Climate change in the era of Trump
BLOWING hot and cold doesnt begin to cover it. In 2009 Donald Trump signed a public letter calling for cuts to Americas greenhouse-gas emissions. In 2012 he dismissed climate change as a hoax cooked up by the Chinese. On the campaign trail he promised to withdraw from an international accord, struck last year in Paris, to fight global warming. This week, as president-elect, Mr Trump said he has an open mind on the Paris deal and that there is some connectivity between human activity and climate change. Such fickleness gives succour to pessimists and optimists alike. Those who are gloomy about the climate still expect America to ignore or withdraw from the Paris agreement, or to abandon the 1992 UN framework that underpins it. Sunnier folk hope that Mr Trump will govern differently from how he campaigned, enabling the fight against climate change to continue unabated. The reality is more complex. Mr Trumps brand of America First populism will do nothing to help the planet, but neither need it be the catastrophe many fear. Hot air First, the bad news. Even if Mr Trump honours Americas commitment to the Paris accord, it is unlikely that his administration will galvanise action. Many in the Republican establishment think that climate deals are examples of global regulatory over-reach. Plenty of Mr Trumps voters dismiss climate change itself as a phoney fad peddled by bicoastal elites. Fossil fuels stand for prosperity and freedomfrom the romance of the roughneck to the lure of the road. Sure enough, on November 21st Mr Trump pledged that on day one of his administration he would scrap job-killing restrictions on the production of American fossil fuels, which account for 80% of Americas man-made greenhouse-gas emissions. The rhetoric is not the only thing that will be markedly different. The main practical way a Trump administration is likely to weaken the Paris agreement is by avoiding Americas commitments to pay large sums to help other countries cope with climate change. The burden of fighting global warming falls less on rich countries, where energy demand is stagnant and efficiency is rising, than on poor ones, where billions still lack the cheap energy fossil fuels can provide. Poor countries were won over partly by the $100bn a year that America and others promised to help them cope. Private investors were always going to have to stump up lots of cash to fund climate-change action; the onus on them will be heavier. This is worrying. But, on close inspection, the path to a greener future still remains open, both in America and abroad. At home there are limits to what Mr Trumps embrace of fossil fuels can achieve. For all the trillions of dollars-worth of oil and gas that he hopes will be fracked on federal lands, no one will sink a well unless it is profitable to do so. That needs oil prices to be substantially higher than they are now. Coal, too, has been displaced by cheap shale gas rather than Barack Obamas regulations. Even if the new administration abandons Americas Paris pledges, California has its own clean-energy mandate and will continue to set fuel-efficiency standards that other states and the car industry follow. Besides, energy investments last for decadesfirms may well be loth to bet that future presidents will stick with Mr Trumps policies. Nor need the fight against climate change elsewhere founder in the absence of American leadership. Self-interest will see to that (see article). China takes air pollution in its cities at least as seriously as it does climate changea recent study found that air pollution contributed to the deaths of 1.6m people in China each year. Switching from burning coal to cleaner forms of energy thus makes sense twice over. India needs climate action as insurance against extreme weather: it spends a fortune in the wake of storms, floods and other events. Commercial self-interest will also keep other countries on the path towards decarbonisation. The costs of clean energy are tumbling. The cost of batteries in electric vehicles has fallen by 80% since 2008; the bill for offshore-wind energy has more than halved over the past three years in northern Europe. Solar power is closing in on gas and coal as an attractively cheap source of power. China plans to have nearly 150 gigawatts of installed solar capacity by the end of the decade, triple what it has today as the worlds biggest solar generator. As this weeks special report points out, such developments will curb demand for oil and coal in decades to come. Last year was the first in which renewable energy surpassed coal as the worlds biggest source of power-generating capacity (although natural gas will remain an important complement to renewables because of the vagaries of sun and wind). These are epochal changes, with moneymaking opportunities to match. China, for instance, hopes to become a clean-energy superpower by producing cheaper panels, turbines, batteries and electric cars, as well as the systems that link them all together. Dont COP out To be clear, there is much to regret in the prospect of America relinquishing its leadership on fighting climate change. The idea of the worlds second-biggest polluter free-riding on the efforts of others has some countries mulling counter-attacksone proposal, a carbon tariff on American exports, could lead to a damaging trade war. The Paris agreement was always likely to fall far short of its goal of limiting global warming to within 2C of pre-industrial temperatures. A more recalcitrant America puts the prospect of deep decarbonisation even further off. And evidence that Mr Trumps America is withdrawing from its global role is worrying. Yet with climate change, as with other areas that have come to depend on American leadership, the rest of the world can make the best of a bad situation by staying the course. Chinas carbon emissions may already have peaked. Improvements in cars fuel efficiency cut oil consumption by 2.3m barrels a day in 2015, even when petrol was cheap. China, India, the European Union, Canada and others have strong incentives to embrace cleaner technologies. If they work together they can make a differencewith or without the United States.