Big Take: A Warming Planet vs. Trump
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Security is your job, and it's theirs too. With Microsoft Security, you have a partner that helps your business move forward confidently. To learn more, visit Microsoft.com slash CISO. That's Microsoft.com slash C-I-S-O. Hi, it's Akshat. This week, I joined the Big Take podcast to talk about the global consequences of President Donald Trump's rollback on climate.

We wanted to share that episode with zero listeners too. So take a listen and do follow The Big Take for daily news coverage from Bloomberg reporters. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. Since taking office in January, President Trump has set in motion a series of sweeping rollbacks on U.S. climate policy.

The president slashing funding to combat climate change. President Trump on social media is again calling for FEMA to be shut down. The latest firings hitting NOAA, the nation's top weather and climate agency. Hundreds let go. And on Tuesday, the few times Trump mentioned climate policy in an address to Congress, he didn't hold back. I terminated the ridiculous green news scam.

— I withdrew from the unfair Paris climate accord, which was costing us trillions of dollars that other countries were not paying. — His remarks highlighted the ways his administration has dismantled efforts to combat climate change.

And they were the culmination of weeks of actions that pushed climate change into the background, at a time when governments around the world have lagged behind their stated environmental goals. 2024 was the first year when for the entire year, the world averaged over 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Akshat Rathi is a senior climate reporter for Bloomberg News and host of The Zero podcast. Any amount of warming, any 0.1 degrees Celsius of warming makes the planet worse. And what happens when Trump or other countries start to pull away from these targets is that we start to get more warming because we move away from the focus of trying to get more clean energy and rely less on fossil fuels.

So just how did we get here? How have Trump's actions played out since his first day in office? And how will these last few weeks of climate policy reversals impact the U.S. and the rest of the world? It is the job of a government to try and provide for welfare of society. That is why governments are elected. But it is not the job of a government to try and provide for welfare of society.

But if you are not going to be believing in the facts of climate change, which are scientifically true and have consensus around the world, then you're not going to be able to make informed decisions that will help you to protect people from the harm that's coming their way.

Today on the show, Trump and the climate. A walk through some of his administration's key climate actions, the international fallout, and what it all means for the global fight to stop the warming of the planet. This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder.

So Akshat, Trump has taken several actions to reverse U.S. policy on climate since the start of his second term. But the one that really set the tone was him pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement on day one. So let's start there. He's pulled out of the accord before during his first term in 2017. But what's different this time? Well, you're right. This wasn't a surprise because...

He'd said he'd do it and he's done it in the past. But there is certainly something different about this time. So on the negative side, Trump has more backers for his anti-climate push because there's been a right wing turn in politics around the world.

There's also the fact that companies and countries that had set targets to meet as soon as 2030 are way off track from meeting those climate targets. And we've also just lived through the hottest year in 2024. We breached for the first time 1.5 degrees Celsius, which is one of the two most ambitious targets we have under the Paris Agreement.

So there is the sense of whether we'll ever be able to keep under the Paris goals of not warming the planet by 2 degrees Celsius. And so the urgency to act has grown, but clearly the companies and countries aren't doing all that much. That's the bad side.

There is also a good side that is different this time. So when Trump quit the Paris Agreement the first time around, global clean energy investments stood at about $400 billion, according to Bloomberg NEF. In 2024, they breached $2 trillion, $2.1 trillion to be precise.

And there is something fundamentally different about this moment, which is today, clean energy is much, much cheaper than the last time Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreement. And...

climate impacts are much, much more severe. And so people have a recognition that this problem is only going to get worse. But fortunately, the solutions are also getting cheaper. The other thing is that there were always these rumors that once the U.S., the world's largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, the world's largest economy pulls out of a global treaty, other countries will follow. That didn't happen last time. And it doesn't seem like it's going to happen this time.

Okay, so you've given us the good news and the bad news. I'm wondering a little more about how other world leaders and business leaders are reacting to Trump's moves. Just how strong are other countries' climate commitments now?

