What Trump win means for fight against climate change
Season two of the Trump administration is here, and the main cast –Donald J Trump, who is known for downplaying the urgency of tackling the climate crisis, is making a come-back in a year poised to be the warmest ever. His win comes just a few days before the biggest climate conference begins (the 29th Conference of Parties (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan. Trump’s stance on the climate crisis brings jitters to environmentalists and may backtrack any progress made in the US, and globally, to cut down greenhouse gas emissions. When he first became president, one of his most controversial actions was the decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, a global pact that unites nearly all countries to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. He took this step just six months into office in 2017. “The US election result is a setback for global climate action, but the Paris Agreement has proven resilient and is stronger than any single country’s policies. The context today is very different from 2016. There is powerful economic momentum behind the global transition, which the US has led and gained from, but now risks forfeiting. The devastating toll of recent hurricanes was a grim reminder that all Americans are affected by worsening climate change,” said Laurence Tubiana, CEO, the European Climate Foundation. The US rejoined the agreement under the outgoing President Joe Biden and has been a crucial source of climate finance for developing nations, like Kenya. In May 2024, during President William Ruto's visit to Washington, where he met Biden, the two entered into climate deals in the clean energy projects. It is during Biden’s tenure that he restored 100 projects related to the environment that had been trumped by Trump’s administration. However, even if Trump makes it one of his first agendas upon assuming office, it would still take the US, one the World’s largest greenhouse gas emitters, a year to fully exit the Paris Agreement. In Trump’s Agenda47, a blueprint of what he plans for America, he plans to re-introduce dependence on fossil fuels in order to cut down gas prices. His predecessor did the opposite, increasing the prices by half for cutting down emissions from fossil fuels. “President Trump will free up the vast stores of liquid gold on America’s public land for energy development. He will remove all red tape that is leaving oil and natural gas projects stranded, including speeding up approval of natural gas pipelines into the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and New York,” reads part of Trump’s Agenda 47. He promises to relive 2017 and exit the Paris Agreement, which in the Agenda, is termed as ‘unfair.’ He gives free will on the cars to be used in the US, waging war on electric cars even when one of his greatest supporters, Elon Musk, is a manufacturer for electric cars. “I will cancel Biden's ruinous power plant rule, terminate his electric vehicle mandate - if you want to buy an electric car, that's fine, but you're going to be able to buy every other form of car also - and unleash domestic energy production like never before. But just think of it: energy independence three years ago. Energy dominance was going to follow very shortly. We were going to pay off our debt. We were going to lower taxes for everybody,” reads part of his Agenda 47. But it is not just the potential exit from this agreement that has many climate scientists and leaders worried. Throughout his previous term, Trump remained vocal about his scepticism toward the science behind climate change, even calling it “a hoax” on multiple occasions. Yet, in the months leading to the elections, Hurricane Helene and Milton wreaked havoc in the country’s Florida region and 32 per cent of voters in the ravaged states said climate change would be a more important factor in their decision. An analysis of the 2020 election found that climate change concerns were enough to win the election for Joe Biden. Scientists have said that climate change is enhancing conditions for extreme weather events like Hurricane Helene. Friederike Otto, a climatologist and senior lecturer at the Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London, said: “Trump can deny climate change all he wants, but the laws of physics don’t care about politics. As we speak, nearly every US state is experiencing drought and last month, back-to-back hurricanes wreaked havoc in the southeast. Extreme weather will keep getting worse in the US as long as the world burns fossil fuels.” Ironically, despite the widespread impacts of climate change around the globe, the issue didn’t take centre stage in the campaign. Climate and energy policies were sidelined, appearing only as occasional topics in the broader election discourse. Trump aggressively promoted oil and gas expansion with vows to “drill baby drill”. Raila Odinga, Kenya’s former Prime Minister and candidate for Chair of the African Union Commission, posits that climate negotiations at COP29 in Baku, coming on the back of US elections, is a perfect opportunity for the US to step up and be a global steward of the planet. “Actions of the United States on climate change at home and globally will shape how Africa, a continent that is least responsible for the climate crisis yet suffering most from climate impacts, will navigate its own development path, delivering energy access to over 600 million people who are without electricity access today. At COP29, the US must lead from the front and support the delivery of ambitious grants-based and highly concessional climate finance to the trillions of dollars required to meet the adaptation and mitigation needs of developing countries and compensate for losses of damages in a timely and transparent manner,” he said. Julius Mbatia, climate finance Expert at ACT Alliance, says climate change knows no national or geopolitical boundaries, adding that ambition in finance would mean higher financial provision and will lower cost of finance to achieve climate and development objectives for regions such as Africa “We are all in boats being buffeted by the same challenge but different circumstances of countries mean some of us are barely afloat with limited or no hope to survive while others remain afloat as they have mega, technologically modified vessels. COP29 in Baku must address fundamental barriers to enhancing ambition and break through serious financial challenges of developing countries to tackle the climate crisis.” Despite all the gloom that overwhelms his return, data shows that clean energy in the US was highly embraced during the first tenure of Trump’s presidency. A study from Pew Research Centre also shows that most Americans prefer investments on renewable energy.