Outside In | Trump’s ‘drill, baby, drill’ vision adds to the global climate nightmare

Greatest harm is in the emboldening of the US fossil fuel industry and pressure on US finance giants to turn away from funding climate goals

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The CHS oil refinery silhouetted against the setting sun on September 28 in McPherson, Kansas. Photo: AP

Published: 8:30pm, 7 Feb 2025

Amid the rumpus US President Donald Trump has created with his shock-and-awe, bull-in-a-China-shop diplomacy, his assault on already fraught efforts to contain the climate crisis is possibly the most alarming.

That is perhaps a precocious claim. After all, his wrecking ball has been swung at home and threatened at places from Mexico and Canada, to Greenland and Panama, and to Gaza, which he plans to make the next “Riviera of the Middle East”. He has yet to get started on the Ukraine war or China trade war, but watch this space.

But his withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement again – Joe Biden had the US rejoin the climate pact in 2021 – and his call on US fossil fuel companies to “drill baby, drill” have put the world on watch: the battle to contain a potentially catastrophic global warming just got a whole lot harder.

As the Centre for American Progress puts it, Trump’s decision “disregards science, undermines years of painstaking global cooperation, harms the American economy and people, and sends a dangerous signal that the nation most responsible for the climate crisis is abandoning its moral and practical obligations”.

Not that Trump cares. The US is now one of just four countries sitting aloof from global climate efforts, with Libya, Iran and Yemen. In normal times, the US might call such a peculiar group an axis of climate evil.

But what harm has Trump actually done? In immediate practical terms, he has withdrawn financial support for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the objectives of which the Paris Agreement implements.