News of Donald Trump’s election shocked the international climate-change proceedings taking place this week in Marrakech, Morocco. During his campaign, Trump vowed to revoke America’s participation in the Paris Agreement, a global plan to keep temperature increases below 2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial averages. More than 190 countries have signed the agreement, and many consider it a last hope for fighting climate change. Trump has also vowed to dismantle President Obama’s clean power plan.
“The U.S. delegation had previously planned to cut greenhouse gas emissions from the amount released in 2005, by between 26 and 28 percent by 2025,” says the Huffington Post. “The prospect of a presidency helmed by Trump, who has said that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, throws that into question. He has threatened to ignore those pledges and leave the Paris deal, end all funding on the issue, appoint climate deniers to lead major government agencies and roll back President Barack Obama’s sweeping environmental legacy.”
Trump has selected Myron Ebell, a climate-change skeptic and director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, to head his EPA transition team. Ebell has called for an end to climate-change “alarmism” and “global energy rationing,” says Scientific American.
Some environmental leaders and scientists at the 22nd Conference of the Parties in Morocco called for Trump to face climate change as reality. “It’s clear that Donald Trump is about to be one of the most powerful people in the world, but even he does not have the power to amend and change the laws of physics, to stop the impacts of climate change,” said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy at the Union for Concerned Scientists, a U.S. science advocacy group, at a press conference.
Others in Morocco already fear the worst. “The election of Trump is a disaster for our continent,” Geoffrey Kamese, a senior program officer for the group Friends of the Earth Africa, said in a statement, reports Huffington Post. “The United States, if it follows through on its new president’s rash words about withdrawing from the international climate regime, will become a pariah state in global efforts for climate action.”
According to the The Guardian, recent analysis by Lux Research predicted that a Trump presidency would increase U.S. greenhouse gas emissions 16 percent by the end of his second term, should he win one, compared to a Hillary Clinton administration. “Such a shift could prove key in not only pushing the world towards dangerous climate change but also dissuading other nations from making the required cuts in emissions,” says The Guardian.
The last attempt at a global climate treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, failed because the U.S. reneged. The effects of that decision set the world back by 20 years in terms of climate progress, says Huffington Post. So far, delegates in Morocco have said they intend to see the Paris Agreement through even if the U.S. — the world’s second largest polluter — doesn’t participate. The survival of their countries depends on it.