File:Report on Trump's Climate Rollbacks.jpeg

Slowdown in Downward Greenhouse Gas Emissions

• https://rhg.com/research/taking-stock-2025/

Executive summary

The first seven months of the second Trump administration and 119th Congress have seen the most abrupt shift in energy and climate policy in recent memory.

After the Biden administration adopted meaningful policies to drive decarbonization, Congress and the White House are now enacting a policy regime that is openly hostile to wind, solar, and electric vehicles and seeks to promote increased fossil fuel production and use.

In this year’s Taking Stock report—Rhodium Group’s annual independent outlook of the evolution of the US energy system and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions under current policy—we find the US is on track to reduce GHG emissions by 26-41% in 2040 relative to 2005 levels. On the way to 2040, we estimate GHG emissions levels will decline 26-35% in 2035, a meaningful shift from our 2024 report, which showed a steeper decline of 38-56% by that point. Emissions outcomes vary due to a range of expectations for economic growth, future fossil fuel prices, and clean energy cost and performance trends, which we combine to create low, mid, and high emissions scenarios. In the high emissions scenario, the most pessimistic outlook on decarbonization, the pace of decarbonization more than halves through 2040, with annual average GHG reductions of 0.4% from 2025 through 2040 compared to 1.1% from 2005 through 2024. In the mid and low emissions scenarios, the pace of decarbonization accelerates instead, with annual average reductions of 1.4% and 1.9% through 2040, respectively, representing a 22% and 70% acceleration, compared with the pace of the last two decades.

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