The Unchanged Fundamentals of Climate Politics

Until late in the last decade, prominent political scientists were accusing their own discipline of mostly ignoring the problem of global climate change.Footnote ⁹ Since then, there has been something like a Cambrian explosion of political science research on climate change.Footnote ¹⁰ The literature identifies four fundamental features of climate change politics. We quickly review them to establish why climate change is unlikely to retreat from global politics despite a moment of green backlash.

First, climate change is a direct externality of industrialization that will not leave any section of society unaffected, which means it will remain a domestic politics problem regardless of the extent of international cooperation. The critical relevance of domestic politics is made clear by the “two-level game” literature of international climate politics.Footnote ¹¹ While international negotiations like the United Nation’s COP meetings grab headlines, any (national or international) promises governments make are tightly constrained by the domestic opposition that such promises engender. Constraints are also shaped and generated by domestic institutionsFootnote ¹² and social movements.Footnote ¹³ This is true of mitigation commitments but also adaptation plans, which CR emphasizes and which the literature has so far mostly neglected.Footnote ¹⁴

Second, the research suggests an understanding of climate politics as political economy all the way down, in which distributional politics plays a central role.Footnote ¹⁵ Actors concerned about climate vulnerabilities—including coastal real estate, farming, and anything that involves outdoor activity—have incentives to push for decarbonization. Some of those actors, like pension funds or homeowners, hold climate-vulnerable assets—which could take many forms, including capital, labor skills, natural resources—but other pro-climate actors see themselves as stewards, like politicians or environmental NGOs. They face opposition from those who hold climate-forcing (polluting) assets, who have strong material incentives to resist policies that support decarbonization and climate mitigation. In as much as the goal of decarbonization requires fewer fossil fuels to be consumed, it implies a historically unprecedented energy transition. Previous energy transitions have only ever increased the consumption of existing fuels; for example, the shift to oil led to more, not less, coal consumption.Footnote ¹⁶ In short, the battle between different climate politics coalitions will map onto other political economy battles and continue to intensify.

Third, climate change has now entered the level of mass politics that is hard to repress or, for that matter, push back to purely technocratic spheres. Recent research has shown that ideational politics—involving narratives, worldviews, and perceptions—provide important modifications to a purely materialist understanding of climate politics.Footnote ¹⁷ The intermingling of individual material considerations and collective social identity makes for a complex political issue both at homeFootnote ¹⁸ and internationally.Footnote ¹⁹

Fourth, the problem of unmitigated global climate change is characterized by high severity and high uncertainty. In terms of severity, the probable consequences of failing to decarbonize the global economy include increased social unrest;Footnote ²⁰ amplified civil wars;Footnote ²¹ internal and cross-border migration;Footnote ²² and food and water systems failures.Footnote ²³ Their manifestations are uncertain, though the floor for the overall magnitude of damages grows more certain over time as states and firms offer more evidence about their emissions trajectories. There is also considerable uncertainty about how to support technological change,Footnote ²⁴ how markets should value risks,Footnote ²⁵ how physical harms translate into social consequences,Footnote ²⁶ and a host of other factors related to climate mitigation and adaptation.

We see these four features as enduring aspects of climate politics. They underpin what we call the Climate Politics Dilemma, which consists of two core truths: (1) in the worst scenarios, climate change creates existential risks for our species, and even without the worst scenarios, it is likely to be highly damaging; and yet (2) the international politics of global public good provision are nationally selfish, riddled with distributional challenges down to the most local level, and routinely focused more on the crisis du jour than long-term problems. These four features, and the Climate Politics Dilemma they produce, are analytically essential to explain climate politics since the 1990s and are unlikely to change in the near term. CR fails to resolve these four features or the Dilemma, despite CR’s effort to alter the approach to climate policy and politics. That does not mean, however, that climate politics is entirely unchanging, as we discuss in the next section.

