The US has long been regarded
as in thrall to the fossil fuel industry lobbyists, and Trump and the Republican
party platform aim to “forbid” the regulation of carbon pollution and “reject”
global efforts to tackle climate change. Trump wants to “scrap” environmental
regulations and “cancel” the Paris Agreement.[1] And Republicans may well
mount further legal challenges to ratification. However this climate denial is
now clearly at odds with public opinion in the swing states that will decide
the outcome of the election. In Colorado, North Carolina, Florida, Virginia,
and Pennsylvania, at least 75 percent of surveyed adults support regulating
carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Over 60 percent of respondents in those same
states said that global warming will harm future generations. The marked
increased incidence of “once in 500 years” events has also played its part. The
New York Times noted the Baton Rouge flood was the eighth once-in-500-year
event to occur since May 2015. To quote
a landmark report of the 214 National Climate Assessment:
“Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved
firmly into the present.” All this suggests that, despite some of the
wilder aspects of the Presidential campaign, a major reversal of US policy,
while still a risk, is a less likely outcome.
So what might we conclude from
these momentous events?
First, it is increasingly improbable
that other countries enjoying or aspiring to global significance or standing
will be able to hold back from ratification. The agreement comes into force
legally after it is ratified by at least 55 countries, which must also account
for 55% of global carbon emissions. With the US and China alone accounting for
40%, and the third largest economy in the world, that of the EU, having been a
prime mover in demanding action on climate, the Paris ratification conditions
will, one assumes, be met easily and soon.
However the US and Chinese announcements will also put pressure on G20
nations to move faster with ratification and, inter alia, with pledges to phase
out subsidies to fossil fuels. In UK domestic politics it no longer credible to
argue that UK emissions reduction will have no effect “because the biggest
emitters are doing nothing”.
Second, this may be an event
that finally marks the end of an era of damaging and irrelevant debate and
denial over the fundamental validity of the underpinning science. The science
has been very clear for a long time that persistence with high levels of CO2
and other GHG emissions is an unacceptable risk to the future of humanity. But
we are now seeing, perhaps, the collapse of continuing political resistance to
these inconvenient realities. That is not to say that further understanding of
our climate systems may not throw up some further nasty surprises, or more
positively hitherto undetected effects that go some way to mitigating the worst
outcomes. But the basic features of the climate risks we are running are now an
established, and essential, part of any serious policy debate. And the upward statistical
trend lines on global temperature are starting to look remarkably stable.
Despite a weakening el Nino, July 2016 set a new record for the highest global
temperatures on record.
Third, the challenge of
actually meeting the ambitions of Paris remain huge, both in the context of
individual national economies and in terms of reaching binding international
agreements. At some point we can expect a resumption of debates about historic
responsibilities, collective or national, and more hard bargaining over who is
going to meet the costs either of mitigation or of adaptation to a warming
world.
Finally, and turning to some
of the specific issues for the UK, it seems unlikely that that the UK’s
commitment to emissions reductions will be reduced by its prospective exit from
the EU. There will be some interesting
questions to address, including how the UK motor industry seeks to influence
patterns of regulation and technology choice for a low carbon road transport
sector in the EU. There will also be the question of continuing membership of
the emissions trading scheme, and indeed the future of that scheme within the
remaining EU. But some of the more important impacts may well be felt through
changes in the tone of domestic economic policy within the UK. The abandonment
of austerity targets is likely to change the political and economic climate for
infrastructure development, with more willingness to engage in lower cost of
capital public borrowing to support investment, and policies that are more
friendly towards the UK’s industrial heartlands and the “left behind” voters
and regions who swung the vote towards Leave. Exactly how all this will play
out remains uncertain, but there is no doubt that energy policy is now being
framed against some very different policy priorities, both economically and
politically.
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