Allow me to catch you up on how America is faring in the fight against climate change: not well. President Trump is attacking the country’s environmental rules in a way that he never did in his first term. He’s trying not only to repeal rules limiting air and water pollution but also to undo the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate climate pollution — even whether it can define carbon dioxide as a pollutant.
Perhaps even more important, his volatile trade policy of the past weeks is helping to usher in a new and more paranoid era. This will weaken all of America’s systematic strengths in combating climate change, make us poorer and get us virtually nothing in return.
The core of the climate problem — especially for the next 75 years — is that the billions of people living in the world’s middle-income countries want to get richer. But if we want to avoid catastrophic global warming, then they need a way to achieve that prosperity without burning gargantuan quantities of fossil fuels as Europe, the United States, Russia and China have done.
The United States can do a few things to ease this problem. Most important, it can help develop lower- or zero-emission versions of the technologies that help power the modern world — cleaner jet fuel, new battery chemistries and carbon-neutral ways of making cement and steel. It can also help finance the transition to cleaner energy at home, for its allies and in the developing world. And finally, it can generate economic growth to pay for the costs of adapting to climate change and transitioning to new energy sources.
That’s the playbook. Ultimately, even a more environmentally inclined America can’t force countries such as India and Indonesia to stop burning fossil fuels. (Nor should we try.) We can only sell them the technology, lend or give them the money to build clean energy and generate the economic activity to help make other forms of low-carbon development possible. The United States also can and should reduce our emissions to demonstrate that a high-income, low-carbon economy is possible.
The Trump administration’s governance — and the president’s unhinged trade war on the entire world — has hurt America’s ability to meet all of these goals.
First, the president’s actions have critically damaged America’s research, development and innovation engine. The United States is the world’s laboratory, but Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has pulled the plug on hundreds of federal scientific grants, gutted key offices assisting our scientists and engineers and forced a total disruption of our world-leading research programs.
At the Department of Energy, Mr. Musk’s downsizing efforts have compromised the federal government’s ability to understand, harness and promote technologies such as nuclear fusion and batteries. And while China is investing in new rounds of demonstration projects to show off its next-generation energy technologies, the Trump administration is considering killing America’s projects meant to keep up with them.
Mr. Trump has also weakened American companies’ ability to discover such technologies on their own. Some climate technologies can be developed in government and university labs, but others can emerge only from tinkering and finding process improvements on the factory floor. By imposing his eye-watering tariffs on manufacturing and mining inputs, he has hurt domestic manufacturers and strangled a nascent U.S. mining boom. This will hurt high-end manufacturers, such as Howmet Aerospace and the machine tool maker Haas, which help make up America’s industrial base and are a major reason the United States is the world’s second-biggest manufacturer. In his pursuit of an 1890s economic fantasy, Mr. Trump is at risk of killing the real comparative advantages that we have in 2025.
These changes mean that some technologies could be invented in China and Europe instead, others will be delayed and others may never be discovered. Either way, America — and the world — will have fewer resources to help the world navigate decarbonization.
The president’s tariffs have already undermined America’s role in the global order and the free-trade system it helped build. The world can fight and manage climate change only if countries are generally peaceful, rule-following and capable of maintaining positive-sum relationships. Mr. Trump doesn’t seem to believe in these virtues.
The illogical tariffs will also undermine America’s ability to generate economic growth. Only through growth can we clean up after hurricanes, wildfires and superstorms and invent cheap and abundant forms of clean energy. But Mr. Trump’s policies are crashing consumer and business confidence at home and abroad, and they are forcing the rest of the world to reconsider whether it wants to invest here. He is choking off America’s stability premium — the confidence that our people, companies and financial assets are safer investments because we are a stable society governed by rule of law.
It’s hard to predict what will come next. A recession would be of little help to the climate. Fossil-fuel use and emissions might go down in the short term as Americans drive less, skip family trips and skimp on purchases. But only a sustained shift to cleaner technologies will reduce carbon pollution in the long term. And the range of possibilities remains wide. Perhaps Mr. Trump’s tariffs could backfire so much that they diminish the U.S. oil and gas sector’s political power or encourage the European Union and Canada to import China’s electric vehicles in much greater numbers.
In this light, the president’s punitive tariffs on China are a particular disaster. China has some of the world’s best advanced energy technology, particularly its batteries and electric vehicles. If the United States wants to keep up with China — even for national security reasons — then it must learn from Chinese companies now, much as Chinese manufacturers learned from our top firms, like Tesla, over the last decade. That education happened when the Chinese government entreated American companies to open state-of-the-art factories in China; we should consider encouraging Chinese companies to do the same thing here.
At moments like these, it is worth stepping back and asking: Why do we care about climate change in the first place? I fret, for one, because a much warmer world will mean a lower quality of life for billions of people. Climate change will ravage Earth’s ecosystems — impossibly complex and iridescent landscapes that make up this planet’s true wealth. It will be harder for the world’s poorest people to improve their lot on a hotter, more disaster-prone planet. In a climate-changed world, even middle-class and upper-class Americans will experience shocks that uproot their families and livelihoods forever.
The short history of industrial civilization suggests that human society is quite fragile. While we have invented technological wonders, defeated diseases and reduced the world’s poverty, we have also created weapons of mass destruction and killed millions of people because of stupid and self-inflicted mistakes. Climate change will make the balancing act at the heart of industrial society harder.
The Trump era has been full of rapid reversals, and perhaps the president will continue to reverse himself on this trade misadventure, too. But some broken things can never be repaired.
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