Three New Disruptive Forces for Climate Politics

Three genuinely new shifts due to the 2024 US elections make the road to address climate change much harder and a critical engagement with CR necessary. First, there are the Trump administration’s policy actions, which undermine the United States’ transition to clean energy and related technologies. In its first 100 days the Trump administration rolled back more than 140 environmental rules, started rewriting regulations that limit pollution from cars and power plants, and accelerated environmental reviews of drilling projects to just a few weeks.Footnote ²⁷ Trump also signed executive orders to ease restrictions on fossil fuel extraction and offered the fossil fuel industry an exemption from the tariffs he presented in April 2025. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed on 3 July 2025 mostly gutted the Inflation Reduction Act and significantly increases projected US greenhouse gas emissions.Footnote ²⁸ The federal government’s stop-work order in August 2025 on the mostly built Revolution Wind project, among others, indicates that further efforts to cancel or hinder renewable energy projects are likely. The United States has seen fluctuations in climate positions across the past decadesFootnote ²⁹ but never has US climate policy shifted so radically in such a short period of time.

Second, these actions coincided with an attack on the administrative state and the role of science in policymaking. Very early on the administration pushed for sweeping cuts to federal agencies on the forefront of the climate crisis, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the Department of Agriculture, and widespread firings of climate scientists and regulation experts. There have been cancellations of climate science grants, censorship of climate-related works from official contracts and documents, and suspension of funding for regional climate centers. The president’s executive orders have been challenged in court but, at a minimum, this administration puts American climate institutions and the environmentally minded civil society to a test. While some theorists have controversially suggested that autocratic institutions might be legitimate in the face of climate change,Footnote ³⁰ empirical research suggests that robust democratic institutions support environmental ambition.Footnote ³¹

Third, there are the international ripple effects of the second Trump administration. These have been heterogenous, consistent with the mixed evidence in the literature on elections’ effects on climate policymaking.Footnote ³² In some countries, far-right leaders have modeled themselves as local versions of the MAGA movement. Consequently, in places like Germany (with AfD) and the United Kingdom (Reform), far-right parties have embedded climate-skeptic positions in their core electoral agendas, putting pressure on center-right parties to do the same. At the same time, Trump’s actions have reinvigorated some center-left parties elsewhere. The Liberals in Canada and the Labour party in Australia won elections in 2025 partly based on fears of a Trump effect at home. Still, these centrist victories have not necessarily led to climate agenda: Prime Minister Mark Carney removed the consumer carbon tax two weeks before the Canadian national elections, and the Australian Labour cabinet approved a fifty-year extension of one of the largest gas projects in the world just after the elections.

The global political landscape therefore remains patchy and uncertain, and this triggers important questions for future climate politics research. The European Union sees material and soft-power opportunities of the United States retreating from climate action, but also the challenges of conducting a smooth transition as far-right parties exert power domestically.Footnote ³³ For example, Hungary has allocated foreign direct investments, including EU resources, to build a powerful EV battery manufacturing hub, but then uses its industry opportunistically, as a geopolitical weapon against Brussels. China, meanwhile, provides a model for clean energy growth, but aligning with China comes with the risks of exposure to the Chinese Communist Party’s monopoly of global supply chains. As the new Trump administration withdraws the United States from being a fulcrum of innovations around renewable energy and a participant in the climate change battle, these countries—and those in the Global South—may have to reposition themselves on climate change, either by further linking their economies to green transition, or downscaling their green energy markets.

The Pitfalls of Climate Realism

Despite the disruptive forces the new Trump administration has unleashed, climate politics is here to stay because climate change itself is unavoidable. The inter- and sub-national tensions over the responsibility for climate change outlined earlier will intensify as the impacts grow in severity and scope. To address this conundrum, CR is an attempt to find a compromise between the reality of climate change and the political opposition to decarbonization. Its three imperatives are preparing for a world that fails its climate targets, investing in market-competitive clean technology and industries, and leading efforts to avert truly catastrophic climate change. Crucially, the CFR manifesto treats as a fallacy the idea that “reducing US domestic greenhouse gas emissions can make a meaningful difference.”Footnote ³⁴

CR is only loosely related to Realism in IR.Footnote ³⁵ CR is not an explanatory theory; it is a partly descriptive, partly normative analysis of contemporary climate politics with powerful indications for policymakers. CR shares with Realism its acceptance of national self-interest as a primary driver of international behavior, its skepticism toward the capacity of international institutions to meaningfully constrain state actions, and its unflinching acknowledgment that climate governance will inevitably produce winners and losers, with some actors facing substantial costs. It appears to be more than mere a pragmatic description of the current moment because CR implicitly rests on a claim that states and other actors define, and will continue to define, their interests quite selfishly and narrowly in the face of a collective challenge like climate change. However, CR departs fundamentally from Realism in some critical respects, as we describe next.

