Three MAGA Climate Futures
Analyzing what's at stake in the Presidential election with an eye towards the climate.
Our climate future appears dire; many scientists fear that exceeding the 1.5°C warming limit set by the Paris Agreement is inevitable. We’ve made progress, but it’s not enough. More action is needed.
I try to be optimistic, but let’s be real: another MAGA Administration will do irreconcilable damage to the global climate and the United States. If you care about the climate, Harris is the only option.
At a minimum, a second Trump Administration will:
Withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement;
Claw back Inflation Reduction Act funds earmarked for decarbonization (to say nothing of potentially firing the public servants who could effectively administer this law);
Put oil and gas executives in positions of power, resulting in federal land, including nature preserves like ANWR, being opened to unfettered oil and gas exploration and drilling;
Prevent the Federal Government from including the expected impact of climate change (i.e. the social cost of carbon) in its cost benefit analyses; and
Roll back regulations that support renewable energy and electric vehicles (Trump rolled back over 100 Obama era regulations during his first term).
I could go on, but you get the point. The United States government will become actively hostile to environmental regulations, nature, global negotiations, and renewable energy.
These actions are a given; the way that the rest of the globe responds is to be determined. To think through what this might look like, I explore three possible futures below.
Spoiler alert: none of them are good.
The Best Case: The Center Holds
Here’s the rosiest picture I can paint. MAGA/US antagonism to the rules-based global order is limited to climate negotiations and trade policy. While the US withdraws aid from Ukraine, it remains a member of NATO.
US actions cause the foundations of the global system to wobble—great powers disregard the rules when it suits them to—but overall the system remains intact. On the climate front, we tread water. COP30 in Brazil in 2025 was supposed to be an opportunity to accelerate climate action, but with the US no longer there, global ambition wanes.
The EU and the Small Island Developing States (SIDS) push for more action and funding for adaptation, but it’s met with ambivalence. China, India, and the OPEC countries say all the right things publicly to expand their soft power, but neuter proposals that push for more action behind closed doors.
Global climate negotiations, always a long shot to succeed, are no longer seen as a viable path to global decarbonization and climate adaptation.
Still, there are some bright spots. The EU maintains its position as the global leader on sustainability through enforcement of European Green Deal regulations like CSRD and CSDDD. Not to be outdone, Canada, California, the New England states, and Japan pass matching legislation. This creates a business incentive for all companies, including those based in the US, to adhere to stringent environmental practices in order to maintain global market access.
At the same time, jurisdictions around the world continue to adopt the IFRS sustainability and climate disclosure regulations. These regulations create a global sustainability floor for businesses that aligns to the Paris Agreement. In this way, the Paris Agreement continues to drive positive change despite a lack of progress at COP30.
Back in the United States, emissions continue to go decline despite the Trump Administration’s best efforts to increase them. The reason is twofold:
Big American corporations want to do business in countries with climate regulations, so they follow the climate disclosure and action requirements required to maintain market access; and
Economics. The cost of renewable energy, which are already lower than that of fossil fuel alternatives, continues to drop.
While there is a chance of regulatory capture by the fossil fuel industry, the momentum behind renewables and push for global market access more than offsets the Trump Administration policies.
Somehow, we muddle through four more years and emerge relatively unscathed.
The Middle Way: The System Decays
The rules-based international order more than wobbles; it starts to decay. The MAGA Administration leads the charge, opting out of the World Trade Organization and NATO while playing an obstructionary role at the United Nations, which it refuses to fund. MAGA views multilateralism as a suckers game.
Alternative power structures are ready to fill the void. The BRICS countries, already busy holding summits with scores of potentially friendly countries in 2024, seize the momentum to upend the global order. We begin sliding into a multipolar world with even less reverence for international laws and institutions.
In this scenario, the EU is no longer able to lead a balancing coalition that favors climate action and international institutions. The wave of nationalism and populism that brings Trump back to power is ascendent across Europe, with nationalist and right-wing governments winning elections and tilting the continent away from climate action. The European Parliament begins unwinding key planks of the European Green Deal.
While businesses still provide lip service to climate action, they’ve realized that decarbonization is both hard and expensive. More “pragmatic” [read: short-sighted and spineless] leaders focus on near-term profits. They justify that when climate crisis really hits, it will be on someone else’s watch—and they have quarterly profits to worry about.
Some younger and more highly skilled workers opt out of working for these companies, but in a contracting economy beset by trade protectionism, most people are happy to just have a job. Climate protests happen, but the people are pushing governments to do less. The yellow vests were a harbinger of what was to come. Climate joins immigration as a popular boogeyman for why prices are up.
Rapidly developing countries see what is happening in the industrialized world and prioritize industrialization—even when it requires exploiting fossil fuels. The only silver lining is that the economics of renewables are more favorable in many places, so emissions continue to increase, but not at an accelerating rate.
The global system, while weakened, is still somewhat functional. There is a hope that, now that many have experienced a more chaotic world, the resilience and adaptability of democratic countries will lead them to elect leaders who see the value in reforging global ties and rebuilding global institutions.
But for now, a scarcity mindset—with people and countries fearful and protective of their pieces of an ever shrinking pie—has taken hold.
The Worst Case: System Collapse
Steve Bannon put it best: the MAGA goal is to deconstruct the administrative state. After being stifled by conservatives during the first Trump Administration, Trump V2 is bereft of principled conservatives who check the President and his lackeys worst impulses.
MAGA strips the US Federal government of expertise by eradicating Schedule F protections for bureaucrats and these public servants with loyalists. This makes the government incapable of effectively administering and executing the laws, impacting everything from implementing the Inflation Reduction Act to the Clean Air Act and workplace safety under OSHA. Trust in government further erodes, with conservative federal courts piling on by curtailing the power of the Executive branch.
MAGA works with new allies such as China, Russia, and right-wing European political parties in Hungary, France, Germany, and elsewhere to deconstruct global cooperative institutions. The UNFCCC, NATO, and the WTO tumble into irrelevance, as does the UN, where the majority of the Security Council is hostile to the institution.
As the US withdraws, the world becomes more violent. We return to a multipolar world with spheres of influence, shifting great power alliances, more territorial wars of aggression like what we’re seeing in Ukraine, and an erosion of individual liberties. Without incentives for international cooperation, climate action becomes sporadic and hard for governments to justify. Emissions continue to rise as issues of war and peace take center stage.
Nature and non-human animals suffer the consequences of this breakdown.
Even if MAGA is swept from power in 2028, the damage has been done. The pre-Trump global system cannot be put back together. It was a good run, but eighty years of Pax Americana comes to an end. A new world order, if one is established, will need to come out of the wreckage of another dark period in history. It could be a long night.
Conclusion
All of these scenarios are depressing to consider. Forging a sustainable climate future will require US involvement, and marginalizing MAGA is the only way for this to happen. Harris must win.