Trump’s Fossil Fuel Fanaticism Is Surrending the Future to China

Meteorologists are predicting that there will be some relief in August from the brutal heat wave that has engulfed much of America. But this is just a temporary respite. This year’s scorching weather is only a foretaste of the even more boiling future that climate change has in store for us. And unfortunately for the United States and the world, Donald Trump’s administration is committed to a program of fossil fuel nostalgia and deregulation that will intensify climate change and blunt any possibility of mitigating its effects. 

The Trump administration has been busy stalling and rolling back regulations essential to dealing with the climate crisis. For instance, under Joe Biden, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) proposed a new heat standard that would require employers to protect workers from extreme heat. The American Prospect reported that the Trump administration has made no moves to implement this new standard and has “drastically reduced the 1,400-strong workforce of the organization that funds and develops the research supporting OSHA rules.”

But that matter, grave as it is, is nothing compared to the nightmare Trump apparently has in store for the Environmental Protection Agency. On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported,

The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday unveiled a proposal to rescind the landmark legal opinion that underpins virtually all of its regulations to curb climate change.

The move would end EPA regulations on greenhouse gases emitted by vehicles from lightweight cars to heavy-duty trucks, while also undercutting rules that limit power plant emissions and control the release of methane by oil and gas companies.

Climate change has long been the subject of a political seesaw. In 2009, under Barack Obama’s administration, the EPA ruled that greenhouse gases endangered public health and could be regulated. In his first term, Trump used his executive powers to overturn many of Obama’s environmental policies, which were then restored in turn under Joe Biden.

But the new proposal goes much further. It is designed to fundamentally strip the EPA of power to deal with the climate. As right-wing climate denialist Myron Ebell of the American Lands Council told the Post, “If the endangerment finding is withdrawn, then this ping-pong match will be much harder for a future Democratic administration, or a green Republican president, to undo.”

In truth, the “ping-pong” match that Ebell describes was always an uneven one. While Republicans from Trump to George W. Bush have been zealous enthusiasts for eternal fossil fuel domination, both Obama and Biden were only half-hearted environmentalists. The measures they undertook, while welcome, were hardly on the scale necessary to deal with the climate crisis.

Writing in the Financial Times in December, the historian Adam Tooze rightly pointed out that Democrats have been complicit in allowing the US to falter in energy transition:

Liking new sources of power is one thing. Being serious about the energy transition is quite another. The kind of tough-minded carbon pricing applied in Europe went out of style in Washington DC with the failure of Obama’s cap and trade proposal in 2010. America’s preferred energy policy is more, more, more, as cheaply as possible. After years of heavy investment in fracking, the US under Biden became the largest oil producer the world has ever seen. Trump plans to raise production by a further 3mn barrels. Decarbonisation of electricity supply will continue because wind and solar are now so much cheaper. But despite hurricanes regularly devastating parts of the country, any broader ambition to meet America’s climate targets is off the table.

Tooze contrasted the fecklessness of the United States and Europe with the much more sustained and serious investment in renewables undertaken by China. He concluded:

Insofar as there is to be a global climate leader, it can now only be China, which is responsible for more than 30 per cent of global emissions and has mastered the green energy supply chain…. [China] will not single-handedly solve the climate crisis but it will assert a claim to leadership that the west will find hard to answer.

This claim was buttressed by striking statistics that Tooze presented in May in his blog Chartbook. In 2001, he wrote, the United States created 21.2 percent of new global capacity in wind and solar; Europe. 65.1 percent; and China, a mere 0.6 percent. By 2024, the numbers were: the United States, 7.7 percent; Europe, 12.5 percent; China, 63.3 percent. While the US and Europe are producing far more renewable energy than they did in 2001, they are now minor players in renewable energy, while China is a superpower.

In Phenomenal World, environmental researchers Tim Sahay and Kate Mackenzie built on Tooze’s research to document a much broader Chinese domination in clean energy, evidenced by the new Chinese innovations in electric vehicles developed by Build Your Dreams (BYD). They noted:

BYD, China’s leading EV maker leapt out of its home market in a stunning international expansion, threatening the future of European political coalitions grown up around the internal combustion engine and prompting new waves of anxiety among Western policymakers and captains of industry. China’s dramatic surge of investment into the “new three”—EVs, batteries, and solar—is expected to crush oil demand by 5 million barrels a day by 2030. That cheaper green tech is now enabling a hundred plus countries to break free from expensive imported hydrocarbons towards the sunlit uplands of electric self-sufficiency.

If human civilization is to have a sustainable future, it will have to be green. It is entirely possible that no such green future will emerge, at least not enough to prevent societal collapse. China’s innovations might be too little, too late. But there is also a possibility that they will build our only path out of catastrophe.

By contrast, the United States is already on its way to being a technological backwater and a climate albatross. The country will be part of the problem, not part of the solution. By pushing insufficient policies, Obama and Biden put the United States on the path to its current environmental weakness. Trump, of course, is doing something even worse—not just being a slowpoke in innovation but taking the United States backward. The only results of this fossil fuel fanaticism will be a ravaged planet and a future shaped by China.

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