US vital statistics
Six years after Donald Trump allegedly wrote a suggestive birthday note to Jeffrey Epstein, the current US president put his name to something that now seems almost as shocking: a letter calling for action on the climate crisis.
In 2009 Trump, then a real estate developer and reality TV personality, was among a group of business leaders behind a full-page advertisement in the New York Times calling for legislation to “control climate change, an immediate challenge facing the United States and the world today”. The US must lead on clean energy, Trump and the others wrote, to avoid “catastrophic and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet”.
Today, the letter is jarring. The world continues to dawdle politically in its response to the climate crisis but clean energy is booming, responsible for almost all new energy capacity and drawing double the investment of fossil fuels globally. The market, as those business leaders from 2009 would now note, has shifted.
Most starkly, though, Trump has become the planet’s foremost advocate of fossil fuels, throwing the might of the US presidency into a rearguard battle to keep the world mired in the era of combusted carbon. There is now no fiercer single opponent to the collective effort to stave off climate breakdown than Trump.
When world leaders gather for UN climate talks in Brazil next month, the escalation of Trump’s hostility towards climate action will be apparent. The US state department’s office that deals with climate negotiations has been abolished as “unnecessary”, making it unclear who, if anyone, will represent the world’s leading economic and military superpower in Belem.
As in his first term, Trump has again withdrawn the US from the Paris climate deal, thrown open more land and waters for oil and gas drilling, and set about dismantling clean air protections that would have prevented thousands of deaths across America. These rollbacks will “drive a stake through the heart of the climate change religion”, as Lee Zeldin, Trump’s head of the Environmental Protection Agency, gleefully put it.
But Trump’s latest spell in the White House has gone even further, to extremes that have surprised many onlookers.
Rather than simply boost a fossil fuel industry that donated handsomely to his election campaign, Trump has set about obliterating clean energy projects: halting offshore windfarms that had already been approved, banning wind and solar from federal land, and eliminating subsidies for renewables and electric cars (while handing fresh taxpayer dollars to a seemingly futile effort to revive coal).
“We are certainly in a different environment than we were in the first Trump administration,” said Kim Carnahan, who was the chief climate negotiator for the US during Trump’s first term.
“There’s a focus on dismantling rather than building. It’s hard to see. We’re not present for a major global issue and are ceding that ground to our competitors, which is not good for the United States.”
Not content with jettisoning Republican free-market orthodoxy in the US energy market, Trump has sought to intervene in other countries’ climate policies, scolding the UK for erecting wind turbines and for not drilling enough oil for his liking. He has also pushed the EU to agree to buy $750bn (£550bn) in US oil and gas over the next three years, as well as striking fossil fuel deals with Japan and South Korea.
“Countries are on the brink of destruction because of the green energy agenda,” Trump told stony-faced leaders during a UN speech last month. “If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail. You need strong borders and traditional energy sources if you are going to be great again.”
The president has tried to rewire language around energy and climate, too. Trump, who was seemingly radicalised by his disgust at viewing wind turbines from his Scottish golf course in 2011, has called wind energy “ugly”, “disgusting” and “pathetic”. The climate crisis is, in his words, a “hoax”.
His administration has cut or hidden inconvenient climate research, deleted mentions of climate change from government websites and created an error-strewn study in their stead and even, despite Trump’s supposed support for free speech, drawn up a list of banned terms, such as “decarbonisation”, “sustainable”, “emissions” and “green”. The mere reporting of greenhouse gas emissions is now verboten, too.
Fossil fuels, meanwhile, have been rebranded. “I have a little standing order in the White House,” Trump confided to the UN. “Never use the word ‘coal’, only use the words ‘clean, beautiful coal’. Sounds much better, doesn’t it?”
All of this has slowed the adoption of clean energy in the US: in the first half of the year, spooked businesses closed or downscaled more than $22bn in clean energy projects, costing more than 16,000 jobs, most of them in Republican-held districts.
Energy prices are rising for Americans as a result; and the US’s planet-heating emissions, while still falling, are expected to worsen their already sluggish descent in the years ahead.
This agenda is perplexing even on Trump’s own terms, experts have said. The president has spoken of making American energy “dominant” and of the need for jobs and new generation to fuel AI data centres, and yet has undercut this by attempting to stamp out renewables.
“I do struggle with this – if you are serious about American energy dominance you need to deploy, deploy, deploy,” said Abraham Silverman, an energy expert at Johns Hopkins University.
“It’s puzzling and very strange to say wind and solar has no role in the American system when these are often the quickest and cheapest sources. There’s a real tension in the administration’s main messages.”
The US government’s abandonment of climate concerns raises broader questions about America’s place in the world, too. In the geopolitical struggle with China, two very different visions are being touted to the rest of the world: one that remains hooked to the fossil fuels touted by the planet’s largest oil and gas producer, or one that shifts to clean energy components, probably made in China.
“Trump continues to embarrass the US on the global stage and undermine the interests of Americans at home,” said Gina McCarthy, the former top climate adviser to Joe Biden.
McCarthy believes that American cities and states committed to climate action can help to fill the void left by the federal government. Markets and sub-national governments will continue to shift, even if Trump tries to halt states from cutting pollution. But from China’s perspective, the race to shape energy, and thereby alter the overall trajectory of this century, may already be over.
“The last chance for the US to jump on the green bandwagon has left the station,” said Li Shuo, a China climate policy expert at the Asia Society Policy Institute, of Trump’s dismemberment of the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature climate bill. “In China, this isn’t even treated like a competition. The US is just not in the game.”
At home, Trump may order mentions of the climate crisis and its impact to be scrubbed from the internet, and mock those who worry about such things as “lunatics”, but the effects of an overheated planet will continue to mount, regardless.
Floods in Texas, fires in California and uninsurable homes in Florida can only be dismissed for so long, as can the lure of cheap, abundant clean energy. Trump’s 2009 call for action on climate may be delayed, but it is unlikely to be denied.
“There is a dip now, there is less willingness to talk about decarbonisation,” said Carnahan. “But this is against the tide of what you see happening with renewable energy in our biggest competitors. They are not just all in, but really driving ahead.
“All of this won’t go away because the problem hasn’t been solved. There will still be concerns about action on climate change because there is no other choice.
“The problem is still there and the realities of its impacts will just become more and more clear over time.”
