The Paris Agreement: The US leaves the global climate pact – what happens next?

A cheer rang out from the crowd at a stadium in Washington DC on January 20 as US President Donald Trump signed an order on stage to withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement. The order said the move was in the interest of putting “America first.” But environmental groups condemned the decision, arguing that the world’s second-biggest greenhouse gas emitter’s exit from the deal will worsen climate damage while ceding US influence in global negotiations to its rival and clean-energy juggernaut, China.

“This is a matter of the United States and the Trump administration shooting themselves in the foot,” said David Waskow of the World Resources Institute, a global environmental nonprofit. “It will put the United States on the sidelines.”

It is the second time Trump has pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement, the landmark agreement struck in 2015 to limit global warming to well below 2°C above the pre-industrial average. Due to the rules of the UN treaty, the first exit in 2017 took three years to become official, and the US left only a few months before former US President Joe Biden got the country to rejoin in 2021.

This time, the rules of the agreement stipulate that it will take a year for the withdrawal to become official, after which the United States will be the only major economy not party to the agreement. The other countries that have not signed are Libya, Yemen and Iran.

“This is certainly not good news for international climate action,” says Li Shuo of the Asia Society Policy Institute in Washington DC. Unlike the first time, the US with Drew, this second exit comes at a time when the country’s appetite for ambitious emissions reductions was already facing geopolitical, social and economic obstacles, he says. Last year saw a record for global emissions, while the increase in global average temperatures exceeded 1.5°C for the first time.

The US exit would leave the country without leverage to push for deeper emissions reductions and could create an excuse for countries around the globe to reduce their own climate commitments. “Climate momentum around the world, even before Trump’s election, was declining,” says Li.

However, the American withdrawal will not mean that “the bottom falls out” of the global climate effort, says Waskow. Countries representing more than 90 percent of global emissions are still committed to the Paris Agreement. Wind and solar energy, electric vehicles, batteries and other clean technologies also now play a much bigger role in the global economy than the first time, the US with Drew, he says.

“The rest of the world is switching to clean energy,” says Manish Bapna of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a US environmental advocacy group. “This will slow that transition, not stop it.” But it raises the question of what role the United States will play in shaping that future, he says.

Looming large is China, which dominates many of the key clean energy industries, from solar panels to batteries, and is increasingly exporting its technology to the rest of the world. “The United States will not only cede influence on how these markets are shaped, but will cede these markets period,” says Waskow. “I don’t think other countries will think of the United States first when they think about who to engage with.”

The retreat from global climate action also comes as the new Trump administration moved quickly to reverse, abandon or obstruct the previous administration’s policies in a flurry of orders issued on its first day in office. These include a ban on federal permits for wind energy and a rollback of policies put in place by Biden to promote the spread of electric vehicles. Others are aimed at expanding fossil fuel development on federal lands, in coastal waters and in Alaska and increasing natural gas exports to address what yet another order declares is a “national energy emergency.” “We’re drilling, baby, drilling,” he said in his opening remarks.