Climate change remains feeling like a growing avalanche, an ever-ticking time bomb counting down to irreversible damage. Amid the range of policy changes under the administration of President Donald Trump — alongside a series of devastating natural disasters, from hurricanes to wildfires — the relationship between climate science and shifting policy is a pressing, if foreboding, topic to watch.
Experts on climate change study the phenomenon using a variety of metrics, including ocean levels, natural disaster rates and carbon emissions. Most notably, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has used increasing global temperatures to predict drastic jumps in the effects of climate change. In 2015, based on the severity of these increases, the international community set a target of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Climate experts predicted such an increase would be associated with major ecological costs, including a 14% loss in biodiversity, a 24% increase in global population exposed to flooding and $63 billion lost to increased food insecurity.
To reach this goal, the IPCC recommended a 43% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2019 to 2030, with a peak necessary by 2025 to prevent another catastrophic increase in the impacts of climate change. Now, global temperatures have increased by 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to the preindustrial average, and emission rates have increased notably since 2019.
In this keystone year for emission peaks and having crossed over the long-maintained 1.5-degree benchmark, the new administration has the potential to either heed the warnings of leaders in climate science or increase emissions into dangerous territory.
In the short time since Trump’s inauguration, most notable among these policies are the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and a declaration of a “national energy emergency.”
Trump’s executive order to withdraw from the Paris Agreement caused concern due to its perceived weakening of a global, multilateral effort to reduce emissions. It indicates that the administration is unlikely to commit to any of the internationally established greenhouse gas reduction goals or clean energy financial efforts.
In declaring a national emergency over the energy crisis, the executive branch will be able to take more expansive and immediate measures to reallocate funding and increase energy production by loosening regulations, including those surrounding the burning of fossil fuels. This declaration opens up the possibility for increased greenhouse gas emissions despite no indication that the United States is facing a fuel shortage. Climate actions enacted by former President Joe Biden, including through the Inflation Reduction Act, are likely to be the first regulations on Trump’s chopping block.
These actions do not set the stage for bringing down global temperatures after a 2025 peak or preventing warming past the 1.5-degree limit, which has already been reached in 2024. In fact, a 2024 report by Carbon Brief predicted that Trump’s actions would lead to almost 5 billion additional tons of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.
However, Gina McCarthy, former climate adviser under Biden, suggested that a number of Trump’s proposals are unlikely to hold up in court. Furthermore, many climate protection measures, such as geothermal energy and carbon dioxide removal, have garnered bipartisan support. The decisions of city mayors, businesses and state governments also have the potential to offset national action that may worsen climate change.
While the implementation of these proposals is still uncertain, 2025 will be an important year to commit to a turning point in climate protection. Otherwise, each increase in global temperatures will bring with it increasingly dire and irreversible consequences. Further increases could see the loss of coral reefs, worsened droughts and extreme heat waves. These nascent policies will set the stage for the role the United States will play in these critical next few years for the future of the planet.