It Isn’t Just the U.S. The Whole World Has Soured on Climate Politics.

 

It Isn’t Just the U.S. The Whole World Has Soured on Climate Politics.

 

How do we think about the climate future, now that the era marked by the Paris Agreement has so utterly disappeared?

 

Credit...Photo illustration by Lola Dupre

David Wallace-Wells

By David Wallace-Wells

Sept. 16, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/magazine/climate-politics-us-world-paris-agreement.html

 

Ten years ago this fall, scientists and diplomats from 195 countries gathered in Le Bourget, just north of Paris, and hammered out a plan to save the world. They called it, blandly, the Paris Agreement, but it was obviously a climate-politics landmark: a nearly universal global pledge to stave off catastrophic temperature rise and secure a more livable future for all. Barack Obama, applauding the agreement as president, declared that Paris represented “the best chance we have to save the one planet we’ve got.”

 

Paris wasn’t just a brief flare of climate optimism. To many, it looked like the promise of a whole new era, not just for the climate but also for our shared political future on this earth. Back then, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, liked to talk about how sustainability would be for this century what human rights was for the previous one — the basis for a new moral and political order. His successor, António Guterres, turned out to be an even more emphatic climate advocate, treating the Paris Agreement as though its significance approached, if not exceeded, that of the U.N. charter itself.

 

By design, the treaty wasn’t a one-shot solution, just a first step. Other steps, it was broadly assumed, would follow — toward faster climate action, yes, but also toward greater global cooperation, mutual obligation and solidarity. High off the success of its Millennium Development Goals, the U.N. had just released its far more ambitious Sustainable Development Goals, which brought the rich nations of the world into its lasso of responsibility. Diplomats talked optimistically about an emergent partnership they called the G2, with the United States and China cooperating on the world’s biggest challenges, as they had in Paris.

 

A decade later, we are living in a very different world. At last year’s U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP29), the president of the host country, Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev, praised oil and gas as “gifts from God,” and though the annual conferences since Paris were often high-profile, star-studded affairs, this time there were few world leaders to be found. Joseph R. Biden, then still president, didn’t show. Neither did Vice President Kamala Harris or President Xi Jinping of China or President Ursula von der Leyen of the European Commission. Neither did President Emmanuel Macron of France, often seen as the literal face of Western liberalism, or President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, often seen as the face of an emergent movement of solidarity across the poor and middle-income world. In the run-up to the conference, an official U.N. report declared that no climate progress at all had been made over the previous year, and several of the most prominent architects of the whole diplomatic process that led to Paris published an open letter declaring the agreement’s architecture out of date and in need of major reforms.

 

This year’s conference, which takes place in Brazil this November, is meant to be more significant: COP30 marks 10 years since Paris, and all 195 parties to the 2015 agreement are supposed to arrive with updated decarbonization plans, called Nationally Determined Contributions, or N.D.C.s. But when one formal deadline passed this past February, only 15 countries — just 8 percent — had completed the assignment. Months later, more plans have trickled in, but arguably only one is actually compatible with the goals of the Paris Agreement, the climate scientist Piers Forster recently calculated, and more than half of them represent backsliding.

 

The most conspicuous retreat, of course, has been the United States under President Trump, who first announced his intention to withdraw from Paris way back in 2017 with a ceremony in the Rose Garden. Trump has celebrated his return to office by utterly dismantling his predecessor’s signature climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, and vowing to stop all approvals for new renewable projects (not to mention paving over that same garden). But this is not just a story about Trump. When Paris was forged, the United States was a trivial exporter of natural gas, and it was still illegal to ship American oil abroad. Even before Trump’s second inauguration, the country had become the world’s largest producer and exporter of refined oil and liquid natural gas.

 

And neither is it a story particular to America. The retreat from climate politics has been widespread, even in the midst of a global green-energy boom. From 2019 to 2021, governments around the world added more than 300 climate-adaptation and mitigation policies each year, according to the energy analyst Nat Bullard. In 2023, the number dropped under 200. In 2024, it was only 50 or so. In many places — like in South America and in Europe — existing laws have already been weakened or are under pressure from shifting political coalitions now pushing to undermine them.