And who might step up and fill the void left by the United States? There's certainly been a muted response this time. Let's take corporations. Last time around, these big tech companies were jostling to be the climate leaders in the world. Elon Musk quit a Trump advisory council as a result of Trump pulling out of the Paris Agreement.

Well, this time around, none of the tech bosses are saying anything about Paris. Elon Musk is in the Trump government.

And from a country standpoint, there isn't the same bulwark of climate-forward leaders that was there the last time. We had Angela Merkel, we had Justin Trudeau, who'd just been elected. This time, yes, Ursula von der Leyen from the European Union did say that Europe is going to stay the course. But even Lula in Brazil, who is going to be hosting a COP meeting later this year, let his deputies react to a Trump exit.

So there is this sense among world leaders who are facing economic issues that they are not willing to try and push back against an emboldened Trump. Last time we spoke, the big questions at the COP summit in Baku were around money. Who's going to pay for the energy transition? How much developed countries will spend to support developing countries?

How does the U.S. pulling out change those calculations? That is perhaps the most significant question. So at Baku, all countries, including the U.S., agreed on a goal to triple climate finance from $100 billion to $300 billion by 2035. That's money developed countries promised to put specifically toward helping developing nations respond to climate change and invest in clean energy. So they have 10 years to get to that goal.

But it means they have to start ramping up right away because it is a big goal to meet. And now that the US, the world's largest economy, is out with all its banks and all its heft, it's unlikely that that acceleration from 100 to 300 will happen at the same pace as it would have if the US were part of the agreement. Now, we will certainly see a rise in climate finance because other countries will start to step in.

But maybe we are already looking at the $300 billion goal being missed. Even if the US is not putting any money directly from the government side under a Trump administration towards climate finance,

It does contribute to these multilateral development banks like World Bank or the IMF, which then go on to contribute to climate finance. And the U.S. is the largest shareholder in most of these MDBs. And it could start to try and pull back money that these banks were previously giving to climate finance. So that could have a multiplier effect if Trump so wishes.

Right. And meanwhile, Trump has been cutting domestic spending on the climate, too, with the help of Elon Musk's Doge task force. And EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has been cutting millions in EPA grants focused on environmental justice. What do we know about how these cuts could impact climate regulation and climate research?

There is just so much that is happening and it is unclear just how widespread this impact is going to be till we start to come to the places where we expect an EPA regulation to come through because industries need to move on and start to build things or a climate science report has to drop because there was a deadline to produce that report and then it doesn't come.

Those are things we are looking out for which are in the future. But there are already impacts that we can see. So,

In trying to keep climate out of the conversation, out of research, there was a downstream impact where a climate scientist in the US who was supposed to be heading a very important working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is the world's premier body for all climate science research, could not make it to her meeting in Hangzhou in China because the Trump administration said that NASA cannot fund any more climate science work.

What does it mean for that researcher to miss that meeting? What didn't happen? Well, the U.S. is one of the world's largest funder of climate science research. About a fifth of all the authors of these big IPCC reports are Americans.

That is twice as much as the next biggest country, which is the UK. And so when you stop bringing American scientists into the climate conversation, you lose a big chunk of climate science understanding of the world. And OK, that for now is fine. But these reports, which will come in 2030, will start to become worse today.

And so this sort of pull one string and then the fabric starts to fall apart is something we expect to see more and more of. After the break, more on what climate policy reversals could mean for the green technology sector and for the world's reliance on fossil fuels.

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Pulling out of the Paris climate agreement was only the first in a flurry of climate policy changes since Trump took office. We ended all of Biden's environmental restrictions that were making our country far less safe and totally unaffordable. His administration has blocked the enforcement of environmental justice laws, stopped a global air quality monitoring program, and started to roll back rules around corporate climate disclosures.

