President Trump has spent much of his second term trying to reshape global politics, first through a series of tariffs and trade deals that began on what he termed “Liberation Day” last April. This year, he’s focused on changing the world through military force: After abducting the leader of Venezuela and blockading Cuba, last month the president launched an attack on Iran that has now spiraled into a regional war involving most of the Middle East.
Among many profound consequences, Trump’s military strikes could have dramatic effects on the world’s energy trajectory and climate change, though what those effects are remains to be seen. But well before Trump’s attention was consumed by deposing foreign leaders, the president devoted much of his foreign policy to much more directly undermining international progress on global warming: Top diplomats in the Trump administration have pressured other countries to sabotage major treaties on plastic production and shipping emissions, and they have fought to drop even the mention of climate change at international institutions like the United Nations and the International Energy Agency.
“It’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” Trump said of climate change, speaking to world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly in September. “The entire globalist concept of asking successful industrialized nations to inflict pain on themselves and radically disrupt their entire societies must be rejected completely and totally, and it must be immediate.”
This bully-pulpit effort has already succeeded in stalling international agreements and shifting international focus away from the warming world. Even so, it’s far from clear that the administration will be able to alter the world’s energy transition in its preferred direction, cultivating dependence on American fossil fuels as the global standard. The United States might be able to sit out decarbonization, but other countries have strong economic and political incentives to act on climate change. Even a voice as loud as Trump’s may not deter them indefinitely. Just as the president’s efforts to kill renewable energy in the United States have faltered, his overseas efforts may have little staying power as well.
Here are the biggest changes Trump has tried to make to global climate action.
Killing a carbon tax
The Trump administration’s first major diplomatic action against climate change came last year, when it tried to derail a global carbon tax on the shipping industry, which accounts for about 3 percent of the world’s emissions. At the time, dozens of countries and industry representatives had coalesced around a framework that would require shippers to pay a fee per ton of greenhouse gas emissions. But the U.S. abruptly withdrew from the negotiations in April. It then threatened countries with retaliatory measures if they continued supporting the tax. Trump’s handpicked heads of the federal departments of State, Transportation, and Energy issued a joint statement warning that the U.S. would impose additional tariffs, visa restrictions, port fees, and sanctions on officials from countries that voted for the framework.
The coercion worked. In October, 57 countries effectively voted to delay a decision on the framework — even though just weeks earlier it seemed poised to pass unanimously. According to recent reporting from Politico, the Trump administration now appears to be preparing to sink the effort altogether. A State Department cable reviewed by the news organization says the U.S. is “strongly opposed” to a carbon fee on shipping, and “will not tolerate” the creation of a fund that uses tax revenue to reduce the industry’s emissions.
“The most appropriate path forward is to end consideration of the [net-zero framework] prior to moving to a new discussion,” the draft cable states.
Alisa Kreynes, a director of the ports and shipping program at C40, a global network of mayors taking climate action, said that countries will ultimately need to decide their vote based on their shared commitments to the United Nations charter, and “not in response to unfounded claims or intimidation tactics from individual member states.” Without a global carbon fee for shipping, the industry will need to navigate a patchwork of regulations. “This is why we need the adoption of the [net-zero] framework,” she said.
A plastics treaty goes bust
Last summer in Geneva, the U.N.’s intergovernmental Negotiating Committee held what was supposed to be the final negotiating session for a landmark treaty that would have put mandatory caps on global plastic production. Fossil fuel companies that have been investing heavily in virgin plastics, which are made from natural gas or crude oil, strongly opposed the legally binding framework. Still, more than 100 countries backed the restrictions. Ahead of the final negotiations, however, the U.S. circulated an informal negotiating memo encouraging key countries to oppose the caps.
“We will not support impractical global approaches such as plastic production targets or bans and restrictions on plastic additives or plastic products — that will increase the costs of all plastic products that are used throughout our daily lives,” the memo said. As the U.S. and a group of oil-producing nations refused to budge, the talks ended with no agreement in sight.
Silencing an island nation’s climate campaign
Last month, the U.S. State Department took its anti-climate pressure campaign to the United Nations General Assembly. The agency sent a missive to every U.S. embassy and consulate, urging all U.N. members to reject a resolution proposed by the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu. Vanuatu and its neighbors in the region had recently brought a successful case to the International Court of Justice, or ICJ; the court ruled that countries have an obligation to mitigate climate change. The resolution called on states to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, phase out support for fossil fuels, and pay climate reparations, among other measures.
Joie Chowdhury, a Switzerland-based attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law, said such resolutions are standard practice in the wake of ICJ advisory opinions — but she wasn’t surprised by U.S. opposition. “Those most responsible for the crisis will often be the first to resist accountability,” she said. “That’s predictable, but it’s also what makes accountability essential.”
In its message, the Trump administration called the “disturbing resolution” a “charade” and asked Vanuatu to “immediately withdraw” the effort and “cease attempting to wield the Court’s Advisory Opinion as a basis for creating an avenue to pursue any misguided claims of international legal obligations.”