 

To our north, the former central banker Mark Carney — whose 2015 warnings about the financial risks from climate change helped set the stage for Paris by alarming the world’s banking elite — became prime minister of Canada in March and as his very first act in office struck down the country’s carbon tax, before storming to a landslide victory in the April election. To our south, President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico, a former climate scientist, has invoked the principle of “energy sovereignty” and boasted of booming oil and gas production in her country — and enjoys one of the highest approval ratings of any elected leader anywhere in the world. Almost everywhere you look, the spike of climate alarm that followed Paris has given way to something its supporters might describe as climate moderation but which critics would call complacency or indifference. “You can’t walk more than two feet at any global conference today without ‘pragmatism’ and ‘realism’ being thrown around as the order of the day,” says Jason Bordoff, a former Obama energy adviser who now runs Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “But it’s not clear to me that anyone knows what those words mean other than this whole climate thing is just too hard.”

 

The world hasn’t actually abandoned green energy, with global renewable rollout still accelerating and investment doubling over the last five years. But climate politics is in undeniable withdrawal, and far from ushering in a new era of cooperative global solidarity, Paris has given way to something much more old-fashioned: an atavistic age of competition, renewed rivalry and the increasingly naked logic of national self-interest, on energy and warming as with everything else. In the wake of America’s presidential election, Alex Trembath of the Breakthrough Institute declared that “the era of the climate hawk is over.” Perhaps, at least for now, the age of climate statesmen, too.

 

It was in the heady aftermath of Paris that I first began writing about warming. In retrospect, it was a strange time to come of age, climate-wise.

 

By any simple measure, the treaty looked like a breakthrough — in a representative tribute, The Guardian called it “the world’s greatest diplomatic success.” But frustrated advocates were still filled with rage, sure that not enough was being done and armed with the scientific reports to prove it. Remarkably, the world’s leadership class mostly embraced the critique, inviting activists on stage at Davos and the U.N. General Assembly in performances of collective self-laceration designed, it seemed, to inspire yet more climate concern. What is perversely striking today is that those years do not look now like a low point for political commitment to climate action but the opposite — at least when it comes to rhetoric, which is, of course, free.

 

At the time, trying to raise concern about warming, I found myself again and again in conversation with world leaders of one kind or another — presidents and prime ministers, treasury secretaries and environmental ministers and climate diplomats, among others. Most were a bit less alarmed than I was and a bit more mindful of the obstacles to a rapid transition. But in those conversations and in public speeches and commentary, their concern was nevertheless palpable. In fact, they were often proud to showcase it as a totem of good faith, and to invoke the ambitious Paris goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees — which many scientists had already concluded was a lost cause — as a necessary objective.

 

It helped that climate activism in the aftermath of Paris — Fridays for Future and the climate strikers, Extinction Rebellion and Sunrise — looked like a generational uprising, made more intense, of course, by the new powers of social media. Even those in power who weren’t moved felt they had to respond, and high-profile scientific reports gave them extremely short timelines on which to do so.

 

In describing their own awakenings, many leaders would also invoke private conversations they’d had on the subject with their children and grandchildren, who invariably faulted them for not moving faster, as relatives of corporate leaders did too. In a sense, the crisis seemed to offer a kind of redemptive opportunity to the whole technocratic liberal elite, whose social status and moral claim on leadership had somewhat crumbled since the financial crisis. The United States hadn’t yet been rocked by the election of Donald Trump, nor Britain by Brexit, or the rest of the rich world by the wave of populist backlash that Brexit foreshadowed. But with the global war on terror long since dissipated into tragic farce and a new Cold War not yet well crystallized in the public imagination, the American-led global order seemed to be missing some sense of purpose, too. Here came the existential project of climate action to fill that semi-spiritual void, at least for some of those who felt it.

 

Polls show that voters don’t actually prioritize decarbonization and, crucially, aren’t willing to pay much to bring it about.

 

The material context mattered, too. Borrowing money had been cheap — indeed close to free — for almost a decade since the 2008 housing crash, and though Western countries generally embraced austerity in its immediate aftermath, many were beginning to think that might have been an economically damaging mistake. Looking around for places to invest, a green transition seemed like one obvious choice, which is why anyone trying to blue-sky a brighter economic future for Europe invariably proposed huge increases in clean-energy investment and why American progressives conceived their ideal form of climate action at the scale and scope of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. The rapidly declining cost of green energy meant it all penciled out a bit better, to boot.

 

There were also moralistic, or quasi-moralistic, elements. In the years following Paris came more and more talk of climate justice, the ways that rich countries were choking the futures of the poor with carbon and temperature rise. This was just one of many similar reckonings with systemic social inequities in those years, and a green transition may have looked to world leaders like a more appealing and forward-focused way of expiating white guilt than, say, portioning out reparations for centuries of slavery or colonialism. Indeed, politicians and their appointees routinely dismissed calls to even discuss climate reparations, preferring to promise trillions of dollars in profit-seeking energy investment in the global South. (Reader, they did not come.)

