There are few campaign promises that Donald Trump has actually kept, in part because keeping them was never possible to begin with. Whether it’s automobiles, air conditioners, or Oreos, those manufacturing jobs he promised to nail down have gone away. Neither has he managed to resurrect the coal and steel industries being ground down by pure economics. And when it comes to one of those things that Trump actually pretended to be good at—making deals—the nation is tens of billions in the hole over payments that have had to go out while Trump was destroying trade deals rather than making them.
But there’s one thing at which Trump has been even better than his word: pollution. He has weakened regulations on both air and water pollution, allowing the skies to be filled with more smog, allowing industry to dump more waste into streams, and, above all, allowing fledgling efforts to fight the climate crisis to be strangled in their crib. And it’s working.
It’s working not just in the United States, where factory farms and coal mines are luxuriating in their fresh ability to dump toxic sludge, while power plants and manufacturers bellow carbon. It’s also working overseas. A new study from the U.N. shows that, after Trump made it clear that the United States would opt out of even voluntary efforts to control the rate of carbon emissions, others stopped make an effort as well. As a Chinese official made clear, “Now that the U.S. has withdrawn from the Paris agreement, the entire global response to climate change is shifting. We have to be realistic … There’s no point in being in a rush.”
Trump has not just succeeded in taking the United States out of the effort to address the climate crisis. He’s also taught that lesson to the world. And, as The Washington Post reports, that lesson is already bringing results: The crisis is now greater, and the requirements to address it more daunting, than ever before.
The latest report brings “a grim assessment of how off-track the world remains.” Just this past week, a separate report from the World Meteorological Organization showed that by May of this year, the concentration of carbon dioxide had reached 407.8 parts per million. That new record is part of a continuing upward trend that shows “no sign of a slowdown, let alone a decline, in greenhouse gases concentration in the atmosphere despite all the commitments under the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.”
Which isn’t surprising, seeing that the lesson that Donald Trump delivered to the world was, Crisis? What crisis? Even as storms, drought, fires, rising seas, melting permafrost, and wild swings in weather mark the destabilized warming system that is already costing billions to address and already generating a growing tide of climate refugees, Trump has sent the signal to slow down. After all, why work to address the climate crisis when there is still so much money to be sucked out of the existing system, in which profits are individualized and consequences are globalized?
The U.N. report sets global temperatures on track to increase by 3.9 degrees Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, which is not only an absolutely devastating amount, but is also far above the predicted pace set when nations gathered to work out the Paris agreement.
As the predictions of temperature increase accelerate, it’s necessary to go ever further back in time to find a situation equivalent to what we have today. The geochemical record indicates that the last time CO2 levels exceeded 400 was somewhere close to five million years ago, when ocean levels were as much as 70 feet higher than they are today.
Trump did not actually dig any coal. But he may have dug our civilization’s grave.