Five days before President Donald Trump’s inauguration last month, Ali Zaidi, the Biden administration’s domestic climate czar, told an audience at Harvard University that Biden’s signature legislation to cut planet-heating emissions by investing in clean energy would prove hard for Republicans to unwind.
“Way more is durable than is appreciated because of the interconnectedness of our economy,” Zaidi said. “Take offshore wind for example. You might not like offshore wind, hypothetically. But if you don’t, but you like shipbuilding, you’ve got a big problem.” Zaidi pointed to ships currently being built on the Gulf Coast. “You’ve got big sectors of the House of Representatives that have gone and cut ribbons and celebrated the commissioning of these vessels. If these offshore wind farms don’t continue to scale up, not just the ones that are already built but the ones that need to be built, what’s going to happen to the shipbuilding industry? That’s a big problem.”
Not for Trump. On his first day in office, the new administration slapped a ban on new offshore wind projects, ordered the Justice Department to look into lawsuits to revoke permits from existing ones, and halted all new terrestrial turbines on federal lands. By day’s end, Trump had also begun the process to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accords and announced several other attacks on Biden-era climate policy. Officials from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency are now pushing to fire tens of thousands of federal workers and targeting the lead agency in charge of climate research for cuts, while Trump halts grants and loans issued through former President Joe Biden’s clean infrastructure laws, even though the money has disproportionately benefited red states.
“Climate advocates were hopeful that economics would trump culture war issues and that Republican politicians would be economically rational actors and protect investments that had already been made in their communities,” Holly Jean Buck, a University at Buffalo sociologist who studies climate policy, told me. “Unfortunately, and to the surprise of many, it doesn’t seem to be playing out that way.”
Trump has only been back in power for about a month. His opponents are still finding their footing, particularly as an administration rife with factional infighting among political novices results in whiplash over radical policies issued and revoked at a record pace. The colder-than-usual winter weather may be keeping large-scale protests at bay—for now.
Already, however, a picture is emerging of how climate policy may advance over the next four years. The pathways look likely to run through state and local governments, may involve controversial compromises, and could take cues from progress unfolding overseas. If nothing else, the rollback of popular programs might become powerful campaign fodder for next year’s midterm elections.
Until Biden signed the nation’s first major climate legislation into law, efforts to curb emissions and adapt to a hotter world of more extreme weather were largely carried out on the state level. States already represented the biggest bottleneck to deploying the projects the federal government funded under the administration. Now—at least for the next four years—state capitals will once again serve as the primary venue for climate policy.
“For as dire as things seem, and for many it’s quite dire, you have to recognize that the federal government doesn’t play that large a role when it comes to climate action,” Jesse Keenan, the director of the climate science program at Tulane University in New Orleans, told me. While Biden-era spending laws like the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law “were very impactful and became catalysts,” he said, “really most investments in mitigation and adaptation are state and local.”
At the federal level, Trump’s push to reduce deployment of technologies like solar panels and wind turbines doesn’t mean that all climate-friendly infrastructure is on the chopping block. His executive orders support construction of new nuclear reactors, geothermal power plants, and facilities to mine and process the minerals like lithium and rare earths that are needed to establish domestic supply chains for batteries and other green-energy equipment. Republican lawmakers have expressed support for using trade policies like carbon tariffs—which would charge levies for imports made with more planet-heating pollution—to cleaner boost domestic industry.
More controversial climate mitigation technologies could also get funding in the next few years: pipelines and wells to store captured carbon dioxide and even geoengineering tools to cover up the worst effects of warming. Carbon capture is still in its infancy and not considered very reliable or scalable yet, while many researchers and climate advocates consider geoengineering to be unacceptably risky. But in a world where other options are blocked for the next four years, investing in researching these sorts of technologies now could pay off down the road by hopefully buying a future administration some time to clean up the cumulative carbon mess.
Meanwhile, Trump’s spending cuts that shutter factories and eliminate tax credits for helped homeowners and drivers threaten real job losses and price increases for voters. That’s bad news for many, particularly in the short term. But it also offers Democrats a political cudgel in next year’s midterm elections, said Ralph Chapman, a professor of environmental studies at New Zealand’s Victoria University of Wellington.
“Republicans don’t control all the states and cities, and even many red states appreciate that there are practical policy steps that are worth taking to speed up the energy transition,” he said. Democrats would be wise to start spending time and money “educating voters on the downsides of Trumpian decisions,” including “pulling out of Paris, and on the merits of maintaining U.S. competitive advantage where it has not been lost.”
As China seizes on Trump’s attempts to shutter soft-power agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development by stepping up its outreach to countries threatened by climate change, Beijing’s ongoing progress building and deploying renewables, nuclear reactors and electric vehicles offers states an example for “picking up the best policies,” Chapman said.
For Ruth Cerezo-Mota, a climate scientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the new Trump administration represents less of a shift from the Biden administration on certain climate policies than the average newsreader might expect. Trump’s attempts to ramp up U.S. drilling and exports of oil and gas resemble the Biden administration’s own efforts. But she warned that there’s no obvious replacement to the data and research work the Trump administration may now defund and dismantle. “What truly worries me since Musk’s visit to the NOAA HQ is a massive budget cut that will directly impact Mexico in the worst way,” Cerezo-Mota said. “Mexico depends totally on NOAA’s hurricane forecast. If NOAA, due to a shortage of staff or funding, is not able to produce the hurricane forecast, we in Mexico won’t be able to protect our people, land and infrastructure when the hurricane seasons start.”
Therein lies what Lisa Schipper, a researcher at Germany’s University of Bonn who tracks the effects of climate change on poorer countries, feared would be the hardest effect of Trump’s climate policies to reverse. Emissions and extreme weather are going to get worse in the next few years, and the pool of money available to help those most impacted will shrink as the funding from the U.S.—until now the world’s top source of development financing—evaporates, she said.
“The consequences of this will last for a long time—even if someone else comes in in four years and reverses all of these changes,” Schipper said. “This is because development and climate finance prevent many very poor people from falling into poverty traps that they can never really get out of. Once they fall into these poverty traps, they get caught in a vicious cycle that prevents them from recovering sufficiently to have decent lives.”
Other rich nations may step up. While North America and Europe failed for years to put up the money needed to fully finance the Green Climate Fund the U.N. set up under the 2015 Paris Agreement, the United Arab Emirates launched its own $30 billion clean investment pool in 2023. By last November’s global climate conference, however, the UAE fund had hardly spent any cash. Following Trump’s decision to claw back $4 billion the U.S. pledged to the Green Climate Fund, the endowment’s executive director made a plea to rich countries to “rise to the occasion.”
With droughts already parching vast swaths of the southwestern U.S., the middle of South America, central Africa, and southeast Asia—and the Atlantic hurricane season just a little over three months away—there’s little time to lose. “When people are hit by climate extremes,” Schipper warned, “the distance to falling into catastrophic poverty is much less.”
