At some point in the coming months, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump will almost certainly pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, like he did at the start of his first presidency in 2017. And just like in 2017, European leaders, U.S. Democrats, and climate policy advocates will condemn the decision, claiming that it puts the world on collision course with catastrophic climate change. So, too, will the leaders of poor countries in the global south, for whom the U.S. pullout will signal an abandonment of the principle enshrined in the Paris Agreement that rich countries that have prospered by emitting carbon dioxide over the centuries owe a debt to poor countries that have not.
Trump’s forthcoming rejection will undermine the credibility of international efforts to address climate change and simultaneously provide a convenient scapegoat for the multi-decade failure of the United Nations’ climate-policy process to do very much about it. But the impending U.S. pullout will also give the 77 low-income and lower-middle-income nations—which account for almost half the global population—the opportunity to abandon a process that has clearly not served them and, indeed, has often justified their continuing impoverishment.
At some point in the coming months, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump will almost certainly pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, like he did at the start of his first presidency in 2017. And just like in 2017, European leaders, U.S. Democrats, and climate policy advocates will condemn the decision, claiming that it puts the world on collision course with catastrophic climate change. So, too, will the leaders of poor countries in the global south, for whom the U.S. pullout will signal an abandonment of the principle enshrined in the Paris Agreement that rich countries that have prospered by emitting carbon dioxide over the centuries owe a debt to poor countries that have not.
Trump’s forthcoming rejection will undermine the credibility of international efforts to address climate change and simultaneously provide a convenient scapegoat for the multi-decade failure of the United Nations’ climate-policy process to do very much about it. But the impending U.S. pullout will also give the 77 low-income and lower-middle-income nations—which account for almost half the global population—the opportunity to abandon a process that has clearly not served them and, indeed, has often justified their continuing impoverishment.
Poor countries dutifully show up at the United Nations’ annual COP summits. Climate action is often justified in their name because the global poor are far more vulnerable to climate extremes than the rich. But not only have rich countries failed to deliver, they also now routinely use the specter of catastrophic climate change to deny poor countries the energy technology, infrastructure, and development aid they critically need to escape poverty.
At every year’s COP, poor countries ostensibly have an equal voice in a process that has demonstrably failed to cut—or even cap—global emissions. The price for this has been to legitimize Western policies, such as banning development finance for all fossil fuel infrastructure, that keep the global south poor and thus vulnerable to climate impacts. It’s not worth it.
Last November, the latest COP in Baku, Azerbaijan, ended in predictable acrimony. Rich countries reluctantly agreed to provide $300 billion a year in climate finance, far less than the $1.3 trillion requested. Poor countries condemned the amount as a pittance, massively out of line with the needs of the global poor. “It’s a betrayal of both people and planet, by wealthy countries who claim to take climate change seriously,” said Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, a Kenya-based climate and energy think tank.
For any regular COP observer, the disappointing outcome and subsequent condemnations were all too familiar. In 2021, after COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, Adow branded the summit as “a triumph of diplomacy over real substance” whose outcome “contains the priorities of the rich world.” A decade earlier, after COP16 in Cancun, Mexico, the Bolivian government issued a statement, calling the negotiation “a victory for the rich nations who bullied and cajoled other nations into accepting a deal on their terms.”
From its origins in the early 1990s, the promise of the U.N. climate process for poor countries was that rich countries would cut their emissions first, fastest, and deepest, as well as underwrite the cost of mitigation and adaptation in poor countries. But few of these promises have ever been met.
Even worse, the funds offered by rich countries almost never actually materialize. It took until 2022 for rich countries to barely meet a promise made in 2009 to provide $100 billion in climate finance per year. To pay for it, rich countries and donor agencies have drained resources from development projects with proven benefits. CARE International, a global nongovernmental organization, estimated that 52 percent of climate finance provided by 23 rich countries between 2011 and 2020 was money taken from programs focused on health, education, and women’s rights. Worse, the effectiveness of projects classified as climate finance is dubious at best. Rich countries have used climate money to fund rainforest-themed movies, a coal plant, and a chain of chocolate shops.
All of this begs the question: Might the exit of the world’s most powerful country from an obviously failed global climate-policy process turn out to be a good thing for the world’s poor countries? Should they also pull out of the process?
To begin answering this question, it’s necessary to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth: Global climate policy and the mechanisms to pursue it reflect Western priorities, not those of the global south. Unsurprisingly, people who actually live in poor countries have very different views than their rich-world brethren. When the World Bank conducted a survey for its 2024 fiscal year and asked what issues it should prioritize in its work, respondents in 17 African nations ranked climate change only 11th, behind food security, education, health, energy, and jobs. Other important issues that ranked ahead of climate included water and sanitation, public sector governance, and private sector development.
