The age of Trump

So, Donald Trump did the expected. I watched from millions of miles away in the dead of the night, Trump signing with great flourish the executive order to take his country out of the Paris Agreement on climate change. “We will save trillions,” he said to the cheering red cap-adorned crowds. What does this mean for the global fight against climate change?

For many reasons, the time is different from Trump 1.0 in 2017. One, he is much more belligerent against all things green. I will explain this later. It is also a time when climate change catastrophe is showing up everywhere. On the day of his swearing in, the entire event had to be moved inside because of an intense cold wave. The cold blast has to do with the fact that because of climate change, the Polar vortex—winds that circulate over the Arctic—has become more unstable and has hit the west coast of the US. Even as Trump takes office, the homes of the rich and famous in Los Angeles have been burnt to the ground with deadly fires, driven by ferocious winds.

There may have been incompetence in the handling of the fire, but it is a fact that the rain has been variable and has led to drying up of the region, turning the forests into a tinderbox. With such devastations hitting virtually every region and every class of people in the world, it is hard to be a climate denier. But he is. And he has been voted in by the majority in his country on this position. In fact, his closest adviser Elon Musk, the electric car magnate, was standing next to him when he said in his inaugural address that he intends to “end the Green New Deal and revoke the electric vehicle mandate”.

Climate change is now “woke” politics in his lexicon. But there is more to this bellicosity—it is about the fossil fuel and the manufacturing that he wants his country to return to. He needs the complete rejection of the idea of climate change so that “drill, baby, drill” has no opposition. Trump wants the US gas to head to the shores across the world to counter any clean energy transition plans. He has even said that if Europe wants to avoid higher tariffs then they need to buy US gas.

Similarly, the move back to the internal combustion engine vehicle is because his country has domestic advantage in the technology and manufacturing, and also because the Chinese have dominance in the electric vehicle and the supply chains that operate around it. This is about trade and the world order that he believes USA must lead. Climate change is an inconvenient footnote in this historical battle for global supremacy.

So, what does this mean for climate change? A lot. And this cannot be disguised in sweet nothings. First, the US is a massive contributor to the stock of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that are forcing temperatures to rise. It has a mega historical footprint—it is responsible for a fifth already in the atmosphere—and is the world’s second largest annual GHG polluter, behind China. Under Joe Biden, the US government had pledged to reduce its emissions by 50-52 per cent below the 2005 levels by 2030, and 61-66 per cent by 2035. Now, this is off the table. This means the US will continue to emit more and more—enough to tip the world over to cascading temperature rise and risks.

This is not to say that the US under Biden was on track. In fact, US emissions have only marginally reduced in the past few years; but there was a promise and commitment to do more. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) delivered investment to make the green deal possible. There were mandates to move to renewable power; to electric mobility. Now Trump (all in a matter of two days) has declared a national energy emergency; revoked restrictions on new drilling; suspended offshore wind leasing; halted disbursement under IRA and signed an order to end electric vehicle subsidies.

Second, this time it is about more emissions. Till now, it was assumed that the US had passed its emission peak in 2005 and emissions would naturally reduce as populations and consumption stabilised. But now, Trump is promising a return of manufacturing jobs, this will add to emissions. Then there is the growth of Artificial Intelligence—data centres, it is estimated, will greatly add to energy consumption in the country. And this energy will be mostly from burning natural gas—a fossil fuel. Third, Trump is bad news because of the signals his actions will send to other governments, already reluctant to do more to reduce emissions. It will now be easier to be locked into the fossil fuel economies of the world.

The only silver lining, if you can call it that, is that climate change impacts are not going to go away. It is in the interest of all countries to take actions so that we can avoid the worst devastations of growing extreme events. We have no other Planet to move to and there is no Plan B. We must stay on course. How will we do that in the age of Trump? This is what we must continue to discuss. DTE

The writer is the Director-General of CSE and editor of DownToEarth. Views expressed are personal