Why Trump’s Climate Rollback Cannot Stop the Global Net Zero Machine

When Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, he did not merely reverse his predecessor’s climate policies; he launched what researchers describe as a far more systematic dismantling of the legal, scientific, and institutional foundations of American climate action. On his first day in office, he signed executive orders withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement, suspending climate-related provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, and directing the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider the scientific determination that underpins federal greenhouse gas regulation. References to climate change and environmental justice vanished from federal websites, and programs supporting climate adaptation, assessments, and risk disclosure were defunded or halted. Yet a new analysis published in Global Public Policy and Governance argues that this dramatic retreat, however damaging, is unlikely to derail the global transition to net zero emissions.

The study, authored by Yixian Sun and Yitong Ye of the University of Bath, examines how Trump’s second-term anti-climate agenda is reconfiguring global climate governance and how different actors around the world are responding. Their central claim is that the architecture of global climate action has become polycentric, meaning that authority is distributed across many overlapping centers, including national governments, subnational states, cities, businesses, and transnational networks. Because no single actor, not even the world’s largest economy, dominates the system, the withdrawal of one major player cannot collapse the whole regime. The researchers compare this to a safety net: when one strand fails, the others hold the structure together.

The scale of the American retreat is nonetheless unprecedented. Unlike the first Trump administration, whose rollbacks were largely regulatory and reversible, the 2025 agenda targets structural foundations. Beyond the Paris exit, the administration suspended disbursement of tax credits and funds authorized under the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest public investment program in US history, which had mobilized roughly 370 billion dollars for renewable and zero-emission technologies. Federal policy has been reoriented toward expanding domestic oil, gas, and coal production under banners of energy dominance and economic security, deepening what the authors call the structural lock-in of a high-carbon economy.

The rollback has even extended to pressuring private climate action. In August 2025, 23 Republican state attorneys general sent a letter to the Science Based Targets initiative, a global standard-setter for corporate net zero commitments, demanding disclosures about its governance and membership on antitrust and consumer protection grounds. The researchers note that such threats from subnational governments to non-state climate initiatives are unprecedented and could deter US-based companies from pursuing decarbonization. Meanwhile, a 90-day freeze on foreign assistance and the closure of USAID terminated more than 150 climate-related contracts and grants worth roughly 1.2 billion dollars, while the administration rescinded 4 billion dollars previously pledged to the Green Climate Fund and withdrew from the Loss and Damage Fund.

These cuts strike hardest at developing countries, which have long relied on American finance to access clean technologies, build institutional capacity, and manage climate-induced losses. The authors frame this as a philosophical shift in US foreign policy, away from cooperative leadership based on providing global public goods and toward coercive influence exercised through punitive measures such as tariffs. In the Trumpist worldview, international commitments are constraints on American sovereignty, and climate finance is a zero-sum transaction that benefits other countries at America’s expense. The resulting trade tensions, particularly with China, the principal supplier of clean technologies, have raised costs for solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles in the US market.

Yet the multilateral system has refused to buckle. No other member state has followed the United States out of the Paris Agreement. Instead, most countries have continued updating their Nationally Determined Contributions, the five-yearly pledges that form the treaty’s ratcheting mechanism. By early November 2025, 108 parties excluding the US had officially submitted their 2035 targets, together accounting for 65.3 percent of global emissions and 55.3 percent of the world’s population. In July 2025, China and the European Union jointly committed to submit enhanced 2035 pledges before the COP30 summit and to demonstrate shared leadership in advancing net zero transitions.

China’s announcement on 24 September 2025 was particularly consequential. President Xi Jinping pledged emission reductions of 7 to 10 percent below peak levels by 2035, an increase in non-fossil fuels to more than 30 percent of energy consumption, and an expansion of wind and solar capacity to over six times 2020 levels. Although analysts debate the ambition of these targets, it marks the first time China has promised an absolute cap on its greenhouse gas emissions, and the country may overperform given its current pace of clean energy deployment. Brazil, meanwhile, has pledged to cut emissions 59 to 67 percent below 2005 levels by 2035 and intends to use its COP30 presidency to keep global ambition aligned with the Paris goals.

Within the United States itself, subnational and non-state actors are sustaining momentum. Twenty-four states and territories have formed the US Climate Alliance, representing nearly 60 percent of the national economy, and have collectively reaffirmed a net zero target of reducing emissions 50 to 52 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. States such as California, Washington, and Massachusetts continue to operate renewable portfolio standards, cap-and-trade systems, and electric vehicle mandates. Even Republican-leaning Texas, the largest oil and gas producing state, has become a renewable powerhouse, holding more than 26 percent of US wind capacity in 2022 and attracting over 21 billion dollars in solar investment by early 2023. City networks like C40, which includes 14 major American cities, have pledged to remain bastions of climate progress, and the share of large US companies adopting net zero targets has continued to rise even during Trump’s second term.

Perhaps the most striking evidence of resilience comes from the Global South, where cheap solar technology is driving a consumer-led energy revolution. In Nigeria, savings from reduced diesel imports allow solar panels to pay for themselves within six months. In Sierra Leone, imported panels could generate electricity equivalent to 61 percent of the country’s 2023 output if fully installed. Pakistan recorded one of the fastest solar expansions in history by importing 16 gigawatts of panels during 2024 alone. With American climate finance gone, new funding sources are filling the gap, most notably China, which provided an estimated 3 billion dollars annually for developing country climate action between 2015 and 2021 and has pledged overseas green investments of up to 71.6 billion dollars, particularly through the Belt and Road Initiative since 2022.

The Bath researchers conclude that Trumpism has limited purchase on a polycentric system in which many actors have strong, increasingly economic incentives to decarbonize. Climate politics, they argue, is no longer primarily a collective action problem but a distributional one, with countries and firms competing for the benefits of clean energy markets. As climate impacts intensify and green technology costs fall, the actors positioned to gain from transition are strengthening their commitments rather than abandoning them. The long-term consequences of America’s retreat remain uncertain, and the damage to US decarbonization and to vulnerable countries is real. But the evidence assembled suggests that the global net zero machine, powered by major emitters, American states and cities, corporations, and Chinese capital, will keep turning regardless of what happens in Washington.

Subject of Research: The resilience of polycentric global climate governance under the second Trump administration's climate policy rollback

Article Title: Global climate governance remains resilient under Trump 2.0

Article References: Sun, Y., & Ye, Y. (2025). Global climate governance remains resilient under Trump 2.0. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 353-366. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00131-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00131-x

Keywords: climate governance, Paris Agreement, Trump administration, net zero, polycentricity, climate finance, China, Nationally Determined Contributions, US Climate Alliance, renewable energy, Global South, COP30