BY MARIANNE LAVELLE, INSIDECLIMATE NEWS
Following the first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the gulf between the candidates has never seemed deeper, perhaps most alarmingly so on climate change.
The election shapes up as the most significant possible choice
when it comes to climate policy. Clinton, though not committed to a swift
transition away from fossil fuels, vows to build on the climate policies of the
Obama administration and live up to U.S. commitments to the Paris accord.
Trump, in contrast, pledges to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency
and "cancel" the Paris
agreement.
More fundamentally, the election is a choice between one candidate
who accepts the global scientific and political consensus on the causes and
cures for climate change, and one who rejects both.
"The 2016 presidential election can really be seen as the most important referendum on climate change, and on positive action to make the planet a livable place," said Daniel Kammen, physicist and founder of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. "Secretary Clinton and Donald Trump differ more on clean energy and on climate change than on any other issue."
Peter Clark, a paleoclimatologist at Oregon State University who
co-authored a study in Nature Climate Change that
calculated the global warming that already is inevitable, said the decisions
made in the next few years will have profound consequences.
"If we delay any longer, we're just committing ourselves to
greater impact, and greater economic costs," he said. "We are falling
off the cliff as far as what we need to do to combat emissions."
Why is this election so crucial for climate action? Here are the
major ways the next U.S. president can influence the arc of history:
Paris Agreement
The Paris agreement is the first climate pact that requires
emissions-cutting commitments from every one of the 191 nations that have
signed it. And it demands a worldwide transformation to carbon-free energy
sometime in the second half of this century. For its part, the U.S. has pledged
to cut greenhouse gas emissions by up to 28 percent below its 2005 level in
2025.
If he were elected, Trump would not have the power to
"cancel" the agreement, which is a legally binding pact under
international law, and which will already have entered into force by the time
he takes office. The United States, having already ratified the deal,
technically wouldn't be able to exit until 2020, after giving two years'
notice.
But Trump could eviscerate the treaty by directing that the U.S.
do nothing. The U.S. is the second-biggest carbon polluter behind China,
responsible for 18 percent of current annual emissions and 26 percent
cumulatively. If it were not committed to deep cuts, there would be no
meaningful solution to the global climate crisis.
"Such a decision would make it far more difficult to develop
effective global strategies for mitigating and adapting to climate
change," 375 members of the National Academy of Sciences, including 30
Nobel Prize winners wrote in an open letter expressing
alarm at the possibility of an exit from the Paris accord.
"The consequences of opting out of the global community would
be severe and long-lasting—for our planet's climate and for the international
credibility of the United States."
Without naming him, the letter included an extraordinary rebuke of
the Republican Party for nominating Trump. "It is of great concern that
the Republican nominee for President has advocated U.S. withdrawal from the
Paris Accord," the scientists wrote.
Like the U.S. exit from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which President
George W. Bush formally renounced in his first year in office, a U.S.
"Parexit" also would inflame the resentment from the poorest, most
vulnerable countries, who contributed the least to global warming, but are
suffering the greatest impacts.
"It could start to unwind the web that tenuously holds it
together," said Michael Oppenheimer, an atmospheric scientist at Princeton
University, who has served as an adviser to the Clinton campaign. "It
doesn't take very much for countries to start distrusting each other, when the
most influential country doesn't live up to its commitments."
Clean Power Plan
Clinton has pledged to "defend, implement, and extend" the
Clean Power Plan—President Obama's signature climate policy to cut carbon
pollution from the nation's electric power system.
Even with the Clean Power Plan, U.S. policy doesn't go far enough
to meet the U.S. goals under the Paris agreement, as a new peer-reviewed study in
Nature shows. But the new regulations would take a vital step by tackling the
single largest source of U.S. global warming emissions.
If the Clean Power Plan is upheld by the courts (it was put on
hold by the Supreme Court in February and is currently being argued in a
federal appeals court), it would also lay a groundwork for more rigorous action
to cut emissions from oil, cement and other industries.
"A Clinton administration would be about
gap-closing—broadening into new emitting sectors, and going deeper into
others," says policy analyst Kevin Book, of Washington, D.C.'s Clearview
Energy Partners, which conducts research for institutional investors and
corporate strategists.
Trump has vowed to rescind the Clean Power Plan within his first
100 days in office.
He has even said he wants to abolish the Environmental Protection
Agency, which is responsible for carrying it out. That's no small feat, given
that the agency was created by law—one signed by President Nixon.
Trump has named a prominent climate science denier and longtime
foe of regulation, Myron Ebell of the conservative Competitive Enterprise
Institute, to lead his EPA transition team. The administration might even move
more quickly to gut the regulations by asking Congress to eliminate the budget
to enforce it, quite likely an easy ask if the Republicans retain control.
