What's in store for US climate agenda after Obama?

America’s climate agenda after Obama

“For all the challenges we face, the growing threat of climate change could define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other,” asserted the US President Barack Obama during his address at the Paris Climate Conference in December 2015. Almost a year later, when the US is on the verge of a leadership transition, its citizens are compelled to ask an important question: will America’s climate agenda fall apart without Obama?

It is not far-fetched to say that the Paris climate deal may get derailed depending on the outcome of the US elections since the success of the agreement depends largely on the political willingness of one of the largest emitters in the world. The US is not just the world’s second largest emitter of greenhouse gases, but also one of the biggest emitters per head. As Sunita Narain said in an interview with Leonardo di Caprio, “Electricity consumed by one American at home is equivalent to 1.5 citizens of France, 2.2 citizens of Japan and 10 citizens of China, 34 of India and 61 of Nigeria.”

Hence, without the US, the efforts to reduce climate risks would hardly make any cut.

Obama’s efforts so far

The 44th president of the US created the country’s first carbon standards for power plants, ratified the Paris Agreement and updated fuel-efficiency standards for the first time in three decades. From pledging to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 26-28 per cent below 2005 levels by 2025 to dramatically reducing financing for coal-fired power plants, Obama was prompt in prioritising actions related to clean energy. He directed his efforts towards finalising numerous energy-efficiency standards and building codes, apart from promulgating the Clean Power Plan (CPP), which is projected to cut carbon pollution from the power sector by 32 per cent by 2030.

While CPP has been dubbed as the “biggest step that any single president has made to curb the carbon pollution” it cannot absolve itself from the fact that it is misleading, as pointed out by a report published in Down To Earth. The report noted that “the so-called reduction of power sector emissions by 32 per cent from the 2005 emissions levels is not a target. It is a projection”. It also questioned the decision to consider 2005 as the baseline year for emissions reduction, since it was a year when the US emissions peaked. ”If the baseline year in CPP had been 1990—which is the baseline year chosen in the Kyoto Protocol of the United Nations Framework Conference on Climate Change—then the projected emissions reduction by 2030, à la CPP, would have been a paltry 15 per cent,” observed the report.

While the Obama administration has figured out what that policy should look like, its implementation has not been worked out. Whoever succeeds Obama has to take up the job of directly working with the states and figuring out what their implementation plans are going to be.  

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Can Hillary further the work on climate action?

Hillary’s goals are ambitious, to say the least. She intends to install half a billion solar panels by the end of her first term, cut energy waste by a third and deliver on the pledge Obama had made at the Paris climate conference. Reducing methane emissions across the economy and putting in place strong standards for reducing leaks from both new and existing sources is also one of the goals that find place in her priority list.

She has to also pursue Obama’s unfinished agenda: mid-term review of fuel-efficiency standards for light-duty vehicles and the final decision regarding coal leasing on federal land.

Hillary’s clean energy plan

Hillary has been vocal about harnessing a clean energy future. She wants to “defend, implement and extend smart pollution and efficiency standards, including the Clean Power Plan and standards for cars, trucks, and appliances that are already helping clean our air, save families money and fight climate change.”

During her campaign trail, she has talked about investing in clean energy infrastructure, launching a US$60-billion Clean Energy Challenge and reducing American oil consumption by a third through cleaner fuels and more energy-efficient cars, trucks and ships. For the votaries of clean energy and sustainable development, Hillary Clinton seems to be an obvious choice. However, this transition to a clean energy economy is fraught with challenges.

Some recent reports about Hillary’s campaign being funded by fossil fuel industry allow scepticism to sneak in. According to the data revealed by the Center for Responsive Politics, an independent research organisation in the US, Clinton received contributions $309,101 (as of April 11, 2016) from people working for fossil fuel companies. Greenpeace has found that $4,000,000 in donations has come from large donors whose primary business is extraction, processing and sale of coal, oil or gas.

According to the investigation by Daily Caller News Foundation, Bill and Hillary Clinton received at least $100 million from Persian Gulf states and their leaders. “I obtained the $100-million figure by examining the donation reports of the Clinton Foundation and the personal tax returns of Bill and Hillary Clinton,” said Richard Pollock of Daily Caller News Foundation to Down To Earth.

 “These regimes are buying access. You’ve got the Saudis. You’ve got the Kuwaitis, Oman, Qatar and the UAE. There are massive conflicts of interest. It’s beyond comprehension,” national security analyst Patrick Poole recently said in a media interview. Hence, these reports undermine the presidential candidate’s claim of creating an Environmental and Climate Justice Task Force.

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Hillary's challenges

According to Clinton’s $60-billion Clean Energy Challenge, the federal government will “partner with states, cities, and rural communities to cut carbon pollution and expand clean energy, including for low-income families.” While she has already indicated that she will defend Obama’s Clean Power Plan, she is yet to assess how much she can do under existing statutory authorities to deliver on the earlier promised goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by up to 30 per cent by 2025.

