In the book Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth the environmentalist Mark Hertsgaard states that: “humanity has two options for containing temperature rise. The first option is to make sharp, continuing cuts in global emissions starting now. [The second] is to remove greenhouse gases that are already in the atmosphere or find ways to nullify their effects.” Given the difficulty of achieving the latter, Hertsgaard makes it clear that carbon reduction strategies should be a priority.
An American scientist who specializes in climate adaptation told Hertsgaard that: “If we let global warming get out of hand, our current outlook on adaptation will look quaint … the major effort has to be thinking outside the box about how to reduce emissions. If I had $2 to spend on climate change, I’d spend $2.50 of it on mitigation. That’s how important it is to keep global warming from getting out of hand.” Hertsgaard suggests that the overall strategy for addressing global change should be “Avoid the unmanageable and manage the unavoidable” a phrase he first heard from by a Dutch environmentalist who convinced the International Committee for the Red Cross to make climate change a core part of its mission.
The Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate change agreement deliberately thumbs its nose at this sort of thinking, and it is all of a piece with the new Presi-dent’s shoot-from-the-hip foreign policy. Like many of his other initiatives it has been proposed with a characteristic mixture of ignorance and incompetence. Acting like a one-man Brexit, Trump has boldly announced his intention to withdraw from a complex multinational agreement without really considering the likely consequences, not to mention the practicalities, of the multi-year process that disengagement would entail. Like the Brexiteers he can look forward to months of shame as the folly of his impulsive decision becomes better known.
With near-perfect timing, ExxonMobil shareholders voted on May 31 for a resolution which requires the company to account for climate change, specifically the risks it poses to the company’s profits as dozens of countries prepare themselves for a post-petroleum future. Thirty-eight per cent of the shareholders backed a similar measure last year; this year the level of support rose to 62 per cent. That shift in attitudes is in part due to a series of embarrassing investigations, published in the Los Angeles Times and by the Columbia University School of Journalism, which showed that Exxon deliberately misled its shareholders about the risk of climate change and chose instead to undermine the standing of climate scientists who threatened its bottom line. Even mainstream investment firms like BlackRock have recently voted to make climate change assessments part of their routine corporate disclosures. In other words, at the very moment that corporate America has come around to addressing climate change, the new administration seems determined to take the country in the opposite direction.
Elon Musk, founder of the electronic car manufacturer Tesla, responded to news of the withdrawal with a tweet announcing his departure from “presidential councils.” With his usual directness Musk noted: “climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America over the world.” In subsequent tweets he pointed out that under the terms of the Paris agreement, by 2030 China would produce more renewable energy than the entire United States currently consumes. India, equally aware of the looming post-petroleum future, has announced that it will only sell electronic cars from 2030, and it is already the world’s largest market for solar power.
During the 2016 American elections the topic of climate change was almost completely ignored. Many prominent Republicans are resolutely sceptical about climate change, and unwilling to break ranks with the petroleum lobby. The Trump administration has come into office with a headstrong approach to the issue that is out of tune with younger American voters and entirely at odds with the rest of the world. Withdrawing, noisily, from the most significant effort at decarbonization of the planet while other countries are preparing themselves for what appear to be inevitable transitions to renewable energy, makes the United States look anachronistic and navel-gazing. And if the Trump administration persists in its folly, America may well become economically and possibly even politically irrelevant to countries that are preparing for the future with more foresight.
