International Environmental Policy: The Role of the USA

International environmental policy is made up of a number of stakeholders, including states, corporations, charities and more. This area of international cooperation and discussion is always changing, concessions being made, and agreements being signed. COP29 is currently underway in Baku, Azerbaijan, which brings together delegates from across the world to negotiate on future environmental targets and processes which need to occur now. These negotiations span 2 weeks and so will be addressed in more detail in the next insight instalment, as well at CCS’s COP29 debrief event on Tuesday 3rd December, where you will get to hear first-hand delegate’s experiences at the conference.

Since the first policy insight, we have seen the re-election of Donald Trump. His stance on climate and environmental change warrants us highlighting the crucial role which the USA plays in the international environmental policy arena. This piece is not a political stance, but rather an outline of the USA’s climate legislation and their position in international debates.

Over the years, the extent to which the USA has imposed legislation around climate change mitigation and environmental protection has fluctuated. The Kyoto Protocol was the first international treaty to set legally binding targets to cut greenhouse gas emission but it was never ratified by the US. As President, Obama passed the Climate Action Plan, which laid out an economically viable pathway to net zero by 2050 and ratified the Paris Accord at COP21. These decisions were a step in the right direction for the USA to start to combat climate change, considering the responsibility they have as an industrialised and developed nation with the largest historical cumulative CO2 emissions (Our world in Data, 2019).

At the start of the first term of Trump’s administration, the White House announced that Obama’s Climate Action Plan was harmful and unnecessary. In 2019, it was replaced with an energy plan to revive the coal industry with the aim of becoming energy independent based on the expansion of fossil fuels (EPA, 2024). The same year, Trump announced that he would be withdrawing the USA from the Paris Accord, citing conflicts around the economic burden being placed on the American worker (Pompeo, 2019). This decision sent ripples through the international environmental policy arena.

Many hoped that the election of Biden would represent a sea-change in American climate policy, especially after he rejoined the Paris Accord. Indeed, in 2022, he brought in the Inflation Reduction Act which included the largest federal government climate investment in the USA’s history. This legislation put the USA back on track to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030, in line with the Paris Accord.

With Trump returning for a second term, the stringency of future climate and environmental legislation taken up by the USA is unknown. Presently, he has announced that he wishes to repeal parts of the Inflation Reduction Act and once again pull the USA out of the Paris Accord. The USA delegation who are currently at COP29, under the Biden administration, have pledged that progress towards a cleaner and safer planet will not cease under the Trump Administration (Podesta, 2024). However, the pledges made by this delegation at negotiations will have little standing under the incoming Trump administration due to their very different stance on climate change issues.

At a crucial time in fighting the climate crisis, the unknown future position of the USA may be worrying. In spite of this, forums of international cooperation around combatting the climate crisis and widespread environmental degradation are still occurring. Countries still are and will continue to undertake climate action. Progress will continue to be made just through alternative channels to what we may have expected a couple of weeks ago. Therefore, hope should not be lost. This is just a change of pathway, not a dead end.