Published on
Tuesday, November 22, 2016
by Foreign Policy In Focus
Trump Can’t Hold Back the Tide of Climate Action
Market forces, state and local action, and strong social movements could blunt the impacts of a denialist White House.
byOscar Reyes

Climate scientists have been quick to condemn Trump’s election as a “disaster,” and it’s not hard to see why. (Photo: Garry Knight / Flickr)
One of the sad ironies of Donald Trump’s victory is that climate change has risen up the political agenda only after the campaign, when both candidates and debate moderators largely ignored it. Trump’s denialism in the face of an urgent, planetary threat provides some potent imagery for how the devastation caused by his presidency might look.

Climate scientists have been quick to condemn Trump’s election as a “disaster,” and it’s not hard to see why.

The last three years have broken temperature records, with 2016 set to become the hottest yet. The UN Environment Program just warned that we need to do far more and far faster, while a new study of pledges from G20 countries found that even under Obama, the U.S. remained a long way off meeting its share of the global effort to tackle climate change. Yet we’ve just elected a man who promises to drill more oil, burn more coal, and scrap our national climate plan.

"Alongside resistance, efforts to build a new economy could, and should, continue from the ground up."
The Trump disaster could hit communities on the front line of climate justice struggles the hardest. Scenes like the militarized response to the struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline could be the new normal under Trump if the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure is matched with increasingly repressive policing.

It’s little wonder, then, that Trump’s election has left climate advocates reeling. But as mourning turns to anger and resistance, it’s worth recalling that there are significant limits on what Trump can do to hold back action on climate change.

The transition to cleaner energy will carry on regardless, as coal will remain uncompetitive. States and cities could ramp up their own climate efforts irrespective of the federal government. And international climate action has a momentum that’s not solely dependent on who occupies the White House.

Rogue State

Some of the loudest noises coming from the Trump camp suggest that his administration will withdraw from the Paris climate deal.

Since this process takes four years, it’s rumored that Trump is considering the shortcut of leaving the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which George Bush Sr. signed in 1992 and the Senate ratified. That would set the U.S. apart from every other nation on earth (except the Vatican, which is strongly in favour of climate action all the same). There would be no clearer way to signal that Trump is making the U.S. a rogue state.

Unilateralism on this scale could throw up legal, political, and diplomatic hurdles that Trump’s team might not easily overcome. The Senate might demand a say on leaving the UNFCCC — and it’s not a given that a majority would favor the path of global isolation.

Alternatively, the Trump administration might choose to ignore Washington’s commitments without formally abandoning the international climate process. One of the first victims could be the global Green Climate Fund, which was set up to help developing countries with their climate transitions — and is now unlikely to see at least $2 billion of the $3 billion originally promised to it by the United States.

But the Trump wrecking ball won’t be able to destroy everything in its path. There are strong signs that U.S. isolation won’t wreck the Paris Agreement. Many other countries (including Saudi Arabia) have suggested that they will stick to their international climate commitments with or without the United States. There’s precedent here, too: When George W. Bush withdrew from the last global climate treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, the rest of the world continued with it anyway.

Faced with failed harvests, floods, droughts, and ever more extreme weather, most countries now realize that taking on climate change is in their own self-interest. Ultimately, the countries that lead the way in renewable energy, efficient buildings, and improved public transport (among other climate measures) will be best placed to cope with changes in the global economy.

Self-Inflicted Wounds

If Trump follows the path of isolation, as he and his acolytes currently brag about doing, the big loser will be the United States itself. Other countries (notably, Canada and Mexico) might retaliate with border taxes for American goods if Trump welches on Washington’s climate commitments, and going it alone would considerably damage U.S. “soft power” — the ability to broker favorable international deals in other areas, ranging from defense to trade — as well as threatening jobs in clean energy, which already outnumber those in fossil fuel extraction.

Closer to home, the promised bonfire of environmental regulations could leave U.S. citizens choking on smog for years to come. With cities like Beijing regularly under a haze of toxic air, the Chinese know only too well that controlling climate change goes hand in hand with reducing pollution from power stations, factories, and cars. And while Trump has been peddling conspiracy theories about climate change being a Chinese hoax, the world’s most populous country has been shuttering coal plants and factories, alongside a host of other measures intended to help China transition to a greener economy.

Trump promises to take the U.S. in the opposite direction: scrapping the Clean Power Plan and gutting the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), starting with the appointment of climate denier Myron Ebell to lead its transition team. But scrapping the Clean Power Plan could lead to a long legal battle, as would attempts to ditch long-standing regulations like fuel-efficiency standards for cars.

Even if Trump succeeds, almost half of the U.S. population lives in states that have already planned for its implementation. Those efforts may continue regardless of the federal government. For example, California legislators have already made clear they will not repeal a recently approved target of 40 percent emissions reductions by 2030. And from Boston to Boulder, a growing list of U.S. cities have pledged to cut 80 percent of their greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, and have developed plans to make that a reality.

Trump’s plans for a return to coal power won’t get far without large new subsidies or a sustained attack on the fracking industry. Otherwise the numbers simply don’t add up. Meanwhile the economics of renewable energy are getting better all the time. Residential solar power is expected to out-compete fossil fuels in over 40 states by 2020, while huge advances are also being made in energy storage and the development of electric vehicles.

The Seeds of a New Economy

While advances in technology and the changing economics of energy could very well dampen the impacts of the climate skepticism emanating from the White House, they obviously won’t come anywhere close to what the U.S. needs to do to actually pull its weight on climate change.

Climate justice activists, on the other hand, are already digging in for a long fight. Thousands of activists joined hundreds of protests around the country in support of the Standing Rock Sioux and other Native American activists opposed to the Dakota Access Pipeline, while international climate justice groups have promised to stand with their U.S. allies in resisting the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure.

