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What Trump’s Exit from the Paris Agreement Will Really Mean

One week ago, the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University published an essay I wrote for its Climate Blog. My topic was “What Trump’s expected exit from the Paris Agreement will mean.” In fact, Trump filed papers yesterday with the United Nations to initiate the process of withdrawal. Hence, my essay from last week is (unfortunately) very relevant, and so I’m reproducing it in full here for readers of my blog, An Economic View of the Environment.

What Trump’s expected exit from the Paris Agreement will mean

Jan 13, 2025

By Robert N. Stavins

At noon on Monday, January 20, Donald Trump will take the oath of office for his second term as president. It is reasonable to anticipate that one of his first actions will be to file papers with the United Nations to initiate withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement of 2015.

In short, it may be 2017 all over again, when Trump moved to exit the agreement – a legally binding accord requiring signatories to publish plans for reducing planet-warming emissions. As I wrote at the time, the Paris Agreement included an initial statutory delay of four years from the date of the agreement coming into force in November 2016, meaning the U.S. remained a party for almost the entirety of Trump’s first term. Dedicated staff from the State Department continued to participate in the ongoing negotiations in meaningful ways, including co-chairing with China the Enhanced Transparency Framework negotiating stream. Ultimately, the U.S. was out of the Paris Agreement for just a few months – until shortly after President Biden’s inauguration in early 2021.

Today, the statutory delay is 12 months, and so if Trump files withdrawal papers as soon as January 20, one year later the U.S. will be alone among the community of major nations as a non-party to this fundamental and path-breaking agreement (only Iran, Libya, and Yemen are non-parties of the agreement). Furthermore, it is much less likely that civil service staffers at the State Department, Environmental Protection Agency, or the Department of Energy will be able to continue their work, as Trump now seems determined to purge the upper ranks of the Executive Branch of anyone other than loyalists. At the very least, the U.S. delegation will have lame duck status for the year.

A possible – but unlikely – alternative to withdrawal

It is at least conceivable that instead of withdrawing, the Trump administration could choose to submit to the UN a revised and severely downgraded climate action plan as required under Paris – the Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) – although a subsequent administration could unilaterally revise the NDC again. The option to downgrade the NDC rather than withdraw existed during Trump’s first term as well, but was obviously not chosen.

Whereas the original Obama-era NDC pledged to reduce U.S. emissions by 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2025, Biden updated this in April 2021 to 50-52% by 2030, and on December 19, 2024, the lame-duck Biden administration strengthened this to 61-66% by 2035. But it is highly unlikely the Trump administration would want to submit a downgraded NDC, given that such action could be interpreted as endorsing the overall legitimacy of the Paris Agreement, anathema to MAGA Republicans.

And an even more dramatic route

A more drastic action would be to withdraw not just from the Paris Agreement, but from the umbrella agreement, the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This requires only a one-year delay to become effective. During Trump’s first term, serious consideration was never given to this more significant move, perhaps because the UNFCCC was ratified by the Senate in 1992 and signed by Republican President George H.W. Bush.

Now, however, some of the most passionate climate skeptics in Trump’s orbit want the U.S. to pull out of the UNFCCC as well. A key question, which legal scholars can debate, is whether withdrawal from a Senate-confirmed treaty requires Senate action, including a super-majority vote, which Democrats in the chamber could easily defeat. There seems to be some uncertainty. While Senate action is required to ratify treaties, Senate involvement in terminating ratified treaties is not mandated nor even mentioned in the Constitution. Several previous presidents have unilaterally exited from Senate-confirmed treaties.

Global impacts

In the meantime, a key question is how a U.S. withdrawal will impact other key countries’ positions. We know that after Trump’s first-term pullout the EU became more ambitious; China was happy to evolve from co-leadership with the U.S. to sole leadership; India did not retrench; and although Brazil backed off its pledge, that was because of the election of Jair Bolsonaro, himself a climate skeptic.

It may be that Trump’s election need not derail global climate action, but it is too soon to make firm predictions. It does appear that Trump’s November election victory emboldened Saudi Arabia to be much more strident in its defense of fossil fuels weeks later at COP29, even more than it had been previously at this annual meeting of UNFCCC signatories. The result, largely due to Saudi Arabia fighting any negative comments about fossil fuels in the final communique, was that COP29 did not repeat a call for a transition away from fossil fuels, let alone offer something stronger. EU and the U.S. negotiators wanted language about actions to achieve any goal, but that was likewise rejected. If, beginning in January 2026, the U.S. is not even a party, the negotiating effectiveness of countries such as Saudi Arabia will, if anything, be enhanced.

