Bahrain is concerned about its environment, but even before Donald Trump hijacked the Republican Party, he was loudly declaring that the science of climate change had not been born in the US. It was, he insisted in 2012, a Chinese hoax “created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive”.
Trump has promised that within 100 days of taking office he will “cancel” the Paris Climate Agreement of last December and “stop all payments of US tax dollars to UN global warming programmes”.
Now in practice, Trump can’t cancel the Paris Agreement, which has been signed by 195 countries. He can pull the US out of the treaty (as George W Bush, another climate change denier, pulled the US out of the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change in 2001), but he can’t stop other countries from carrying on with the agreed cuts in emissions – which they may well do, because they understand how dangerous the situation is.
The net effect of a Trump presidency will certainly be to slow the rate at which American greenhouse gas emissions decline, but simple economics dictates that they will not actually rise, and might even fall a bit.
So how hard will the American defection hit the Paris Agreement, whose target is to stop the average global temperature from reaching two degrees C higher than the pre-industrial level? Will it cause everybody else to walk away from it too, because the US is no longer doing its share?
The US is the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases (after China), accounting for about 16 per cent of global emissions. Its commitment under the Paris deal is to cut that amount by just over a quarter in the next 10 years, so what is actually at stake here is around 4pc of total global emissions in 2025 if the US just lets it rip.
That is not a make-or-break amount, particularly given that all the pledges of cuts made in Paris last December did not get us down to the never-exceed plus-2-degree target. They got us a lot closer to it, but we would still be heading for around plus 2.7 degrees if everybody kept all their promises. Without American co-operation we are probably heading for plus 3, but in either case there was still a lot to do.
The unwritten assumption at Paris was that everybody would be back in a few years with bigger commitments to emission cuts, and so we would eventually stagger across the finish line just in time. It was always a dangerous assumption, but the other major players might simply refuse to go any further if the US is not doing its share. Especially China, which is responsible for 26pc of global emissions.
On the other hand, China is terrified of the predicted local impacts of climate change, and has installed more solar and wind power than any other country. It already gets 20pc of its power from renewables, and is aiming much higher. The Chinese will resent the Trump administration’s refusal to carry its share of the burden, but it will not cut off its nose to spite its face.
The world has grown wearily familiar with this aspect of American exceptionalism, and the effort to avoid a climate disaster will stumble on elsewhere even while Trump reigns in Washington.
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