CR offers no easy way around the four features of climate politics we identified in the second section of this essay, especially the high severity and complicated uncertainty of unmitigated climate change. The Faustian bargain CR proposes is the negative consequences of failing to meet decarbonization goals in the short- and medium-term in exchange for the potential benefit of a stronger or larger political coalition for long-term climate mitigation and adaptation. CR advocates only hint at this tradeoff without ever really engaging with its full costs, benefits, or probabilities.Footnote ³⁶ This bargain proposed by CR implies a slower mitigation trajectory that simultaneously creates (1) higher certainty about the (large) magnitude of future climate damages given current technology, but also (2) less certainty about exactly what damages would occur, what effects future technology might have, and how actors will respond to the hotter, more volatile climate of the future.

A key example of the hidden assumptions and tradeoffs imbedded in CR is the idea that some horrific consequences of climate change would be acceptable so long as it happens to unspecified Other People. CR is curiously content with the unexamined vagueness about the word catastrophe, and who exactly it affects. Worse still is CR’s assumption that the privileged “Us”—whether that is the United States, the West, or the Global North—would be able to isolate ourselves from spillover of problems and instability in the rest of the world. Given the unprecedentedness of the expected climate impacts, scholars are struggling to estimate how civil wars, human migration, and humanitarian disasters will affect the world, but the best estimates suggest high magnitude costs.Footnote ³⁷ In short, it is much easier to use the term Realism to signal tough-minded thinking than it is to come to grips with the attendant inequality, racialized harm, and high likelihood of spillover effects to wealthy countries that come with this framework.

Another weakness in CR is the unexamined uncertainty about future technologies and future political coalitions. CR places a big bet that climate “catastrophe” can be averted by developing and deploying new technologies like carbon capture and storage (CCS) or solar geoengineering, but that outcome is far from certain. Indeed, some prominent scientists are now warning that CCS is unlikely to play a major role in mitigating climate change,Footnote ³⁸ which means that it might act primarily as an expensive subsidy to the fossil fuel industry. Similarly, CR recognizes the two-level game of climate politics and is explicitly designed to “rise above” partisan disagreement but it does not examine the probability of success of building a future bipartisan political coalition in the United States or elsewhere. This view does not offer any detailed political strategy to appeal to a Republican Party or other right-wing parties that are hostile to clean energy and view climate science as exaggerated or a hoax.Footnote ³⁹

Varieties of Climate Contestation and Strategies

While CR is deeply flawed, its emergence highlights the three key topics we noted in the introduction to this essay: the political strategies of the anti-green coalition, the heterogeneity in national economic strategies, and the implications for IR.

The first of these topics is essentially about domestic politics, ripe for comparative analyses of anti-green coalitions.Footnote ⁴⁰ Scholars observe that pro- and anti-carbon coalitions now form a major cleavage in US politicsFootnote ⁴¹ and that one side pursues recarbonization rather than decarbonization.Footnote ⁴² Under what conditions, how much, and how effectively are those opposed to decarbonization prosecuting their campaign against clean energy and other green technologies? These questions deserve significantly more focus.Footnote ⁴³ Since the Biden administration’s clean energy policy efforts, the United States has experienced an upsurge in local community resistance to solar and wind energy projects. One report indicates that now roughly 20 percent of all US counties have some form of ban or restrictive ordinance against solar and/or wind energy.Footnote ⁴⁴ Moreover, anti-green politics is hardly unique to the United States. For instance, protests against energy infrastructure projects are common around the world. Scholarly work in progress suggests, for instance, that about one in eight wind projects in the Global South face opposition involving collective action like protests,Footnote ⁴⁵ but at present we still know little about the causes and consequences of such opposition.

