Fight against global warming carries on
Many hoping to outlast Trump, get U.S. back on track
WASHINGTON — His promised coal renaissance sputtered. Rollbacks of environmental protections are tangled in court. Even automakers aren’t on board for his push toward heavier polluting cars.
But even so, a year after President Donald Trump pulled out of the landmark Paris accord on climate change, the struggle to contain global warming has grown considerably more complicated without the prodding and encouragement once provided by the U.S. government.
And though many in the climate movement hope progress toward cutting emissions can continue despite Trump’s retreat, there are growing doubts about reaching the Paris agreement’s goal of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, if Washington does not re-engage soon.
Yet even in these dark days for climate action, plunging natural gas and renewable energy costs, as well as the grit of state and local leaders determined to carry on without Washington — and to fight it in court — have bought the movement some time.
Some activists are optimistic that they can wait this administration out. They are diligently crunching numbers and preparing reports to unveil at the global climate summit Gov. Jerry Brown is hosting in California in September.
That’s when new benchmarks will be proposed for getting the nation back on track for meeting its Paris commitments.
In many ways, Trump has proved far less competent at dismantling climate action than feared, they say.
“Teddy Roosevelt talked about speaking softly and carrying a big stick,” said Nigel Purvis, a climate negotiator during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations and chief executive of the firm Climate Advisers. “Donald Trump is tweeting loudly and carrying
fiddlesticks. The level of damage is not as much as one might have thought given all the tweeting and speeches.”
Coal plants have continued shutting down since Trump took office.
The costs of renewable energy continue to fall, even after Trump slapped tariffs on foreign-made solar panels crucial to the industry’s growth. Led by California, states representing 40 percent of the U.S. population are pushing ahead with innovative strategies to drive their emissions down and are on track to meet their states’ benchmarks under the Paris agreement.
The group, called the U.S. Climate Alliance, last week rolled out a fresh set of actions it will take to keep the U.S. moving toward its Paris commitments. They include policy innovations that put the coalition — which collectively represents an economy larger than most industrialized nations — at the forefront of the climate movement.
The alliance has grown to include three states with Republican governors.
McDonald’s has joined such companies as Walmart and Citigroup in pledging to abide by the Paris agreement. It is a heavy lift for a company serving 69 million a day — one that will mean upending its supply chain for beef and packaging.
The emissions it will cut by 2030 are equal to the amount of greenhouse gasses 32 million passenger cars create in a year.
It’s all encouraging, said Marc Hafstead, an economist at the Washington think tank Resources for the Future, but it falls far short of getting the country where it needs to be.
“If we are going to take this target seriously, we need federal action,” he said. “There is still time. We
can still do something in 2020 or 2021 or after.”
Hafstead anticipates a national policy of pricing carbon will be essential.
Such policies are proving politically challenging even in the states most bullish on climate action.
There is another big problem states are finding themselves hard-pressed to tackle— automobiles.
The aggressive Obamaera fuel economy standards the Trump administration is trying to scrap do not go far enough in reducing vehicle emissions, which recently became the nation’s biggest contributor to climate change, surpassing power plants.
States are trying to do their part by building vast
charging networks that will encourage drivers to move into electric vehicles.
But even as other nations set timelines for banning combustion engines, sales of zero-emissions vehicles in the U.S. are minuscule.
“How do you achieve this massive shift in consumer and automaker behavior that gets the majority of vehicles sold in next few years into the zero-emissions category?” said Kate Larsen, a director at Rhodium Group, a research firm that tracks the progress nations are making in meeting climate goals.
“No one has a clear idea of how to do that on the time frame we need.”