Alongside resistance, efforts to build a new economy could, and should, continue from the ground up. The energy transition requires new forms of ownership and a more collaborative economy. That may sound like a tall ask in such a hostile political climate, but there is historic evidence that the Scandinavian model of cooperative ownership grew in response to political polarization and the repression of organized labor, while deeper changes in the way markets work could spur the rise of collaborative production.

In short, while Trump’s election is a disaster for the climate, there remains plenty of fertile ground for an energy transition, and many spaces to sow the seeds of a new economy.

© 2016 Foreign Policy In Focus
Oscar Reyes
Oscar Reyes a research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and a writer and activist focusing on climate and energy finance. His recent work includes Power to the People?, which takes a critical look at the World Bank’s Clean Technology Fund, and the co-authored Carbon Trading: How It Works and Why It Fails. He provides research and advice on the economics and politics of climate change to various organisations, including Corporate Europe Observatory, Earthlife Africa and Friends of the Earth UK. He is also environment editor of Red Pepper, a magazine that he previously edited.

What do you mean cant fed ourselves California produces half the nations fruits and vegetables and all of the nuts and a good portion of meat eggs and dairy products, Our universities do not get millions in federal grants nor much from the state that's the reason tuition is nearly as high as private universities. Your help building a wall would be greatly appreciated. History is replete with wall builders and we need a wall because those Anglo Saxons -- they're not sending us their best

So  how do we move forward having declared the new president to be an absolute jackass, a sexual predator and a liar one would only expect to find In a mental hospital.   How do we go from talking about  the nuclear codes being in the hands of a  narcissistic, vindictive, psychopath, to actually placing the nuclear codes in his tiny hands.   Well I suppose we just do.   And we have to hope that this man who appears to lie just about everything has also been lying about how  awful a person he is.  Let us hope he isn't who he has seemed to be.  Lets hope he really does believe in global warming.  Lets hope he was only a cipher, that he was only pretending to admire Vladimir Putin.   Lets hope he was only pretending to believe the conspiracy theories that helped get him elected .   Lets hope he really is a con man without  any core commitments other than to maintain his own fame and glory.

Because then their is a chance knowledgeable  people can influence him.   President Obama struck a good note yesterday,  we all must hope for Trumps success.   We want his presidency to be a good one.   Unlike Rush Limbaugh who the day after Obama was elected said" I hope he fails"    It's as though we are on an airliner and the real pilot has died and a man who has never flown a plane in his life has taken the controls and is attempting an emergency landing and we're all stuck in the back of the plane.  There are some people who know how to fly the plane but this guy stormed the cockpit and the pilots seat and the runway is in view and we're out of time.  Lets hope he's talking to people in air traffic control.  The problem is it matters who's in the tower.   Just think about who Trump has surrounded him self with.  Rudy Giuliani,  Chris Crispy Crème, Sarah Palin, Mike Pence, this is a clown car of ideologues and incompetents with a couple of religious maniacs thrown in.

But again we want him to land this plane and it doesn't have to be pretty.  It doesn't matter if we all end up covered in vomit we will be grateful just to be alive and I'll be very  grateful if after four years Donald Trump hasn't set back human progress  a generation.  This may sound like hyperbole but who knows what sort of mistakes this man is capable of.   And if you said that about Clinton even with all her flaws.  We have no idea who Trump is or what he will do, he probably doesn't even know.  But we do know he knows less about the responsibilities he is about to assume than any president before him.   He appears to have less understanding than any candidate than most of us have conceived of.   We have to hope being President brings out the best in Donald Trump.   The campaign  brought the worst.  It showed what he was like as an embattled narcissist and fabulist, and demagogue but now he has won.   Now he will be surrounded by people seeking the warm glow of his power.

Now he will inspire fear, actual fear, not merely scorn in his critics.  He no longer is just a clown, he is the most powerful clown on earth.   We have to hope that winning swill pacify some of his demons.  We are about to see what happens to a man with a visibly, palpably,  unhealthy ego who suddenly triumphs over every one who ever doubted him or slighted him in the least.   This is a man who when he voted in New York in his polling place, got jeered by a crowed in a city that voted 87 % against him and one day he's going to ride back into town on Air force one.  Imagine the way his ego feels right now.   Imagine the way Trumps ego feels right now anticipating  the day he enters the White House and shows Obama the door.   The first black President who humiliated him in front of all the Washington elite's at the White House correspondent's dinner, go watch footage of that.  All those laughs at his expense.  Trump has been a punch line for decades.  He's been the Rodney Dangerfield of Billionaires.

But at that moment with Obama at the microphone at the podium was the worst.    And now he gets to tell Barack Hussein Obama to get out of his house and then tear his legacy to shreds. The first black president being shown the door by a man who always questioned his legitimacy in racist terms and now he is officially endorsed by the KKK.  Only Shakespeare  could do the moment justice.   While Trump seems to be a Caligula with an I-phone and a twitter account, we have to hope our democratic institutions will restrain him, that the awesome responsibility of running a superpower will bring out his better angels If he has any.

What we need are smart ethical people at the political center who can defend freedom of speech, and science and the norms of civil discourse from their enemies on both sides
of the right or the left

What do you mean cant fed ourselves California produces half the nations fruits and vegetables and all of the nuts and a good portion of meat eggs and dairy products, Our universities do not get millions in federal grants nor much from the state that's the reason tuition is nearly as high as private universities. Your help building a wall would be greatly appreciated. History is replete with wall builders and we need a wall because those Anglo Saxons -- they're not sending us their best