Climate and Chaos Agents - Where Do We Go From Here?

Dawn, Christmas Day, 2024, at Tomales Bay, Inverness, California. Photo by Martha Ture

President Trump has withdrawn the United States from the Paris climate accords and has proposed a policy to increase gas and oil production under the rubric “drill, baby, drill.” He has lied that climate change is a hoax and he has lied that the United States is in an energy crisis.

The United States is the world’s leading producer and exporter of oil and gas. It exports more oil than Saudi Arabia, Russia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and any other petro-state on the map. It also imports most of its oil from Canada and Mexico. In 2023, the U.S. imported more than 71% of its crude oil from these two countries. Canada supplies nearly 60% of the U.S. crude oil imports.

So this past week, President Donald Trump kicked off his new term by declaring a national energy emergency with plans to "fill our strategic reserves up again, right to the top, and export American energy all over the world.” Let’s repeat a fact: The United States is the world’s leading producer and exporter of oil and gas.

So what’s the point of this risible Trump lie?

On his first full day in office, Trump took aim at public land protections in Alaska, signing an executive order to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling.

Ah. Alaska Public Media reports that as of January 8, 2025, no bids were received in the second oil and gas lease sale in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the Department of the Interior announced.

Had any bids been received, bids were scheduled to be opened on Friday by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. That Interior agency was charged with managing the refuge leasing program created through a 2017 tax bill passed by a Republican-controlled Congress and signed by President Donald Trump in his first term.

“The lack of interest from oil companies in development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge reflects what we and they have known all along – there are some places too special and sacred to put at risk with oil and gas drilling. This proposal was misguided in 2017, and it’s misguided now,” Acting Interior Secretary Laura Daniel-David said in the statement. “The BLM has followed the law and held two lease sales that have exposed the false promises made in the Tax Act. The oil and gas industry is sitting on millions of acres of undeveloped leases elsewhere; we’d suggest that’s a prudent place to start, rather than engage further in speculative leasing in one of the most spectacular places in the world.”

The state of Alaska has also sued to overturn Arctic refuge policies. A complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Anchorage seeks to overturn the environmental stipulations applied to the second lease sale, which the state contends make oil development there economically impossible.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy, in a statement about the lawsuit, blasted what he said was the Biden administration’s “continued and irrational opposition” to Arctic oil development – and, like Ruaro, said he looked forward to a reversal under a new Trump administration.

“We have already heard comments from the incoming president that his administration will thankfully take a different tack and open up those areas that are meant to be developed. But unfortunately, we can’t wait for that—we have to challenge this unlawful action now,” Dunleavy, a longtime Trump supporter, said in the statement.

So, we see another case of a Republican with the authority to damage the world, who has been badly misinformed about the physics of adding heat to an overheated container, such as the atmosphere.

With respect to Trump’s retreat from the Paris Climate Accords, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's philanthropy organization said it will provide funding to help cover the U.S. contribution to the U.N. climate body's budget, after President Donald Trump announced that he would withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement and end the country's international climate funding.

Michael Bloomberg also pledged to work with states, cities and companies to ensure that the U.S. stayed on track with its global climate obligations.

The fact that states, cities, and companies are working with a private philanthropy to overcome the president’s foolishness is a sign of global citizenship. That’s a remarkable exercise in social consciousness. It not only shows the U.S. is becoming useless as a reliable global partner, it shows the independence of non-federal actors, and leadership in global civics.

The U.S. is responsible for funding around 21% of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC's) core budget. Last year, it paid the UNFCCC a $7.4 million required contribution for 2024, and also paid off a 3.4 million euro arrears for missed contributions over 2010-2023.

A Reuters analysis of UNFCCC documents last year found the U.N. body is experiencing a severe budget shortfall, which diplomats said had begun to disrupt parts of the world's climate dialogue.

Meanwhile, calamitous fires have devastated parts of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, while a historic polar cold storm dumped more deep snow along the U.S. Gulf Coast after bringing Houston and New Orleans to a near standstill. Four inches of snow, sleet, and freezing rain piled up in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.

This is what occurs when more heat is added to an already overheated atmospheric system.

Trump’s response? He delivered his America First agenda to Davos’ World Economic Forum.

“My message to every business in the world is very simple: Come make your product in America and we will give you among the lowest taxes of any nation on Earth,” he said in virtual remarks. “But if you don’t make your product in America, which is your prerogative, then, very simply, you will have to pay a tariff.”

It may not occur to the Solons of economics in the administration that the consequences of tariffs include trade wars and global economic depression. University of Michigan Emeritus Professor of International Economics Alan Deardorff has summarized the probabilities.

