Trump 2.0 – Any Room for Energy and Climate Diplomacy?

The re-election of President Donald Trump this month is sure to serve as a shock to the system in a variety of areas from national security to economic policy—and energy and climate are sure to be no outlier here. But unlike some of these other disciplines of international policy, the Trump 2.0 administration is more likely to hew closer to the priorities and strategies it took the first time around on energy and climate diplomacy.

As with the last Trump administration, we can expect that an early priority will be a complete withdrawal from the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, a repeat move from his earlier executive tenure. While a legally-binding international treaty, it is worth remembering that the Paris Climate Agreement is based on Nationally Determined Contributions to meeting goals to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases.  Given the de-facto voluntary reality of the agreement, Paris can’t unilaterally become an economic straitjacket to “rip off of the United States,” as President Trump claimed on the campaign trail this year. Nevertheless, Mr. Trump stuck to this line through the end of his successful campaign, in line with the rhetorical approach he took ahead of his initial withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement in 2017.

While a departure from the Paris Climate Agreement would be another major blow to long-term U.S. leadership on combating climate change, it could be re-entered in the future just as President Biden did at the outset of his administration. A further, more diplomatically-damaging step that has been reportedly considered by Trump aides, is a withdrawal from the UNFCCC treaty itself, which could, among other setbacks, cede diplomatic leadership on clean energy technologies to the People’s Republic of China—all to the U.S. economic detriment—even while China continues to be a laggard in terms of actual climate action.

An alternative approach—and one that might be appealing to Mr. Trump—would be to remain in both the Paris Climate Agreement and the UNFCCC and use those positions as bargaining chips for non-climate diplomatic concessions with nations who remain serious about climate action. Beijing appears to have taken such an approach, offering bilateral and UNFCCC-related climate deals and working groups, possibly exchanging these actions with climate-conscious nations for concessions on economic or national security issues entirely unrelated to climate change.

In other words, Trump could remain in Paris and the UNFCCC but on the grounds of taking a totally transactional realpolitik approach untethered to any real climate action. This would be unsatisfying to any scientist or policymaker interested in real climate action, but perhaps better diplomatically than the damage caused by a full withdrawal from these treaty frameworks that would make re-entry more difficult down the road.

In terms of transforming the government itself through expected measures like budget cuts and ending work from home policies for federal employees, it is highly likely that the Trump administration will also work to rapidly dismantle and discard federal infrastructure related to climate action and policy. For example, the Biden administration created the Office of the U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate (SPEC), which is housed at the U.S. Department of State. The SPEC role was created to elevate and empower a senior envoy of President Biden to advance climate diplomacy globally, including leading the U.S. delegation in the COP process.

Under the second Trump administration, expect the SPEC role and office to be eliminated, and U.S. government participation in future COPs to be minimized or ended. Furthermore, expect the current stable of climate diplomacy expertise in the SPEC office as well as in the Office of Global Change in the State Department’s Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs (OES) to be redirected to other areas of environmental policy—or other tasks altogether. 

Likewise, the State Department’s Bureau of Energy Resources, which increased its focus on renewable energy technology and climate diplomacy issues under the Biden administration, is likely to be reoriented to focus on core energy and national security issues related to addressing global energy geopolitical trends.

Ultimately, academic, civil society, and policy leaders will need to find creative methods, and use alternative messaging strategies, to achieve climate action over the next four years. Such action will likely be relegated to the corporate or subnational levels. But this is better that than no U.S. action at all. Moreover, national security focused academics and think tankers may have more success with the Trump administration on pushing for stronger sanctions and technology export controls regimes to be utilized against U.S. adversaries globally than with the Biden administration. 

For example, Biden officials regularly deferred to Berlin, which served as what might be called the Biden White House’s pacing political power in the use of tools of economic statecraft to pressure the Putin regime, often set at levels several steps behind that needed to support Ukrainian victory since the outset of Putin’s large-scale invasion in February 2022. I wrote about this dynamic for the Center for European Policy Analysis as the world has reached 1,000 days since Russia’s large scale invasion of Ukraine in November 2024.

If arguments from pro-Putin and isolationist voices jockeying for position in the new Trump administration don’t become state policy—and that is a major if—a new president guided by more centrist voices might end up with a stronger national security policy in some areas than that which Mr. Biden’s team pursued, including on the use of energy sanctions to constrain America’s geopolitical adversaries.

Time will tell what voices win out, which is why it is more vital than ever to speak out publicly for policies that would support the energy security of our partners and allies, and our own national security in the process.

Benjamin Schmitt

Senior Fellow, Kleinman Center and SAS

Benjamin Schmitt is a joint senior fellow at the Kleinman Center and the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Penn. He is also an affiliate of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and associate of the Harvard-Ukrainian Research Institute.