Last month, Bloomberg reported that the EPA was recommending the government throw out its conclusion that greenhouse gases endanger the public. But there's another piece of the story that I asked Bloomberg's Akshat Rathi to unpack more. Where this all leaves investments in green technology. When the Paris Agreement was first signed in 2016, there was this rapid rise in investment in climate tech companies,

And there was more funding for projects that focused on the energy transition. With Trump in office, how could that picture of global investment change? It can have pretty big impacts because a lot of the funding that went into nascent climate technologies came from the U.S.,

went to US startups that were at the forefront of developing these technologies. But it does create opportunities for other countries to be able to absorb some of this talent that sits in America, that has developed this technology, that wants to build these plants that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, that will make electricity cheaper, that will make electricity more easily accessible because it'll tap into renewable resources, not just the sun and the wind, but also geothermal resources.

And it creates an opportunity for countries that are climate forward, have climate forward leaders to give home to American startups, because it's clear, at least from this administration's steps taken so far, that they don't care about climate technologies. What are the countries that are set up best to take advantage of this opportunity? I mean, the simplest answer there is China.

Out of the $2.1 trillion that were invested in the energy transition last year, $800 billion came from China. That is more than the US, European Union, and the UK combined.

But that's not to say that China is the only country that can win. There are all these other technologies that China doesn't have a lead in, like carbon capture, like green hydrogen, like heat pumps, where local manufacturing in other parts of the world can certainly catch up. And so you might see competition on green tech outside of America that will produce losers and winners. We have more liquid gold under our feet than any nation on earth.

Akshat, strengthening America's fossil fuel industry is central to Trump's economic agenda. He emphasized that in his speech to Congress this week. It's called drill, baby, drill. But what about the economics of not investing in the energy transition and not investing in these kinds of things? Could this actually hurt the U.S.'s economic competitiveness in this space?

So there is perhaps something to be gained by trying to drill baby drill in the short term. If you have higher oil and gas prices, you might be able to profit from it or make oil and gas cheaper for American consumers. But that is a short term gain for a long term loss. So one thing that most experts agree on is that the future of energy is to go towards

distributed energy that comes from renewable sources because they are widely available, they're easy to tap, and now they are also very cheap to tap. But certainly 10 or 15 years from now, if we look back, we'll see this period as one where the U.S. started to lose its competitive edge in green technologies. Well, Akshat, this is, of course, all happening on the heels of those devastating fires in L.A.,

And just a few weeks ago, Trump moved to end climate-related work and eliminate the use of climate-related terms in the Department of Homeland Security, which typically responds to natural disasters.

If the U.S. government is no longer interested in addressing or acknowledging climate change, what does that mean for the country if and when more extreme weather events happen? What does it mean for the world? I think that was a feeling that many experts had, which is, you know, when we were talking about climate change in the 1990s, it was a problem that was a decade or two decades away. Well, it's here now.

The LA fires are a really good example. A study that just came out said they were made 35% worse by human-caused climate change. But the reality has also sunk in among the people who were hoping that the alarm of extreme weather will cause people to ask for more climate action. That's not happening at the scale we want. I mean, the elections around the world, not just Donald Trump's, are a proof of that.

So there is a pivot that we are seeing among world leaders, but also climate advocates, that economic growth and progress on other metrics are also something that people care deeply about. That any climate action that goes against those progress metrics is not going to fly. You have to find a way to make progress.

all these metrics work together. And you have to find a way to ensure that good information gets to people for why these decisions are being made. And so the hope that extreme weather events will finally get us on the path of acting on climate is one that fewer and fewer people are relying on.

This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. This episode was produced and sound designed by Jessica Beck. It was edited by Aaron Edwards and Emily Buzo. It was mixed by Alex Sugiera and fact-checked by Adriana Tapia. Our senior producer is Naomi Chavin. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Our executive producer is Nicole Beamster-Boer. Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts.

If you like this episode, make sure to subscribe and review The Big Take wherever you get your podcasts. It helps people find the show. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.

Security is your job, and it's theirs too. With Microsoft Security, you have a partner that helps your business move forward confidently. To learn more, visit Microsoft.com slash CISO. That's Microsoft.com slash C-I-S-O.