Earth Day 2025: How the Trump administration's policies will impact global decarbonization

Yahoo

22-04-2025

The actions of President Donald Trump's administration will significantly decelerate the race to decarbonize economies around the world, according to energy and climate change experts.
Since taking office in January, Trump has signed several executive orders aiming to dismantle climate action in the U.S. While these actions have spurred uncertainty in the environmental community, they won't cause global efforts to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions to come to a screeching halt, the experts said.
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This is how these policies will affect America's international standing in the climate fight and the collective aim to reach a carbon net-zero economy, according to the experts:
In the four months since Trump took office for his second term, he has declared an energy crisis in the U.S.; removed the U.S. from the Paris Agreement for the second time; increased timber production in national forests and expanded the mining and use of coal in the U.S.
Trump's administration has rolled back dozens of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations aimed at protecting the environment; laid off hundreds of employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and removed mentions of climate change from public websites.
Last week, Trump issued executive orders to protect "American energy from state overreach." These orders contain language that could block enforcement of state and local laws that are obstacles to production or use of coal, oil, natural gas, hydropower, geothermal, biofuel and nuclear energy and potentially withdraw regulations that affect energy projects and the environment.
The Department of the Interior also announced a new offshore leasing plan on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf last week.
"It's past time to phase out offshore drilling and oil spills, not make way for more," Rachel Mathews, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement to ABC News. "It's clear that oil and gas doesn't mix with a clean and safe ocean environment."
The "Climate Backtracker," a database by Columbia University's Sabin Center for Climate Change that tracks steps taken by the Trump administration to scale back or eliminate federal climate mitigation and adaption measures, lists nearly 100 actions taken since Jan. 9.
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Trump's actions are largely shrouded in the idea of lessening American dependence on the rest of the world.
"We have the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth, and we are going to use it," Trump said during his inauguration speech in January. "We will bring prices down, fill our strategic reserves up again right to the top and export American energy all over the world. We will be a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it."
But these executive orders could significantly slow down global progress on reaching their net-zero goals -- something individual countries are already struggling with, experts told ABC News.
Countries around the globe, including some of the biggest emitters, have made ambitious goals to decarbonize their economies in the coming decades. China is aiming to get its economy to net-zero, or a carbon neutral impact, by 2060. India has pledged to reach net-zero by 2070. Brazil, the host of the 30th Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP30, has promised to reach carbon neutrality by 2050 -- as has the U.S., under the Biden administration.
While no one country is on track to meet those goals, the momentum in the climate fight seen in recent years, spurred domestically by the Biden administration, has now been reversed, Frances Colon, senior fellow of international climate at the Center for American Progress, told ABC News.
But as the top historical emitter of greenhouse gases, the U.S. should be among the countries setting an example for the rest of the world to decarbonize while helping smaller, poorer countries achieve net-zero goals as well, according to the United Nations. The U.S. is responsible for 20% of the carbon dioxide emissions released since 1850, according to Carbon Brief, a climate science database. The next-highest historical emitters are China at 11%; Russia at 7%; Brazil at 5% and Indonesia at 4%.
Europe has been the global leader of transitioning its energy sectors to renewables, while China has been the leader of clean tech, Noah Kaufman, a senior researcher at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy, told ABC News.
The lost momentum will send the U.S. lagging even further behind, which will result is missed opportunities for Americans to save on their energy bills and for American-based firms to profit from the development of clean tech, David Victor, a professor of innovation and public policy at the University of California San Diego, told ABC News.
MORE: Why the Trump administration is wrong about an energy crisis in the US, according to experts
Trump's policies, especially the ones targeting renewable energy, may be the GOP's last hurrah to bring fossil fuels back to the forefront, Michael Lenox, a professor at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, told ABC News.
Eventually, major technological shifts in a number of core industries will cause markets to take over and force economies to adopt clean energy, according to Lenox.
"I don't think the momentum has stopped," Victor said. "I think the federal policy is in chaos right now."
The transition from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles is already happening on a large scale in several countries. In Norway, nearly 90% of new car sales are EVs. More than 50% of new car sales in China are EVs.
Once the cost of EVs begins to drop lower than internal combustion vehicles, the U.S., which has been lagging behind the rest of the world in EV sales, will likely start to catch up, Lenox said.
The adoption of renewable energy for a host of sectors that are harder to decarbonize, like the production of steel and cement, will eventually lead to the end of utilization of fossil fuels to power those supply chains as well, Lenox said.
"Clean energy investments are outpacing fossil fuel investments two-to-one globally," Colon said.
China is among the countries leading the technologies that are going to allow for decarbonization, the experts said.
"They have made huge investments in battery technology, EVs, solar and wind, and basically own the supply chain of especially the kind of upstream part of things like batteries," Lenox said.
While the Trump administration may be trying to bring coal, gas and oil back to the forefront of energy sources, it's not likely to happen, the experts said. Increasing production and flooding the market with excess supply will cause prices to go down -- something the fossil fuel industry wants to avoid.
"The reality is, a lot of this stuff makes sense commercially, and that continues forward," Victor said.
Earth Day 2025: How the Trump administration's policies will impact global decarbonization originally appeared on abcnews.go.com