| This first week of Donald Trump’s U.S. presidency brought a whirlwind of climate-related action and reaction. The responses at home were at times astonishing, but those from abroad—both overt and covert—underscored the magnitude of the global consequences at stake.
“These are very bad decisions for the future of the planet,” Minister Ségolène Royal said in a radio interview, referring to the Trump administration’s removal of climate change from the White House website and the rebooting of approvals for the Keystone XL and Dakota Access oil pipelines. “I hope they aren’t definitive .”
“Regrettably, the signs of pushback on commitments by traditional donors towards assisting in the implementation” of the Paris Agreement “can harm us all,” Sujata Mehta of India’s Ministry of External Affairs told a high-level meeting at U.N. headquarters in New York, alluding to worries over Trump reneging on the U.S. promise of billions of dollars to help developing countries cope with climate change.
In a more covert signal to the Trump White House, India agreed this week to sign the Kyoto Protocol, committing to climate action before its Paris Agreement obligations activate in 2020. “In view of the critical role played by India in securing international consensus on climate change issues, this decision further underlines India’s leadership in the comity of nations committed to [the] global cause of environmental protection and climate justice,” read a government statement.
China tacitly upped the ante when it signed 10 agreements to help Cuba—America’s politically sensitive next-door neighbor—grow its renewable energy capacity. The deal seemed to tell Trump, “We are befriending your nearest potential enemy and doing so in a manner that will take away American business opportunities and support the Paris Agreement.”
Then, as if China were hedging its bets on the off chance Trump makes coal great again, a Chinese company bought the biggest chunk of Rio Tinto’s coal operations in Australia, including port access to ship the fossil fuel globally. “This is a definite game changer…,” said Matthew Boyle of CRU Group, a consultant on the mining sector.
Meanwhile, in advance of U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May’s meeting today with Trump, British members of parliament asked her to set the new president straight on the “unequivocal” reality of human-influenced global warming. “Your meeting with the new president of the United States on Friday presents you with an opportunity to demonstrate your personal commitment to this issue and ensure the U.S. maintains its pledge to the world to take ambitious efforts to combat climate change,” the cross-party Environmental Audit Committee told May in a letter.
Thanks to climate change, cloud bursts are dumping increasingly massive amounts of water over shorter periods of time in localized deluges that are causing dangerous flooding across parts of Europe and Asia, according to a new study published Wednesday. Climate models have predicted this phenomenon—which also is wreaking havoc with overwhelmed flood management systems in the United States—as a result of higher temperatures lifting more moisture into the atmosphere.
Southern and southeastern Europe will suffer the most severe storms, flooding, heatwaves and droughts brought to the continent by climate change, the European Environment Agency warned in a new report released Wednesday. The agency blamed climate change for nearly $430 billion in economic losses and 85,000 deaths in Europe from 1980 to 2013. “All European regions are vulnerable to climate change, but some regions will experience more negative impacts than others,” the report says. “Southern and southeastern Europe [are] projected to be a climate change hot spot… .”
Another study released Wednesday found that climate change is fast destabilizing the world’s mountain habitats, posing an existential threat to plants and animals found at altitude. “Our results, which come from an extensive study of elevation gradients across seven mountain regions of the world—including Japan, British Columbia, New Zealand, Patagonia, Colorado, Australia and Europe—suggest that future climate warming will substantially alter the way that these sensitive ecosystems function,” said co-author Richard Bardgett, a University of Manchester ecologist.
In what was a surprise only for its Constitution-dissing, Orwellian bent, Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, the Republican chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, recommended Americans get their news solely from President Trump rather than the news media. “Better to get your news directly from the president,” he said Monday night on the House floor. “In fact, it might be the only way to get the unvarnished truth.”
In a related surprise, sales of George Orwell’s novel 1984 have soared since Trump’s right-hand advisor Kellyanne Conway called the Trump administration’s misrepresentations of the truth “alternative facts.” By Wednesday, the 1949 dystopian classic—which uses similar terms for government-prescribed thought—topped Amazon’s bestseller list, prompting Penguin to order a reprint of 75,000 copies.
With all of that in mind, it still came as a shock when the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists announcedThursday that it had moved the symbolic Doomsday Clock ahead to two and a half minutes before midnight, marking the first time since 1953 that humanity has been this close to apocalypse. The group cited Donald Trump’s “disturbing comments” about nuclear weapons and climate change among their motivations. “Never before has the Bulletin decided to advance the clock largely because of the statements of a single person. But when that person is the new president of the United States, his words matter,” Lawrence Krauss, chairman of the Bulletin’s board of sponsors, and David Titley, a member of its science panel, wrote in a New York Times op-ed about the reasoning.
Some observers said what transpired this week was a normal part of any presidential transition. Others claimed it was unprecedented.
