Trump Is President Again, and It’s Bad News For the Climate

Bengaluru: On November 6, Donald Trump was elected the 47th US president. This will be Trump’s second term as president.

US stock markets soared after Trump’s victory. Even India’s market rallied, boosting investor wealth by Rs 7.75 trillion by one estimate. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, among the first leaders to congratulate Trump, said that he was “looking forward to working closely” with Trump once again “to further strengthen India-US relations across technology, defence, energy, space and several other sectors”.

But many are unhappy. Scientists, environmentalists and activists have noted Trump’s win in the US elections with much concern, for Trump, a climate denier and sceptic, has been very clear about his thoughts about climate change and climate action: he has called global warming a “hoax”.

Even during his campaign for the just-concluded US elections, he said that people were talking about ‘oceans rising’ (he meant sea levels rising), but “who the hell cares?”. One of the guarantees his campaign this year rode on was that with Trump at the helm, the US would tap into new reserves of fossil fuels.

Some called Trump’s victory in the US elections on Wednesday a “black day” for climate; a former environment minister of Brazil called it “the planet’s biggest civilisational and climatic step backwards”.

There are ways that Trump’s ascent to the presidency could also affect India, especially with regard to exports, because some of India’s clean energy technology is exported to the US. But when it comes to climate action, many are clear: Trump’s re-emergence as US president may, at the most, stall – not deter – the US’s and the world’s transition to clean energy.

The climate background

The past week has been momentous with news that has been coming in regarding climate change and its impacts, with regions experiencing different types of extreme weather events that are claiming lives and causing huge economic, environmental and social losses and damages.

Spain is still struggling in the aftermath of one of the deadliest flash floods that the country has ever witnessed. Intense rains on October 29 aggravated by climate change killed more than 200, and more than 70 are still missing. On November 8, parts of northeast Spain witnessed new flash floods.

On November 7, the Copernicus Climate Change Service – which is part of the European Union’s space programme and releases monthly climate bulletins – released data that shows that it was “virtually certain” the year 2024 would be the warmest year and that the first year when global warming has breached the 1.5°C mark above pre-industrial levels. October 2024 was the second-warmest October globally, after October 2023, in terms of surface air temperatures. 

“After ten months of 2024 it is now virtually certain that 2024 will be the warmest year on record and the first year of more than 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels according to the ERA5 dataset,” commented Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Copernicus, in a press release.

“This marks a new milestone in global temperature records and should serve as a catalyst to raise ambition for the upcoming Climate Change Conference, COP29.”

Also read | Deaths, Destruction on the Rise Due to Extreme Weather Events: Grim Statistics in India Climate Report 2024

On the same day that the Copernicus report was released, the United Nations Environment Programme’s Adaptation Gap Report found that there is still a huge gap in adaptation finance. Basically, it found that developed countries – many of them, including the US, have been historical emitters of greenhouse gases and thus have an obligation to invest more in climate action – need to drastically increase their funding to developing nations to implement measures to adapt to the impacts of climate change.

On November 8, data compiled by the Centre for Science and Environment and its publication Down to Earth showed that extreme weather events are consistently on the rise in India. In the first nine months of the year, extreme events occurred on 255 out of a total 274 days across the country.

These events – ranging from lightning and storms to heavy rain, floods, landslides and heat waves – claimed the lives of 3,238 people, affected 3.2 million hectares of crops, destroyed 2,35,862 houses and buildings, and killed 9,457 livestock across the country.

Meanwhile, all eyes are now on Baku, Azerbaijan. Here, at the 29th United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP29) which kicked off on Monday (November 11), representatives of governments, world leaders and others are sitting down together to discuss, negotiate and implement actions towards tackling climate change.

The first day of the COP has already witnessed countries agreeing to a UN-backed carbon credit standard, which will permit carbon offsets to be traded across nations.

A denier and sceptic to the core

It is in this backdrop that Trump is preparing for a second term as US president. Director general of the Centre for Science and Environment and editor of Down to Earth Sunita Narain alluded to the Trump factor as she launched the India Climate Report virtually on November 8.

