One week in and the climate talks in Marrakech, Morocco, have gotten minimal reporting so far. Given how generally rotten U.S. news coverage has been on climate issues in general, that’s no surprise. And given the focus on the outcome of the election which means Donald Trump will be in charge at the White House in nine weeks, it’s even somewhat understandable.
Whatever Trump’s actual views on the subject of global warming, his public stance is an extremist version of denialism, the nutty claim that human-made change in the climate is an outright hoax.
The starkly depressing example of American exceptionalism gone berserk has to make for some interesting conversations for Americans representing the United States at the Marrakech talks—officially the Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP22. How does one keep a diplomatic poker face without grimacing when everybody knows the soon-to-be new boss has vowed to pull out of the Paris Agreement and open the doors to more, not less extraction and burning of fossil fuels?
Despite the difficulties of carrying on talks when they know the incoming president is a scientifically illiterate fool, the U.S. envoy to the talks, Jonathan Pershing—who was a young science officer at the first climate talks in 1991 and was deputy director of global change at the State Department under Bill Clinton—said in Marrakech on Tuesday as heads of state began arriving that no matter what the United States does, other nations are going to move ahead.
At a packed news conference, Pershing said:
“Heads of state can and will change but I am confident that we can and we will sustain a durable international effort to counter climate change,” [Pershing] said. [...]
[He] said his Chinese counterpart, Xie Zhenhua, told him that China intended to move ahead regardless. [...]
"I'm hearing the same from the Europeans. I'm hearing the same from the Brazilians. I'm hearing the same from Mexico, and from Canada, and from smaller nations like Costa Rica and from Colombia."
That sounds encouraging. But how much of this is a kind of whistling past the graveyard? Not having the U.S. behind the Kyoto Agreement made it impotent. If Trump actually does manage to keep his notoriously short attention span focused on the four-year process for pulling out of the Paris Agreement, that pact will be damaged as well, perhaps fatally.
Whatever other nations do going forward, it’s clear American climate activists are going to have their work cut out for them over the next four years as the Trump administration pushes an aggressive version of the “all of the above” energy policy that the Obama administration tempered with efforts to cut emissions and a push to expand renewable sources of electricity. Reviving the U.S. coal industry, as Trump has vowed, isn’t going to happen in any major way. But the administration’s actions in that realm most certainly will harm efforts to cut back greenhouse gas emissions.
As in other arenas—police violence against people of color, economic reform, reproductive rights—advocates for sane climate and energy policies will need to be active in the streets, in the courts, in the state legislatures, and in Congress. Creative approaches will be necessary to achieve even small victories, but American dissidents have repeatedly proved themselves capable on that score. Perhaps promoting a benign form of nationalism could help, along the lines of, say: Make America No. 1 in Green Energy and Green Jobs. But it will take a lot more than slogans to win this fight that we absolutely must win.