The second topic that CR shines a new light upon is the heterogeneity in national economic strategies. The striking contrast between the United States’ and China’s national economic strategies vividly illustrates the wide range of possibilities. Remarkably, Chinese electric vehicle companies’ outward foreign direct investment surpassed domestic manufacturing investment levels ($15 billion) for the first time in 2024.Footnote ⁴⁶ Then, after Trump took office, China’s Belt and Road Initiative experienced an unprecedented surge in the first half of 2025 after years of post-COVID decline, reaching $124 billion in total engagement—the highest level ever recorded for a six-month period and exceeding the entire 2024 total.Footnote ⁴⁷ This revival encompasses record-breaking energy engagement of $42 billion, including green energy initiatives totaling $9.7 billion in wind, solar, and waste-to-energy projects. Some analysts now refer to China as an “electrostate” based on its dominance in clean energy technologies, manufacturing, and infrastructure deployment.Footnote ⁴⁸ Political scientists have mapped the ways in which oil dependence has allowed petrostates to weaponize the international order in their favor.Footnote ⁴⁹ It remains to be seen whether the electrostate strategy will allow China to exert geopolitical influence in ways that mirror, yet invert, the petroleum-based power structures of the twentieth century. Note, however, that both the United States and Chinese strategies appear to be compatible with the “Realist” label in the sense that they match each country’s national interest as perceived in a given moment—which creates indeterminacy that further undermines CR’s utility for analysis.

Any given state’s choice of national economic strategy in the face of climate change is uncertain and depends on the state’s circumstances. Scholars have usefully called attention to the variety of “strategies of green industrial policy”Footnote ⁵⁰ but paid less attention to the full range of national economic strategies that a country might adopt, including those that intensify the production or consumption of fossil fuels.Footnote ⁵¹ Multiple country-level explanatory variables are worthy of investigation, including: its natural resources; its sources of international comparative advantage; the domestic political coalition that supports its incumbent government; the state’s long-term growth model, if a coherent one exists; its political culture, ideology, and cleavages; time horizons; and its domestic political institutions.Footnote ⁵² Possibly there are multiple strategies that could maximize a state’s economic prosperity, even if they do different amounts of damage to the global climate.

The third topic is the host of IR implications of the United States’ turn away from meaningful climate mitigation and the global spread of CR. One implication is that global energy markets, and adjacent ones such as the automobile markets, which have been dominated by the OECD for roughly a century, are now being contested by China and others. In a telling May 2025 episode, China delayed approval of BYD’s Mexico EV manufacturing plant amid fears that its technology could leak to the United States—a reversal of the OECD’s concerns in the early 2000s about China stealing its industrial technology. India, Indonesia, and Turkey accounted for 75 percent of China’s exports of silicon cells in 2025, which they are then using as inputs for solar panels built by their own rapidly accelerating domestic manufacturing industries. And even the European Union is beginning to demand technology transfers from Chinese companies that seek to invest and manufacture clean technology in Europe like batteries.

Finally, a second implication of the policy emphasis on CR is the impact it would have on the liberal international order.Footnote ⁵³ In a world in which the United States retreats into a petrol-fueled economy and China pursues green tech for national goals while minimizing its international climate commitments, the European Union remains the only international pole nominally advocating for global public goods in the fashion of climate protection. Whether Europe will decide to retreat from its own climate pledges or perhaps instead forge a green partnership with China depends largely on the internal domestic coalitions with power in European institutions such as the Parliament and the Commission.Footnote ⁵⁴ It will also depend on how the rest of the world positions itself toward China and the United States. While the scenario of alignment with China seems unlikely for some Global North countries such as Japan and the United Kingdom, some US-exposed countries such as South Africa, Indonesia, Brazil, and even Canada and Australia could update their priors about which transactional partners to choose on the matters of natural resource trade and green energy markets.Footnote ⁵⁵ Further, in a feedback effect, the repositioning of middle- and small-powers countries could even create competition between China and the United States for relationships with these middle-power countries in separate spheres of interest, just as we have seen during the Cold War and European imperial periods.Footnote ⁵⁶