https://link.thetimes.co.uk/view/643dae8e52f5b18ea2028d73lkhjw.5bq/146db693
By Ben Cooke – Times Earth Editor
Excerpt: Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, perhaps the most consequential climate law ever signed, could eventually disburse $1.2 trillion in subsidies for heat pumps, solar panels, electric cars and cutting-edge green technologies.
While Trump has not said he would repeal the act, that is the recommendation of Project 2025, a blueprint for a second Trump term written by former staffers. Trump has said he would take the US back out of the Paris Agreement, and he has sought $1 billion in donations from oil executives. Democratic victories in the House and Senate might restrain him, but it’s clear that Trump wants to dismantle Biden’s green industrial policy.
How bad would that be for the climate? On this question, there are two schools of thought. The first is that it would be what it looks like: an utter disaster, a body blow to fragile international climate talks, and an excuse for other countries not to reduce their own emissions.
The other argument, forcefully articulated by The Economist last month, is that a second Trump term wouldn’t make quite so much difference, because the main driver of decarbonisation is not diplomacy, but technological progress. A clean energy revolution is sweeping the world, emanating primarily not from America but from China, and while Trump might slow it down he cannot ultimately stop it.
To work out which argument is more convincing, I met up with the climate scientist Michael Mann, who was in London for his election to the Royal Society. Famous for the “hockey stick” graph that showed the vertiginous upward curve in global temperatures, Mann has also written about oil companies’ insidious efforts to sow doubt about climate science.
Mann said that a second Trump term would be “game over” for the effort to limit warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures. As an expert in the planet’s response to warming, he is well-placed to know why this threshold – which the world is on the verge of crossing – is so important.
“The tipping points that worry me are the collapse of the western Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, which could raise sea levels by ten metres. It’s uncertain how close we are to their collapse. Maybe we could warm the planet by another half a degree, but in the face of those potentially devastating tipping points we have to take pause.”
Given how close those tipping points could be, Mann doesn’t think there is time for market forces alone to lead the world away from fossil fuels. “Technological progress is very real, but that alone is not going to reduce carbon emissions fast enough. There has to be some penalty for pollution.”
He thinks that if the countries don’t work together to penalise carbon emissions, the enormous energy demands of AI could swallow up the increase in renewable energy, leading China and other countries to keep running coal power stations.
Carbon Brief has estimated that another Trump term could add four gigatonnes to American carbon emissions by 2030 – about the same as the annual emissions of the EU and Japan. Mann said this study underestimates Trump’s probable impact, because while it factors in a repeal of Biden’s climate legislation, “it doesn’t capture by far the biggest impact of a second Trump term, which would be America ceding leadership on the climate crisis. That would give other countries a potent excuse not to get serious about their own emissions.”
Mann says another Trump term would be “catastrophic” for global efforts to fight climate change.