Finally, some may wonder what a U.S. exit will mean for the world of climate finance (who pays for climate damages and the energy transition – and how). It is helpful to recall that COP29 was labeled the “Finance COP,” because it was intended to focus on augmenting developed countries’ commitment made in 2009 (at COP15 in Copenhagen) to mobilize $100 billion per year by 2020 to support developing countries in addressing climate change, both for mitigation and adaptation. That commitment was eventually reached two years late. At COP29 developing countries received pledges of $300 billion annually, less than 25% what they sought. Will other donor countries fill a void created by U.S. withdrawal, or will it weaken others’ resolve to supply climate finance to developing countries? It will be some time before we know.

Bottom line

All in all, the real-world implications of the expected, forthcoming withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris Agreement under Trump 2.0 may turn out to be less consequential than some observers have feared, despite the clear abdication of global leadership, and the great disappointment that will surely be felt by many in government, environmental advocacy, academia, and private industry. By far, the greater climate policy consequences will be in terms of extensive and severe downgrading of U.S. domestic climate and energy policy, whether via legislation, regulation, or both.

Hope and Expectation for Bottom-Up Climate Progress

Vijay Vaitheeswaran, whom I have known and worked with for over 30 years, is the long-time global energy and climate innovation editor at The Economist. In the latest episode of “Environmental Insights: Conversations on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program,” he expresses his appreciation for bottom-up climate approaches. The podcast is produced by the Harvard Environmental Economics Program. You can listen to our complete conversation here.

Visionary entrepreneurs and the private sector will play increasingly important roles in driving climate progress, Vijay Vaitheeswaran argues, particularly in an era of what he calls “slowbalization,” during which nations will attempt to regionalize and even nationalize supply chains, and establish industrial policies, a trend he says “will have some deleterious consequences” on climate policy. However, he also notes that there could be some longer-term positive effects.

“From the perspective of emissions, I worry. Making very expensive solar panels at home in America or very unattractive and expensive electric cars that nobody wants to buy because you’re reliant on domestic technology or energy storage [is inefficient]. Another example where we have at scale with quite a lot of innovation embedded cutting edge technologies that are available quite inexpensively because China invested and got them to scale and is making them available, but very high tariffs will keep them out of markets like the U.S. And what will happen?,” he asks. “My prediction is that a number of those technologies will be redirected to the emerging world. If that happens, that would be a good thing. It might even help with a green leapfrog in India or certainly in Africa, Latin America. It doesn’t matter to the planet where the emissions cuts are made in the long term.”

Vijay observes that much of current-day green energy solutions are driven by the private sector, and that trend, he says, shows no signs of slowing.

“I have a great deal of appreciation for bottom-up forces, understanding that whatever the cycle and rhythm of international negotiations… and the vicissitudes of domestic policy, that in fact the momentum often builds from the bottom-up, from markets, from the role of business, from the opportunities that are created from technology innovation advancing,” he remarks. “That’s where I keep my eye on both – what’s happening from the top-down… The framework matters, but oftentimes the longer-term trends are determined by what comes from the bottom-up.”

He also notes the trend toward increased use of alternative fuels in several important industrial sectors.

“I think the long game for oil is already in sight that in the long term we know how to electrify transport. That’s a problem that we have a pathway for, certainly in passenger transport. With freight we have to see which technology wins out, whether it is indeed electrification, which is making gains even with freight, even though batteries are heavy and cannot go as far,” he states. “There is an argument for hydrogen or some other kinds of synthetic fuels as well. So, there’s an open competition, but we have pathways to alternatives there. We’re seeing shipping as well moving quite rapidly, in fact, towards some alternatives… to petroleum-based fuels.”

As these alternative fuel technologies come to scale, Vaitheeswaran says, they will help the world lessen its reliance on oil, thereby reducing global CO₂ emissions.

“The way we should work for change faster is to develop these alternatives, make them attractive, make them affordable, keeping in mind energy poverty is still a significant problem for 800 million to a billion people around the world [who have] little or no access to modern energy and to accommodate a world that’s going to use much more energy in future, and rightly so, in developing countries. And in developed countries, of course with the AI surge, we will certainly use more energy for that purpose – to make it clean and firm,” he remarks. “So, I think those are the kinds of outlines of… [a] future that probably calls for fossil fuels to be with us for some time and for more thought in how we think about the emissions from those fuels.”

Vijay also addresses the challenges posed by upstream methane, an issue which has become front and center in recent climate negotiations.

