On Jan. 7, 2026, President Donald Trump declared that he would out of the world’s most important global treaty for combating climate change. He said it was because the treaty ran “.”

His order didn’t say which U.S. interests he had in mind.

Americans had just seen a year of from across the U.S. had burned thousands of homes in the nation’s second-largest metro area, and 2025 had been the globally on record. Insurers are no in many areas of the country because of the rising risks, and they are in many others.

For decades, evidence has shown that increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, largely from burning fossil fuels, are and , and .

The climate treaty – the – was created to bring the world together to find ways to lower those risks.

Trump’s order to now pull the U.S. out of that treaty adds to a U.S. efforts to combat climate change, despite the risks. Many of those moves, and there have been dozens, have flown under the public radar.

Why this climate treaty matters

A year into the second Trump administration, you might wonder: What’s the big deal with the U.S. leaving the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change now?

After all, the Trump administration has been ignoring the UNFCCC since taking office in January. The administration moved to required under the treaty. It canceled U.S. scientists’ . One of of his second term was to start the process of . Trump made similar moves in his first term, but the U.S. returned to the Paris agreement after he left office.

This action is different. It vacates an actual treaty that was in October 1992 and signed by President George H.W. Bush.

Volunteers and law enforcement officers searched for weeks for victims who had been swept away when an extreme downpour triggered flash flooding in Texas Hill Country on July 4, 2025. More than 130 people died, including children attending a youth camp.

America’s ratification that year broke a logjam of inaction by nations that had signed the agreement but were wary about actually ratifying it as a legal document. Once the U.S. ratified it, other countries followed, and the treaty entered into force on March 21, 1994.

The U.S. was a global leader on climate change for years. Not anymore.

Chipping away at climate policy

With the flurry of headlines about the , renewed , , , , the and the fight over , important news from other critical areas that affect public welfare has been overlooked for months.

Two climate-related decisions did dominate a few news cycles in 2025. The Environmental Protection Agency announced its intention to , a legal determination that certain greenhouse gas emissions endanger the public health and welfare that became the foundation of federal climate laws. There are indications that the move to rescind the finding – the EPA sent its final draft rule to the White House for review in early January 2026. And the Department of Energy released a authored by five climate skeptics.

Both moves from scientists, but that news was quickly overwhelmed by concern about a government shutdown and continuing .

Thousands of people lost their homes as wildfires burned through dry canyons in the Los Angeles area and into neighborhoods in January 2025.

This chipping away at climate policy continued to accelerate at the end of 2025 with six more significant actions that went largely unnoticed.

Three could harm efforts to slow climate change:

  • The Trump administration moved to on Dec. 3. Instead of raising the industry average for cars and light trucks vehicles to , as planned, the standard would rise to about .
  • On Dec. 11, to block part of a that would have called for phasing out fossil fuels.
  • Eleven days later, the U.S. Department of the Interior jeopardized billions of dollars of U.S. investment in clean energy by of five East Coast offshore wind farms.

Three other moves by the administration shot arrows at the heart of climate science:

  • The EPA about the causes of climate change to remove , including burning fossil fuels – the . That occurred on Dec. 5.
  • On Dec. 17, Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, announced plans to shut down the , a world-recognized leader in earth system science.
  • A week later, to write the next U.S. National Climate Assessment, the latest in a widely used series of reports mandated by Congress to assess the nation’s climate risks.

Fossil fuels at any cost

In early January 2025, the United States had as a world leader in climate science and was still working domestically and internationally to combat climate risks.

A year later, the U.S. government has abdicated both roles and is taking actions that will increase the likelihood of catastrophic climate-driven disasters and magnify their consequences by and tearing apart programs that helped Americans recover from disasters, .

To my mind, as a , the administration’s moves enunciated clearly its strategy to discredit concerns about climate change, at the same time it promotes greater production of fossil fuels. It’s “” with little consideration for what’s at risk.

Trump’s repudiation of the UNFCCC could give countries around the world cover to pull back their own efforts to fight a global problem if they decide it is not in their myopic “best interest.” So far, the other countries have stayed in both that treaty and the Paris climate agreement. However, many countries’ for future generations were weaker in 2025 than hoped.

The U.S. pullout may also leave the Trump administration at a disadvantage: The U.S. will no longer have a formal voice in the global forum where climate policies are debated, one where since Trump returned to the presidency.

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