The cascade of events started immediately after President Trump’s swearing in last Friday, whenall mention of climate change was wiped from the White House website and replaced with An America First Energy Plan. “For too long, we’ve been held back by burdensome regulations on our energy industry,” the new text states. “President Trump is committed to eliminating harmful and unnecessary policies such as the Climate Action Plan… .” The statement goes on to spell out a commitment to “embrace the shale oil and gas revolution” and to support “clean coal.” An ambiguous reference to protecting natural resources appears near the bottom of the page: “Lastly, our need for energy must go hand-in-hand with responsible stewardship of the environment.”
On Saturday, the president himself reportedly called the National Park Service to object to an official retweet of photos showing the disparity between Barack Obama’s record inaugural audience on the National Mall and Trump’s relatively sparse showing.
On Monday, The Washington Post reported the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had “abruptly” canceled a February conference on the health effects of climate change before Trump’s inauguration, without explanation.
On Tuesday, Reuters reported that the Trump administration had “instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to remove the climate change page from its website,” according to two agency employees. “If the website goes dark, years of work we have done on climate change will disappear,” one of the staffers was quoted as saying.
“The Trump administration has instituted a media blackout at the Environmental Protection Agency and barred staff from awarding any new contracts or grants,” the Associated Press reportedon Wednesday. Other news outlets reported a communications blackout at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “Both EPA and USDA have strong scientific integrity policies in place,” said Gretchen Goldman, the research director for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “A longstanding censorship of scientists at these agencies would be at odds with these policies.”
On Wednesday morning, seven activists climbed a 300-foot crane within sight of the White House and unfurled a giant banner that simply said, “RESIST.” Their intent was “to resist the environmental, economic and racial injustice that Trump and his administration have already laid out and put into practice,” said Travis Nichols, a spokesman for Greenpeace.
Pushback from federal employees began on Tuesday, with tweets on climate change sent from the Badlands National Park’s Twitter account. “Today, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is higher than at any time in the last 650,000 years. #climate,” said one. A few hours later, they were all gone. Just after 11 p.m. that night, the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site in Buffalo, New York, tweeted words from Teddy himself: “Free speech, exercised both individually and through a free press, is a necessity in any country where the people are free.”
Then Twitter accounts began popping up for AltUSNatParkService, AltUSForestService, Resistance_NASA, Rogue NASA and Rogue NOAA and the like. “Can’t wait for President Trump to call us FAKE NEWS,” tweeted AltUSNatParkService. “You can take our official Twitter, but you’ll never take our free time!” By noonon Wednesday, AltUSNatParkService had nearly half a million followers. When The Washington Post tried to track down the dissident tweeters, it received this anonymous reply: “We will not be identifying ourselves due to the anger and threats coming from President Trump’s loyalists. We are just here to push the science that is being dismantled by the current administration.”
On another front, news of a March for Science—date to be announced next week—began circulating Monday. By Wednesday, the march’s Facebook and Twitter accounts had tens of thousands of followers. “Although this will start with a march, we hope to use this as a starting point to take a stand for science in politics,” reads a statement on the event’s website. “Slashing funding and restricting scientists from communicating their findings (from tax-funded research!) with the public is absurd and cannot be allowed to stand as policy. This is a non-partisan issue that reaches far beyond people in the STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] fields and should concern anyone who values empirical research and science.”
There also is a People’s Climate March scheduled for April 29 in Washington, organized by more than two dozens groups, including 350.org, the Sierra Club, GreenLatinos, the NAACP, GreenFaith and the Union of Concerned Scientists. “There is no denying it: Donald Trump’s election is a threat to the future of our planet, the safety of our communities and the health of our families,” says the event’s website. “On April 29th, we will march for our families. We will march for our air, our water and our land. We will march for clean energy jobs and climate justice. We will march for our communities and the people we love.”
In what looked like a message to President Trump, ExxonMobil Vice President William Colton toldBloombergon Wednesday
that his company supports the “monumental” Paris Agreement as a “very meaningful and constructive process.” He describe the global pact’s goals as both doable and in line with the oil giant’s strategic objectives. ExxonMobil “fully appreciates and acknowledges the risk posed by climate change,” Colton said. “We really admire the Paris process, where you have all the major nations of the world coming together on a global basis—for it is a global challenge.”
On Thursday, two House Democrats sent a letter to White House counsel Donald McGahn, alleging the Trump administration’s “gag orders” on employees violate federal laws and, therefore, should be “immediately” rescinded. The same day, five Democrats associated with the committee that oversees the EPA expressed their concerns to the president about the agency’s freeze on communications, grants and contracts.
By midweek, the administration began to deny the news reports. “We’re looking at scrubbing [the EPA website] up a bit, putting a little freshener on it and getting it back up to the public,” said Doug Ericksen, spokesman for Trump’s transition team. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said there had been no directives from the president to federal staff. “There are a couple of these agencies that have had problems adhering to their own policies,” he said. “They haven’t been directed by us to do anything.”
