Does Trump signal the end of climate change extravaganzas?

Nov 16, 2024 by

by John Robson, Mercator:

The 29th UN climate conference convened in Baku, Azerbaijan, on November 11 under something of a cloud. Or rather a pile-up of incoming storm fronts. There were a lot of reasons for delegates to arrive pre-discouraged. And then came the Trump of Doom. Or a peculiar orange formation mistaken for same.

I haven’t actually heard a whole lot of detailed references to the outcome of the American election, which not only put someone openly contemptuous of climate alarmism into the White House but also gave his party control of both houses of Congress. But it’s not as though people didn’t notice. Thus American marquee New York Times columnist David Wallace-Wells, who I believe is absent physically but is certainly present ideologically, just wrote bitterly:

“Trump’s election may look like a black dawn to climate activists. And indeed it is: When the timelines of climate action are so short, and the paths to climate stability so narrow and difficult, any setback is a disaster.”

That he then whistled a happy “global renewables boom” tune that couldn’t change the mood. Not least because his own publication’s “Climate Forward” promptly emailed about “Trump’s potential threat to weather data”.

Canada’s “The Hub” chimed in with a typical Canadian perspective, aka something nobody outside Canada cares about at all: “There’s no reason for Trump to put the brakes on Canada’s low-carbon economic growth”. Nor indeed any reason for anyone to care, given our trivial contribution to supposedly planet-roasting “carbon pollution” despite our outsized contribution to sanctimony on the subject.

The strange thing is that Wallace-Wells did have a point, accidentally. It is true that Trump cannot stop America’s renewables boom, or for that matter Canada’s low-carbon economic growth, because neither is happening anyway. And more broadly, Trump can’t derail the COP agenda because it’s already off the bridge and smouldering in broken chunks in the river below.

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