Marco Magrini ponders the impact on tackling the climate crisis if Trump regains the presidency
Political elections shape the destiny of a country, sometimes of an entire region. But none can influence the fate of the entire world more than the US presidential election.
The raison d’être of this column is that there is a climate crisis underway. It’s a crisis because it points to a string of potentially devastating yet variable future consequences. Ideally, human beings should have come together to steer their economies away from fossil fuels and so prevent the crisis. Not only did it not go this way, but the current expansion of nationalist parties in elections around the world is actually pushing in the opposite direction.
Yet, no political event is as crucial for the climate as the US presidential election set to be held this year on Tuesday, 5 November. After the first televised debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, almost everyone seems convinced that the former will prevail. Perhaps Kamala Harris taking over improves the Democrat’s chances. However, there is still a serious possibility that Trump will return to power.
A blueprint for a second Trump term exists already. Project 2025, a compendium of policy proposals for a conservative reshaping of the US government, openly calls for increasing the production of fossil fuels by drilling on public lands. The Republican candidate himself has vowed to reverse Biden’s environmental regulations. In other words, there are no uncertainties on what it will happen if he were to win.
A lot is at stake, for numerous scientific, economic, historical and moral reasons.
The very idea that an American presidential contender – 62 years after JFK’s ‘We choose to go to the Moon’ address – could outright deny the scientific method, is surreal. Not only could this lead to wasting four more years in combating climate change, but it popularises notions (oceans ‘may rise one-eighth of an inch in the next 497 years’, said Trump at a recent rally) that undermine any distinction between reality and fiction. (NASA reported a rise of 0.3 inches in sea level between 2022 and 2023.)
Postponing decarbonisation doesn’t make any economic sense either. We can’t make oil and gas disappear overnight, but an orderly, if late, transition to a new energy system has a number of advantages. Oil is burnt forever, and forever shines the sun. In the last decade, the cost of solar technologies has dropped by more than 80 per cent and is now cheaper than anything else. There are plenty of new jobs to be created and plenty of chances to close the clean-tech industrial gap with China, now the undisputed leader in photovoltaics, wind turbines and batteries. Yet, Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, the sweeping law that provided US$369 billion for renewable energy programmes, is certain to be dismantled in the case of a Democratic defeat.
Who can seriously deny that the arrow of history is pointing towards the end of the fossil fuel age? An age that started in the mid-1700s, and in the following two centuries, it powered the biggest expansion of wealth and population ever. At least on paper, nations have pledged to consign it to history by 2050.
And here comes the moral issue. The climate crisis has different levels of accountability – who first started to add climate-altering gases to the atmosphere has a bigger responsibility. The USA is in top spot, well ahead of China. However, Trump promises to walk out of the Paris Agreement again, thus failing hundreds of millions of people living in countries whose contributions to the crisis are negligible yet face its worst effects. In a few words, the fate of our planet is disproportionately connected to a single man sitting in an oval office.
CarbonBrief has estimated that, by 2030, the expected policies of a second Trump presidency could add four more gigatons of carbon dioxide than the incumbent president’s. That being said, even under Biden, the current trajectory of American decarbonisation is not on course to meet the promised net-zero emissions by mid-century.
Can the world win its climate fight without America fully on board? This question reveals what’s really at stake on 5 November.
