Trump 2.0 not hopeless for climate

November 13, 2024

SEOUL – In poll after poll, Americans say they care about climate change. But then again, they also say they care about democracy, women’s rights and other such ideals. And yet for the second time in three elections, they have chosen to give ultimate political power to someone loudly and diametrically opposed to them.

For the climate, the best we can hope is that the aftermath of the 2024 election will remain just short of catastrophic. The progress made by President Joe Biden is significant and in some key ways will be difficult to undo. The world’s transition from fossil fuels toward clean energy has a natural momentum that survived Donald Trump’s first term in office and will likely survive his second.

With a big enough dose of hopium, we might even choose to believe that Elon Musk — who has made much of his fortune running a company dependent on that energy transition — will be a moderating influence on a president who says wind turbines kill whales and cause cancer. But Musk isn’t even a moderating influence on himself most of the time, and Trump has repeatedly proved to be a poor candidate for moderation anyway.

Far more likely is that an energy transition described again and again recently as moving too slowly to limit global heating to merely bad levels will receive little to no help from the government of the world’s largest fossil-fuel producer for at least the next four critical years. A Trump administration will add 4 billion more tons of carbon pollution to the atmosphere than a second Biden term would have, according to a June analysis by the nonprofit Carbon Brief. That matches the combined annual emissions of the European Union and Japan. The country’s goal of cutting emissions in half by