Month: January 2026

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

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

Americans had just seen a year of widespread flooding from extreme weather across the U.S. Deadly wildfires had burned thousands of homes in the nation’s second-largest metro area, and 2025 had been the second- or third-hottest year globally on record. Insurers are no longer willing to insure homes in many areas of the country because of the rising risks, and they are raising prices in many others.

For decades, evidence has shown that increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, largely from burning fossil fuels, are raising global temperatures and influencing sea level rise, storms and wildfires.

The climate treaty – the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – 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 growing list of moves by the admnistration to dismantle 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 stop collecting and reporting corporate greenhouse gas emissions data required under the treaty. It canceled U.S. scientists’ involvement in international research. One of Trump’s first acts of his second term was to start the process of pulling the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement. 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 ratified by the U.S. Senate in October 1992 and signed by President George H.W. Bush.

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 U.S. intervention in Venezuela, renewed threats to seize Greenland, persistent high prices, immigration arrests, ICE and Border Patrol shootings, the Epstein files and the fight over ending health care subsidies, 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 rescind its 2009 Endangerment Finding, 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 could be finalized soon – the EPA sent its final draft rule to the White House for review in early January 2026. And the Department of Energy released a misinformed climate assessment authored by five handpicked climate skeptics.

Both moves drew condemnation from scientists, but that news was quickly overwhelmed by concern about a government shutdown and continuing science funding cuts and layoffs.

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 weaken vehicle emissions standards on Dec. 3. Instead of raising the industry average for cars and light trucks vehicles to 50 miles per gallon by 2031, as planned, the standard would rise to about 34.5 miles per gallon by 2031.

• On Dec. 11, the U.S. joined Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia to block part of a U.N. environment report 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 pausing the leases of five East Coast offshore wind farms.

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

• The EPA rewrote its webpage about the causes of climate change to remove human influences, including burning fossil fuels – the primary cause of global warming. That occurred on Dec. 5.

• On Dec. 17, Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, announced plans to shut down the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a world-recognized leader in earth system science.

• A week later, the administration invited the authors of the discredited Department of Energy climate report 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 reestablished itself 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 dismantling certain forecasting and warning systems and tearing apart programs that helped Americans recover from disasters, including targeting the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

To my mind, as a scholar of both environmental studies and economics, 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 “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” 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’ promises to protect the planet 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 China has been gaining influence since Trump returned to the presidency.

Gary W. Yohe does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Donald Trump has handed Marco Rubio the keys to Venezuela. It could make or break the secretary of State should he run for president in 2028.

Rubio has quickly emerged as the administration’s point person on Venezuela, the man standing behind the president as he declared “we’re going to run the country.” Rubio plastered his face across the Sunday news shows to explain the operation that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, then went on in the days after to defend it in briefings to Congress.

Photoshopped memes are now circulating of Rubio sporting a sash with the national colors of Venezuela, like those the country’s presidents wear. Rubio is in on the joke, taking to X on Thursday to humorously knock down “rumors” that he was “a candidate for the currently vacant HC and GM positions with the Miami Dolphins.”

But it’s the American presidency that could be at stake.

“Venezuela could make him president — or ensure that he never is,” said Mark McKinnon, a longtime political adviser and former aide to President George W. Bush.

POLITICO reported in November that Rubio privately had said that he’d back JD Vance for president if he runs in 2028, which Rubio publicly confirmed to Vanity Fair.

“If JD Vance runs for president, he’s going to be our nominee, and I’ll be one of the first people to support him,” Rubio told Vanity Fair, a line his aides pointed POLITICO to when asked for comment for this story.

Few political strategists, however, are buying that line, and Rubio has changed his mind on not running for office before.

“He’s quietly stacking internal GOP capital, from what I hear from people in my circles within the Republican Party,” said Buzz Jacobs, senior adviser on Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign. “As of today, could Marco Rubio enter the presidential race and be very competitive, even against the vice president? I think the answer is undeniably yes.”

Rubio has spent much of his career railing against Venezuela’s socialist dictatorship, a close ally of the regime in Cuba, his parents’ homeland.

“Their experience with the evils of socialism and communism is in his DNA,” said Cesar Conda, Rubio’s first Senate chief of staff. “It guides his world view.”

Rubio ran against Trump for the presidency in 2016; he called Trump a “con artist.” But since Trump won and effectively commandeered the Republican Party, Rubio has adjusted many of his policy positions and his rhetoric. He has surrounded himself with America First staffers and advisers who help push forward the Trump administration’s muscular foreign policy.