Lee-Anne Sackett, Vanuatu’s special envoy for climate justice, said negotiations on the resolution have continued at the U.N. despite U.S. pressure. Strong advocacy from island nations continues, and none of the dozen countries who proposed the resolution alongside Vanuatu have rescinded their support.
“We’re remaining in constructive dialogue with all U.N. members, including the U.S.,” she said. “We’re confident that we’ll get the resolution through, it’s really just a question of what the substance of the resolution will be, and how much we’ll have to compromise.”
Sackett does think that America’s strong opposition has led some supporters to be quieter than expected during negotiations. “The most active in the negotiations seem to be those that have the most concerns with certain elements of the resolution,” she told Grist.
Boosting forecasts for oil and gas
In addition to global assemblies like the United Nations, the Trump administration has also pressured neutral international institutions to adopt its pro-fossil-fuel ideology. Just after Trump took office, his Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, began berating the International Energy Agency, or IEA, a body known for its authoritative analyses of the global energy sector. Wright urged the IEA to revive a model known as the “current policies scenario,” which projects future energy demand with the assumption that climate action will stall out. The secretary went even further this year, urging the institution to stop modeling how the world could achieve net-zero emissions, a goal he called a “destructive illusion.” (It was the net-zero model that led the IEA to declare in 2021 that the world had to stop all new fossil fuel development in order to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.) Wright threatened to pull the U.S. out of the IEA if it didn’t tilt its modeling back toward fossil fuels.
The IEA has tried to play ball with the Trump administration so far. It revived its “current policies” model at Wright’s request, and the institution’s leaders spent most of February’s annual IEA summit talking about “energy security” rather than climate change. But experts doubt that Wright’s threats will cause the IEA to cease modeling net-zero. The institution’s projections of future oil demand are extremely useful not only to other countries pushing climate action but also to petrostates and oil companies.
“The net-zero emission scenario, if anything, is a clear signal to investors where the profitable parts of the global economy are going to be if oil and gas demand drops,” said Maria Pastukhova, a senior policy adviser at E3G, a European climate change think tank. “It essentially lets the [fossil-fuel] producing countries and companies … see what is the worst that can happen to them.”
If the Trump administration throws a fit and disavows the IEA, the agency would likely survive. The U.S. provides a quarter of the agency’s funding, but other players like China could step in to fill the gap; the remaining 30 countries on the agency’s governing body would likely maintain consensus around modeling net-zero.
“The real risk is not a U.S. exit, but the current administration eroding the credibility of the IEA from within,” said Andreas Sieber, head of political strategy for the global climate advocacy group 350.org. “I doubt many member countries would shed a tear if the U.S. were to leave.”
‘Pro-climate PSYOPs’?
You’ve probably noticed a lot less talk about climate change these days.
It’s not just Trump. Many countries were already quietly toning down their climate rhetoric before the last U.S. presidential election. Part of it is a shift in voter priorities: In the United Kingdom, for example, a recent study showed that public support for net-zero policies has declined by nearly 50 percent since 2021. Countries across the income scale have scaled back their climate ambition: Italy has asked the European Union to suspend its landmark carbon tax, Indonesia has pushed back its target for achieving peak carbon emissions, and India has declined to submit its updated climate goals to the United Nations.
But rhetoric and action are two different things, and destabilizing world events are encouraging certain forms of climate action. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine illuminated the dangerous limits of overreliance on Russian fossil fuels, which supplied much of Europe. The new war engulfing the Middle East has halted tankers carrying much of the world’s oil and gas. The U.S., with its massive fossil fuel reserves, is looking like a less reliable energy supplier as well, albeit for political reasons. After Trump deployed special forces to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and the president indicated that he might want to conquer Greenland next, Europe and the U.K. quietly inked a huge offshore wind deal in the name of energy security.
“Clean secure energy,” the British government said in its statement on the deal, is “the only route to escape the fossil fuel rollercoaster.” While climate action might not be politically popular, it’s quickly becoming the fastest and cheapest way for countries to protect themselves from volatility. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s support for fossil fuels may be leading it into diplomatic isolation: A memo reportedly circulated among senior Russian government officials proposed an alliance with the United States to boost oil and gas over renewables in other countries.
“A couple of years back, energy security meant either having cheap gas from Russia or a diverse set of suppliers,” said Linda Kalcher, executive director of Strategic Perspectives, a pan-European think -tank focused on net-zero policies. “Now, it means renewables and being independent from any single supplier.”
In December, roughly 50 percent of Australia’s power in December came from renewable sources and battery storage. Canada aims to double the size of its power grid, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced in January, in order to “deliver cleaner, more reliable, and more affordable power for Canadians.” The announcement came a little more than a week after Carney told world leaders gathered for the World Economic Forum that the world was in the “midst of a rupture” — a thinly veiled reference to the first year of Trump’s second term. All told, global investment in the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables reached $2.3 trillion last year, an 8 percent increase over 2024.
Ed King, an international climate strategist with the Global Strategic Communications Council, recently wondered in his popular newsletter if the Trump administration is secretly trying to diminish the appeal of fossil fuels with its aggressive diplomacy.
“Is the White House running a pro-climate PSYOPs?”
