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My fellow Americans (and concerned people everywhere), this is not the time to give up on meeting the planetary crisis.
This is the time to prepare to win.
Here are some notes on why I think we can.
The Bad News
Let’s get the tragic reality out of the way: Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States, and — on top of all his other moves to increase income inequality, attack immigrants, stoke racism and religious hatred, undermine workers, threaten civil liberties and undercut women’s rights — he will certainly attack the progress that has been made on climate change under President Obama. Trump is anti-climate. That’s the simple truth.
Now, for three decades, climate advocates have focused on climate strategies at the Federal level. For good reason: the unparalleled power of the levers of national government to change economic, energy, agriculture, housing and transportation policies. The Feds can get shit done.
But we’ve never made as much progress as we should have, and now, even that progress will be undone by an anti-climate president — with the support of two anti-climate houses of Congress. Climate denialists will sit in the Cabinet. Others will chair the U.S. Senate Committees on Environment and Public Works; Energy and Natural Resources; and Commerce, Science and Transportation. A large majority of Republican lawmakers are overt climate denialists. There has not been a U.S. government this hostile to climate and environmental progress since Reagan was elected in 1980.
There is a very good chance that many, if not all, of the key climate action achievements of the Obama administration will be undone in the next year or two.
The Ticking Clock
Meanwhile, the planet continues to warm.
Many smart people are in despair right now, because they understand that a Trump election has at least cost us time, and time is the one thing we don’t have.
Every day, we add carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere heats our planet. To stay within any given range of temperature, we must limit to total accumulation of CO2 in the sky: we must stay within a carbon budget.
The warming limit the world agreed to last year in Paris is two degrees Celsius. Staying under 2ºC demands massive change — but even more, it demands massive change quickly. And with every day we delay action, the changes we must make to stay under 2ºC become larger and must be deployed faster. Climate change is a steepening problem.
That’s why Trump’s election is such bad news for the climate. Trump cannot stop the global march to a carbon-balanced society. But he can slow it down in the U.S. (and to some extent abroad) — perhaps even slow progress enough to make 2ºC no longer achievable for the planet as a whole. Dave Roberts argues this over on Vox, when he writes “Trump’s election marks the end of any serious hope of limiting climate change to 2 degrees.”
Read the rest of this piece HERE
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