Good news for the planet

New Zealand democracy and American democracy have run in parallel this year. Elections held just days apart led to results that revealed public trust, or the lack of it, in the system. Trust in democracy is at high levels in New Zealand. But in the US, the public view of the electoral system has been more contested, thanks in part to deliberate misinformation.

The revealing parallels continue. On the same day the New Zealand Parliament was formally opened, and MPs were sworn in, US president-elect Joe Biden was finally able to move forward with his own transition to power.

We might look back at 2020 as a year in which the worst could have happened but didn’t.

Dire predictions that President Donald Trump would attempt a coup if he lost, or encourage Right-wing militias to cause civil unrest, failed to materialise.

There is an enormous sense of relief that the Trump era is now all but over. Another four years of Trumpism would have been unsustainable, and not just for the mores of US democracy but for the planet. Columbia University in New York launched a Climate Deregulation Tracker in early 2017 to record ‘‘steps taken by the Trump administration and Congress to scale back or wholly eliminate federal climate mitigation and adaptation measures’’. By this month, it had listed 165 rollbacks of environmental regulations and standards.

Four of them directly concerned Trump’s intention to pull out of the Paris climate agreement, which finally came to fruition on November 4, a day after the election. Biden has signalled that he will put the US back into the Paris agreement as soon as possible.

Biden’s appointment of former presidential candidate John Kerry in the new role of special presidential envoy on climate change, which will give a climate official a seat on the National Security Council for the first time, is another sign of how seriously he takes the climate crisis.

The Paris agreement, which took effect in 2016, is seen as a historic achievement agreed upon by 196 countries. The intention is to keep average global temperatures from increasing by more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.

The agreement was held up as a major achievement of the presidency of Barack Obama, who called it ‘‘the best possible shot to save the one planet we’ve got’’ in 2016. By then, of course, Trump had already indicated his willingness to remove the US from it.

But despite Trump’s petty and destructive opposition to the agreement, cities, states and the private sector continued to pursue a low-carbon future. This is one reason why emissions plateaued under Trump rather than increased.

The other reason is steeped in delicious irony. The Covid-19 pandemic kept emissions down, just as it contributed to the end of Trumpism itself.