The second Trump administration has disrupted climate politics, turning the United States away from the clean energy and environmental policies of the Biden administration. Trump’s policy actions, along with a systematic effort to undermine the institutions of climate science, have had significant global ripple effects, including by eliciting responses from China, Europe, and elsewhere. Collectively, these shifts have amplified analysts’ interest in finding ways to reconcile the objective threat of climate change with a new era of international politics.
Largely as a consequence of Trump’s new presidency, attention is turning, inside and outside of the United States, to a family of concepts referred to as “Climate Realism” (CR). Different analysts are using different versions, but at heart, Climate Realism acknowledges the risks that climate change poses while advocating for a pullback from the type of green policies pursued by the Biden administration. Specifically, it: (1) expects the world to miss the 2015 Paris targets for climate mitigation, (2) argues that reducing US greenhouse gas emissions will not make a meaningful difference on a global scale, (3) focuses on different long-term solutions, often involving new technologies and adaptation, (4) proposes US leadership on geoengineering, and (5) contemplates coercive action toward countries with rapidly rising emissions. In the United Kingdom, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, the Bank of England, and some influential scholars are similarly rethinking the topic based on CR. In Europe, right-leaning actors see CR as gaining ground. However, this view has not come unchallenged. The American version of CR has already attracted critics who point to the absence of a plausible path to bipartisan support and the pitfalls for US diplomatic credibility of gutting domestic efforts to reduce emissions. We extend this critique more globally, substantiate it by situating the debates in existing research on climate politics, and evaluate how scholarly perspectives on CR may influence future International Relations research on climate change.