12th Jun 2017
by: Stacey Lyons
Trump’s jumping ship on the Paris 2020 Agreement is no surprise and we cannot let it diminish the power of a global commitment.
Let’s face it, President Trump’s announcement last week wasn’t a big shock to us all. The writing was on the wall since before he was elected. Throughout his campaign he has constantly denied climate change as a Chinese fabrication to put the US at a disadvantage.
On day one in the White House President Trump erased all reference to climate change on the White House website. In early February, Rex Tillerson was confirmed as Secretary of State. Tillerson is a former CEO of ExxonMobil, an American multinational oil and gas corporation – in fact the fifth largest oil and gas company in the world. Despite being an ex oil man, Tillerson is one the few in the cabinet who promoted the Paris agreement. He agrees with the 98% of scientists who are convinced that climate change is caused by humans.
But there are plenty of open deniers in the form of Stephen Bannon, special advisor to the President and Scott Pruitt, in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency. Before being appointed its head, Pruitt has sued the EPA over 14 times. It seems extraordinary that he is now in charge of its future.
When the first preliminary budget under President Trump was announced in March, it made huge cuts to the funding of US science and environmental agencies including the EPA, which suffered a 40% cut in funding. The monies ‘saved’ at the EPA will be transferred to defence and the new costly state activity – wall building!
On the 24th of January, barely four days into his term, Trump reversed an Obama executive order stopping the building of large oil pipelines across the country. Thus he began unravelling the work and progress of the Obama administration in the fight against climate change.
On March 28th President Trump signed a further order promoting energy independence and economic growth which rescinded executive reports on climate change and reversed previous orders.
A month later, President Trump signed another executive order that called for a review of the ban implemented by the Obama administration on offshore oil and gas drilling in parts of the Arctic, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
While all this has been going on the EPA, which oversees research and environmental regulation, is being torn down from the inside. In the six months since the Trump administration has been in power the agency has removed many climate change-related papers, data and references from its website, put a freeze on hiring and staffed a key board tasked with approving new research with industry representatives.
Has Trump destroyed our best chance to avoid climate catastrophe?
What does this mean for us – and when I say “us” I mean the world? Trump’s actions – not only last Thursday but since he has arrived in office, could have easily destroyed the best chance the world has to survive for our future generations.
Trump’s attitude of ‘Jobs before climate change’ is misguided. Clean energy will create more jobs than the transition to clean energy will lose.
Time for all the other signatories to the Paris agreement to redouble their efforts.
There is renewed commitment from European countries; China and India take climate change seriously. Many states and mayors in the United States (including Pittsburgh, which Trump purported to speak for during his speech renouncing the Paris agreement) have indicated their determination to proceed with policies to reduce emissions.
It would be foolish to deny that Trump has set back the global transition to clean energy but he cannot stop it. This could be the call to arms for other countries to make a difference.
As for us, here at Solar 21 we continue to look for opportunities to develop renewable energy projects. We have always concentrated our efforts in Europe where successive governments have supported carbon emission reduction through feed-in tariffs and similar incentives for energy from renewable sources. The result is that almost all members of the EU (but not Ireland) have already met their 2020 emissions reductions targets.
We are on the side of Emmanuel Macron, the new French president, who paraphrased Trumps’ election mantra to say “Let’s make earth great again!”