Ditching the Paris Agreement Will Throw the U.S. Into COP Purgatory

As the annual United Nations climate change conference reaches the end of its scheduled programming, this could represent the last time for at least the next four years that the U.S. will bring a strong delegation with substantial negotiating power to the meetings. That’s because Donald Trump has once again promised to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, the international treaty adopted at the same climate conference in 2015, which unites nearly every nation on earth in an effort to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius.

Existentially, we know what this means: The loss of climate leadership and legitimacy in the eyes of other nations, as well as delayed progress on emissions reductions. But tangibly, there’s no precedent for exactly what this looks like when it comes to U.S. participation in future UN climate conferences, a.k.a. COPs, the official venue for negotiation and decision-making related to the agreement. That’s because when Trump withdrew the U.S. from Paris the first time, the agreement’s three year post-implementation waiting period and one-year withdrawal process meant that by the time we were officially out, it was November 2020 and Biden was days away from being declared the winner of that year’s presidential election. That year’s conference was delayed by a year due to the Covid pandemic, by which point Biden had fully recommitted the U.S. to the treaty.

Now that the waiting period no longer applies, the U.S. could exit as soon as January 2026, meaning COP31 would be the first where it’s not party to the agreement. The U.S. could still attend the conference as long as it retains membership in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the body that oversees the meetings, and it could even attend Paris Agreement-related meetings, though for these it would be relegated to “observer status,” with no decision-making power. The U.S. would not be required to submit updated emissions targets and progress reports as prescribed by Paris, and would have much weaker financial commitments to developing countries.

Todd Stern, Obama’s former U.S. climate envoy, told me decisions at COP are essentially made by consensus, meaning that “if you're a player like the U.S., or you're a player like any of the big guys, and you say, We can't do this, that's going to push the negotiation one way or another.” Post-pullout, the U.S. won’t be able to throw that kind of weight around. “But that doesn't necessarily mean, when you get down into the nitty gritty of negotiation, that the people from the U.S. will have views that are uninteresting,” Stern told me, indicating that the American delegation could still make suggestions and share the country’s overall perspective.

Stern noted that after the U.S. announced its first withdrawal from Paris, it kept showing up at COP, with lower-ranking government officials continuing to provide input even as most political appointees stayed home. “The U.S. kept attending and speaking and having ideas because the U.S. team is very skilled. They're smart people who’ve done it a lot,” he told me. Though the delegations Trump sent to COP were notably smaller, less influential, and more fossil fuel-forward than Obama’s and Biden’s representatives, the U.S. kept contributing, even helping to finalize the Paris rulebook in 2018, which codifies detailed guidelines that make the high-level agreement actionable.

Of course the natural next question is, why would Trump pull out again if his first administration seemed to feel that a seat at the table was worthwhile? Beyond the obvious political symbolism around deprioritizing decarbonization, this was something Stern couldn’t quite explain, either. The official statements on COP from that time reiterate that “the United States intends to withdraw from the Paris Agreement as soon as it is eligible to do so,” while also stating that the country “is participating in ongoing negotiations, including those related to the Paris Agreement, in order to ensure a level playing field that benefits and protects U.S. interests.”

Nonsensical as these dual goals may be, this time the U.S. simply won’t have the option to prioritize both — it’s one or the other. But hey, maybe ExxonMobil will get its way and Trump will stay in the agreement after all.