance on oil and gas so that the U.S. can be a reliable exporter,” said Tom Moerenhout, a research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.
Yet burning fossil fuels also releases copious amounts of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. Scientists overwhelmingly agree that those greenhouse gas emissions are warming the world, making extreme heat and precipitation more intense and frequent. Those impacts have become more pronounced globally as countries reel from the hottest year ever recorded and climate change amplifies the impacts of floods and heat waves roiling communities.
At the same time, demand for cheap energy has only grown worldwide. That has fed a big new market for China, a key geopolitical rival, which is not rich in its own oil or gas supply and has instead been racing ahead in the clean energy sector. China has poured hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies into its electric vehicle, wind, and solar industries—massive investments that have allowed it to stake out a dominant position in green supply chains and export cheap technologies all over the world.
“Clean energy is spreading at a pace that no one would have anticipated 20 years ago,” said Alice Hill, a climate expert at the Council on Foreign Relations who served on the National Security Council and at the Department of Homeland Security under the Obama administration.
“There is a play here as well—given China’s dominance in clean energy—to dissuade other nations from turning toward China as they make their energy choices,” Hill added.
Trump is wasting no time in ratcheting up the pressure, from wielding trade threats against world leaders to railing against international agreements designed to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The Trump administration is now pushing the World Bank to ramp up its lending to fossil fuel projects, the Financial Times reported. The United States—a top shareholder in many of the world’s development banks—is also publicly and privately pressuring other institutions to boost fossil fuel lending and turn away from green energy efforts.
Another big target has been the International Energy Agency (IEA), the world’s leading energy organization, which publishes influential forecasts on global energy use. The Trump administration has balked at the IEA’s reports that global oil, gas, and coal demand will peak by 2030 amid greater uptake of electric vehicles and renewable energy—forecasts that could throw a wrench into Trump’s plans to pump up the U.S. fossil fuel industry.
As an IEA member state, the United States contributes about 14 percent of the organization’s budget—money that the Trump administration has threatened to pull. The Trump administration has also pushed to replace a top official in the agency, Politico reported.
“We will do one of two things: we will reform the way the IEA operates or we will withdraw,” U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Bloomberg in July. “My strong preference is to reform it.”
Facing those pressures, IEA officials have vowed to restart a forecast known as the “current policies scenario,” which assesses the global energy landscape on existing national pledges and does not account for new policies that countries are expected to adopt. The current policies scenario will likely have a brighter outlook for fossil fuel demand.
And then there is Trump’s pressure on individual countries. After launching his trade war against much of the world in April, the U.S. leader has harnessed the resulting negotiations to secure fossil fuel deals for the United States. The European Union, for example, agreed to purchase $750 billion in U.S. energy resources over a three-year period, although energy analysts have questioned whether such a pledge is realistically achievable. South Korea and Japan also agreed to purchase $100 billion of liquefied natural gas and invest hundreds of billions of dollars into U.S. energy infrastructure production, respectively.
Much of the world is eager to avoid a direct fight with Trump, experts said.
“Few nations want to have a head-on confrontation,” Hill said. “I think it’s easier to nod, be quiet, try to duck the conversation, and just hope that President Trump doesn’t notice.”
But with momentum for green energy picking up speed worldwide, it remains to be seen whether Trump’s sharp rejection of renewables and clean tech will fully resonate with the rest of the world.
“Other countries are increasingly going to want to embrace technologies of the future,” said Joshua Busby, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who served in the Defense Department under the Biden administration.