https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/20/trumps-exit-climate-deal-means-00199406
By Sara Schonhardt, Zack Colman and Karl Mathiesen
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.
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.”