In November 2018, the then-US President Donald Trump dismissed a study by 300 climate scientists, reportedly with the one-liner: “I don’t believe it”. The study had been commissioned by his own administrators and involved 13 Federal agencies. It concluded that “unless we change our practices and policies, there will be substantial damages to the US economy, environment and human health over the coming decades”.
The White House’s denial of the report, even when it talked of catastrophic consequences for the US, wasn’t surprising. Trump’s disdain for climate science, born of his broader suspicion that America was being upstaged by other countries, notably China, had made the then-US president pull his country out of the Paris Pact a year ago – in May 2017. A few months before that he had asked the US Environmental Protection Agency to dismantle the Obama-era Clean Power Policy that aimed to reduce power sector emissions by 32 per cent over 2005 levels by 2030. Vehicle emission rules were relaxed.
But Trump is not just a climate denier. His climate nihilism was also a manifestation of a Make America Great Again conservatism that seems to have become even more pronounced in the two years since Trump demitted office – the scant respect for the institutions of liberal democracy in the Trump years seems to have grown in currency. That’s why news of Trump seeking re-election should be a cause of concern not just from a climate perspective. A demagogue at the helm of the world’s most powerful democracy twice in eight years could inflict mortal damage to the idea of a world order resting on the bedrock of justice. Will a world ill-equipped to take on authoritarians — Putin, for example – have the moral compass required to take on the climate change challenge? In any case, short-term transactionalism, the stock-in-trade Trump and his ilk, has scant regard for any idea of a global commons.
In the past two years, a climate denier is no longer at the helm in the US. But the country is still debating how long it will take to undo the setbacks of Trump years. Emissions in the US that had shown a downward trend after 2007, rose for the first time in 2018. They fell in 2019 and 2020. But remember, there was the pandemic. And the 2019 emissions were still as much as that of 2017. The issue at hand, as several experts have pointed out, is not just what happened during the Trump years, but also what did not happen. In other words, delaying climate actions in the country that emits the highest amount of GHGs increases the costs of alleviating global warming, making the Paris climate change goal of restricting temperature rise to less than 1.5 degree Celsius much more difficult. Between 2016-2020, America reversed the momentum that was built up during the Obama years in fighting climate change.
In the recent mid-term elections in the US, most candidates endorsed by Trump seem to have underperformed. In his speech announcing his candidature, Trump downplayed their tepid performance. He said nothing of the fumbling and faltering of his administration during the Covid pandemic. Instead, he talked of a movement of millions of people. Was that a veiled reference to the mob attack of January 6, 2021 on Capitol Hill?
kaushik.dasgupta@expressindia.com
Abbas Moontasir, Nagpada’s greatest basketball player, India legend, passes away
Kaushik Das Guptakaushik.dasgupta@expressindia.com… read more