US President-elect Donald Trump on election night in West Palm Beach, Florida. Photo / Doug Mills, the New York Times
The fight against climate change has taken a body blow with the election of Donald Trump, who calls global warming a “scam” and has promised to erase US federal efforts to reduce the pollution that is heating the planet.
Trump told a jubilant crowd last week that the United States, which signed a global agreement last year to transition away from fossil fuels, will instead amp up oil production even beyond current record levels.
“We have more liquid gold than any country in the world,” said the US President-elect, who won with substantial financial support from the oil and gas industry. “More than Saudi Arabia. We have more than Russia.”
Trump’s zeal to repeal the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate law that is pouring more than US$390 billion ($658 billion) into electric vehicles, batteries and other clean energy technology, will quickly face a political test.
Roughly 80% of the money spent has flowed to Republican congressional districts, where lawmakers and business leaders want to protect that investment and the jobs they bring.
And voters in some states approved policies to fight climate change, setting up tension between states that want to accelerate climate action and an incoming federal administration that intends to slow it down.
In Washington state, voters upheld an ambitious new law to force polluters to cap their fossil fuel emissions. In California, voters backed a ballot initiative to create a US$10b ($16b) “climate bond” for climate and environmental projects.
“No matter what Trump may say, the shift to clean energy is unstoppable, and our country is not turning back,” said Gina McCarthy, President Joe Biden’s former climate adviser who now helps lead America Is All In, a coalition of elected leaders, community groups and businesses promoting climate policies. She called any attempt to overturn the Inflation Reduction Act “a fool’s errand”.
Former Vice-President Al Gore urged climate advocates to keep fighting. “We know the line to solutions is never straight or easy. But we have won major victories in tackling the climate crisis and reducing climate pollution in our country, and we will again.”
States are now likely to become a bulwark against federal efforts to undo climate policy. “The locus of climate action is going to shift to the states,” said Martin Lockman, a fellow at the Sabin Centre for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.
“Unless there is a complete reversal of the Inflation Reduction Act, this is something where climate issues, even in red states where they won’t say the word ‘climate’, the impact on the ground is undeniable.”
Trump’s election comes at a crucial moment in the global effort to fight climate change.
Scientists say that by 2030, major economies must reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 50% from 2005 levels to avoid tipping into a world wracked by far more devastating impacts of warming, including famine, displacement, drought, deaths from extreme heat and storms.
Under Biden’s policies, the US was on track to cut roughly 40% of its emissions by that date. Trump’s likely policies to encourage more drilling and burning of oil and gas would add 4 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere, according to a study by Carbon Brief, a climate analysis site.
The President-elect has taken particular relish in describing how he plans to “kill” the Biden administration’s largest climate rule, which is designed to accelerate Americans’ transition away from polluting petrol-powered cars and into electric vehicles.
He also intends to reverse another powerful regulation aimed at reducing emissions from power plants, and other rules that protect endangered species and limit other kinds of air and water pollution.
The oil and gas industry called the election a clear rejection of Biden’s climate policies and an embrace of an energy policy that centres on fossil fuels. “Our long national nightmare with the Green New Deal is finally over because energy was on the ballot in 2024, and energy won,” Daniel Turner, executive director for Power the Future, a fossil fuel advocacy group, said in a statement.
“Let these results serve as a warning to any other politician who feels the green agenda is more important than families,” he said.
With Republicans getting full control of Congress, it increases the chances that Trump could jettison parts of the Inflation Reduction Act – things like tax credits for consumers to buy electric vehicles, electric heat pumps and other technology that reduces greenhouse gases.
Thomas Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, a conservative research group focused on energy, said Trump has a mandate to prioritise fossil fuels. “The decisiveness of the victory gives President Trump the ability to really be aggressive in terms of what he wants to achieve,” he said.
During his first term in his office, Trump’s administration rolled back more than 100 major environmental rules and regulations, including every major Obama-era climate regulation. He withdrew the US from the 2015 Paris climate accord, under which 195 nations had committed to work together to reduce planet-warming fossil fuel pollution.
Biden spent four years restoring, expanding and strengthening those protections. He rejoined the Paris Agreement and pledged to the rest of the world that the US, the world’s largest fossil fuel polluter historically, would be a reliable leader in the effort to tackle climate change.
The Inflation Reduction Act was the nation’s first law to significantly reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. Much of that legacy could soon be shredded.
“We’re already not doing enough to meet the targets to avoid dangerous climate change, and we’re already seeing the consequences worldwide – more intense heatwaves that kill people, more intense rainstorms of the kind we saw in Spain, more intense hurricanes,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University.
“If Trump blows up Biden’s climate change regime, and we don’t get global climate under control, the prospect of a robust economic future with growth and economic opportunity for everyone – all of that shrivels away and becomes less and less likely,” he said.
Mandy Gunasekara, who served as chief of staff to the Environmental Protection Agency administrator during the first Trump administration, said career employees should “be prepared for structural changes” at the agency. “If there’s offices that don’t tangibly support the agency’s mission, then they’re going to be heavily scrutinised as to whether it makes sense to keep them functioning and operational.”
As for tackling climate change, which has been a priority for the EPA under the Biden administration, Gunasekara said: “It’s not going to be a source of hyperbole, but it will likely be one of many environmental issues the agency is working to reasonably address”.
Delegations are in Baku, Azerbaijan, for the annual United Nations climate summit, called COP29.
The Biden administration is widely expected to try to assure the rest of the world that states and local governments in the US will continue the work of slashing emissions, even if the federal government turns away.
As he did during his first term, Trump is expected to withdraw the US from the 2015 Paris climate agreement. His allies are exploring whether Trump could also remove the country from the underlying treaty that allows America to take part in global climate negotiations. That could make it harder for a future president to rejoin the accord as it may require Senate approval.
Laurence Tubiana, France’s former climate ambassador and one of the architects of the Paris agreement, insisted that the Paris accord “is stronger than any single country’s policies”. She said that in the nine years since the agreement was signed, many nations have heavily invested in solar, wind, nuclear, and other non-carbon forms of energy.
There is economic momentum behind renewable power, she said, and by spurning it, the US would risk forfeiting the future. “Europe now has the responsibility and opportunity to step up and lead,” she said.
Gunasekara said she doubted that Trump would bother sending a statement to the UN summit this year. “It’s not a priority of the [President-elect] and his team right now.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Coral Davenport and Lisa Friedman
© 2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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