As Donald Trump won the presidency, significant portions of
the United States were in drought condition.
October was the driest
month on record in my home state of New Jersey, and the high the day after
the election was a balmy 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Just a few weeks ago, abnormally hot waters in
the Gulf of Mexico fostered
the rapid growth of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, and made Helene’s
rainfall so intense that western North Carolina suffered the worst flooding in
over a century.
The effects of climate change will continue to worsen as
long as we humans continue to dump heat-trapping pollution into the atmosphere.
The Biden administration’s policies, especially the Inflation Reduction Act,
were not enough on their own to realize the administration’s goal of halving
U.S. emissions by 2030 and reaching net-zero emissions by 2050, but they were the
most significant
moves to limit heat-trapping pollution in U.S. history.
Donald Trump has vowed to dismantle these policies. All else
being equal, Carbon
Brief estimates that move could increase carbon dioxide emissions between
2025 and 2030 alone by about 4 billion tons, thereby causing nearly $1 trillion
in global damage. Further, Trump will once
again withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement and seek to undermine
international climate diplomacy, giving other right-wing leaders around the
world the go-ahead to slow action on climate change or even ignore it
altogether. Thus, there is a good chance U.S. moves to delay decarbonization will
be partially reciprocated by other countries.
There are some countervailing
factors. On the one hand, most of the benefits of the Inflation Reduction
Act in the form of clean energy and manufacturing investments have flowed
to red districts. When push comes to shove, some Republican Congressmen
might not acquiesce in having their largess removed. The Inflation Reduction
Act has also leveraged and accelerated trends in clean energy that have substantial
momentum on their own. Regardless of what Donald Trump does, solar will remain
the cheapest
new electricity source in much of the world, and battery prices will continue
to plummet.
On the other hand, Donald Trump has promised an economic
agenda likely
to trigger a substantial economic slowdown, including deporting a
significant chunk of America’s blue-collar workforce at a time of low
unemployment and placing large taxes on imported goods. He’s also pledged to
place Elon Musk in charge of cutting government spending, a move that Musk
says “would involve some temporary hardship” for average Americans.
Some heterodox economists argue for “degrowth”
as a solution
to climate change. This is problematic for many reasons, but the degrowth for
which they argue is smart degrowth coupled with a redistribution agenda to
limit hardship. The degrowth that might occur from Trump’s policies would be
accidental and reckless. Reversing economic growth is the worst way to slow
emissions growth—but that’s likely what will happen. So the harm Trump
will do in terms of emissions may be limited by his diminishment of the U.S.
economy.
There’s also another possibility worth considering: that the
MAGA coalition might take an unexpected turn, fusing its xenophobia with a climate
agenda. Elon Musk is, of course, well
aware of the climate challenge. More surprisingly, in the October Vice
Presidential debate, J.D. Vance hinted
at a decarbonization policy not unlike that of the Biden/Harris administration:
“You’d want to reshore as much American manufacturing as possible and you’d
want to produce as much energy as possible… double down and invest in American
workers and the American people.” Of course, he bracketed this proposal with a
dismissal of climate change as “weird science” and denied that these were the Biden
administration policies.
But as climate disasters continue to accumulate, it seems
quite possible a growing MAGA faction will, like France’s Marine Le Pen, tilt
in an ecofascist
direction. Many on the left have, after
all, talked about the need to declare a “climate
emergency” and for a “wartime
mobilization” to fight climate change. Authoritarians love states
of emergency, particularly ones with no obvious end point, and such calls
could easily be turned in an illiberal direction. An ecofascist MAGA president might
pair a declared climate emergency with draconian measures directed, for example,
against migrants or other scapegoats.
Regardless of future emissions,
we are already experiencing a dangerous stream of climate disasters. Dealing with
these threats requires good governance and an attention to on-the-ground facts;
Trump, by contrast, represents a move toward Russian-style kleptocracy, with
little attention to long-term planning and little regard for truth. Trump has a
history of trying to link
disaster relief to political support, and famously
edited a National Weather Service hurricane forecast to align with his
statements.
The onset of the Covid-19
pandemic in 2020 proved the ultimate test of the Trump administration’s skill
in disaster management. Though most
Americans now report believing they were better off four years ago—a time
of mass death and supply shortages—than they are today, it is hard to argue
that the administration passed
this test.
Trump’s confederates also seek to dismantle our ability to
study climate threats. If enacted, the Project
2025 agenda would dismantle the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, commercialize the National Weather Service’s forecasts, and block
the periodic scientific assessments of climate change that have been
required by law since the George H. W. Bush administration, and to which I
myself have contributed. These moves would make it harder to measure the
effects of human activity on the climate, harder to learn about extreme weather
as it is brewing, and thus harder to protect ourselves.
Halting further warming and building resilience to climate
disasters are essential for both the economy and national security. And yet the
American people have chosen an executive who has campaigned not on solving
these problems but on authoritarianism
and conspiracy
theories. This is a path to American decline, not a path to American
greatness.
I wish I had some hopeful thoughts to offer. But as Kate
Marvel wrote in a beautiful essay about the climate crisis published during
the first Trump administration, to preserve both our climate and our democracy,
“We need courage, not hope. Grief, after all, is the cost of being alive. We
are all fated to live lives shot through with sadness, and are not worth less
for it. Courage is the resolve to do well without the assurance of a happy
ending.”
In the aftermath of a disaster, most people respond not with
greed or violence, but with courage
and compassion. Tackling the climate crisis and growing democracy require
both, regardless of whether the federal government is working to advance or
obstruct these goals.
This post was originally published on here
