As US Dismantles Its Climate Policy, Other World Leaders Seek Solidarity

The day after a U.S. State Department proposal to shutter its climate-negotiations office, the U.N.’s secretary-general said, “No group or government can stop the clean energy revolution.”

As the U.S. Department of State proposed this week to shut down its office managing international climate policy, leaders from several other countries that are key to the climate fight said they are determined to press ahead with global action.

If it withstands congressional review, the State Department’s move, announced Tuesday, could further solidify the Trump administration’s intentions to withdraw from international climate processes, as announced in a Jan. 20 executive order.

A United Nations meeting Wednesday in New York offered an international counterweight. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said the leaders’ summit was one of the most diverse to focus on climate recently, and that a unifying message emerged.

“Yes, our world faces massive headwinds and a multitude of crises. But we cannot allow climate commitments to be blown off course,” he said in prepared remarks after the meeting, calling on the global community to build more momentum toward climate action at the next annual climate conference, COP30 in Brazil this fall. 

“No group or government can stop the clean energy revolution,” he said. “Science is on our side and economics have shifted. We don’t have a moment to lose. No region is being spared from the ravages of accelerating climate catastrophes. And the crisis is deepening poverty, displacing communities and fuelling conflict and instability.”

The meeting included China, the European Union, Korea, Malaysia, Turkey and several other countries with growing economies and substantial greenhouse gas emissions. 

Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained his agency’s reorganization in a brief statement Tuesday: “In its current form, the Department is bloated, bureaucratic, and unable to perform its essential diplomatic mission in this new era of great power competition.” He added that “redundant offices will be removed, and non-statutory programs that are misaligned with America’s core national interests will cease to exist.”

The Global Change Office, which manages U.S. climate policy, does not appear on the new organizational chart.

A State Department spokesperson said the cuts “will reverse decades of bloat and bureaucracy at the State Department to meet the challenges of a new era.”

The State Department did not answer Inside Climate News’ questions about the closure of the Office of Global Change. 

Given what’s at stake with an intensifying tsunami of climate impacts, from wildfires that destroy cities to floods, droughts and famines that trigger migration, addressing climate change is at the very core of U.S. interests, said Jesse Young, who worked on climate policy under President Barack Obama and most recently under President Joe Biden as chief of staff in the office of Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Podesta.

While every new secretary of state tinkers with the department’s structure, or the way different offices report to each other, Young said, “It has to be done in consultation with Congress, given that Congress authorizes the State Department, provides the money for the State Department and has an important stake in what goes on there. Congress gets a say, although they can’t stop it from happening altogether, it’s always a negotiation.”

But Young said it’s unclear whether any of the proposed changes could be legally challenged, as have many other directives from various federal agencies and departments. 

He warned of even deeper threats to the United States’ position in the world due to slashes at the State Department. 

“This is on a magnitude that I don’t know that any other previous administration has attempted,” he said. “They’re essentially gutting whole functions at the State Department.”

Moving people around or changing the organizational chart is one thing, Young said. “But the goal here is to deprive the State Department of the ability to function,” he said. 

“It is to make people afraid, and it’s to reduce the scope and capacity of government because this administration believes government is somehow fundamentally opposed to their aims,” he said. “They want to cow the civil service into following their will, and one great way to do that is just to slash and burn through departments like this.”

Young said the second Trump administration’s attacks on climate policy are fundamentally different than during the first term, when the U.S. participated in global discussions “generally as a good-faith actor … although spouting a lot of rhetoric about energy dominance.”

This time, the administration is not just actively withdrawing from these negotiations, it’s threatening other countries that participate in climate-related talks with tariffs, like during a recent meeting of the International Maritime Organization, he said. 

“It’s very unclear if the U.S. will even send a formal delegation to the COP meeting in Belém, Brazil,” he said. “There’s just been a total shutdown of participation.”

Young said he thinks this goes beyond climate policy differences with the Biden administration. Instead, he said, it’s “fundamentally dismantling the ability of the U.S. government to project influence around the world.”

That will handicap the Trump administration’s own goals, “whether it’s on reducing trade imbalances or countering China,” he said. “We’re just shredding our credibility with so many other important partners and allies.”

The deterioration of U.S. relations with former allies and climate policy partners was already evident at COP29 in Azerbaijan, shortly after Trump’s election, said Tom Di Liberto, a former NOAA climate scientist and climate communication specialist who was the lead at the official U.S. Center at COP29.

“I was also at COP22 right after Trump was elected the first time,” he said. “People were walking around almost in a daze, and I felt like that was the whole story of that entire COP.”

The reaction at COP29 last November was quite different, he said. 

“It was more like, the U.S. did it again, but we’re going to keep on doing what we do,” he said. “It didn’t feel like the world’s efforts were going to stop because Trump was elected. It felt like the collaborations would continue, finance would continue, even if the United States wasn’t a player anymore. The rest of the world is ready to move on.”

Cover photo:  U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres speaks at the U.N. Headquarters in New York City on April 21. Credit: Kena Betancur/VIEWpress/Getty Images