There’s No Such Thing as Climate Policy |
Federal climate policy has effectively ceased to function in the United States. Since retaking power last year, the Trump administration has relentlessly and systematically stripped back incentives and regulations aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
On the foreign-policy front, the United States is now absent not only from the Paris Agreement, but also the International Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) (officially as of January 2027), and most other international fora concerned with the climate crisis. The administration has also dismantled many federal offices that implement climate policy, including the State Department’s Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, and the White House’s Climate Policy Office.
Federal climate policy has effectively ceased to function in the United States. Since retaking power last year, the Trump administration has relentlessly and systematically stripped back incentives and regulations aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
On the foreign-policy front, the United States is now absent not only from the Paris Agreement, but also the International Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) (officially as of January 2027), and most other international fora concerned with the climate crisis. The administration has also dismantled many federal offices that implement climate policy, including the State Department’s Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, and the White House’s Climate Policy Office.
It is trite but still worthwhile to note that the impacts of these actions will extend far beyond the next U.S. election. As greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere, the effects of climate change—including extreme weather, sea level rise, and disease outbreaks—will make Americans poorer, sicker, and more vulnerable.
The next president will face the daunting challenge of rebuilding U.S. climate policy. But amid the wreckage left by the Trump administration, the next leader will also have more latitude than any in recent memory to reimagine how the U.S. government addresses the climate crisis. The next U.S. administration would do well not only to learn from previous policy regimes, but also to reconsider the very concept of “climate policy.”
Protesters in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1970. Bettman Archive/via Getty Images
On the heels of successive victories in the 1970s, the U.S. environmental movement—heretofore concerned primarily with local pollution—found itself confronting a challenge of global proportions. Advances in climate science, most famously highlighted by Dr. James Hansen’s 1988 testimony to Congress, showed that greenhouse gases released by fossil fuel combustion were changing the composition of the atmosphere, with potentially catastrophic and worldwide consequences.
Alarm over global warming, later termed climate change, motivated a raft of policies to slow greenhouse gas emissions. The U.S. government began subsidizing wind and solar energy in the hope that they would eventually supplant more carbon-intensive sources of electricity. It also signed onto the UNFCCC, laying the groundwork for decades of international coordination on climate.
As scientists’ understanding of the climate grew, so did the realm of what was considered climate policy. Carbon dioxide, it turned out, was leaking from nearly every sector of the economy, including cars, power plants, factories, farms, and landfills. And carbon dioxide wasn’t the only cause of climate change; so-called super pollutants such as methane and hydrofluorocarbons were also raising temperatures. It became clear that mitigating climate change would require addressing a multitude of emissions sources. It would have to be an all-of-society effort.
Efforts to address emissions, too, spawned their own complexities. Carbon-free energy would require more copper and lithium, demanding increased attention to these supply chains. The uneven burden of—and responsibility for—climate change demanded that policy interventions consider preexisting inequities. All the while, new tensions emerged as nations stumbled unevenly towards emissions reductions.
By the time U.S. President Joe Biden took office, the slate of climate-related issues facing policymakers had grown dizzyingly broad. Recognizing this, Biden pledged a “whole-of-government” approach to climate change, enlisting the capabilities and portfolios of each federal agency. He established a Climate Policy Office within the White House to coordinate among them. Led first by Gina McCarthy and then by Ali Zaidi, this small team........