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Trump’s second innings: Beginning of a devastating impact on planet and people

Tags : climate crisis Paris Agreement Trump

Donald Trump’s return to White House marks a watershed in the history of humankind. The triumph of the loony and convicted felon in the November 2024 US presidential election has sent dire warnings for humanity.

With fossil fuel emissions continuing to heat the atmosphere, Trump, a staunch advocate of fossil fuel, has vowed to withdraw the US from the Paris Climate Agreement, the world’s most significant effort to tackle rising temperatures.

He also made it clear that the US will embark on a new age of oil and gas exploration.

In 2017, President Trump during his first term had said he had been elected “to represent the people of Pittsburgh and not Paris”. The US will now join Iran, Yemen and Libya as the only countries to currently stand outside the Paris Agreement, which was signed 10 years ago in the French capital.

Although the Paris Agreement is not a legally binding treaty, it is the document that drives co-operation among the nations to combat global warming.

On January 20, Trump had announced a “national energy emergency” to reverse many of the Biden era environmental regulations. He had termed the Paris Agreement a” ripoff” during his inaugural speech following his swearing-in and said: “We’ll drill, baby, drill”.

The planet has moved a major step closer to warming more than 1.5C for the first time in 2024, new data shows despite the promise of world leaders to avert this disaster a decade ago.

The European Copernicus planet service, one of the main global data providers, has said 2024 was the first calendar to pass the symbolic threshold as well as the world’s hottest on record.

Last week UN chief Antonio Guterres described the recent run of temperature records as “climate breakdown”. “We must exit this road to ruin…and we’ve no time to lose,” he had said in his New Year message.

Last year’s searing heat is predominantly due to humanity’s emissions of planet warming gases, such as carbon dioxide, which are still at record highs.

The risks from climate change, such as intense heat waves, rising sea-levels and loss of wildlife, would be much higher at 2C than at 1.5C, according a landmark UN report from 2018.

Yet, the world is moving closer and closer to breaching the 1.5C barrier. It’s hard to predict though when we will cross the long-term 1.5C threshold, ‘but we’re obviously very close now,” says Myles Allen, an author of the UN report.

The 1.5C has become a powerful symbol in the international climate negotiations ever since it was signed in Paris in 2015, with many of the most vulnerable countries considering it a matter of survival.

In 2024 the world saw blistering temperatures in West Africa, prolonged droughts in parts of South America, intense rainfall in central Europe, and some particularly strong tropical storms hitting North America and South Asia.

These events were just some of those made more intense by the climate change over the last year, according to World Weather Attribution Group. Even this month’s wildfires in Los Angeles were fueled by high winds and a lack of rain. Experts say conditions conducive to fires in California are becoming more likely in a warming world.

Strangely enough, Trump still denies the existence of the climate change and its disastrous consequence. His dogged determination to explore oil and natural gas will surely be death knell for the planet when the crisis is becoming worse every year.

I am reminded of what activist Jane Fonda had said: “There has never been a ticking time tomb hanging over our heads. There’s a looming catastrophe that will affect all of humanity. That’s never happened before in the history of humankind…”

Sadly, this madcap doesn’t realize that ‘drilling’ Alaska for oil is like digging his own grave.

Cartoon: Suparno Chaudhuri