The global fight against climate change is played at the US polls

Many in Marrakech gulped when the news was confirmed: Republican Donald Trump - who claimed that global warming was a hoax invented by the Chinese - had won the US elections. Just then, early November 2016, he held in that Moroccan city the annual UN climate summit.

And the assistants remembered the fiasco of the Kyoto Protocol, the pact of 1997 to which the United States never joined despite being the country that has emitted the most greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in history.

The fear was that the Paris Agreement, closed in December 2015 and which Trump had put in the spotlight, would now be broken.

That summit in Marrakech closed with a declaration (very political, not very practical) in which it was proclaimed that the fight against warming was now "irreversible".

Four years later, politicians, scientists, activists and citizens concerned about the climate crisis are holding their breath again before the US elections.

At stake is whether Trump consolidates his dark environmental agenda or whether the Republican remains only a footnote in the history of the international climate fight.

After months installed in the White House, Trump announced in June 2017 that he would remove the United States from the Paris Agreement and that his intention was to renegotiate it because he considered it unfair.

But Trump has failed to get it reopened during his tenure.

And a clause introduced in the agreement will not allow the United States to leave Paris until this November 4, a day after an election in which the polls mostly point to a victory for his rival: Joe Biden.

The Democratic candidate ensures that his country will immediately return to the pact if he wins.

• China steps up its commitments against climate change

• Greenpeace denounces the irregularities of the packaging recycling system in Spain

• Europe leads the polluting business of exporting used cars to the poorest countries

Just because the Paris Agreement has not fallen apart does not mean that Trump's mandate has been innocuous.

"A major void has been felt," says Monica Araya, an expert in sustainable mobility and a former Costa Rican negotiator at climate summits, of international discussions on climate change.

“Trump has tried to reverse all the actions of President Barack Obama in the fight against climate change.

This has slowed down international action, ”says Michael B. Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Legislation at Columbia University.

"Many other countries look at the US, the country with the highest ever emissions and one of the richest, and wonder why they should crack down if the US doesn't," Gerrard abounds.

The center that this professor directs is one of the organizations that have followed up on Trump's environmental counter-reform, which has systematically dismantled any regulation that could annoy the most polluting industries.

In total, almost 100 regulations have been reversed, from environmental requirements for pipelines, to permits to exploit Alaska's natural landscapes, to the judicial assault to lower the polluting limits that Obama imposed on the automobile sector.

Of all this counter-reform, Gerrard highlights how the most damaging measure was the paralysis of fuel saving regulations, which forced manufacturers to put more efficient cars on the market and, therefore, that emit less gases and pollutants.

The ballast of transport

The great burden now for decarbonization in the US is transportation.

Araya explains that while in the world this sector is responsible for 14% of emissions, in the North American country it rises to 30%.

This specialist points out that, unlike Trump, Biden has proposed a transportation electrification plan with stricter emissions regulations, incentives and the promise to install half a million chargers.

"It can be a virtuous turn," he says.

Also for Canada and countries like Mexico and Brazil, which are highly influenced by the US transportation model.

"Climate change is the greatest existential threat to humanity," Biden acknowledged this week in an interview;

words Trump would never say.

"Although Biden is not ambitious enough, it is certainly a much more positive position than Trump's," sums up David Howell, climate policy specialist at SEO / BirdLife.

Biden has to navigate between his image as a moderate and a Democratic left that promotes the Green New Deal, an ambitious decarbonization plan that Trump has made synonymous with dangerous socialism.

Biden, who can play the election in mining and oil states, tries to make it clear that his plan is not that and has also refused to veto

.

But at the same time it promises two trillion dollars to combat climate change and renewables.

"And in his climate plan, one of the words that he repeats the most is employment," says Araya.

Goal to 2050

Biden says he will draw up a plan for his country to reach net zero emissions by 2050.

China announced a few weeks ago that it is targeting carbon neutrality by 2060. “If Biden wins, we could have the climate change geopolitics we have dreamed of for decades: the two countries with the highest emissions in the world committed to fighting climate change. climate change ”, says Pep Canadell, director of the Global Carbon Project.

China and Biden's promises are joined by the EU, which also proposes climate neutrality by 2050, and Japan, which this week has pledged to achieve carbon neutrality by the same date.

"The world needs the US to get on that bandwagon," Howell says of those long-term plans, one of the requirements of the Paris Agreement.

"We cannot afford the luxury of this power being outside of reducing emissions and caring for sinks," he adds, referring to the forests and fires that hit the United States.

The fires have shown through screens across the country a level of destruction never seen before and that many scientists associate with climate change.

They have razed millions of acres in California, Oregon, Washington, and Colorado and placed the warming within the presidential campaign and debates.

"It has been placed at the

of people's concerns," says Lori Lodes, executive director of Climate Power 2020, a pressure group linked to Democrats.

“It is one of the issues that will make groups of decisive people vote, such as youth or women from the suburbs.

Now it has an impact on people's lives and that is going to show in these elections, ”adds Lodes.

The coal fiasco

Canadell considers that one of Trump's "great fiascos" has been the failure of his commitment to coal despite "spending millions of dollars to protect" this industry.

"Since Trump took the reins of the country with his promise to return coal to its former glory, more than 100 coal-fired power plants have closed or announced they will close in the near future."

And this trend is produced by the advance of gas and renewables.

Despite Trump's measures, renewables have continued to grow in his term.

For market reasons and for internal resistance.

“For the past three years, states, cities, businesses, universities and other non-national leaders have led the American climate movement,” explains Carla Frisch, a member of the Rocky Mountain Institute.

And this has allowed nearly two-thirds of the American population to reside in states or cities that have submitted climate action plans.

Frisch lists some of the achievements made during Trump's term thanks to this internal resistance: “The number of electric vehicles on the road has doubled;

the number of cities committed to 100% renewable electricity has increased fivefold;

16 states have pledged to phase out super polluting hydrofluorocarbons ... ”.

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