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

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

“This is a matter of the US and the Trump administration shooting themselves in the foot,” says David Waskow at the World Resources Institute, a global environmental nonprofit. “It will sideline the US.”

This is the second time Trump has pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement, the landmark deal agreed upon in 2015 to limit global warming to well below 2°C above the pre-industrial average. Due to the rules of the United Nations treaty, the first exit in 2017 took three years to become official, and the US only left for a few months before the former US president Joe Biden had the country rejoin in 2021.

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

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

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

However, the US withdrawal won’t mean the “bottom drops out” of global climate action, says Waskow. Countries representing more than 90 per cent 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 larger role in the global economy than the first time the US withdrew, he says.

“The rest of the world is shifting to clean energy,” says Manish Bapna at 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 US 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 US won’t only be ceding influence over how those markets are shaped, but will be ceding those markets period,” says Waskow. “I don’t think other countries will think of the US first when thinking about who to engage with.”

The retreat from global climate action also comes as the new Trump administration moved swiftly to reverse, abandon or impede the previous administration’s policies in a flurry of executive orders made in the first day in office. Those include a ban on federal permits for wind energy, and a rollback of policies Biden put in place to encourage the uptake of electric vehicles. Others are aimed at expanding fossil fuel development on federal lands, in coastal waters and in Alaska and increasing exports of natural gas to solve what yet another order declares is a “national energy emergency”. “We will drill, baby, drill,” he said in his inaugural address.