How Do We Protect Climate Gains from Another Trump Presidency? Challenge Accepted.

There’s no candy coating the political calamity of Donald Trump's win or the moment of peril for climate action and the energy transition. What to do next is the most important question to ask.

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This is the 100th edition of The Weekender, and I never dreamed we’d be marking the moment with an analysis piece on a second Donald Trump presidency.

But here we are. As we all take several deep breaths, trying to sort through the shock of the election result and the dread of what might be ahead, I’ve been turning to a few different sources of inspiration.

The two words I’ve held closest since Wednesday morning came from our Managing Editor, Farida Hussain. Her immediate reaction to four more years of attacks on climate action and the energy transition:

Challenge accepted.

A small part of this is sheer stubbornness…and if stubbornness is what we need to get this done, then let’s have more of it, please.

None of us who are working to speed up the energy transition and get climate change under control got into the fight because we thought it would be easy, nor even because we saw it as a guaranteed win.

But we also know that the energy transition is gaining ground fast, and will continue to. That we have all the elements we need to get this existentially important work done. That long before Trump, a lack of political will was the biggest obstacle we faced.

This week, the obstacle got a whole lot bigger. But we keep at it because it matters, and because the “win” is more nuanced than a fixed technical target like 1.5°C. Important as that goal is and achievable as it would be if we “treated it like a damn emergency”, we also know that every small, incremental gain matters. That even or especially above the 1.5° threshold, every 0.1°C of warming we can avert is measured in lives saved or lost.

But nothing stops this from being a moment of extreme peril, and one we should have been able to prevent. We aren’t out of options yet. Not nearly. But what we do in the weeks and months ahead just got an order of magnitude more important.

Yes, This Is Bad.

This was not a good time for a big, raging, vindictive complication to land in the middle of the push to get climate change under control. Global greenhouse gas emissions still have the world on track for “catastrophic” global warming. Atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane concentrations are rising fast. And whether or not they can ever deliver on it, oil and gas companies are touting another big increase in production.

Against that backdrop, Trump arrives in office with a declared agenda that is far more vicious and dictatorial than last time, and he’s planning to approach it far more competently.

Last time, he surrounded himself with career public servants and other “grown-ups in the room” who put a brake on his worst impulses. People like retired Marine general and former Trump chief of staff John Kelly, who in this year’s campaign warned against putting a literal fascist in the Oval Office.

Now, Trump comes equipped with a grudge the size of a planet, an enemies’ list awaiting revenge, and a sweeping plan to radically restructure the U.S. government and replace any officials who stand in his way.

And to restate the blindingly obvious, anything having to do with climate action or the energy transition is high on his hit list. He aims to introduce a “drill, baby, drill” strategy for oil and gas, pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement once again, withdraw from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change if he can get away with it, claw back any funds that haven’t been spent under the Biden administration’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and gut U.S. environmental and climate regulations.

But the shift from fossil fuels to clean energy has advanced, too, across the U.S. and around the world. The IRA triggered a wave of clean energy investment, manufacturing, and jobs, the largest share of it in “red” states that will be represented by Republicans in the next U.S. Congress. It won’t be easy for those legislators to vote against investments that create jobs for their constituents.

Internationally, clean energy is surging, even if the gains are still unevenly distributed, with the IRA taking a share of the credit for setting off a clean energy arms race. The International Energy Agency projects that demand for all three fossil fuels—oil, gas, and coal—will peak before 2030, then start to decline, while renewable energy surges.

Even before Trump, that trajectory wasn’t enough to bring down climate pollution, certainly not as rapidly as we need to. And there was a lot of work ahead to get massive sums of climate finance into the hands of the countries and regions of the world that need it most, to both protect themselves from climate impacts and accelerate the energy transition. That was supposed to be a lead topic for discussion at this year’s United Nations climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, this week and next. Now we’ll see how much Trump’s win distracts from substantive discussions at COP29.

That Was Then. This Is Now.

Eight years ago, I woke up to news of the first Trump presidency in Marrakech, Morocco, where I was attending the COP22 climate conference. It felt pretty much the same then as it does now.

“No one government and no one head of state can stop the global momentum to confront climate change, implement the Paris agreement, and set a course to hold long-term global warming below 1.5°C,” Catherine Abreu, then-executive director of Climate Action Network Canada, told global media the morning after.

“All of us at COP22 understand the environmental imperative of acting on climate change and cutting climate pollution, but the economic imperative to get off fossil fuels is clearer than ever,” she added. “The world knows that a prosperous future is one run on clean energy,” and “these actions serve our national interests and regional interests just as much today as they did yesterday.”

Here are some of the other important things that hadn’t changed then, haven’t changed since, and still fall outside Donald Trump’s control:

• Global action on climate change will continue, just as it did last time. “Countries around the world will see massive economic, job creation, health, security, and resilience gains by ushering in the green energy economy, whether or not the U.S. chooses to join in,” The Energy Mix wrote at the time. “Out here in the real world, outside the confines of his own imaginative narcissism, that reality and the resulting momentum are both bigger than Donald Trump.”

• Trump can’t stop or slow down what we were already calling the “meteoric rise [and] plummeting cost of renewable energy, energy efficiency, and energy storage technologies that now represent an integrated, low-carbon alternative to almost all elements of the fossil economy.” Eight years on, those options are even more affordable and entrenched, more a part of business as usual and integrated into national economies. We’ll see hiccups and reverses along the way, but nothing that changes the overall direction.