The report was being launched at a time when Trump, a “climate sceptic”, has come back to power, she said.

“He has openly said that climate change does not happen, is not happening,” Narain said, of Trump coming back to power in the US.

“He has openly said that he will revive energy drilling in his country. As part of his plan, the cost of energy will fall and there will be more drilling … he has said very clearly that the green deal of Biden is history as far as he is concerned. This is important not because of the global leadership role that the US has played, but because it continues to be a country with a very high emission load.”

Trump’s climate denial is well-known.

“We should be focused on magnificently clean and healthy air and not distracted by the expensive hoax that is global warming!,” he tweeted in 2013. In 2015, he said in an interview: “I believe in clean air. Immaculate air. But I don’t believe in climate change.”

His attitude to the issue of global warming and climate change has since not changed.

On November 2 this year, as part of his election campaign, he said that “nuclear warming”, not global warming, was the biggest threat. “So they talk all the time about the ocean will rise in 500 years, one-eighth of an inch, who the hell cares?” he said. (Of course, he got the numbers wrong, too.)

And over the course of his campaign, “drill, baby, drill” has been a common refrain on his lips; he promised to open up new gas reserves if he came back to power.

“We are going to – I used this expression, now everyone else is using it so I hate to use it, but – ‘drill, baby, drill’,” he said.

On the day he was elected president for the second time, Trump said: “We have more liquid gold than any country in the world. More than Saudi Arabia. We have more than Russia.”

This matters because even with the US’s current levels of fossil fuel consumption – which would be low when compared to what Trump hopes to unleash in the years to come – the US is one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases.

“The US is the world’s single largest historical emitter of greenhouse gas emissions … This matters because we know that the lifetime of carbon dioxide is 150-170 years,” Narain said at the virtual launch of the India Climate Report 2024 on November 8. “So we cannot deny the historical contributions of a country because those emissions have not disappeared.”

These emissions are part of the stock of emissions in the atmosphere that is causing the climate to change, she said. The US is also the second largest annual emitter, and the largest on a per capita basis, she added.

Between 2000 and 2023, the US produced the highest total carbon emissions per capita by region (which factors in population) as per the International Energy Agency.

An analysis by Carbon Brief, a UK-based website covering developments in climate science, climate policy and energy policy, found in March this year that if Trump were to win November’s presidential election, the US would emit an additional 4 billion tonnes of emissions by 2030, when compared with Joe Biden’s plans.

The Carbon Brief report also found that these extra emissions would cause global climate damages worth more than $900 billion (based on the latest US government valuations).

These extra emissions from a second Trump term “would negate – twice over – all of the savings from deploying wind, solar and other clean technologies around the world over the past five years,” the Carbon Brief report stated. That’s a lot.

‘Black day for climate’

Given these, and the moral obligation that developed nations have in aiding climate action worldwide, especially in developing countries, Trump’s climate scepticism and denial and his push for fossil fuels are a huge concern.

In 2017, during his first term as president, Trump pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement. Biden re-entered the US into the Agreement in 2021, after he came into power. Trump, in his second presidency now, will likely pull the US out of the Agreement again.

“This is a black day for the climate,” said Luisa Neubauer of Fridays For Future Germany in a statement, speaking of the day Trump was re-elected into office.

“It’s a shade of black we haven’t invented yet. And I fear there are many more black days to come. Hope is work, now more than ever. Hell is a spectrum and how we as civil society organise and mobilise will be decisive on where on that spectrum we land. People in the climate community will need to step up, and internationally we will have a huge gap to fill.”

Carlos Minc, a former environment minister of Brazil, called Trump’s victory “the planet’s biggest civilisational and climatic step backwards”. He said Trump was a “man who symbolises the most truculent and backward right-wing, who wants to promote the most authoritarian positions worldwide against the rights of women, environmentalists, LGBTQIA+ people and immigrants”.

“It’s toxic,” he said in a statement. “The first step he will likely take is to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement, which is the country that has the most significant historical responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions. So let’s mobilise all other countries and do what we can to stop this victory from becoming a civilisational and climate disaster.”

Stall, maybe, but not deter?

