Last week US President Donald Trump followed through on promises to dismantle former President Barack Obama’s environmental regulations, prompting an existential crisis for global efforts to cut pollution.
Trump signed an executive order Tuesday directing the Environmental Protection Agency to start the complex process of rolling back the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which would have closed hundreds of coal power plants, stopped construction of new plants, and replaced them with vast new wind and solar farms.
The decision ostensibly relinquishes the United States’ leadership role in the international effort to deter global warming and will be disappointing for those still optimistic about the so-called Paris Agreement reached in 2015, in which 197 countries settled to lower global carbon pollution.
While the Paris Agreement was not explicitly mentioned in Trump’s latest executive order, cutting the Clean Power Plan regulations will make it very difficult for the US—and by extension the world— to meet its national goal of a 26-28 percent reduction of 2005 greenhouse gas emission levels by 2025.
Some experts say the Trump administration is unlikely to formally pull out of the Paris Agreement because, as former climate change advisor for Obama, Paul Bodnar, put it, “burning valuable political capital seems especially unnecessary when one considers the simple, low-key requirements associated with staying in the [Paris] agreement: Submit some reports, show up to meetings.”
Regardless, many think-tanks say the clean energy industrial revolution might be on the horizon. A recent Bloomberg report presented a cheerful outlook, saying that worldwide by 2040, “zero-emission energy sources will make up 60 percent of installed [power system] capacity.”
Pending that utopian transformation, key polluters like China, India and Brazil, where clean energy is yet to deliver extravagant investment opportunities and returns, could see Trump’s attack on environmental protections as a pretext to relax their own pollution targets.