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David Dodwell

Amid the rumpus US President Donald Trump has created with his shock-and-awe, bull-in-a-China-shop diplomacy, his assault on already fraught efforts to contain the climate crisis is possibly the most alarming.
That is perhaps a precocious claim. After all, his wrecking ball has been swung at home and threatened at places from Mexico and Canada, to Greenland and Panama, and to Gaza, which he plans to make the next “Riviera of the Middle East”. He has yet to get started on the Ukraine war or China trade war, but watch this space.
But his withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement again – Joe Biden had the US rejoin the climate pact in 2021 – and his call on US fossil fuel companies to “drill baby, drill” have put the world on watch: the battle to contain a potentially catastrophic global warming just got a whole lot harder.
As the Centre for American Progress puts it, Trump’s decision “disregards science, undermines years of painstaking global cooperation, harms the American economy and people, and sends a dangerous signal that the nation most responsible for the climate crisis is abandoning its moral and practical obligations”.
Not that Trump cares. The US is now one of just four countries sitting aloof from global climate efforts, with Libya, Iran and Yemen. In normal times, the US might call such a peculiar group an axis of climate evil.
But what harm has Trump actually done? In immediate practical terms, he has withdrawn financial support for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the objectives of which the Paris Agreement implements.


In the context of the trillions of dollars needed to restrain global warming, this counts for little. UNFCCC operations cost about US$96 million a year, with the US on the hook for a fifth of this. And anyway, former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has promised his foundation would fill this breach, as he did the last time Trump withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement.
More harmful is Trump’s likely cancellation of Biden’s climate financing pledges, the largest of which was to boost the US’ contributions to international climate funding to over US$11 billion a year, a target just met last year. Previous commitments were just US$1.5 billion a year on average.
Already, Trump’s administration has cancelled an outstanding US$4 billion pledged to the UN’s Green Climate Fund, out of a total of US$6 billion which would have made the US the single largest contributor.
The scale of hurt is hard to assess. There is a troubling opacity over national commitments to the United Nations’ call for climate funding and a large gap between commitments and disbursements. Governments have fallen far short in making the contributions needed to keep global warming in check and help protect poor economies from climate change.
The world will need to invest US$6.3-6.7 trillion per year in climate action by 2030, according to UN projections. Whether the US is in or out, national commitments fall miserably short of global needs and pessimism is growing.
The evidence is clear. Greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. The past two years have been the hottest recorded. Most dramatically of all, wildfires, floods and increasingly violent storms illustrate the immediacy of the global warming threat.


Funding shortages aside, the severest harm arising from Trump’s withdrawal sits elsewhere. First: his robust defence of the US fossil fuel industry, which has been lobbying hard against Biden’s funding support for green energy.
Research from Climate Analytics and non-profit consortium Climate Action Tracker suggests Trump’s fossil fuel policies could lift US greenhouse gas emissions by 2-4 billion tonnes of equivalent carbon dioxide by 2030. Rhodium Group says this could be even higher, at around 1 billion tonnes a year. This rise alone would not lift emissions fatally above the global warming threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius, but it won’t help.
Second: Trump’s anti-woke campaign against the green agenda has suppressed the commitment of many US financial institutions to the Paris accord.
When the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) was launched at COP26 in 2021 by Mark Carney, former Bank of England governor and possibly the next Canadian prime minister, the finance sector forum promised to “mobilise the trillions of dollars necessary to build a global zero emissions economy and deliver the goals of the Paris Agreement”.
Today, GFANZ looks to be in threads. Finance giants Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street – which had joined GFANZ’s Net Zero Asset Managers (NZAM) initiative – are being sued by several US states for their pro-climate policies. Departures from Vanguard’s in 2022 to Blackrock’s last month have left NZAM to suspend activities. Citing “recent developments in the US and different regulatory and client expectations in investors’ respective jurisdictions”, it has also removed its list of signatories from its website.
Since December, six leading US banks – JPMorgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs – have withdrawn from GFANZ’s Net Zero Banking Alliance because of similar pressures. Without the support of such US financial institutions, raising the funds needed to address global warming challenges has suddenly become immeasurably more difficult.
Whether groups such as the America Is All In alliance or US Climate Alliance can make up for Trump’s climate withdrawal at the federal level, or whether other governments like China, Brazil or the European Union can fill the funding breach, remains open to question. But the danger is high that Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” plans leaves the world fearing “burn, baby, burn”.


Why a Chinese farmer’s reunion with a US teacher moved me to tears

Torrential rain in Vietnam leaves 3 dead, 16,000 homes flooded

What the China-Nepal floods teach us about crisis communication

Indonesia’s Prabowo mulls labelling wildfires as ‘ecological terrorism’

Climate change

Trump’s ‘drill, baby, drill’ vision adds to the global climate nightmare

The CHS oil refinery silhouetted against the setting sun on September 28 in McPherson, Kansas. Photo: AP

Oil still runs the world, but its role in geopolitics is changing

People walk past an electronic billboard that shows US President Donald Trump shaking hands with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Tel Aviv on February 3. The era of oil’s waning supremacy may best be seen in Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s plan to broaden investment and trade with the US. Photo: AP

A Chinese oil products tanker is moored at the crude oil terminal Kozmino on the shore of Nakhodka Bay near the Russian port city of Nakhodka in 2022. Photo: Reuters

How Trump is setting US reputation and creditworthiness alight

US President Donald Trump holds a marker as he signs an executive order to create a US sovereign wealth fund, in the Oval Office of the White House on February 3, in Washington, DC. As of February 5, Trump has issued 80 executive actions, including executive orders, proclamations and memos, according to the CNN. Photo: AFP 

A woman holds up a sign that reads “Trump + Musk are not kings,” as she marches down JFK Boulevard in Philadelphia on February 5, during protests across the US against the Trump administration’s actions. Photo: The Philadelphia Inquirer / TNS

How Trump is creating a more peaceful and cooperative multipolar world

Illustration: Craig Stephens

Tesla CEO and Trump administration official Elon Musk (left) meets President Xi Jinping’s special representative, Vice-President Han Zheng, in Washington, on January 19. Photo: Xinhua

Opinion

World Opinion

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Economy, Trade & Business

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Business

Climate and energy

Greatest harm is in the emboldening of the US fossil fuel industry and pressure on US finance giants to turn away from funding climate goals


Greatest harm is in the emboldening of the US fossil fuel industry and pressure on US finance giants to turn away from funding climate goals.


Donald Trump

Diplomacy

United Nations

Energy

Joe Biden

Banking & finance

Climate change diplomacy

J.P. Morgan

Business of climate change

US Politics

Inside Out & Outside In

Expresses the views, ideas and conclusions of the author. (Eg. Enough of Crazy Rich Asians, think of crazy poor Hongkongers.)


Column

Outside In

Trump’s ‘drill, baby, drill’ vision adds to the global climate nightmare

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Greatest harm is in the emboldening of the US fossil fuel industry and pressure on US finance giants to turn away from funding climate goals

Greatest harm is in the emboldening of the US fossil fuel industry and pressure on US finance giants to turn away from funding climate goals