Opinion Green stakes

Two weeks after being elected US President, Donald Trump told the New York Times that there was “some connection” between human activities and climate change and he would keep an “open mind” when it came to environmental policy. Coming from someone who had, at various times in the past four years, described climate change as a “Chinese conspiracy”, “a big scam”, “a canard” and a “very very expensive tax,” the New York Times statement seemed like a mellowing down. But any hopes that the demands of the office he will occupy in about a month have forced the POTUS-elect to be less belligerent on climate change have seemed to be belied since. Trump has appointed climate sceptic Scot Pruitt to head the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Pruitt’s is the sort of appointment that more than 800 climate scientists have cautioned Trump against in an open letter. “Appoint scientific advisors, cabinet members and federal agency leaders who respect and rely on science-based decision-making. This would exclude many of your cabinet and transition team appointees to date, who deny the scientific realities of human-caused climate change,” they urged.

Pruitt has been known as an ally of the fossil-fuel industry. The Oklahoma attorney has spearheaded a multi-state legal effort to resist the Obama administration’s environmental agenda. He has initiated litigation against clean energy plants, a lynchpin of the Obama administration’s plans to fight climate change. As the EPA head, Pruitt could decline to defend the project in court or go slow on its implementation. The Barack Obama administration has, without doubt, been the most progressive regime in the US on matters of climate change. But most of Obama’s policy decisions on the environment, including that of ratifying the Paris climate accord, stand on weak ground. They were products of executive orders which means that Trump does not require the sanction of the Congress to revoke them.

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The open letter to the US president-elect warns Trump that he would be going against a global consensus if he does not honour the Paris accord. France and Canada have threatened the US with a carbon tax on goods produced in the country if Trump pulls his country out of the Paris pact. Given the international pressure, Trump might not backtrack from the accord immediately. However, the greater threat is that of the US becoming extra stingy in matters of financial aid to developing countries in dealing with climate change. The world will then have to find ways of pressuring the world’s second top emitter of greenhouse gases to fulfill its moral — and international — obligations.