A jump in greenhouse gas pollution in the US helped push global emissions higher in the first half of this year. This could be an omen of what’s to come, with Donald Trump’s pro-fossil fuel agenda set to significantly slow down the emissions cuts required to avoid disastrous climate impacts, a new forecast has found.
The “most abrupt shift in energy and climate policy in recent memory” that has occurred since Trump re-entered the White House will have profound consequences for the global climate crisis by slowing the pace of US emissions cuts by as much as half the rate achieved over the past two decades, the Rhodium Group forecast states.
The US is still expected to reduce its planet-heat emissions by between 26% and 35% by 2035 compared with 2005 levels, according to the report. But this is well down from a 38% to 56% reduction by 2035, which Rhodium forecast just last year during Joe Biden’s presidency.
None of these scenarios will be sufficient to allow the US, the world’s largest historic emitter of carbon pollution, to play its full part in helping the world avert a worsening climate breakdown coming from 2C (3.6F) or more in global heating.
Chart of the projected US emissions under various scenarios falling short of the reduction targets set in the US Paris agreement
The US and other governments agreed a decade ago in Paris to avoid this threshold but are badly off-track in required emissions reductions, ahead of a key UN climate meeting in Brazil in November to thrash out new targets.
Even under the best-case scenario, whereby fossil fuels become much more expensive and cheap renewable energy is swiftly deployed, the US will cut its emissions by just 43% by 2040, Rhodium found – well below Biden’s own pledged target, since jettisoned by Trump.
In the worst case, in which clean energy is severely constrained by economic and political factors, US emissions could even tick up slightly at the end of 2030s, the report states.
“That is very different to where we were before; it’s more than halving the pace of decarbonization we’ve had over the last two decades,” said Ben King, a director at Rhodium.
“The US was already off-track in meeting its contribution to emissions cuts and this is now a fairly big step in the wrong direction. The emissions trajectory is now a lot worse because of this policy whiplash.”
Under Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda, the federal government has thrown open vast areas of land and waters to drilling and mining, ditched the Paris targets and shredded almost all regulations that aim to limit greenhouse gas pollution and the emissions of other air toxins that harm people’s health.
Trump has sought to hobble the clean energy sector in the US, signing a Republican spending bill that kills off incentives for new solar, wind and battery projects and instructing his administration to halt new renewables facilities, even if they were previously approved and nearly completed.
“We don’t allow windmills and we don’t want the solar panels,” the president said recently. Trump, who has a longstanding animus towards wind after objecting to viewing “ugly” wind turbines from his Scottish golf course, has conversely praised “beautiful clean coal” and encouraged fossil fuel producers to bypass pollution rules.
This stance towards renewables, despite the administration demanding more supply to meet growing electricity demand, has already had a tangible impact. Offshore wind farms have been halted, while plans for a battery factory in North Carolina have been canceled and a plant in Michigan has recently been closed.
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In all, nearly 65,000 clean energy jobs have been lost or stalled since Trump’s election, according to the Climate Power group, with household power bills rising as a result of the cuts to cheaper renewables.
“Unfortunately, federal policy obstacles and restrictive mandates are threatening hundreds of billions in planned energy investment,” said Jason Grumet, chief executive of the American Clean Power Association, which last week reported solar installations had plummeted by a quarter in the first half of 2025.
“The uncertainty created by new bureaucratic delays and unclear demands is having a chilling effect on the pipeline for future energy projects, stalling growth precisely when our nation needs more energy to power a growing economy.”
The emissions impact of all of this will become obvious over the next couple of years, Rhodium’s King said. A preview of this can be seen in the first six months of the year, during which US emissions rose by 1.4% compared with the same period last year, according to Climate Trace.
This bump in emissions, aided by a similar rise in Brazil, ensured that global emissions were slightly higher than the first half of 2024, a stark sign of the task ahead for governments in tackling the climate crisis without the leadership of the US, the world’s second largest emitter.
“We won’t see the impacts of the Trump administration in the emissions data for a couple of years, I think,” said King.
“But we are already seeing a slowdown in renewables installations and, to be honest, even a flatlining of emissions is a pretty bad indicator of the trajectory we need to be on.”