Trump shortlisted him for the vice presidency in 2024, but Rubio ended up at the State Department instead. To the surprise of many political observers, Rubio fell into lockstep with Trump on issues many thought would be a red line for him. He enthusiastically shut down pathways for refugees and ended funding for democracy and human rights programs, causes he once championed. Taking such steps helped him stay in Trump’s good graces, enough so that the president named him acting national security adviser as well.

Trump has often cozied up to autocrats, but he has never liked Maduro. In recent days, he made it clear he sees Venezuela as a source of oil and other natural resources for the U.S. to exploit. Rubio has long painted Maduro as a thug who thwarted democracy.

For much of this year, both men pushed the idea that Maduro had to be dealt with, alleging he led a drug cartel killing Americans with its products. They got their wish: Maduro is now in U.S. custody in New York.

But the South American country’s fate is far from clear. Many of Maduro’s cronies remain in power, even though Trump insists that they will do what the U.S. demands. Trump told the New York Times this week that the U.S. could be running Venezuela for years.

“I understand that in this cycle and society we now live in, everyone wants instant outcomes. They want it to happen overnight,” Rubio told reporters after briefing the Senate Wednesday. “It’s not going to work that way.”

Members of Congress were not notified of the Maduro operation in advance, and many are fuming about what they say is a continued lack of transparency.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said Rubio’s briefing “raised more questions than it answered.”

“It’s time to let the public in on this, and let the public see what’s at stake,” said Kaine, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Venezuela is unlikely to be a quick or easy fix. The country is roughly twice the size of California, with a shattered economy, a varied landscape, and many armed groups in a population of 30 million. The Maduro cronies left behind have their own internal rivalries, and some control military forces.

Despite Trump and Rubio’s warnings to the remaining members of the regime to fall in line and capitulate to U.S. demands, it’s possible the Venezuelan state could collapse.

And it may not end with Venezuela: Rubio and Trump are warning other countries to get in line with what the U.S. wants from them, including Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela.

“If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I would be concerned, at least a little bit,” Rubio said in a Saturday press conference just hours after the Venezuela operation.

The potential chaos ahead could leave Rubio on the outs with key GOP voting blocs. Those include anti-interventionist conservatives, who remain wary of Rubio’s neoconservative instincts, and Republican Latino voters, especially in Florida, some who desperately want regime change in the nations their families fled and others who are frustrated by the region’s instability.

Then, of course, there’s the general public, a good chunk of whom want the U.S. to avoid another repeat of Iraq and Afghanistan. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted after the raid, 72 percent of Americans are concerned the U.S. will get “too involved” in Venezuela.

As Rubio has become the face of the effort, Vance, a potential rival in 2028, has largely kept away from it. He was not at the makeshift Mar-a-Lago situation room while the raid unfolded on Saturday, a fact his spokesperson attributed to concern “a late-night motorcade movement … may tip off the Venezuelans.” Vance was “deeply integrated in the process and planning of the Venezuela strikes and Maduro’s arrest,” the spokesperson said.

Rubio also has to consider some practical matters: If he wants to run for president, he will need to raise money, build a campaign infrastructure and take all the other steps needed before the GOP primary kicks into full gear.

That’s especially difficult to do while secretary of State, a position that traditionally has stayed away from the partisan domestic scene. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had been out of the Obama administration for more than a year before she publicly moved toward a presidential campaign.

Rubio would likely have to leave the administration after another year or so to have time for all the logistics, as jostling for the 2028 presidential campaign will kick off by early next year.

Most U.S. presidential elections don’t hinge on foreign policy, though candidates from John McCain back to Hubert Humphrey have been damaged by their party’s foreign adventurism. Still, the first year of Trump’s second term has been surprisingly heavy on foreign policy — and any Republican running in 2028 will likely have to grapple with the results of Trump’s bold international moves.

“The MAGA base is very loyal to Trump. It will watch if people are disrespectful to him,” said Alex Gray, a former National Security Council official during the first Trump administration.

There are also factions of the GOP — including members of the Cuban and Venezuelan diasporas — who will stand by hardline moves against the regimes there no matter what the cost. Mike Madrid, a GOP strategist, said he has heard from many Latino Republicans who are impressed by how much Trump relies on Rubio. Whenever Trump needs “an adult in the room, he seems to look towards Marco’s leadership,” Madrid said.

But Madrid and other party strategists aren’t about to start taking bets on the GOP primary yet. After all, the situation in Venezuela is just one of multiple Trump foreign policy adventures that could turn into quagmires.

For Rubio in particular, “what may look like the president knighting him as a sort of competent successor may actually, in fact, be him carrying all the weight of the unpopular actions of the president in a couple of years,” Madrid said. “There’s a greater likelihood of that than not.”

​Politics