Trump withdraws from the Paris Agreement and WHO.
While Trump can justify his decisions based on some of the recent failures of the WHO and the Paris Agreement, the withdrawals still carry significant risks for public health and climate change mitigation, which the Trump administration has not shown a plan to address.
Withdrawing from the Paris Agreement won’t affect our climate change outlook much, but it is a missed opportunity to redirect U.S. climate policy toward a more realistic objective. The treaty’s goal of keeping global surface temperatures to roughly 1.5°C (2.7°F) above pre-industrial levels is now practically unattainable after record-hot years in 2023 and 2024, and its secondary 2°C goal also appears to be in peril — a 2024 UN Environment Programme report stated that “emissions must fall 28 per cent by 2030 and 37 per cent from 2019 levels by 2035” to maintain the 2°C goal. Achieving those reductions would undoubtedly require massive, destabilizing changes to economic systems, which are neither desirable nor plausible.
However, that provides more justification for the United States to stay in, not to drop out of, the agreement. In his executive order announcing the withdrawal from the Paris accords, Trump even said the U.S. must play “a leadership role in global efforts to protect the environment” — but how can we lead from the sidelines? Withdrawing is a huge missed opportunity to direct international climate policy towards its biggest problems: China’s rise and finding alternative fuel sources.
Domestically, Trump is also missing a large opportunity to combine a center-right "all of the above" energy policy with a center-left "abundance agenda," one that maintains a seat at the table for petroleum and natural gas while we continue to invest in renewable technologies. Nuclear energy should also be part of this effort, and its adoption is squarely in line with both the Trump administration and Paris Agreement’s goals.
The WHO does critical work tracking new disease outbreaks and identifying emerging pathogens, and the U.S. withdrawal threatens its ability to aid this work and maintain the benefits we all receive from it.
Furthermore, our status as a global health leader within WHO is smart diplomacy and advances our national security interests. We can guide ongoing efforts to eradicate polio, protect children from diseases, and mitigate future outbreaks. We also receive benefits, like communications on transnational spread of dangerous viruses, scientific collaboration for each year’s seasonal flu vaccine, and access to information about emerging threats. Lastly, we can investigate global threats, as we did when U.S. scientists joined the WHO delegation that visited China in February 2020 to assess its Covid response.
Both Trump and public health experts have rightly criticized the effusive praise the WHO heaped on China in the early days of the pandemic, even as questions swirled about how the virus spread. In a critical moment for its mission, the WHO seemed more occupied with keeping China happy than fulfilling its obligations to the rest of the world. The organization also failed to acknowledge that Covid was airborne early on, providing more evidence that it was ill-prepared to meet the moment.
Trump is right that the U.S. contributes a disproportionate amount to the WHO compared to China (even though he has exaggerated the magnitude of that difference), and we should push for fairer standards. While it is now starting to diversify its revenue sources, the organization’s reliance on the U.S. is evident in the measures it has already taken since Trump announced the withdrawal order — freezing recruitment and drastically scaling back its travel budget.
With all these issues in mind, leaving the WHO is still not the answer; in fact, leaving will make our problems worse. In our absence, China would likely seek to step up to mold decisions to its will — how does that help the U.S.? If Trump wants to play tough with the WHO, why not stay involved but slash our funding commitments?