Obama: will Trump destroy climate legacy?

President Obama is not that good on legacy. By the time he leaves office at the end of the year he will leave behind him a vastly improved healthcare system, a reduced (but not closed) operation at Guantanamo bay and… well, not many more headline achievements really. However, in the eleventh hour the first black president of the USA may have one last triumph to add to his legacy: getting China to sign up to tackling climate change – and joining the USA up to the same pledge.

A global agreement on reducing emissions of CO2 to tackle climate change was reached last year in Paris. Although it probably fell short of agreeing the measures which scientists believe are needed, it did see most countries in the world take the issue more seriously than ever before. Now, just before the G-20 meeting began in Hangzhou, China and the USA have ratified this agreement. This is extremely important: these two countries are the largest polluters in the world, so action from them will be crucial to making the agreement work.

Obama recognised the significance of the deal, saying, “History will judge today’s effort as pivotal.” He added, “We are moving the world significantly towards the goal we have set.” While the two new ratifications are indeed crucial, this only brings the number of countries which have ratified the agreement to 25. Among those yet to ratify is the UK – where the Government will not go further than saying it will ratify “as soon as possible”.

However, this slow but positive progress may yet be doomed. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is a very reluctant convert to the need to tackle climate change. On 6th November 2001 Trump tweeted, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.” Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders seized upon that tweet during their campaigns to be the Democrat candidate. Trump went on to claim the Tweet had been a “joke” – apparently not understanding that a “joke” is something that is funny, not something you regret saying.

However, reporters have recorded several other occasions Trump referring to global warming as a “hoax”, either in tweets or interviews. Increased flooding and other rare extreme weather events in the USA are putting him under pressure to admit that global warming does exist – and has direct consequences for the country. To date, he is showing little sign of changing his mind. If Trump manages to win the presidential election, Obama’s success in signing the USA up to climate change may be the shortest lived of his legacies.

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