There is a brutal clarity to Donald Trump’s latest assault on climate action. It is not rooted in science, economics or even the lived experience of the people who will bear its costs. It is rooted in belief – belief that consequences do not matter, that earthly suffering is incidental, and that any reckoning can be deferred to a promised afterlife. When politics is fused with a certainty of salvation, death becomes abstract, collateral damage becomes acceptable, and policy becomes a theology of indifference.
Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does nothing to alter the physical reality of a heating planet. Temperatures will continue to rise, seas will continue to encroach, and extreme weather will continue to punish the most vulnerable. Tipping points in the climate system remain imminent and irreversible. None of this is changed by a presidential memo or a campaign slogan about “drill baby drill”.
What does change is who suffers first and most. As Simon Stiell, the UN’s climate chief, has warned, American households and businesses will pay the price: higher energy costs, less affordable food and transport, collapsing insurance markets, and ever more frequent disasters battering crops, infrastructure and livelihoods. This is not an abstract future. Wildfires in California have already forced mass evacuations. Farmers across the country are grappling with droughts, floods and pests. Entire communities are discovering that their homes are becoming uninsurable. Extreme weather cost the US at least $115bn last year alone.
Yet Trump’s political base is repeatedly asked to ignore this reality. Many are encouraged to see climate breakdown as either a hoax, an inconvenience, or a sign of divine destiny. If you have been convinced that you are going to heaven regardless, then earthly life becomes cheap. The death of others can be dismissed as unfortunate but necessary. Even your own death can be reframed as martyrdom or destiny. In that mindset, a president who accelerates environmental collapse is not a threat; he is a vehicle.
This helps explain the extraordinary disconnect between Trump’s climate vandalism and the economic direction of the world. The global shift to low-carbon energy is no longer driven primarily by environmental idealism but by cold, hard economics. Investment in low-carbon energy now exceeds $2tn a year, double that spent on fossil fuels. Renewables account for more than 90% of new power generation capacity. Electric vehicles make up around a fifth of new car sales worldwide. China and India now derive more than half of their power generation capacity from low-carbon sources, while China’s exports of low-carbon goods and services have exploded.
From this perspective, Trump’s actions look less like strength and more like a self-inflicted wound. As John Kerry has noted, sidelining the US from the technologies and industries of the 21st century is a gift to China. Nicholas Stern has been even blunter: the science grows more alarming by the year, but the technology grows more encouraging. In an insecure world, countries want independence from volatile fossil fuels. In a sluggish global economy, they want new sources of growth. Those opportunities lie in renewables, storage, electrification and efficiency – not in doubling down on the fuels of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The rest of the world has seen this movie before. US obstruction delayed the Kyoto protocol for years. George W Bush’s administration attended climate summits only to undermine them. Trump’s first-term withdrawal from the Paris agreement did not trigger a global retreat; it simply forced others to carry on without Washington. That is likely to happen again. As Mohamed Adow of Power Shift Africa has argued, the climate movement is bigger than any one nation. Countries in the global south will continue to demand climate justice and build clean energy systems because their survival depends on it.
What is new, and more dangerous, is the prospect that America’s absence could become permanent. Legal scholars are divided on whether a president can unilaterally withdraw from a treaty ratified unanimously by the Senate in 1992, but the practical effect is clear: the US has walled itself off from the world’s central climate processes. There was no official US delegation at the last UN climate summit, and that silence will now be normalised. Re-entry may one day require a two-thirds Senate majority that feels politically unreachable.
The irony is that Trump himself is not immune to the consequences he helps accelerate. Palm Beach, home to Mar-a-Lago, is among the areas most vulnerable to sea level rise. The climate crisis does not check party affiliation, religious belief or net worth before it floods streets, buckles roads or drives insurance companies away.
And yet belief remains powerful. When people are told that this world is temporary and the next is guaranteed, they can be persuaded to vote against their own survival. They can be convinced that environmental destruction is either irrelevant or righteous. In that context, a leader who dismantles climate protections is not seen as lethal but as faithful.
That is the real scandal of Trump’s climate agenda. It is not only an attack on science, international cooperation and economic sense. It is an attack on the value of human life itself. When politics teaches people not to care whether policy kills them – because heaven supposedly awaits – democracy becomes a death cult, and the planet becomes its altar.
