The Paris Agreement on climate change, adopted less than a year ago and ratified internationally earlier this month, is now in danger of being undermined or even ending up dead in the water as a result of the election of Donald Trump as 45th president of the United States.
Even as the US delegation negotiates with representatives of other countries at this year’s United Nations climate change conference in Marrakech about how to strengthen the deal made in Paris last December, its members know their efforts could be set at nought when Trump, a climate change denier, moves into the White House.
The Marrakech event is the 22nd conference of the parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, COP22, and its “high-level segment” involving ministers, which starts on Wednesday, will show what countries are prepared to do to close the “emissions gap” and put Earth on a safer course.
Just two months after taking office in January 2001, Obama’s predecessor, George W Bush, disowned the Kyoto Protocol on the basis that “it exempts 80 per cent of the world, including major population centres such as China and India from compliance, and would cause serious harm to the US economy”.
The difference between then and now is that both China and India as well as every other country on Earth have signed up to the Paris Agreement, pledging to work towards the goal of reducing carbon emissions to limit global warming at “well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels”.
Although it took eight years to ratify the more limited Kyoto Protocol after it was adopted in 1997, the Paris deal came into force in double-quick time – just 11 months – and part of the impetus among countries in setting this UN record was to guard against a negative outcome in the US election.
That negative outcome has now come to pass, magnified by a Republican-controlled congress. And just as Bush surrounded himself with oil men as his energy advisers, the president-elect has been doing the same, with a view to “cancelling” the Paris Agreement.
Carbon emissions
Trump would also prevent the US Environmental Protection Agency regulating carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants, end President Obama’s clean energy programme, promote more hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) and even permit drilling for oil and gas in American national parks.
“Rather than continuing the current path to undermine and block America’s fossil fuel producers, the Trump administration will encourage the production of these resources by opening onshore and offshore leasing on federal lands and water,” the incoming president’s transition team has said.
The permit process for “billions of dollars” in dirty energy projects “held up by President Obama” would be streamlined. Even as China moves away from coal, Trump’s team pledged to “end the war on coal . . . and conduct a top-down review of all anti-coal regulations issued by the Obama administration.”
Given this grim backdrop, it is no wonder that the figure of Trump has hung like a dark spectre over the climate talks in Marrakech. But despite his determination to reverse energy policy in the US, other countries, including China, have made it clear that they will implement the Paris deal.
The latest “emissions gap report” from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), published as the talks opened last week, shows that there is a gulf of 14 gigatonnes between what countries have pledged to do and what’s actually needed to limit the rise in global surface temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius.
“UNEP’s report paints a bleak picture of hunger, floods and people being forced from their homes as we hurtle towards a devastating 3.5°C warming of the planet [by 2100],” Asad Rehman, spokesman for Friends of the Earth in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, has warned at the Marrakech meeting.
The World Meteorological Organisation has confirmed that the average global concentration in the atmosphere of the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, has already exceeded the symbolic and significant milestone of 400 parts per million for the first time as global temperatures continue to increase.
UN climate chief Patricia Espinosa said: “Achieving the aims and ambitions of the Paris Agreement is not a given. We have embarked on an effort to change the course of two centuries of carbon-intense development. The peaking of global emissions is urgent, as is attaining far more climate-resilient societies.”
Developing countries
The Mexican diplomat, who took over from Christiana Figueres last July, identified the provision of billions of dollars in aid for developing countries to “green their economies” as one of the key areas. Another major priority is to provide support for the most vulnerable countries to adapt to climate change.
But Meena Raman, of the Third World Network, said: “Against estimated needs in the trillions, rich countries are promising $100 billion (€92.9 billion) and having to resort to fudging the numbers even for that. Without finance, the early entry into force of the Paris Agreement will be much ado about nothing.”
Under the Paris timetable, ideally no later than 2018, parties to the agreement are meant to complete details of a “rulebook” that would measure, account for and review the adequacy of actions taken by all countries to accelerate global climate action and ensure that the targets agreed last December are met.
How this will be done in the context of a Trump presidency will be an acid test of the rest of the world’s commitment to dealing with the climate crisis. If the new administration in Washington decides to pull the plug on US participation in the UNFCCC process, the likelihood is that China will take the lead.
Veteran UNFCCC participant Alden Meyer, of the Washington-based Union of Concerned Scientists, said even Trump “will not be not powerful enough to change the laws of physics or wish away the serious impacts climate change is having on people in the US and around the world.” That’s the reality check.