Climate campaigners are urging the EU to step into the “leadership void” left by the US.
As soon as US President Donald Trump was inaugurated, he began tearing up climate rules and regulations.
He vowed to drill more oil and gas – despite record production in the US last year – to remove funding for EV chargers, leave the Paris Agreement, stop Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act investments, put a pause on wind power and far more.
Such sweeping changes to the world’s biggest economy are unlikely to stay within the country’s borders. Trump’s deregulation drive also emboldens those who want their own governments to wind back the green agenda.
From pressure to import more liquified natural gas (LNG) to an absence of global leadership in climate negotiations, the European Union is unlikely to escape the new US president’s sphere of influence.
Trump is causing a climate leadership vacuum
One of the biggest global impacts – and probably the biggest climate headline – to come out of Trump’s first few days as President was the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. It joins Iran, Libya and Yemen as the only UN member states not committed to the deal.
EU leaders at Davos last week were quick to signal their continued support of the agreement. Von der Leyen said it was the “best hope for all humanity”. German economy minister Robert Habeck called the exit a “fatal signal to the world”.
“There is a leadership void caused by the United States being more isolationist and obviously that’s not just in the climate,” says James Trinder, international climate policy coordinator at CAN Europe.
He adds that we were already in a place where the US positioning was more cautious and self-interested than other developed countries in negotiations.
Many of Trump’s sweeping anti-climate orders are against the law or face a legal fight before implementation.
Because of this, less than enthusiastic cooperation from the US may not have as big an impact as you think. If anything, it officially opens the door for other more ambitious countries to take the reins.
Will the EU step up as a climate action leader?
Momentum for action at this year’s annual climate talks, COP30, is already building and other nations, including host country Brazil, are stepping up to the plate. China has become one of the biggest renewable energy developers in the world. The UK too is eyeing the title of global climate leader.
In the absence of the US’s contribution, Trinder adds, it becomes ever more important for other global leaders to scale up their actions – and that includes the EU.
From helping ensure a just energy transition for developing countries to more funding for vulnerable nations facing devastating climate impacts, there’s plenty that needs to be done.
“Trumpism’s return is yet another firm invitation to the EU to reconsider how it is deploying its development policies, its trade policies and the nature of its partnerships in a multipolar world and in a world where the poles are changing,” Trinder says.
He also hopes that the ease with which billionaires and big business have been able to influence the politics of the US will bring a growing awareness of the need for systemic change.
Will the EU buy more US gas?
In November last year, just as Trump was elected, EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen suggested: “We still get a lot of LNG from Russia and why not replace it with US LNG, which is cheaper for us and brings down our energy prices?”
Some EU policymakers are already clinging to the idea that buying more US gas could help avoid tariffs – something Trump has hinted at.
“That obviously is very shortsighted and very economically only driven,” says Esther Bollendorff, CAN Europe’s senior EU gas policy coordinator. For a number of reasons aside from climate change, it doesn’t make sense for the bloc.
She points out that we now have several reports on how gas demand has changed since the energy crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Between August 2022 and March 2024, LNG demand decreased by 18 per cent. Import terminals across Germany, France and Spain have been left underutilised in recent months.
It is now at the point where analysis from the EU’s Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER) predicts demand will have peaked in 2024 due to ambitious decarbonisation goals from the bloc.
“Very clearly there is a downward trend,” Bollendorff explains. “Member states introduced their gas demand reduction measures and they implemented those measures really successfully.”
On top of this, comfortable levels of storage and Norwegian supplies saw Europe reduce its LNG imports by almost 25 per cent in 2024. Building more infrastructure so that more US gas can be imported into the EU, therefore, would leave both with potentially stranded assets.
“We don’t need that gas and we have economic reasons for that,” Bollendorf stresses.
Is the EU’s energy transition now unstoppable?
The flipside of decreased LNG demand is the ever-increasing growth of renewable energy in the EU.
As Trump suspended leases for offshore and onshore wind projects, figures from Ember showed that renewables made up nearly half of the EU’s electricity generation in 2024. For the first time ever, solar power overtook coal in the bloc’s energy mix.
With the global energy transition now well underway, the US backpedal on renewables has the potential for hugely damaging economic impacts with spillover effects elsewhere in the world.
Last week, Trump told the UK to “get rid of windmills” and re-open the North Sea for oil and gas. With renewable energy projects boosting the British economy and helping create new jobs, the government has said its priority is still a just transition away from unstable fossil fuel markets.
Shares in European wind power companies fell the day after Trump issued his executive order to suspend wind power projects. Denmark’s Orsted, the key player in a project to build the largest US offshore wind farm off the country’s northeast coast, took one of the biggest hits.
A majority of renewable energy giants, however, have shrugged off his policies. Siemens Energy, one of the world’s biggest renewables players, is instead focusing its efforts on Europe, where 80 per cent of the firm’s wind market is.
Spanish renewables giant Iberdrola told CNBC last week that the transition away from fossil fuels was now “absolutely unstoppable”. With regulation mostly made at the state level, it believes its business in the US won’t be severely affected.
In Europe, it’s a similar story, with member states ensuring that the transition is already well underway.
“There’s been too much legislation put into place over the last five, but also 10, 15 years and more, to put a transition in motion,” Bollendorff says.
There now needs to be renewed strength in defending this legislation, with the first few months of the new Commission and Parliament having seen attacks on some of it.
The EU will have to think very carefully about how to deal with the “alarming political messages” coming from the US, Bollendorff adds, but urges caution from the bloc.
“We certainly should not take any short-sighted decisions around increasing, for instance, LNG imports from the US, which both economically and from the climate perspective are very damaging.”