 

Outside the corridors of influence, rapid warming looked to some like comeuppance for cultural decadence and consumerist excess, with climate attaining sometimes apocalyptic features of a theological morality play. Those frustrated that so few financiers had been legally held to account for the financial crisis could regard fossil-fuel companies as a new set of villains, even if most policymakers were more inclined to make a positive-sum case for climate action than rail against the energy companies that still provided the vast bulk of the world’s power. And as some climate protesters called for fundamental political transformations in the name of fighting warming, world leaders seemed inclined to blunt that drive by directing it toward a more focused purpose — rapid decarbonization within the guardrails of an existing order.

 

You could see all this on display in 2021, in Glasgow, at the first climate conference held in the aftermath of the Covid-19 emergency. There, world leaders paraded past one another, ecstatically unmasked, to reaffirm in the most dramatic terms that, even as the world was stumbling back onto its feet out of the pandemic shadows, climate change was still the paramount crisis of the day.

 

In fact, at least briefly, the experience of the pandemic seemed to give the urgency of climate action an additional existential cast. John Kerry called the conference “the last best hope for the world,” and Prince Charles — now king of Britain — described it as “literally the last-chance saloon.” In his opening remarks, Boris Johnson, then the British prime minister — a conservative, of course, who surfed into office on the nativist tide of Brexit — warned, “It’s one minute to midnight on that Doomsday Clock, and we need to act now.” In a rare and celebrated return to the global stage, Barack Obama warned that, despite meaningful progress, the world was still “nowhere near where we need to be.” Since leaving office, Obama has presented himself primarily as a long-view meliorist, but at Glasgow he tried to sound more like the rabble-rousing community organizer of legend. “To all the young people out there — as well as those of you who consider yourselves young at heart — I want you to stay angry,” he advised from the stage. “I want you to stay frustrated. But channel that anger. Harness that frustration. Keep pushing harder and harder for more and more, because that is what is required.”

 

What changed? In short, everything but the science, which continued to generate grim warnings about the speed and consequences of temperature rise even as the fever of climate panic appeared to subside.

 

In its place, at first, we got the pandemic, which not only canceled climate conferences and interrupted the green-energy rollout but also seemed eventually to undermine the spirit of global solidarity that lay beneath the broader project. Climate protest almost disappeared, and when it returned a few years later, the numbers were much smaller, the reception much chillier. Climate activists were once venerated as moral authorities by heads of state and a broadly liberal mass media; now they are being given jail sentences stretching multiple years for the crime of merely planning protests that might block up commuter traffic or for throwing paint against plexiglass they knew would protect the artwork hung behind it — a victimless publicity stunt if ever there was one.

 

Amid the pandemic, a surge of inflation soon brought about a spike in interest rates and, with it, an end to the era in which world leaders felt like public spending was free. There were wars in Ukraine and Gaza, which exploded the fantasy that the world had passed into a more stable and peaceful state, and which, in the first case, produced the largest energy crisis since the 1970s — one that Europe managed in part by spending more on direct fossil-fuel subsidies than it did on green-energy investments.

 

In the years that followed Paris, you would often hear the phrase “World War II-style mobilization,” invoked to inspire climate action of the same scale and urgency. Instead, we have gotten a real re-militarization, with Europe responding to the war in Ukraine and the re-election of Donald Trump by promising to more than triple military spending — to 5 percent of gross domestic product, which happens to be close to what the I.E.A. once projected would be necessary for a global mobilization on climate.

 

But it wasn’t just the return of history that surprised climate advocates. The terrain of politics proved surprisingly bumpy, too. The Paris Agreement wasn’t a projection of a single worldview beamed out from Brussels or Davos — indeed, some of the most striking rhetoric it produced was from vulnerable nations that regarded the terms of agreement as a betrayal. But a few common threads of political presumption ran into it and out of it: that support for decarbonization would naturally grow over time, especially given an informed public; that a new era of intensifying climate extremes would amplify that trend, rather than flatten it; that large-scale green investment would produce palpable benefits to the public and that those benefits would reliably erode whatever public resistance to climate action remained, at least once the pernicious influence of the fossil-fuel business could be swept out of the public square.

