For much of the last 30 years, the rest of the world has been forced to persevere with climate action in the face of US intransigence
Donald Trump’s latest attack on climate action takes place amid rapidly rising temperatures, rising sea levels, still-rising greenhouse gas emissions, burgeoning costs from extreme weather and the imminent danger that the world will trigger “tipping points” in the climate system that will lead to catastrophic and irreversible changes.
Trump’s decision to withdraw from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the world’s leading body of climate scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will not alter any of those scientific realities.
Nor will it do much, at least in the short term, to alter the economic reality that the push to a low-carbon world is proving an engine of growth for scores of countries. Global investment in low-carbon energy now outstrips that in fossil fuels by two to one. Taking over Venezuela’s basket-case oil industry will make no perceptible difference.
Yeah, honestly, this is one of the few good things to happen lately. There’s a comment from Mark Blyth where he calls himself a climate optimist because (paraphrasing) between China, India and the US, it really only needs one of them to move and the rest of the world will have to follow. We’re using “optimist” pretty loosely here, obviously, yes we all know that we’ve kicked the can too far down the road for any solution to even be good, let alone perfect, but China is merrily dragging us into many of the better of the bad solutions simply because they’re just good business (and, y’know, they had that whole thing where you could cut Beijing’s air with a chainsaw on a good day). Without the US fucking shit up, we might actually start to get somewhere on some real solutions. I hate looking to China to lead the world on anything, but US voters decided they didn’t want to act like adults so here we are.