However, clean energy is catching up so much that Trump’s victory may only stall, not deter, climate action in the US and the world, some have said. Reuters reported some experts as saying that Trump’s push for fossil fuels will not slow down the US’s clear energy boom.

That’s primarily because a law implemented by Biden that offers huge subsidies for new solar, wind and other clean-energy projects for the next decade “would be near-impossible to repeal”, ironically, due to support from Republican states (that have invested heavily in clean energy), the Reuters report said.

“The world is in a very different place to what it was when Trump was last in power,” Friederike Otto, senior lecturer at Imperial College London’s Centre for Environmental Policy and a member of the World Weather Attribution Group, said in a statement.

“The global move to renewable energy is now happening at an unprecedented pace. Nothing the US government can do will change the simple fact that renewable energy is cheaper and more reliable than oil, gas and coal. Fossil fuels are a thing of the past,” she said.

And the US too is experiencing extreme weather events, like much of the world, Otto added.

“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,” Otto said.

While the US election results would be seen as a “major blow” to global climate action, “it cannot and will not halt the changes underway to decarbonise the economy and meet the goals of the Paris Agreement”, said Christiana Figueres, former executive director of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

“Standing with oil and gas is the same as falling behind in a fast moving world. Clean energy technologies will continue to outcompete fossil fuels, not just because they are healthier, faster, cleaner and more abundant, but because they undercut fossil fuels where they are at their weakest: their unsolvable volatility and inefficiency”. 

India, the US and energy concerns post Trump’s win

Trump’s win and decision to turn to fossil fuel over clean energy may have ramifications for India’s clean energy exports.

Currently, India exports 90% of its solar modules to the US, said Arunabha Ghosh, CEO of the Delhi-based Council on Energy, Environment and Water, in a statement.

“The proposed trade barriers will need careful navigation so that Indian industries, especially for [sic] clean technologies, do not suffer,” he said. “Over the next four years, India will need to be prepared and strategically nimble to deepen green trade, co-develop clean tech supply chains and accelerate its energy transition.”

However, the US election results do not change the fact that India and the US will continue to be key strategic partners, said Ghosh.

“With Donald Trump in power, India can count on continued oil and gas supply to ensure its developmental needs, since the US is a net exporter of fuels now. Between 2017 and 2024, the US became the fifth-largest liquified natural gas (LNG) and crude oil supplier to India,” Ghosh said.

But there’s another possibility too. If the US turns to fossil fuel for its use as Trump says it will, the US could double down on its LNG exports and this could be a concern, said Aditya Lolla, Asia programme director at global clean energy think tank Ember, in a recent virtual discussion on COP29 hosted by Climate Trends.

That’s because the US is among the top suppliers of LNG to not only India but several other Asian countries too. As per data published by the US Energy Information Administration, Japan and South Korea received 0.8 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of LNG exports from the US, the fourth- and fifth-highest US LNG export volumes by country in 2023.

Also in 2023, Japan, China and India increased LNG imports from the US by a combined 0.6 Bcf/d, when compared with 2022.

A ‘bigger’ fight

While the US election outcome was “bitterly disappointing” for climate and it was clear that the next administration would “make a u-turn and undo all the progress”, it was “not the end of our fight for a cleaner, safer planet”, John Podesta, US climate envoy to the ongoing COP29 at Baku, said on November 11 at the UN climate conference.

“Facts are still facts. Science is still science. This fight is bigger than one election, one political cycle, in one country. This fight is bigger still,” Podesta said at a press conference during day one of the climate talks.

Al Gore, former Vice President of the US and the founder of The Climate Reality Project, which aims to train and mobilise people to work towards climate action, said that Trump’s victory means that climate advocates must just “find ways to redouble our efforts and find bipartisan solutions to the climate crisis that create jobs, promote prosperity and safeguard the future of humanity”.

“Now more than ever, this movement needs engagement and leadership from all corners of the country,” Gore said in a statement.

“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. My greatest source of hope comes from the courage and commitment of grassroots leaders and advocates in the US and around the world who are relentlessly pushing for progress. Onward.”