 

Few advocates believed naïvely in the caricatured versions of those propositions, but even so, it was seductive to imagine a kind of flywheel effect unfolding, with faster action enabling still faster action through public enthusiasm for a new and transformative green industrial revolution. At least when it came to politics, the flywheel never got spinning. Globally, concern about warming is still rising, but only slowly — and while large majorities in many countries say they support faster decarbonization, other polls show that voters don’t actually prioritize decarbonization and, crucially, aren’t willing to pay much to bring it about.

 

Progressives long believed that climate politics was a kind of tug of war, in which tugging harder would pull many on the other side over the line into grudging support. To some degree, that is what happened after Paris, with advocates shifting the Overton window pretty dramatically and winning meaningful gains along the way.

 

But it also looks a bit as if they pulled so hard they collapsed in disarray. In the United States, the Inflation Reduction Act was hailed as an unprecedented investment in the country’s green-energy future. Today, just three years after passage, Biden’s signature legislative achievement has been stripped bare, and while the bill didn’t produce a large-scale backlash, as long feared, it also failed to inspire a broad political coalition to defend it.

 

And yet, there is good news — global leaders may be talking less about the risks of warming and the necessity of limiting it, these days, but on the ground, decarbonization is nevertheless racing ahead. “It’s not about climate politics anymore,” says Christiana Figueres, former head of the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change and one of the architects of Paris. “It’s about climate economy.”

 

It took almost 70 years from the invention of the solar cell, in 1954, for the world to install its first terawatt of solar power, in 2022. The second one came two years later. The third? Perhaps later this year. In 2024, renewables provided more than 40 percent of the world’s electricity, and twice as much money was invested in them than in fossil fuels — even though renewables offer, generally speaking, less return on investment. Ninety-three percent of new power worldwide came from clean sources, meaning that for every new unit of dirty capacity brought online in 2024, there were 24 units of the good, clean stuff. This is not yet enough to push global emissions downward. But in a battle between old energy and new, it represents an obliterating margin. As soon as next year, it is estimated, renewables will be the world’s largest source of electricity.

 

In certain ways, the story is one that moderates and skeptics long predicted: that decarbonization could not be reliably imposed from above on moralistic terms and would have to be powered instead by market forces, private investment and the informed consensus of a price-conscious public. These are familiar and somewhat simplistic neoliberal bromides, and if they now look prophetic, it is also a strange kind of prophecy: Global policymakers may be leaving climate increasingly to markets, but they are doing so even as in other realms they are embracing a new language of muscular state capacity and interventionist industrial policy.

 

Since the pandemic, the United States has wagered an awful lot of its economic future on A.I. — and although that requires an awful lot of new electricity, the new administration has not just kneecapped the Inflation Reduction Act but also undertaken a genuine war on renewables, which appear to most analysts to be the fastest and cheapest method of delivering all that power. As a result, even as U.S. solar power has grown 200 times over in 20 years, the country nevertheless looks increasingly like a petrostate — especially to outsiders, who have long viewed America’s commitment to climate goals with skepticism and may see some petrostate-like features in our political system as well (autocratic elements, more open corruption, dynasticism).

 

“If the U.S. isn’t there, I have a little more faith.”

 

And the other side of the great-power rivalry? China has made a different bet and is fast becoming what people in Silicon Valley, raised on science fiction, like to call the world’s first electrostate. A decade ago, those who saw themselves as energy realists would often argue that moving faster on decarbonization amounted to a self-imposed handicap that would benefit less scrupulous powers, like China. But the actual pattern of recent history has been the inverse: As the United States has moved more slowly on green tech, China has stormed ahead. In fact, if you had to name the single biggest development in climate geopolitics since Paris, it would be the startling rise of China as a green-energy superpower in the midst of what looked, at the outset of the period, like a global future still dominated by an indispensable United States.

 

Seventy-four percent of all global solar and wind projects are now being constructed in China or by Chinese companies, and in the 12-month period ending this June, China installed more solar power within its borders than America has ever brought online. So far this year, China has installed twice as much solar as the rest of the world put together, and the country’s command over the world’s green supply chain is now famous enough to be an energy-world cliché. Not just the world’s first electrostate, Princeton’s Jesse Jenkins wrote earlier this summer, China will be “the global clean tech hegemon,” whose ability to confer cheap clean energy has already become one unmistakably valuable source of soft power. Between 2019 and 2024, the country’s foreign investment in green manufacturing has grown more than 25-fold, and just since 2022, its green-tech industry has spent more abroad than the United States did on the Marshall Plan. As the former U.S. treasury secretary Lawrence Summers put it a few years ago, “There’s a growing acceptance of fragmentation, and — maybe even more troubling — I think there’s a growing sense that ours may not be the best fragment to be associated with.”