“Assuming that he follows through with his proposal to apply a 10% (or 20%) tariff on all imports from all countries, and that many of those countries retaliate (as they did when he used tariffs in 2018), the effect will be to largely cut the U.S. off from the world trading system, substantially reducing both our imports and our exports.

How could a 10% or 20% tariff on imports impact the U.S. economy, including costs and industry effects?

This will raise the costs of much that we currently import from abroad, as well as the even more things that rely on imports as inputs to their production. Our export sectors will shrink. Overall, we can expect permanently higher prices and a recession.

What might be the global economic consequences of Trump’s tariff plans, particularly for countries reliant on U.S. trade?

As for the rest of the world, those countries that depend heavily on trade with the U.S., most obviously Canada and Mexico, will be badly hurt, and the world too will likely go into recession. But I expect that most of the world will recover from that before we do because, big as we are, the rest of the world is much bigger.”

So much for one part of the probable short-term future. As for the longer-term wellbeing of Earth and sustainability, social justice, and economics, the overarching issue is whether policy changes on the part of corporations, banks, financial institutions, capital investors, and other governments will render oil and gas development financially unlikely. In a paper assessing 21^st century global policy scenarios, author Zeke Hausfather shows a growing consensus that the central estimate of 21st century warming is now likely below 3 °C.

“This reflects progress on both clean energy technologies and climate policies that has reduced the plausibility of high-emissions pathways...However, it is difficult to fully preclude warming of 4 °C or more under a current policy world if there are continued positive emissions after 2100 or if carbon cycle feedbacks and climate sensitivity are on the high end of current estimates in the literature. …

“That being said, there is considerable skepticism among IPCC authors that even the central estimate of current policy outcomes will be achieved, with 58% of those recently surveyed expecting at least a 50% chance of reaching or exceeding 3 °C by or before 2100 (Wynes et al., 2024).

“There remains a huge amount of work to do to achieve the Paris Agreement Goal of limiting warming to well-below 2 °C this century. While the move away from high-end emissions scenarios is promising, the longer the world delays in transitioning from current policies toward deep emissions mitigation, the greater the risks become of overshooting our temperature goals and locking in the impacts of a much warmer world or having to rely on an ever-increasing amount of costly negative emissions to bring global temperatures back down.”

What forces in addition to the government, private, and corporate coalitions, might move us forward?

Solar power overtook coal in the European Union’'s electricity mix in 2024. Solar generation provided 11% of the EU’s electricity mix in 2024, up from 9.3% in 2023 and overtaking coal, which fell to less than 10% for the first time since energy think tank Ember began collating the figures in 2011, the data showed.

Gas-fired power production fell to a 15.7% share from 16.9% in 2023 while wind power was almost flat at 17.4%. Although some 13 gigawatts of new wind capacity was added in 2024, wind conditions were less favorable than in 2023, leading to lower than expected generation.

The EU wants wind power to make up around 34% of its electricity mix by 2030 and more action is needed, particularly around making permitting for new projects easier, to meet the goal.

Nuclear remained the dominant electricity provider in the EU, rising to 23.7% from 23% in 2023.

However, last year was the hottest on record—and likely the coolest we will ever again experience. To hold the rise in average global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius, nations must cut emissions 42 percent over the next five years and 57 percent by 2035—targets that now seem totally implausible. The planet currently is on course for a 2.6 to 3.1 degree Celsius temperature rise during this century.

This dire trajectory calls for a massive mobilization, akin to the Manhattan Project or Apollo Program, to accelerate investments in decarbonization and natural capital, accompanied by economic incentives and regulations to foster a nature-positive economy. “

The Carnegie Endowment article by Stewart Patrick describes three ongoing world-changing movements that will probably derail the Trump agenda, even if they contribute to the downfall of Earth. The first is migrations from poor, youthful countries to richer, older countries, despite all efforts to the contrary. The second is the climate crisis. The third is AI.

Historically, technological innovation has often outpaced governance efforts. Today, commercial and geopolitical concerns are lengthening this lag, increasing safety and security risks from technologies that are inherently dual use and prone to unintended consequences. Not two years ago, thousands of technologists warned that AI companies were “locked in an out-of-control race to develop . . . ever more powerful digital minds that no one—not even their creators—can understand, predict, or reliably control.” Such worries have since been brushed aside, as firms compete to reap financial gain and the U.S. government races to best China as the dominant AI power.

Add to these three the fairly probable economic results of the Trump tariff policy, and the Michael Bloomberg coalition looks close to salvific. We wish his coalition health and strength and success.