When the world’s nations meet for COP30 in Belém, Brazil, on 10 November to lock down new commitments to limit dangerous climate change, it will be the first such conference since US President Donald Trump announced in January that his country would, for the second time, exit the landmark Paris climate treaty.
Drill, baby drill? Trump policies will hurt climate ― but US green transition is underway
Trump and his administration have championed fossil fuels, called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” and rolled back federal funding and tax breaks for clean energy introduced under former president Joe Biden.
The United States is the world’s second biggest greenhouse-gas emitter, accounting for 11% of global emissions. Although US emissions will continue to fall under Trump, they could increase by up to 470 million tonnes annually — more than three times the annual total from the Netherlands — over the next decade compared with what they would have been under Biden policies, according to an analysis led by researchers at Princeton University in New Jersey (J. Jenkins et al. Preprint at Zenodo https://doi.org/qbrm; 2025; see ‘Trump’s climate legacy’).
Source: Repeat Project
The US exit from the Paris accord will not become official until January 2026. Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva explicitly invited Trump to COP30. But the Trump administration is not expected to send any high-level representatives to the meeting, and many say that’s for the best. “Without the US, there’s still a chance the world could come together in Belém,” says Claudio Angelo, the international policy coordinator at Observatório do Clima, a coalition of climate organizations, who is based in Brasília.
Whether that happens, and so whether humanity bends the emissions curve sufficiently to escape the most dangerous climate impacts, depends in large part on the actions of other big players. China is the world’s largest greenhouse-gas emitter, accounting for nearly one-third of the global total — and it is also the global leader in renewable energy. India and the European Union come after the United States, at 8% and 6 % of emissions, respectively. Brazil is expected to take on a bigger climate leadership role as host to COP30 and home to the Amazon, a major carbon sink. US states and cities are also pursuing their own clean-energy agendas. COP30, at which countries are expected to agree a round of more-aggressive climate targets, offers a glimpse of these actors’ plans.
Will China take the lead on climate?
In addition to being the world’s largest emitter, China has driven 90% of the growth in carbon dioxide emissions since 2015, the year the Paris agreement was adopted. But the country also leads the world when it comes to adopting clean energy and producing the equipment needed for the transition to a decarbonized economy, including solar panels, wind turbines and electric vehicles (see ‘China’s energy explosion’).
Source: China Statistical Yearbook, China Electricity Council & Natl Energy Administration
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