 

Consider Pakistan. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, it threw the world’s energy markets into crisis, sending already-high prices soaring and redirecting fossil fuels headed to markets in the developing world instead to energy-starved Europe, where each shipment could fetch a still-higher price. In Pakistan as elsewhere in South Asia, the result was rolling blackouts and widespread political discontent. And then, something miraculous happened: Without any coordination or planning, millions of frustrated Pakistanis began buying and importing rooftop solar panels manufactured in China, which had grown so inexpensive that in some global markets they were cheaper to buy than the wood for a yard fence.

 

The result: Once a green-energy afterthought, Pakistan is now the sixth-largest solar market in the world, with recent solar additions equal to the entire country’s pre-existing electric grid, all thanks to what the Carnegie Endowment’s Noah Gordon and Daevan Mangalmurti called a “disorganized, bottom-up boom” and the entrepreneur Azeem Azhar and the researcher Nathan Warren called a “silent energy revolution.” It was silent enough the boom hadn’t even shown up in any official reports and had to be sleuthed out via satellite imagery by BloombergNEF’s solar analyst Jenny Chase. Now batteries are flooding in, too, with imports from China up eightfold to Pakistan since just 2023.

 

And it does not appear that Pakistan is exceptional, only early. According to estimates from the think tank Ember, several dozen countries may be ready to make the same jump, though presumably with more directed support from their governments. According to a forthcoming report by the Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab at Johns Hopkins, the number is 50 — or perhaps even higher, its co-director Tim Sahay told me. In many countries across sub-Saharan Africa, imports of Chinese solar panels have grown tenfold since 2023; in a few, they’ve grown more than a hundredfold. “For the first time in two centuries, the West is no longer the leader in future technology but the follower,” Sahay recently wrote, with Kate Mackenzie, in the online journal Polycrisis. The historian Adam Tooze has taken to suggesting that the entire history of global modernity should be rewritten with the rapid recent development of China as the core analytic prism and narrative center.

 

The shape of the green transition is being rewritten, too. If dirt-cheap green tech can enable developing nations to declare a kind of energy independence, they can extract themselves from exploitative relationships with petrostates and protect themselves from inflation and punishing debt. Just a few years ago, skeptics of decarbonization liked to point to the 600 million people worldwide who lack access to electricity or the billion-plus living in what’s called “energy poverty” to argue for the continued expansion of fossil fuels. But recently the hardheaded investor and policymaker Jigar Shah, who led the Department of Energy’s venture-capital-style Loans Programs Office under Biden, has started to predict that clean tech will bring an end to energy poverty globally within a decade. Perhaps the retreat of the United States needn’t represent a global setback, but simply a redrawing of the map for climate geopolitics. Maybe it’s even for the best. Figueres calls it a more “distributed” world, with Trump rendering the United States “irrelevant” on climate and most other countries pleasantly surprised at how little difference that really makes for them and their green-energy futures.

 

Probably, there is some wisdom in that view — America was never a purely beneficent actor on climate, having spiked several previous rounds of negotiations, and operating always enough out of self-interest that the poorest and most vulnerable countries were often left in distress at American indifference. “If the U.S. isn’t there,” the political scientist Geoff Mann told me, “I have a little more faith.”

 

But it’s hard for me to be quite so optimistic, and not only because warming is proceeding at a terrifying pace and the task of adapting to future risks is growing by the day. A decade ago, the scale of that challenge alarmed me, but I also took the intuitive lessons of the crisis to be ones so elementary they could be mocked as naïve: that we are all in this together, billions of us living on one planet; that while our vulnerabilities varied they also revealed our shared humanity; and that the most humane response to a crisis facing us all would be one that pulled the world forward together to address the needs of those with the least.

 

Perhaps it was always foolish to believe the world might fulfill the headline dream of Paris, and keep warming close to 1.5 degrees, and perhaps the promises to do so were always empty, as the most informed always suspected. Perhaps a hands-off green transition can still deliver relatively rapid decarbonization — or at least steer us clear of catastrophic warming scenarios. But as the planet races past targets that terrified so many into action not so long ago, on its way toward two degrees and the jagged future on the other side, I would rather it didn’t seem to be abandoning that secondary aspiration, that beyond the logic of national self-interest we still actually owe one another something: a better, more just, more equitable future for all.

 

In March, the U.N. considered a resolution to establish an International Day of Hope and an International Day of Peaceful Coexistence. On both propositions, the United States voted “no.”