• The U.S. president still can’t control the global price of oil—as we wrote eight years ago, not even Vladimir Putin can do that. The announced details of Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” plan are a bit different this time, but the upshot is still the same: “Success will mean driving up supply, extending the glut, and undercutting prices for U.S. and other producers while the rest of the world continues to decarbonize its energy systems and further erode fossil demand.”

• Trump still can’t change the laws of physics, even if he cared to understand them. Countries will still respond to the climate emergency, not as some sort of ideological stance, but because there’s already no practical way to ignore it. In Canada, once you get past the performative buffoonery of Alberta’s United Conservative Party declaring its undying devotion to carbon dioxide, you still have a province where farmers face persistent drought, Fort McMurray is more and more threatened by raging wildfires, and taxpayers will be on the hook for a massive cleanup bill from abandoned oil and gas wells. Take ideology out of the picture, and it’s possible to craft a legislative package that addresses climate impacts and taps into the economic boom in clean energy. When Alberta eventually gets there, that will still be a win for both the province and the planet.

• And in 2024, just as surely as in 2016, there are positive steps to take and lots of work to do while we let some very bad news sink in. So, then and now, “awfulizing doesn’t help. It is just as powerful a paralytic now as it was last week at this time. And it is still a matter of deep communications malpractice if we allow a storyline of fear and futility to immobilize the communities and audiences that have to engage as never before to get this work done.”

I wish I didn’t have to write those words again. I wish you didn’t have to read them. And if we don’t like it, we’re the ones who are going to change it.

Building a Bigger Tent

We still lost ground during Trump’s first presidency, lost valuable time we couldn’t afford to waste, but we also found ways to limit the wreckage. This time, we need to repeat and redouble that effort, while reaching out to build the bigger tent that will prevent this week’s political calamity from ever happening again.

Last time, U.S. state and local governments, the private sector, front-line communities, and community sector organizations all stepped up to defend their gains and carry on the energy transition, with some environmental groups filing hundreds of lawsuits each to try to slow the administration down and limit the damage. In the end, we learned that all of that effort couldn’t fill the gap created by actively hostile national leadership.

Now, as we reported last week, “all the members of those various coalitions know what to do because they’ve been here before. And eight years later, they’re arguing that both the climate emergency and the energy transition technologies that are a central part of the solution are more advanced now than they were then.”

But there’s a deeper level where the transition hasn’t succeeded—not yet. And it goes to the heart of one of the strands of analysis of why a dynamic, joyous campaign by Kamala Harris and Tim Walz failed to break through.

From the top down, so the argument goes, the campaign could point to economists insisting that inflation was under control, jobs were coming back, and good times were ahead—exactly the gains that the energy transition is meant to deliver.

From the bottom up, with families struggling and communities in crisis, it just looked like more out-of-touch happy talk and paved the way for a Trump win.

We’re in the same place on our side of the border, just a year or so behind in the electoral calendar. I was horrified this week, and you should be, too, to read that one-quarter of Canadian parents are going without food so their kids will have enough. No wonder an opposition campaign built on vacuous three-syllable rhymes is so much more popular than federal funding programs that are now routinely long on spin and short on substance.

To change the channel, and to avert the kind of climate setbacks we’re now facing in the United States, we need to listen as if we mean it and connect as if it matters. And that doesn’t begin by spraying orange paint on U.S. embassies to greet the Trump win.

We’ve had more to say in weeks past, and will again in the weeks ahead, about how we keep up momentum and reach out more widely in the climate and energy fight. For starters, we’re going to have to get more thoughtful and strategic about language that drives people out of the climate “bubble”, while doing what it takes to connect on issues like housing, food and energy costs, basic health and safety in a climate emergency, and building community wealth from the ground up.

For now, there’s nothing here to candy coat. A second Trump presidency is not where we wanted or needed to be, and so many of us will have a mountain of grief and anger to get through before we can fully respond. But respond we must, and respond we will.

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Mitchell Beer traces his background in renewable energy and energy efficiency back to 1977, in climate change to 1997. Now he and the rest of the Energy Mix team scan 1,200 news headlines a week to pull together The Energy Mix, The Energy Mix Weekender, and our weekly feature digests, Cities & Communities and Heat & Power.

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Chart of the Week

Graphic by RMI/data by Ember

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Energy Transition, Climate Emergency Won’t Stop for Trump, Global Leaders Say

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Hydrogen Projects Delayed, Cancelled as ‘Hype’ Meets Reality

Canada’s Biggest Carbon Capture Project Set to Skip Environmental Review, Critics Warn

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Stellantis to Road Test Solid State Batteries

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Norway’s Equinor Admits It ‘Over-Reported’ Amount of Carbon Captured at Flagship Project for Years (DeSmog)

The case for Ontario to do as the French do — use parking lots for solar projects for the grid (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation)

Community wealth building is a strategy for Canada’s transition to net zero (Policy Options)

Power restored in Kimmirut, Nunavut, after 3-day outage (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation)

Polar bears face higher risk of disease in a warming Arctic (BBC News)

Money, politics are the biggest barriers to U.S. high-speed rail (Smart Cities Dive)

Record Air Pollution Hospitalizes Hundreds in Pakistani City (New York Times)

‘Two sides of the same coin’: governments stress links between climate and nature collapse (The Guardian)

Duke Energy sees up to $2.9-billion in restoration costs from three U.S. hurricanes (Reuters)

‘Total Nightmare’ as Wildfire Burns Through Southern California Homes (New York Times)

How a Former ExxonMobil Employee Confronted the Climate Disinformation Machine (DeSmog)

Has the world 'surrendered' to climate change? These authors think so (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation)