14.11.2024
Drill, baby, drill!
Trump wants to both max out oil production and pull out of the Paris Accords, writes Eddie Ford - bad news for a planet already experiencing record-high temperatures
There is a horrible irony to the fact that Donald Trump became president-elect in the year when 1.5ºC plus looks like becoming the new temperature norm for the planet. A year that the UN secretary general, António Guterres, declared “a masterclass in human destruction”, with families running for their lives before the next hurricane strikes, workers collapsing in insufferable heat, and floods tearing through communities and devastating infrastructure. The year when developing countries at Cop29 in Azerbaijan want guarantees of $1 trillion a year in funds by 2035 to help them cut greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of extreme weather.
Yet monstrously the world’s hegemon wants to speed up that process, not try to reverse it - a complete abdication of responsibility that will be felt by later generations, as the world becomes hotter and hotter. On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly pledged to unleash oil production by telling stadium crowds that he would “drill, baby, drill!” - a slogan first used at the 2008 Republican national convention. But Trump has adopted it as his own with a vengeance, claiming this would see energy prices halved within 12 months of his taking office.
Executive order
As part of his assault on the planet that we all live on, the president-elect’s team has already prepared an executive order that would see the US withdraw from the Paris Agreement when he returns to office in January - a move heavily symbolic, as Joe Biden signed up to the accords on his first day in office, and has frequently touted his administration’s ‘green credentials’, spending billions of stimulus dollars on various renewable energy projects.
Grimly, there are plenty more executive orders being prepared for Trump when he re-enters the White House - such as one that would shrink the size of national parks to allow more drilling and mining, his transition team having readied proclamations that would redraw the boundaries of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in southern Utah. The former is a sacred site for Native Americans, who use the land for religious and cultural ceremonies, hunting, fishing, and gathering,1 whilst the latter is among the most remote in the country, being the last to be mapped in the contiguous United States - where numerous dinosaur fossils over 75 million years old have been found, including the discovery of a new species of dinosaur.2 During his first term, Trump reduced the amount of land under management by the federal government at Bears Ears by 85% and Grand Staircase-Escalante by 47% following an expansion under the Obama administration - with Biden restoring that territory in 2021. Trump perversely argued that the expansion under Obama amounted to “a massive federal land grab” and an “egregious abuse of federal power”, while shrinking their size would “give that power back to the states and to the people where it belongs.”
Trump is also expected to end the pause on permitting new liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports to big markets in Asia and Europe - something implemented by Biden in January in order to complete a study on their environmental and economic impact. Furthermore, he is likely to revoke a waiver that allows California to have tighter pollution standards than the rest of the country. Given that it is the most populous state in the US - and indeed the largest sub-national economy in the world, with a $4 trillion gross state product - this decided what America’s standards would be.
According to the most recent reports, the transition team is drawing up orders that would eliminate federal offices working on “environmental justice” - a Harris-Biden administration effort to reduce the “disproportionate impacts from climate change and pollution” on poor communities. Also being discussed is moving the Environmental Protection Agency and its 7,000 federal workers out of Washington DC, and the president-elect is planning to appoint an ‘energy tsar’ to lead efforts aimed at promoting oil, gas and coal production and slashing regulations.
Still, all this is to be expected from a man who has repeatedly dismissed climate science as a “hoax” and unsurprisingly received $14.1 million or more from the oil and gas industry during his election campaign, making it his fourth-biggest source of cash - though short of the £1 billion he directly requested from oil executives with promises that he would scrap environmental rules.3
It is worth mentioning that the president elect has vowed to repeal what he called the “socialist” Inflation Reduction Act. This is a piece of legislation that has delivered an estimated $450 billion in private investment into the US energy sector, and it has been estimated that its repeal would result in a 17% drop in new renewable capacity additions from 2025 to 2035, with offshore wind falling by as much as 45%. However, according to a Financial Times analysis, an estimated three-quarters of all manufacturing projects announced in the first year of the law’s passage benefited Republican districts, and 18 Republicans in the House of Representatives put their names to a letter protesting against “prematurely repealing energy tax credits”.
In an ominous sign of what it is to come, this week it was announced that Elon Musk, along with ex-presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, had been tasked to lead the newly proposed Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) - a reference to the name of the cryptocurrency, Dogecoin, which Musk promotes, the value of which has more than doubled since election day, tracking a surge in cryptocurrency markets on expectations of a softer regulatory ride under a Trump administration. Despite the name, the department will not be an actual government agency - Trump has issued a statement saying that Musk and Ramaswamy will work from outside government to advise the White House on how to “drive large-scale structural reform, and create an entrepreneurial approach to government never seen before”. He added that the dynamic duo would “shock” government systems.
Baku
Last year global carbon missions reached a staggering 40.6 billion tonnes - a record that is expected to be broken by the end of 2024 - and atmospheric carbon levels are now more than 50% higher than they were in pre-industrial days. All this explains why 1.5ºC has become the ‘norm’, though in reality it will almost certainly be far higher than that.
At last year’s Cop28 summit in Dubai, it was agreed to “transition away” from fossil fuels. Incredibly, this was the first time that there had been an international commitment to tackle the root cause of the climate crisis - taking three decades of negotiations to get to the stage where this pathetically weak statement could be agreed globally. It obviously falls far short of the full-blooded “phasing out” of fossil fuels that is needed if we are to stand a chance of surviving as a human civilisation.
New data
But now Donald Trump is back and even achieving that “transition away” is in jeopardy. The new data, released at Cop29, indicates that the planet-heating emissions from coal, oil and gas will rise by 0.8% in 2024. By stark contrast, emissions have to fall by 43% by 2030 for the world to have any chance of keeping to the now doomed 1.5ºC temperature target and limiting “increasingly dramatic” climate impacts on people around the globe.
Ed Miliband, energy secretary, has said that UK will lead efforts to save Cop29, following the election victory of climate-denier-in-chief Donald Trump. This requires building “vital alliances” with other countries, and Britain must become “a clean-energy superpower” to deliver climate action. In turn, Sir Keir Starmer announced new targets for the UK to cut greenhouse gases, and said he would fulfil a £11.6 billion pledge in climate finance to poorer countries made under the previous Tory government, but left hanging in the balance by Rishi Sunak. The UK, said Starmer at Baku, will now aim for an 81% cut in its emissions by 2035, updating the 78% pledge made by the Tories. He also announced a £1 billion investment in a wind turbine project in Hull that he said would create 1,300 local jobs, at a time when the world was standing at a “critical juncture” in the climate crisis.
Sir Keir insisted the government would not “tell people how to live their lives”, absolutely not - he was not Jeremy Corbyn after all - but believed the target was vital to the UK’s “future prosperity and energy security”. Starmer spent nearly two days at the talks, one of only seven G20 leaders attending the summit, with 13 absentees, including the leaders of the US, China, France and Germany (nor will Ursula von der Leyen, EU Commission president, be there). Yes, the poorer countries are hoping for a settlement in Baku that will deliver at least $1 trillion a year by 2035, but in all likelihood the developed countries will cough up a much smaller sum - perhaps significantly less than $400 million in the absence of the US, now that Donald Trump is back at the helm. This money, we are told, should come from public sources, such as overseas aid budgets, the World Bank and other publicly owned finance institutions. They also want large emerging economies such as China, and petrostates such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, to contribute to the funds - funds that will be endlessly haggled over at Baku until the very last minute, and beyond, doubtlessly ending up in a diplomatic fudge, as the world burns.
Yet even holding Cop in a country like Azerbaijan must be “some kind of dark joke”, as remarked by Greta Thunberg, the famous climate activist - particularly mocking the ‘Cop of peace’ theme chosen by the authoritarian, human rights-trashing conference host.4 Even the national symbol is a gas flame, epitomised in the shape of three skyscrapers that tower over the city. Azerbaijan’s entire economy is built on fossil fuels, with the oil and gas of the state-owned oil company, Socar, accounting for close to 90% of the country’s exports. It plans to expand fossil fuel production in direct contradiction to the 1.5ºC target and the general goals of the Paris Agreement.
The planet continues to produce more and more CO2 every year - vast areas could be inundated like the Netherlands and whole cities like Jakarta, Alexandria, Shanghai, Dhaka, parts of London, and so on. Then there are the disastrous consequences for existing agricultural zones, maybe with the Wheat Belt in North America turning to dust. Work for some is becoming increasingly difficult, as the temperatures get higher and higher. Meanwhile Trump says “drill, baby, drill!”