As Donald Trump won the presidency, significant portions of the United States were in drought condition. October was the driest month on record in my home state of New Jersey, and the high the day after the election was a balmy 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Just a few weeks ago, abnormally hot waters in the Gulf of Mexico fostered the rapid growth of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, and made Helene’s rainfall so intense that western North Carolina suffered the worst flooding in over a century.
The effects of climate change will continue to worsen as long as we humans continue to dump heat-trapping pollution into the atmosphere. The Biden administration’s policies, especially the Inflation Reduction Act, were not enough on their own to realize the administration’s goal of halving U.S. emissions by 2030 and reaching net-zero emissions by 2050, but they were the most significant moves to limit heat-trapping pollution in U.S. history.
Donald Trump has vowed to dismantle these policies. All else being equal, Carbon Brief estimates that move could increase carbon dioxide emissions between 2025 and 2030 alone by about four billion tons, thereby causing nearly $1 trillion in global damage. Further, Trump will once again withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement and seek to undermine international climate diplomacy, giving other right-wing leaders around the world the go-ahead to slow action on climate change or even ignore it altogether. Thus there is a good chance U.S. moves to delay decarbonization will be partially reciprocated by other countries.
There are some countervailing factors. On the one hand, most of the benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act in the form of clean energy and manufacturing investments have flowed to red districts. When push comes to shove, some Republican congressmen might not acquiesce in having their largesse removed. The Inflation Reduction Act has also leveraged and accelerated trends in clean energy that have substantial momentum on their own. Regardless of what Donald Trump does, solar will remain the cheapest new electricity source in much of the world, and battery prices will continue to plummet.
On the other hand, Donald Trump has promised an economic agenda likely to trigger a substantial economic slowdown, including deporting a significant chunk of America’s blue-collar workforce at a time of low unemployment and placing large taxes on imported goods. He’s also pledged to place Elon Musk in charge of cutting government spending, a move that Musk says “would involve some temporary hardship” for average Americans.
Some heterodox economists argue for “degrowth” as a solution to climate change. This is problematic for many reasons, but the degrowth for which they argue is smart degrowth coupled with a redistribution agenda to limit hardship. The degrowth that might occur from Trump’s policies would be accidental and reckless. Reversing economic growth is the worst way to slow emissions growth—but that’s likely what will happen. So the harm Trump will do in terms of emissions may be limited by his diminishment of the U.S. economy.
There’s also another possibility worth considering: that the MAGA coalition might take an unexpected turn, fusing its xenophobia with a climate agenda. Elon Musk is, of course, well aware of the climate challenge. More surprisingly, in the October vice presidential debate, J.D. Vance hinted at a decarbonization policy not unlike that of the Biden-Harris administration: “You’d want to reshore as much American manufacturing as possible, and you’d want to produce as much energy as possible … double down and invest in American workers and the American people.” Of course, he bracketed this proposal with a dismissal of climate change as “weird science” and denied that these were the Biden administration policies.
But as climate disasters continue to accumulate, it seems quite possible a growing MAGA faction will, like France’s Marine Le Pen, tilt in an ecofascist direction. Many on the left have, after all, talked about the need to declare a “climate emergency” and for a “wartime mobilization” to fight climate change. Authoritarians love states of emergency, particularly ones with no obvious end point, and such calls could easily be turned in an illiberal direction. An ecofascist MAGA president might pair a declared climate emergency with draconian measures directed, for example, against migrants or other scapegoats.
Regardless of future emissions, we are already experiencing a dangerous stream of climate disasters. Dealing with these threats requires good governance and an attention to on-the-ground facts; Trump, by contrast, represents a move toward Russian-style kleptocracy, with little attention to long-term planning and little regard for truth. Trump has a history of trying to link disaster relief to political support and famously edited a National Weather Service hurricane forecast to align with his statements.
The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 proved the ultimate test of the Trump administration’s skill in disaster management. Though most Americans now report believing they were better off four years ago—a time of mass death and supply shortages—than they are today, it is hard to argue that the administration passed this test.
Trump’s confederates also seek to dismantle our ability to study climate threats. If enacted, the Project 2025 agenda would dismantle the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, commercialize the National Weather Service’s forecasts, and block the periodic scientific assessments of climate change that have been required by law since the George H.W. Bush administration, and to which I myself have contributed. These moves would make it harder to measure the effects of human activity on the climate, harder to learn about extreme weather as it is brewing, and thus harder to protect ourselves.
Halting further warming and building resilience to climate disasters are essential for both the economy and national security. And yet the American people have chosen an executive who has campaigned not on solving these problems but on authoritarianism and conspiracy theories. This is a path to American decline, not a path to American greatness.
I wish I had some hopeful thoughts to offer. But as Kate Marvel wrote in a beautiful essay about the climate crisis published during the first Trump administration, to preserve both our climate and our democracy, “We need courage, not hope. Grief, after all, is the cost of being alive. We are all fated to live lives shot through with sadness, and are not worth less for it. Courage is the resolve to do well without the assurance of a happy ending.”
In the aftermath of a disaster, most people respond not with greed or violence but with courage and compassion. Tackling the climate crisis and growing democracy require both, regardless of whether the federal government is working to advance or obstruct these goals.