But, will Clinton be able to persuade Congress to fund the aggressive plan? “Even if Hillary Clinton is elected President, her party will probably not control both the houses of the Congress. Therefore, new climate legislation is unlikely. However, the President has considerable authority under existing laws, especially the Clean Air Act, to impose additional controls on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, factories and vehicles,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.

Getting the proposed carbon tax enforced is another major challenge that Clinton has to tide over, especially when it is struggling to find takers. According to the Clinton campaign emails revealed by the WikiLeaks, her campaign team had investigated the potential impacts of a serious carbon tax back in early 2015. In January 2015, campaign director John Podesta sent an email to his colleagues saying, "We have done extensive polling on a carbon tax. It all sucks." Few months later, when polling results were studied, the support for a carbon tax was waning.

The proposed $42-a-tonne carbon fee raises average annual energy expenditures by about $478 per household. The idea behind this plan is to distribute the revenue among all citizens as a per capita rebate and set aside some amount for transition assistance to coal communities.

This plan doesn’t cut ice with the wealthier households. They see a greater rise in costs since they spend more on energy.  Although the government promises to return the revenue as per capita rebates, people don’t trust that it will happen. To them, it doesn’t make sense for the government to take money from people and give it right back. Instead, they would prefer the additional revenue to be invested for improving renewable energy landscape.

The Republicans, on the other hand, see carbon tax as more than just an increase in energy costs. Trump has also vetoed it as he doubts the impact of greenhouse gases on climate change. The Republicans had, in fact, passed a symbolic resolution in June 2016, denouncing a carbon tax.

This is worrying at a time when statistics shows that the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by the US power sector in 2015 were 1,925 million metric tonnes, which is about 37 per cent of the total US energy-related CO2 emissions of 5,271 million metric tonnes.

CO2 emissions from US electric power sector by source, 2015

Source: US Energy Information Administration

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Donald Trump: the climate change denier

Nobody knows what Trump really believes in. He doesn't accept the overwhelming scientific evidence that climate change is real and wants to dismantle the Paris Agreement, something that nearly 200 countries agreed to last December. The Republican candidate for the US President also wants to scrap the Clean Power Plan. It is possible for him to take the US out of the Paris climate deal since it’s a non-binding agreement. In his capacity as a President, he can also nix several CO2 regulations that Obama has put in place. “I will eliminate all needless and job-killing regulations now on the books—and there are plenty of them,” Trump had said hinting at clean energy policies.

Just a week before the elections, Trump finally said something emphatic and alarming.  In the “New Deal for Black America” plan, which Trump released, he promised to cut all federal spending on the climate change issue to save $100 billion during terms in office. He pledges to “cancel all wasteful climate change spending.” To save that amount, the government has to reduce funding for climate science research and helping the US communities deal with climate-related changes. More importantly, it has to cut all the money the Department of Energy spends on technology development. According to Trump, the US shouldn't waste money on climate change and “instead use it to provide for infrastructure, including clean water, clean air and safety.”

He is also likely to push for more oil and natural gas drilling on public lands. Hence, it is not hard to imagine emissions rising under his presidency.

If not the climate scientists, Trump should pay heed to the words of senior US military and national security experts who have warned that the effects of climate change present “a strategically-significant risk” to the US national security. The US has already seen climate refugees in their own country. Coastal populations are threatened by sea level rise; residents of south Florida are already experiencing seawater flooding in streets; hurricanes and storm surge have become more intense and frequent. In Alaska, lakes are getting smaller due to increased evaporation caused by warmer temperatures and shrubs are expanding. On the other hand, drought conditions are worsening in the southeastern part of the country.

Despite these signs of climate change, Donald Trump administration can derail the modest progress that the US has made. “Donald Trump has promised to halt the Obama administration's programmes on climate change. He would have considerable ability to do that. It would be very time-consuming to repeal existing regulations, but Trump could order a halt to enforcement of them. There would certainly be many lawsuits challenging this action, but they could take years to resolve,” said Gerrard.

“Should Trump become president, international arrangements for trade, collective security and nuclear proliferation will all be threatened. The Paris Agreement will continue to be supported by other countries, but the willingness of these countries to take action to limit emissions will be weakened. It will be a riskier, more fragmented and less secure world,” said Scott Barrett, Professor of Natural Resource Economics at the Columbia University.

But there’s still a silver lining.

While a substantial minority denies climate change, there’s now a greater consensus on the need for clean energy. The standing rock protest against $3.7-billion Dakota Access pipeline project is a notable sign of Americans warming up to the idea of a fossil fuel-free future. This is what Sunita Narain meant when she said in Before the Flood, “We need countries to believe that climate change is real and it is urgent. It’s not a figment of their imagination.”

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