As for the CDC’s apparent self-censorship on climate change, Al Gore announced Thursday that the agency’s cancelled conference on the health effects of climate climate was back on, organized by his Climate Reality Project, the Harvard Global Health Institute, the University of Washington Center for Health and the Global Environment and Howard Frumkin, former director of the CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health. “They tried to cancel this conference but it is going forward anyway,” Gore said in a statement. “Today we face a challenging political climate, but climate shouldn’t be a political issue. Health professionals urgently need the very best science in order to protect the public, and climate science has increasingly critical implications for their day-to-day work.”
In an uncharacteristically stinging admonishment, China’s official Xinhua news agency ran a story Sunday claiming the Trump administration’s post-inauguration climate deletions from the White House website had generated “anxiety” and “criticism” across the world. “Observers worldwide are watching with uneasiness whether the biggest developed country in the world will backslide on climate change or not,” Xinhua said. “Science has proved that climate change is largely caused by human activities,” said a companion commentary. “Any energy policy that goes against the science is shortsighted and disastrous to the whole world.”
“In the first days after his inauguration, Trump’s administration goes in the opposite direction to the rest of the world,” Li Shuo of Greenpeace China was quoted as saying in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post. “Right when China shuts coal power plants, Trump vows to cancel climate change action.”
A piece in Monday’s state-run Global Times highlighted the “different attitudes adopted by the U.S. and China toward climate change.” While China suspended construction of more than 100 coal-fired power plants, “the Trump administration committed to ‘reviving America’s coal industry,’ per an announcement posted on the White House’s official website shortly after the new president was sworn in.” It goes on to suggest Washington may find itself “under external pressure once the new administration becomes overly active in revising policies to give the U.S. coal industry an advantage. Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has called for a carbon tax on U.S. imports if Trump rips up the Paris Agreement… .”
Perhaps more worrying, the Global Times warned that “the uncertainty brought by Washington could affect Chinese public opinion on climate issues. As some Chinese netizens grumble and question why developing countries like China should strictly comply with commitments to reduce emissions, Chinese authorities need a firm determination to continue the process of supporting energy-saving and emission-reduction plans.”
Despite India’s agreement to join the Kyoto Protocol in a redoubled commitment to the Paris Agreement, much of this week’s news underscored the country’s status as a hot spot for mushrooming fossil fuel consumption.
India looks set to overtake China as the largest growth market for energy by 2030, according to this year’s BP Energy Outlook, which was released Wednesday. The oil giant predicts India’s growth in oil consumption will outpace all other major economies by 2035. And while global growth in coal consumption is expected to “slow sharply,” due in large part to China’s cutbacks, “India is the largest growth market, with its share of world coal demand doubling from around 10 percent in 2015 to 20 percent in 2035,” the forecast says.
It is no wonder then that India received VIP treatment this week in the United Arab Emirates, which invited Indian companies to invest in its petroleum sector. “India sits very high on our strategic partnerships and strategic economic relationships agenda, and we would do everything we can to expand that relationship and to develop new avenues for partnerships and cooperation,” said the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company’s CEO Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber.
In addition to being India’s largest player in renewable energy, Tata Power wants to tap coal deposits in the Russian Far East, according to officials from Russia’s pristine Kamchatka region. Senior Tata executives reportedly were in Moscow this week meeting with Kamchatka’s governor about the deal. As with the Adani Group’s mega coal project near the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, Tata’s Kamchatka project reportedly would include both coal extraction and building nearby port facilities for ease of exportation.
The Trump administration is preparing executive orders related to U.S. participation in international treaties, including the Paris Agreement, The New York Times reported this week. The president also may soon nominate a Supreme Court justice, who could end up casting the deciding vote on the EPA’s Clean Power Plan.
Federal employees who work on climate are bracing for more chaos and conflict, The Hill reported. “We asked some environmental employees, and one said, ‘We’re in the clown car to crazy town,'”Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, was quoted as saying. This week was “sort of the opening act of what’s going to be a long and bloody drama,” he said, calling attention to cuts in Trump’s upcoming budget proposal. Myron Ebell, former head of Trump’s EPA transition, told the Associated Press he would like to see at least half of the EPA’s staff axed. “Let’s aim for half and see how it works out, and then maybe we’ll want to go further,” he said.
Expect to see more resistance as additional changes unfold. Trump’s team “came in stomping with very heavy boots…, determined to make the federal workforce the enemy,” said Eric Schaeffer, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, who resigned in protest from George W. Bush’s EPA. “You get what you pay for.”
On the international front, climate change has been a bright spot in U.S.-China relations in recent years. “There is a long history of countries that struggle to get along using the subject of the environment to continue talking and build good will,” said David Victor of the Brookings Institution. From all appearances, President Trump seems hell bent on throwing away that leverage. “You have to think that leads to an overall deterioration of the U.S.-China relationship,” said Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “There are not that many positives to offset the negatives.” If the world’s top two greenhouse gas emitters end up at odds on all fronts, where might that leave the Paris Agreement? |
