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Donald Trump

Climate Story Jeffrey Gogo
Donald Trump almost avoided the major issue of climate change when he spoke for the first time as US President at the annual UN General Assembly meeting in New York last week.

And then he eventually mumbled something to the effect of reiterating his previous infamous stance on the Paris Agreement: to pull the US out. He burst the little bubble of hope that had seemed to inflate from a series of statements issued out by a number of different high ranking US officials ahead of the global summit, attended by hundreds of world leaders.

The officials, including US secretary of state Rex Tillereson appeared to give the impression that Mr Trump would backdown from his intentions announced in June to exit the climate treaty, if new terms “favourable to America” can be agreed.

Instead, Mr Trump said he will press ahead with plans to withdraw America, the world’s second largest polluter after China, from the Paris Agreement – a process that could nonetheless take as long as the US president’s entire four-year term of office.

Now the Paris Agreement is only a half-down payment to what is actually needed to keep the world a safe place to live in, but the accord was hailed as an important step to more ambitious action when nearly 200 world governments – except Syria and Nicaragua – agreed to it in France in 2015.

To achieve its goal of a maximum warming of 2 degrees Celsius in this century, the agreement would have to double the action. Current pledges can only produce a 3,5 degrees Celsius temperature rise, scientists say, something mankind couldn’t bear.

Such catastrophe can be avoided if nations pull their own weight both as individual states and as a community of nations, as agreed under Paris, and commit to do much more.

Unmoved by the deathly backdrop of successive climate-related hurricanes that rammed through US cities recently, Mr Trump has demonstrated he is unwilling to do this. He is not going to live up to the Obama-era pledge of reducing the emission of gases blamed for causing climate change like carbon dioxide by between 26 to 28 percent from 2005 levels by 2025.

Instead, in his quest for a deal whose terms “are fair to the United States” Mr Trump has proposed to renegotiate the Paris treaty, or tear it up altogether, and start an “entirely new transaction.” That, of course, is not going to happen. There is really no reason to renegotiate anything if it doesn’t add value to the existing accord. French President Emmanuel Macron, under whose country’s chairmanship the Paris accord was steered to life, later on made this point clear to Mr Trump.

Mr Macron vowed “we won’t go back” on what was agreed at Paris simply because Mr Trump felt hard done by. And considering that Paris was largely a voluntary process where state-parties defined their own contributions through what are known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), surely Mr Trump would have by now given us an idea of what he thinks is fair for America, if the initial pledge wasn’t.

This is what he probably means by “re-engaging, renegotiating”, isn’t it? Otherwise, what else would be? The US President had the opportunity to announce his country’s revised NDCs, one that’s “fair to America”, if ever there’s one, at the 2017 UNGA meeting that was aptly themed: “Focusing on People: Striving for Peace and a Decent Life for All on a Sustainable Planet”.

He didn’t. There is thus a pervading feeling that the only reason Mr Trump wants pull out of the Paris treaty is because Barack Obama, his predecessor, signed it. It was Obama that committed to the 26 to 28 percent emissions cut.

Ever since coming to power, Mr Trump has typically been rat-racing to undo everything that Obama before him did.

From Obamacare to the Iranian nuclear deal, climate change to the so called Dreamers, an Obama-era project granting immigrants that came to the US as children citizenship, Mr Trump has attempted to rewrite history.

Clearly, Mr Trump has no reasonable grounds to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement.

In his desperation to please his business friends in the fossil fuels industry, the biggest polluting industry, the US President has often claimed that the climate change treaty will result in severe 6,5 million job losses and $3 trillion of lost GDP in the American economy.

But even some of the states he leads in the United States of America are beginning to call his bluff, demonstrating a lack of national consensus on how to tackle the dangerous climate change.

A new report by the NewClimate Institute, a US non-profit, shows that American states and businesses have made commitments to cut emissions by between 22 percent and 25 percent between now and 2025, regardless of Mr Trump’s withdrawal.

Obviously, this isn’t good enough. But it does send the right message to the volatile US President, that the climate agenda is not slowing down, it continues to build momentum, even in his own backyard.

Why the Trump fuss? So, why should Zimbabwe, Africa and the rest of the world concern over the US staying in the Paris Agreement, or, as it were, its withdrawal? Firstly, the pull-out makes it more difficult for the world to meet the emission reduction goals set out at Paris, including those on finance, necessary to help African nations adapt.

Together with China, the US accounts for 45 percent of the global emissions total. By pulling out, Trump has taken with him about a sixth of world emissions from the Paris Agreement.

Without Obama’s promised tightening of laws in the US energy industry, targeting power plants, oil and gas, the transport and construction sectors, to eliminate emissions, the US withdrawal will clearly be most damaging to the global effort on climate change.

It could set the world back several decades at a time scientists at the UN expert panel on climate change are agreed action needs to be ramped up. The withdrawal can also take with it the $3 billion that the US has pledged under the Green Climate Fund, a vehicle within the multi-lateral climate scheme designed to finance projects to build resilience to, and ease the impacts of climate change in emerging economies.

Zimbabwe wants up to $90 billion of that aid mainly for adaptation and mitigation in agriculture and energy, according to its Nationally Determined Contributions.

God is faithful.

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