“We now understand, although scientists have known this for a very long time, but much more in the political consciousness, that methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas in the short term in the 10-to-20-year timeframe because it does have a shorter life than CO₂,” he says. “And global accords were reached at Dubai, at the COP Summit, and reaffirmed in Baku, to try to dramatically reduce the methane footprint of oil and gas companies during their production process.”

For this and much more, please listen to my complete podcast conversation with Vijay Vaitheeswaran, the 65th episode over the past five years of the Environmental Insights series, with future episodes scheduled to drop each month. You can find a transcript of our conversation at the website of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program. Previous episodes have featured conversations with:

Gina McCarthy, former Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Nick Stern of the London School of Economics discussing his career, British politics, and efforts to combat climate change
Andrei Marcu, founder and executive director of the European Roundtable on Climate Change and Sustainable Transition
Paul Watkinson, Chair of the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA) within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
Jos Delbeke, professor at the European University Institute in Florence and at the KU Leuven in Belgium, and formerly Director-General of the European Commission’s DG Climate Action
David Keith, professor at Harvard and a leading authority on geoengineering
Joe Aldy, professor of the practice of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, with considerable experience working on climate change policy issues in the U.S. government
Scott Barrett, professor of natural resource economics at Columbia University, and an authority on infectious disease policy
Rebecca Henderson, John and Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard University, and founding co-director of the Business and Environment Initiative at Harvard Business School.
Sue Biniaz, who was the lead climate lawyer and a lead climate negotiator for the United States from 1989 until early 2017.
Richard Schmalensee, the Howard W. Johnson Professor of Management, and Professor of Economics Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Kelley Kizier, Associate Vice President for International Climate at the Environmental Defense Fund.
David Hone, Chief Climate Change Adviser, Shell International.
Vicky Bailey, 30 years of experience in corporate and government positions in the energy sector.
David Victor, professor of international relations at the University of California, San Diego.
Lisa Friedman, reporter on the climate desk at the The New York Times.
Coral Davenport, who covers energy and environmental policy for The New York Times from Washington.
Spencer Dale, BP Group Chief Economist.
Richard Revesz, professor at the NYU School of Law.
Daniel Esty, Hillhouse Professor of Environment and Law at Yale University.
William Hogan, Raymond Plank Research Professor of Global Energy Policy at Harvard.
Jody Freeman, Archibald Cox Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.
John Graham, Dean Emeritus, Paul O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University.
Gernot Wagner, Clinical Associate Professor at New York University.
John Holdren, Research Professor, Harvard Kennedy School.
Larry Goulder, Shuzo Nishihara Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics, Stanford University.
Suzi Kerr, Chief Economist, Environmental Defense Fund.
Sheila Olmstead, Professor of Public Affairs, LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas, Austin.
Robert Pindyck, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi Professor of Economics and Finance, MIT Sloan School of Management.
Gilbert Metcalf, Professor of Economics, Tufts University.
Navroz Dubash, Professor, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.
Paul Joskow, Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics emeritus, MIT.
Maureen Cropper, Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland.
Orley Ashenfelter, the Joseph Douglas Green 1895 Professor of Economics, Princeton University.
Jonathan Wiener, the William and Thomas Perkins Professor of Law, Duke Law School.
Lori Bennear, the Juli Plant Grainger Associate Professor of Energy Economics and Policy, Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University.
Daniel Yergin, founder of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, and now Vice Chair of S&P Global.
Jeffrey Holmstead, who leads the Environmental Strategies Group at Bracewell in Washington, DC.
Daniel Jacob, Vasco McCoy Family Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry & Environmental Engineering at Harvard.
Michael Greenstone, Milton Friedman Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, University of Chicago.
Billy Pizer, Vice President for Research & Policy Engagement, Resources for the Future.
Daniel Bodansky, Regents’ Professor, Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Arizona State University.
Catherine Wolfram, Cora Jane Flood Professor of Business Administration, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, currently on leave at the Harvard Kennedy School.
James Stock, Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy, Harvard University.
Mary Nichols, long-time leader in California, U.S., and international climate change policy.
Geoffrey Heal, Donald Waite III Professor of Social Enterprise, Columbia Business School.
Kathleen Segerson, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Economics, University of Connecticut.
Meredith Fowlie, Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics, U.C. Berkeley.
Karen Palmer, Senior Fellow, Resources for the Future.
Severin Borenstein, Professor of the Graduate School, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley.
Michael Toffel, Senator John Heinz Professor of Environmental Management and Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School.
Emma Rothschild, Jeremy and Jane Knowles Professor of History, Harvard University.
Nathaniel Keohane, President, C2ES.
Amy Harder, Executive Editor, Cypher News.
Richard Zeckhauser, Frank Ramsey Professor of Political Economy, Harvard Kennedy School.
Kimberly (Kim) Clausing, School of Law, University of California at Los Angeles
Hunt Allcott, Professor of Global Environmental Policy, Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.
Meghan O’Sullivan, Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School.
Robert Lawrence, Albert Williams Professor of International Trade and Investment, Harvard Kennedy School.
Charles Taylor, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School.
Wolfram Schlenker, Ray Goldberg Professor of the Global Food System, Harvard Kennedy School.
Karen Fisher-Vanden, Professor of Environmental & Resource Economics, Pennsylvania State University
Max Bearak, climate and energy reporter, New York Times

“Environmental Insights” is hosted on SoundCloud, and is also available on iTunes, Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

A Keen Observer Expresses Skepticism about the Outcome of COP29

In my podcast series, “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program,” I’ve had the pleasure in my podcast conversations of chatting with a number of smart, well-connected journalists who cover climate change and environmental policy. In my latest podcast episode, I was joined by Max Bearak, an energy policy and global climate negotiations reporter for the New York Times, who shares his perspective on the recently concluded 29^th Conference of the Parties (COP 29) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). (You can read my summary and assessment of COP29 here.) You can listen to our complete conversation here.

Hosted by the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan in the capital city of Baku on November 11-22, COP29 concluded with a pledge by developed nations to contribute $300 billion annually to developing countries to address climate change, short of the $1.3 trillion developing countries were hoping to obtain. Bearak expressed some disappointment with the outcome.

“What ended up coming out of this COP was a kind of kitchen sink approach where developed countries said, ‘we will take the lead in trying to get together around 300 billion dollars a year, and not starting right now, but starting a decade from now,’” he says. “And the additional trillion will be made up by a huge variety of sources in the private sector, in multilateral development banks, carbon markets, you name it, basically everything else. And developing countries were left with a sense that their needs were not being taken very seriously.”

Bearak says the sentiment felt by developing nations was reflected in comments delivered shortly after the conferenced was gaveled to a close.

“The first speaker after that gavel was the representative from India, Chandni Raina, who is a spokesman for the Indian Finance Ministry. And she gave one of the most scathing speeches I’ve ever heard at a COP really tearing down the Azerbaijani presidency as leading essentially a sham process that did in the end push through a resolution that most developing countries found to be an insult,” he notes.

Negotiators settled for a less-than-ambitious agreement, Bearak argues, due to the nature of the COP’s decision-making process.

“The final agreement [falls within] the boundary between what is politically possible and what’s needed. And so, you get to the lower end of what’s needed, which is the higher end of what’s politically possible, and that’s essentially what happens every year,” he says. “Watching that boundary tells you exactly where we are, and I think that’s what is fascinating about COP is the distillation of where that line is on a given year.”

Bearak says the American delegation had a voice during the COP, but because the outcome of the recent presidential election is almost certain to presage U.S. withdrawal from future global climate negotiations, the delegation’s impact in Baku was limited.

“Sitting down with John Podesta, the U.S. Climate Envoy, for example, he would tell you the U.S. was extremely active in these negotiations,” Bearak remarks. “I think they certainly may have been active, but I’m not sure that anybody felt like they could plan on U.S. support being there in the coming years, which ultimately puts a lot more pressure on both China and the European Union as the most likely sources of bilateral climate finance.”

The next round of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), aimed at achieving net zero carbon emission goals, are due to be presented at COP 30 next year in Brazil, but Bearak says he isn’t very optimistic about those negotiations.

“I think the reason that we even got a deal despite so much discord in Baku was the feeling that if we don’t get a climate finance deal now, we might have to wait half a decade before having that kind of multilateral spirit come back,” he states. “So, I think the COP in Brazil is going to be… hampered. The vibes are going to be more pessimistic [than they were in Baku], and it’s just going to be really tough for them to provide a sense of optimism and the sense that the world is making progress and taking a step forward, which is ultimately what all of these COPs [are designed to do.]”

For this and much more, please listen to my podcast conversation with Max Bearak, the 64th episode over the past five years of the Environmental Insights series, with future episodes scheduled to drop each month. You can find a transcript of our conversation at the website of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program. Previous episodes have featured conversations with:

Gina McCarthy, former Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Nick Stern of the London School of Economics discussing his career, British politics, and efforts to combat climate change
Andrei Marcu, founder and executive director of the European Roundtable on Climate Change and Sustainable Transition
Paul Watkinson, Chair of the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA) within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
Jos Delbeke, professor at the European University Institute in Florence and at the KU Leuven in Belgium, and formerly Director-General of the European Commission’s DG Climate Action
David Keith, professor at Harvard and a leading authority on geoengineering
Joe Aldy, professor of the practice of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, with considerable experience working on climate change policy issues in the U.S. government
Scott Barrett, professor of natural resource economics at Columbia University, and an authority on infectious disease policy
Rebecca Henderson, John and Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard University, and founding co-director of the Business and Environment Initiative at Harvard Business School.
Sue Biniaz, who was the lead climate lawyer and a lead climate negotiator for the United States from 1989 until early 2017.
Richard Schmalensee, the Howard W. Johnson Professor of Management, and Professor of Economics Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Kelley Kizier, Associate Vice President for International Climate at the Environmental Defense Fund.
David Hone, Chief Climate Change Adviser, Shell International.
Vicky Bailey, 30 years of experience in corporate and government positions in the energy sector.
David Victor, professor of international relations at the University of California, San Diego.
Lisa Friedman, reporter on the climate desk at the The New York Times.
Coral Davenport, who covers energy and environmental policy for The New York Times from Washington.
Spencer Dale, BP Group Chief Economist.
Richard Revesz, professor at the NYU School of Law.
Daniel Esty, Hillhouse Professor of Environment and Law at Yale University.
William Hogan, Raymond Plank Research Professor of Global Energy Policy at Harvard.
Jody Freeman, Archibald Cox Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.
John Graham, Dean Emeritus, Paul O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University.
Gernot Wagner, Clinical Associate Professor at New York University.
John Holdren, Research Professor, Harvard Kennedy School.
Larry Goulder, Shuzo Nishihara Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics, Stanford University.
Suzi Kerr, Chief Economist, Environmental Defense Fund.
Sheila Olmstead, Professor of Public Affairs, LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas, Austin.
Robert Pindyck, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi Professor of Economics and Finance, MIT Sloan School of Management.
Gilbert Metcalf, Professor of Economics, Tufts University.
Navroz Dubash, Professor, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.
Paul Joskow, Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics emeritus, MIT.
Maureen Cropper, Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland.
Orley Ashenfelter, the Joseph Douglas Green 1895 Professor of Economics, Princeton University.
Jonathan Wiener, the William and Thomas Perkins Professor of Law, Duke Law School.
Lori Bennear, the Juli Plant Grainger Associate Professor of Energy Economics and Policy, Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University.
Daniel Yergin, founder of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, and now Vice Chair of S&P Global.
Jeffrey Holmstead, who leads the Environmental Strategies Group at Bracewell in Washington, DC.
Daniel Jacob, Vasco McCoy Family Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry & Environmental Engineering at Harvard.
Michael Greenstone, Milton Friedman Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, University of Chicago.
Billy Pizer, Vice President for Research & Policy Engagement, Resources for the Future.
Daniel Bodansky, Regents’ Professor, Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Arizona State University.
Catherine Wolfram, Cora Jane Flood Professor of Business Administration, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, currently on leave at the Harvard Kennedy School.
James Stock, Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy, Harvard University.
Mary Nichols, long-time leader in California, U.S., and international climate change policy.
Geoffrey Heal, Donald Waite III Professor of Social Enterprise, Columbia Business School.
Kathleen Segerson, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Economics, University of Connecticut.
Meredith Fowlie, Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics, U.C. Berkeley.
Karen Palmer, Senior Fellow, Resources for the Future.
Severin Borenstein, Professor of the Graduate School, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley.
Michael Toffel, Senator John Heinz Professor of Environmental Management and Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School.
Emma Rothschild, Jeremy and Jane Knowles Professor of History, Harvard University.
Nathaniel Keohane, President, C2ES.
Amy Harder, Executive Editor, Cypher News.
Richard Zeckhauser, Frank Ramsey Professor of Political Economy, Harvard Kennedy School.
Kimberly (Kim) Clausing, School of Law, University of California at Los Angeles
Hunt Allcott, Professor of Global Environmental Policy, Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.
Meghan O’Sullivan, Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School.
Robert Lawrence, Albert Williams Professor of International Trade and Investment, Harvard Kennedy School.
Charles Taylor, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School.
Wolfram Schlenker, Ray Goldberg Professor of the Global Food System, Harvard Kennedy School.
Karen Fisher-Vanden, Professor of Environmental & Resource Economics, Pennsylvania State University

“Environmental Insights” is hosted on SoundCloud, and is also available on iTunes, Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Stitcher.