Since Donald Trump moved into the White House for his second term as president in January 2025, you’d be forgiven for thinking the US has abandoned all action to tackle climate change and is working aggressively to undermine the efforts of other countries towards that end.This week, at the Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington DC, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent cast doubt on the scientific consensus around global warming and pressured the two institutions to reverse what he called their “mission creep” and “myopic focus” on climate.But this hostile rhetoric from the Trump administration and its withdrawal from the UN climate regime – coupled with its support for fossil fuels – doesn’t tell the whole story of what’s happening in the US, according to Lou Leonard, the first dean of the School of Climate, Environment, and Society at Clark University.At the state, city and community level, as well as in business and higher education, efforts are resolutely continuing to reduce planet-heating emissions, boost clean energy and adapt to climate shocks, Leonard, an environmental lawyer, told Climate Home News in an interview from Massachusetts.Thanks to impetus from coalitions such as America Is All In – whose predecessor group he helped launch – the US can still make significant progress towards its 2035 goals to cut emissions, research shows. Leonard, who worked as senior vice president for climate and energy at the World Wildlife Fund for over a decade, explains how US climate action and the Paris Agreement can survive Trump’s wrecking ball.Q: Has the effect of the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine global climate action and the UN climate process been worse than you expected? A: A thing that is striking to me, looking at the decade of the Paris Agreement… is that over the course of that decade, the United States had a hostile sort of leadership in Washington, and the agreement has endured.And it has endured despite the United States, not because of the United States – at least from a federal standpoint. The US was really important in the formation stage but has not been as vital to the endurance of the agreement.Q: Is it not fair to say though that the current US abandonment of the UN climate process could reduce the impact and influence of the Paris Agreement?A: The nature of an international cooperative framework means that the aggregate ambition is as strong as the countries that make up it, right? I’m not saying that, in the dream scenario where every country was in a really aggressively positive place that we would not get more out of the international framework. There’s no question that that’s true.I think it’s just when we’re thinking about the singular role of one country – even the United States – there’s much more in play here than that theory of how things were going to work; the centrality of the United States to all this, especially at the Washington level. I think that turned out to be wrong – at least in the longest sweep of the progress that we’ve made.Fossil Free Zones can be on-ramps to the clean energy transitionI think the reason why what’s happening in Washington didn’t have as great an impact as it might have in the rest of the world is because the story of what’s happening in the United States is not limited to what’s happening in Washington.And that’s the second part – which is the things that sometimes frustrate people about the American political system – the sharing of power and the federal system, and all of those things which were intentionally built into the US system.In these moments, that structure has helped create a reality… and then the rest of the world can see for itself that there’s all these efforts through America Is All In and in other places to bring those actors and that leadership and analysis of the impact of that effort to the rest of the world. I think that that has been an important part of the story of why the Paris Agreement has endured.