Climate action is quickly becoming the catchall boogeyman for many Western countries’ economic woes.
The trend is bad news for global efforts to preserve a livable planet as rising temperatures continue to wreak havoc across the world. It’s also creating a climate leadership vacuum that other countries, such as China or India, may try to fill.
In the U.S., President Donald Trump has blamed policies boosting clean energy for a vast array of societal ills, from higher utility bills and economic decline to cancer and whale deaths. He began his second term with a whirlwind assault on U.S. climate policy, exiting the Paris Agreement on Day 1 and attempting to reverse pollution-cutting policies and spending from the Democrats’ 2022 climate law.
He’s not alone. Germany, once considered one of the world’s most climate-ambitious nations, is making a U-turn. Sunday’s election means Friedrich Merz is likely to take power, installing a chancellor who blames Germany’s economic turmoil not on the energy instability caused by Russia’s war with Ukraine, but on the nation’s green policies, writes Karl Mathiesen. His stance echoes that of leadership in Poland and France.
New Zealand, another poster child for climate policies, is under new leadership and scrapping its climate goals. Canada and Australia may soon follow suit.
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Western disinterest in fighting climate change is making room for countries like China to take up the mantle. A first test of how that might play out could come this week as delegates from more than 190 countries meet to hash out the details of the next U.N. climate report, write Sara Schonhardt, Zack Colman and Zia Weise.
Trump prevented the U.S. delegation from attending the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meeting — a move that threatens to delay the pivotal scientific report.
This “is the first opportunity to see how China may react to the absence of the U.S. in international climate processes,” said Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute.
