Marco Rubio and the State Department have moved to eliminate the Office of Global Change, according to reporting from Politico on Thursday evening. That office is “responsible for implementing and managing U.S. international policy on climate change,” and representing the US at international negotiations like those at the UN COP climate conferences each year. Add this to the “not surprising, but still shocking” pile.
A reasonable approximation of a Trump Doctrine is that all negotiated interactions with other countries hurt the US somehow, and so we shouldn’t do them. “This office — which supported the efforts of previous Administrations to hobble the United States [emphasis added] through participation in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) [you’re missing a third C but okay] and other agreements purporting to limit [or] prevent climate change, is unnecessary,” a State Department spokesperson said, according to Politico.
There is no easily articulated description of what that “hobbling” actually looks like or means, of course. Participating in the COPs — this year’s COP30 will be held in Brazil in November — doesn’t somehow cost the US meaningful amounts of money, and in fact helps maintain its leadership position in global affairs. As one insider told Politico, the move is “strategically fucking dumb when it comes to China” — the world’s biggest emitter recently announced its intention to basically do the opposite of Trump’s climate moves and submit a Nationally Determined Contribution under the Paris Agreement that for the first time will cover all economic sectors and all greenhouse gases. The US backing off what most countries consider among the most critical areas of international cooperation leaves an obvious leadership void, and an obvious candidate to fill it.
And all that’s before we even get into the clear economic benefit to actually reining in climate change — as the Office of Global Change’s own website says (for the moment), “U.S. climate diplomacy supports sustainable economic growth, energy security, and a healthy planet.”
The Office, whose shuttering is apparently part of a massive and absurd State Department restructuring with unclear timing, also oversees US participation in other international negotiations outside of the UNFCCC. Those include talks surrounding the International Civil Aviation Organization and the International Maritime Organization, among others — again, maybe the sort of talks a country serious about not tanking its entire economy might be interested in keeping a toe or two in.
The overarching climate policy of the administration is that nothing is happening that warrants attention, and if anything is happening it would cost too much to do anything about it, and in fact the solution is to dig up and burn more of the stuff that isn’t actually a problem. It doesn’t hang together all that well but hey, at least its an ethos.
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