The Welland Tribune

Climate- change show still rolling, despite Trump

- — Gwynne Dyer is an independen­t journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries. GWYNNE DYER

“Promoting coal at a climate summit is like promoting tobacco at a cancer summit,” said Michael Bloomberg, the former New York mayor, but U. S. President Donald J. Trump did exactly that. He sent a team of American diplomats and energy executives to the annual world climate summit, being held this year in Bonn, Germany, to extol the wonders of “clean” coal.

Bloomberg, now a UN special envoy for climate change, got it right. The audience at the U. S. presentati­on heckled the presenters. Where people who were concerned about global warming once worried about whether the U. S. government would dare to defy the fossil fuel lobby at home, the denialists now control the government — and it turns out not to matter all that much.

There are several reasons. One is that global coal use has declined as the cost of renewable energy has dropped. It’s just not competitiv­e any more, and China and India have cancelled plans for hundreds of new coal- fired power plants this year.

Even in the United States, the share of electricit­y coming from coal fell from 51 per cent in 2008 to only 31 per cent last year. And U. S. coal companies are going bankrupt.

A second reason is that Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement has had zero impact internatio­nally. The fear that other countries would also default on their commitment­s proved to be unfounded, and the United States is literally the only country on the planet that does not subscribe to the treaty.

Finally, Trump has been outflanked by a new alliance announced in Bonn on Monday that links the 15 U. S. states committed to strong climate action with the Canadian and Mexican government­s in a continentw­ide group that concentrat­es on phasing out coal power and boosting clean power and transport. Much of the U. S. contributi­on to emissions cuts that Trump reneged on will be covered by these state- level tactics.

There are other causes for alarm, of course. After three years when global carbon dioxide emissions stayed steady, albeit at a very high level, they have started rising again. And there is an unexplaine­d rise in methane emissions in the tropics, not caused by burning fossil fuels, that leads some scientists to suspect that one of the dreaded feedbacks is kicking in.

Feedbacks are the spectre at the feast. You can get everything else right, your emissions are going down nicely, and you are on course to stop the warming just before the average global temperatur­e reaches two degrees Celsius higher — and then the whole global system goes into overdrive. The warming that human beings have already caused has triggered some other, natural source of warming that we cannot shut off.

It is still uncertain whether we can ratchet down emissions fast enough to stop the temperatur­e rise in time. But there are big changes in the offing that will make it easier to cut emissions: meat substitute­s and labgrown meat, electric vehicles, and further rapid falls in the price of renewables like solar and wind.

Plus, the long struggle between rich and poor countries over who is to blame for the problem and who pays to fix it is largely over.

Nobody in Bonn is celebratin­g the U. S. government’s defection from the fight against climate change, but their panic is long past. The Bonn meeting has concentrat­ed on writing the rules for measuring how countries are complying with the promises they have made on emissions cuts.

When the conference closes on Friday, there will be no exciting new breakthrou­ghs, but real breakthrou­gh came in Paris in 2015, and the objective now is to keep the show on the road. So far, so good.

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