November 8, 2024
5 min read
What Trump Can—And Probably Can’t—Do to Reverse U.S. Climate Policy
The new president-elect can go beyond just pulling out of the Paris Agreement. But it may be more difficult to roll back clean energy policies
In 2019, then-President Donald Trump visited a liquid natural gas facility in Hackberry, Louisiana.
Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
The following essay is reprinted with permission from 
The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.
As the U.S. prepares for another Trump administration, one area unambiguously in the incoming president’s crosshairs is climate policy.
Although he has not released an official climate agenda, Donald Trump’s playbook from his last stint in the Oval Office and his frequent complaints about clean energy offer some clues to what’s ahead.
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Exiting the Paris climate agreement
Less than six months into his first presidency, Trump in 2017 formally announced that he was withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate accord– the 2015 international agreement signed by nearly every country as a pledge to work toward keeping rising temperatures and other impacts of climate change in check.
This time, a greater but underappreciated risk is that Trump will not stop at the Paris Agreement.
In addition to exiting the Paris Agreement again, Trump could try to withdraw the United States from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The 1992 treaty is the foundation for international climate talks. A withdrawal from that treaty would make it nearly impossible for a future administration to reenter the UNFCCC treaty because doing so would require the consent…
Read the full article here
