A Trump win for the planet? Maybe
Into the bleak landscape that is the Trump administration’s environmental record comes a new report — from the government’s own analysts — that lays out in the grimmest terms yet the consequences of continued inaction on climate change.
The National Climate Assessment, issued Friday when most Americans’ attention was on shopping, football and leftovers, predicts devastating effects from a warming planet and stands in sharp contrast to President Donald Trump’s blithe rejection of the basic science of climate change. The report details the environmental, human and economic costs of a changing climate in the United States, including worsening drought, more-vicious wildfires, wider crop failures and accelerating property damage. The impacts could reduce domestic economic activity by as much as a tenth by 2100, the report says.
The president shrugged it off as he has all previous studies on climate change, even as his administration pursues policies that will in all likelihood make the problem worse. In fact, the administration’s retrograde policies and its assault on President Barack Obama’s environmental agenda have been so broad that it’s become something of a game to ask which of Obama’s initiatives on climate change and the environment still have life. Trump is determined to weaken Obama’s rules restricting greenhouse-gas emissions from automobiles and power plants — the chief culprits in the warming climate.
As for positive bits, Andrew Wheeler, Trump’s choice to run the Environmental Protection Agency, has pledged to move ahead with stronger air-pollution standards for heavy trucks, as promised by Obama. This is big news from an agency that has torpedoed one clean-air initiative after another.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke plans an auction of federal waters off Massachusetts as a possible site for wind turbines. Offshore wind is a carbon-free source of power, and Obama promoted it as a way to reduce greenhousegas emissions.
One important Obama policy decision still stands, at least in part because it has been largely ignored, even though it is of considerable value not just to the planet but also to the U.S. economy. It is the 2016 Kigali amendment to the 1987 Montreal Protocol. The protocol, to this day the most successful global environmental agreement, was aimed at rebuilding the thinning ozone layer by requiring all nations to phase out their use of chlorofluorocarbons and other ozone-depleting chemicals. A new report from the United Nations says the ozone layer is on the mend, and large parts could be completely healed by the 2030s.
The replacement chemicals, including a more ozone-friendly cousin called hydrofluorocarbons, turned out to be powerful globalwarming gases. Hence the Kigali amendment, under which nations agreed to find substitutes that were friendlier to the atmosphere.
To date, 60 countries, not including the United States, have ratified the amendment.
Two trade groups — the Air-Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute and the Alliance for Responsible Atmospheric Policy — estimate the U.S. would gain 33,000 jobs and $12.5 billion in annual economic output by 2027 solely by ratifying the amendment. The U.S. Chamber of Congress likes the agreement, and so do many members of Congress. Trump could just say “yes” and make his base (and the rest of us) happy. He doesn’t even have to mention “climate.”