President vows to leave Paris climate agreement and 'drill, baby, drill'

President Donald Trump has once again vowed to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement, the most significant global effort to combat rising temperatures. Trump's first administration took similar action in 2017, but that move was swiftly reversed on President Joe Biden's first day in office in 2021.

The U.S. now needs to wait a year before it can officially exit the agreement. The White House announced a “national energy emergency,” outlining a series of changes that would roll back U.S. climate regulations and promote oil and gas production. This comes after 2024 saw global temperatures exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels for the first time in a calendar year. While the Paris Agreement is not a legally binding treaty, it is a document that drives global cooperation to limit the causes of global warming.

President Trump’s distaste for this kind of cooperation was echoed in his 2017 statement, when he said he was elected to “represent the people of Pittsburgh, not the people of Paris.” This temperature threshold identified in the Paris Agreement is considered a tipping point at which the world will face extremely dangerous impacts. The U.S. will now join Iran, Yemen, and Libya as the only countries not currently party to the agreement, which was signed in the French capital a decade ago.

On Monday evening at the White House, Trump signed an order to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, including a letter to the United Nations explaining the decision. He also declared a “national energy emergency” to roll back many Biden-era environmental regulations. Trump called the Paris Agreement a “rip-off” during his inaugural address at the Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C. “We’re going to drill, baby, drill,” he said earlier in his inaugural address. The new president also vowed that the U.S. will usher in a new era of oil and gas exploration.

“We’re going to bring down prices, refill our strategic reserves, again, to the top, and export American energy all over the world,” he told the audience. “We’re going to be a wealthy nation again, and the liquid gold beneath our feet is going to help us do that.” However, U.S. fossil fuel production is already at unprecedented levels. Since 2016, U.S. oil production has increased by 70%, and the U.S. is now a major global producer and exporter. Similarly, exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) have grown from almost nothing in 2016 to the U.S. becoming a global leader.

The new administration stated that the president will also end the “Green New Deal,” a reference to the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature climate policy, which poured billions of dollars into clean energy. The president said he will also scrap efforts to increase electric vehicle ownership, which he called Biden’s “EV mandate,” and that he will ramp up efforts to save the U.S. auto industry. He will also end the leasing of federal land and waters for “giant wind farms that are destroying the landscape of our country.”

Simon Stiell, the UN’s climate chief, said that the U.S. risks missing out on last year’s $2 trillion global clean energy boom. “Embracing it would mean huge profits, millions of manufacturing jobs and clean air,” he said in a statement. “Ignoring it will simply send all that enormous wealth to rival economies while climate disasters like droughts, wildfires and superstorms worsen, destroying property and businesses, hammering food production across the country and driving economy-wide price inflation.”

President Trump’s previous attempt to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement became a rallying cry for many Americans who were frustrated by the exit. Internationally, the U.S. withdrawal also became a unifying force for countries. However, this exit could do more damage to global efforts to limit emissions, as climate change has already fallen down the list of priorities for national governments. There are also other countries, such as Argentina, that may follow the U.S.’s lead. Developing countries are also angered after the COP29 meeting in Azerbaijan, when richer nations struggled to improve financial support.

But, after Trump's previous attacks, there is also a sense that this may not be the final decision for the U.S. on the Paris Agreement. “The door to the Paris Agreement remains open and we welcome any country for constructive engagement,” said the UN’s Simon Stiell.