Trump Wins Presidency.

Can Individual US States, The Private Sector, And The International Community Fix The Climate Despite Trump Election?

Steve Zwick and Kelli Barrett

What does the election of Donald Trump mean for climate policy? For now hope is shifting to individual US states and the corporate sector within the US. Internationally, the Obama administration has proven adept at “leading from behind”, and some see Canada or the European Union filling that gap.

9 November 2016 | MARRAKESH | Morocco | Kevin Fay was in law school when Ronald Reagan was elected.
“Most of the members of the law school at the time were instantaneously suicidal, and thought the end of the world is at hand,” he recalled here this morning, as he and others struggled to make sense of the previous night’s US election, which gave the presidency to Donald J Trump and both houses of Congress to his Republican party, with which Trump, himself, has often been at odds. In Washington state, voters also rejected a carbon tax.
“The beginning of the Reagan administration, particularly in the environmental arena, was pretty ugly,” Fay continued. “But I’ll remind you it was Ronald Reagan who gave the final authorization for signing the Montreal Protocol, which is now considered to be the most successful multilateral environment treaty ever negotiated.”
It was a game-face statement – an effort by Fay, who now heads the International Climate Change Partnership (ICCP), to remind us that no one really knows what will happen next – in part because Trump offered little in the way of discernible policy on any issues, let alone environment.
International Emissions Trading Association (IETA) boss Dirk Forrister agreed.
“As the election reached its fever pitch, the climate issue never got engaged in a serious way,” he said. “We know that Mr Trump is skeptical enough on the issue that he doesn’t want to proceed with the Clean Power Plan, but the Clean Power Plan is stuck in the courts.”
NGOs expressed a willingness to work with the new president, and a hope that, once in office, he’d prove more thoughtful than his public persona.
“We cannot pretend that last night’s election outcome was anything less than deeply disturbing to those of us who care about climate stability and the role of the United States in the world,” said Nathaniel Keohane, Vice President for Global Climate at the Environmental Defense Fund. “Mr. Trump should listen to the large majority of Americans who support climate action, and to the overwhelming majority of climate scientists who warn that the time for action is now.”
“There is a belief that the incoming administration seems to have that there is a trade-off between environmental management and economic growth, in particularly climate action and economic development. The evidence is overwhelming that this is not the case and actually, if you want robust, inclusive growth, you have to act on climate change,” said the President and CEO of the World Resources Institute Andrew Steer. During a November 9 press call, Steer expressed his interest in working with the new political administration on environment and climate policy.
But as rumors spread that Trump had chosen climate-science denier  Myron Ebell, of the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, to run the Environmental Protection Agency, a consensus seemed to emerge that the best hope now lies with individual US states and even the corporate and banking sectors, which have become more cognizant of climate risk.
“There’s a huge amount happening at the sub-national and corporate level, all of which we need to support,” Steer said.
Negotiators continued the task of developing a work plan for addressing the key issues of transparency and linking finance to reductions, but sources predicted an end to the groundwork-laying backroom diplomacy that the Obama administration had become so adept at, largely because that requires knowing what will happen in the future.