It would be difficult for a Trump administration to undo the Clean
Power Plan, if it's upheld by the federal courts. But the next president will
name the next Supreme Court justice, and it's a given the high court will
decide the Clean Power Plan. The justices could even revisit their 2007 ruling
that carbon dioxide is a pollutant under the Clean Air Act—the underpinning of
all EPA greenhouse gas rules.
The loss of the Clean Power Plan would erode the foundation on
which the Paris treaty is built. Oppenheimer points out that after Congress
failed to pass a cap-and-trade bill early in Obama's first term, the
administration's drive to develop an alternative path was critical in bringing
China to the bargaining table for the joint climate agreement between the
world's two largest carbon emitters that was inked in November 2014. That deal,
in turn, set the stage for the Paris pact the following year.
"Without U.S. domestic leadership, there is no China
agreement," said Oppenheimer. "And without China bellying up to do
its part, there is no Paris accord. That's why U.S. leadership on both the
domestic and international level remains a crucial element of global progress
on climate change."
Energy Policy
Clinton's energy platform, essentially an extension of President
Obama's all-of-the-above strategy with no firm goals to reduce oil and gas
drilling, has disappointed many progressives in the Democratic Party. As
Secretary of State, she pursued an initiative to promote U.S. fracking technologies
overseas. Her campaign has received donations from Washington, D.C. lobbying
groups that have oil and gas clients. She has refused to take a position on a carbon tax.
During the Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders' call to keep fossil
fuels in the ground energized his followers and pressured Clinton to move
further to the left on energy issues. She formally came out against the
Keystone XL pipeline, called for an end to drilling in the Arctic and off the
Atlantic coast and called for restrictions on fracking and other drilling.
She also touts a renewable energy plan that includes
installing a billion solar panels in the United States by 2020 and generating
enough renewable electricity to power every home in America in the next
10 years.
Climate scientists and activists agree that Clinton's plan does
not go far enough, but are committed to electing her and pushing her further once
she is in office.
"If you look at the math, if your goal is to keep the
temperature increase below 1.5 degrees, you have to not only stop further
development, you have to dismantle the fossil fuel infrastructure we have in
place," said Jacob Scherr, an attorney who is former director of the
international climate program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "I
share what Bernie Sanders is saying. I really do believe we need a real
mobilization of resources, technologies, and engagement. But I say to folks if
you're for all that, you want to support Hillary Clinton in a big way because
she has the potential for delivering on that vision."
Trump, on the other hand, has not released the kind of detailed,
and cohesive energy policy typically
developed by presidential candidates.
In the one speech where he laid out his vision, at a North Dakota
fracking industry conference, he grandly promised to achieve "complete American
energy independence," vowing that under his administration, the country
would extract as many fossil fuels from the ground as it can.
A study in Nature last
year calculated that globally, a third of oil reserves, half of natural gas
reserves and 80 percent of current coal reserves need to remain in the ground
to have even a 50-50 chance of limiting warming to relatively safe levels.
It is clear by Trump's rhetoric and choice of advisers, including
Ebell and Harold Hamm, chief executive of the leading fracking firm Continental
Resources, that he would work to roll back any restrictions that he feels
burden fossil fuel suppliers.
Trump is not likely to succeed in his promise to rejuvenate U.S.
coal production—a refrain he has targeted to swing states that have lost mining
jobs, like Ohio and Pennsylvania.
That's because the losses are due largely to market forces,
namely, competition from natural gas and renewables, as well as federal
pollution regulations. "No matter how much he might wish it, he cannot
bring back coal demand that has been extinguished by the market," said
Book.
On oil and gas development, though, a Trump administration would
be able to remove barriers now in place and squelch further regulations.
He has vowed to rescind the EPA's Waters of the U.S. rule that was
finalized earlier this year, a measure that was meant to clarify federal
protection for thousands of waterways and wetlands, which is vigorously opposed
by the fracking industry in North Dakota.
On Trump's short list for Interior Secretary, sources have said,
is another oil executive, Forrest Lucas, the
co-founder of Indiana-based Lucas Oil. Trump has promised to "lift
moratoriums on drilling in federal areas," which are all under Interior's
purview.
Trump's no-holds-barred energy development vision has done more to
galvanize environmentalists' support for Clinton than her own tempered embrace
of climate policy.
"If we have a climate denier in the White House, we will lose
momentum, and the result will be that we will race past a 1.5-degree increase
on the way to 2 degrees," said Scherr. "Donald Trump can fool a lot
of people, but you can't fool Mother Nature."