Despite this vast gap in priorities, the Western view of climate change as the greatest existential threat to humanity requires that reducing carbon emissions be everyone’s top priority, no matter their level of poverty or energy consumption. Impoverished African countries that cumulatively account for 0.55 percent of global emissions have been told, for example, that they cannot exploit their natural gas reserves; instead, they must spend valuable resources preparing net-zero targets. At the World Bank and International Monetary Fund’s annual joint meeting in Washington in October, government officials from São Tomé and Príncipe, a small island state that only escaped least-developed status in 2024 (and whose 230,000 people emit only one-20th the amount of carbon per capita that Americans do) were required to present a decarbonization plan—as if this had any impact on climate change and as if these officials did not have more urgent uses for their time. “That all the wealthy donor agencies seem to think this is all fine and normal is, frankly, obscene,” Todd Moss, founder and executive director of Energy for Growth Hub, wrote on Substack.
That poor countries are forced to spend so much time and money on what, for them, is a low priority is the effect of what development sector veterans call the “donor dance.” With so much Western aid now tied to climate goals, poor-country officials have little choice but to jump through net-zero hoops if they want to get any money at all.
As a result of catering to Western priorities, poor countries are now expected to make do with intermittent wind and solar power—a poor option for the rapid growth in energy supplies and infrastructure they need to industrialize, raise agricultural productivity, and build modern housing and transportation infrastructure. More reliable natural gas is off limits, hydropower has become extremely difficult to finance due to environmental rules, and nuclear energy has also been banned by many of the largest development funders.
Naturally, the rules are different for rich countries. Even as they block the financing of fossil-fuel projects in the developing world, their own consumption of oil, gas, and coal has not suffered at all. In the United States, oil and gas production is at or near all-time highs; another 7.7 gigawatts will be brought online in 2025. Supposedly green Germany is the world’s third-largest producer of lignite, the dirtiest form of coal. Britain is issuing drilling licenses for Rosebank, a new oil field in the North Sea that’s estimated to provide around 500 million barrels of oil in its lifetime. As countries in Europe and North America face voter backlash over rising energy costs, they have relaxed their net-zero goals by moving them to the future. Many Western companies are backing away from their climate targets, as well.
“Energy austerity for thee but not for me” has been a reliable feature of global climate politics as practiced by Western political leaders. They have made a habit of appeasing domestic green constituencies that are unhappy with the lack of progress at home by imposing draconian restrictions on the pittance of development finance that they offer to poor countries abroad.
Development finance agencies have been more than willing to disregard the wishes of the poor to cater to their political bosses and burnish their resumes. A senior administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development proudly boasts on her LinkedIn page that she has been working “to turn the largest government development agency in the world into a ‘climate agency’ in which our $30 billion + budget is informed and in some cases driven by the climate crisis.” In its search for relevance in Washington and Brussels, the World Bank has largely set aside its core mission of reducing poverty. It has committed 45 percent of its total lending for the 2025 fiscal year to climate, skewing away from projects with an established track record in education, health, and economic development toward a portfolio of unknown quality and outcome.
Regardless of how you feel about Trump, his return might just provide an opportunity to end the toxic dependency that has developed between rich and poor countries on climate policy. If the Paris Agreement and COP process fracture, a window could open for poor countries to pursue their own priorities again—and stop their donor dance of following rich-country priorities in hopes of extracting more cash.
Last year, the world got a glimpse of what it might mean if African countries reassert their agency in economic development. A group of 18 African states announced that they sought $5 billion to launch a multilateral energy bank that would finance a wide range of energy sources, including fossil fuel extraction and infrastructure. These countries are not climate change deniers, but they recognize that various types of energy will be needed until better alternatives to current wind and solar technology come around. In particular, fossil fuels are still needed to produce cement, steel, and fertilizer, as well as for transportation and cooling. By providing a reliable backup source of electricity, these investments—especially in natural gas—could even increase the potential for wind and solar. Some African governments, including Ghana’s, have also expressed interest in nuclear energy as a clean and reliable alternative.
Rich countries have been unable to devise—let alone finance—a clean development path for the developing world. Trump pulling out of the Paris Agreement will only be the final nail in the coffin of a failed process. With any luck, it will also be the final nail in the coffin of Western climate justice discourse, which, in the name of equity for the global south, advocates for policies that keep countries poor and non-resilient to the impacts of climate change.
What the evidence over the last several decades suggests is that rich countries’ commitments to underwrite the cost of leapfrogging fossil fuels and adapting to climate change in poor countries have been entirely empty. The notion that international climate efforts would be a net positive for the social and economic development aspirations of poor countries has been a mirage. On the contrary, climate efforts have arguably set those aspirations back.
There is no need for poor countries to wait. While Western donors fret over whether investing in roads is “green,” China has been more than willing to help poor countries build urgently needed infrastructure—as have India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. It is up to poor countries to seize the moment and return to their own priorities with investments in energy, agriculture, infrastructure, and jobs. Asserting their own agency is by far the best path to alleviating poverty, generating economic growth, and building society-wide resilience to a warming climate.
The post Trump Is Quitting the Paris Agreement. Poor Countries Should, Too. appeared first on Foreign Policy.
