Climate world learns to speak Republican

 

Climate world learns to speak Republican

 

Instead of fuming over Donald Trump’s moves this week, climate advocates stayed mostly mum and plotted ways to make climate change MAGA-friendly.

 

January 22, 2025 5:56 pm CET

By Karl Mathiesen

https://www.politico.eu/article/climate-world-speak-republican-donald-trump-paris-agreement/

 

In 2017, volcanic diplomatic outrage erupted when Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accord.

 

Eight years later, there was no explosion when he did it again.

 

The difference cemented a change in tactics for climate-conscious officials and advocates that has been a long time coming but wasn’t guaranteed until Trump reclaimed the U.S. presidency.

 

For many climate warriors, Joe Biden’s presidency gave the illusion of permanent ascendency. Trump’s first term had been marked not by climate retreat but by the emergence of a broad political consensus that beating climate change was as fundamental to governing as providing clean water, security and education.

 

But a rightward shift in the electorate has ousted many leaders who portrayed climate action as a moral duty. So gradually, the climate crowd has shelved its righteousness in favor of cooler arguments based on economic self-interest and securing vital supplies. Other times, they’ve simply opted for silence.

 

In other words, they’re learning how to say “climate change” in a MAGA world.

 

“People are also wondering if we should try to be bilingual,” said Li Shuo, director of China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. “If we should speak the language of the right — or at least be on the same page with them when it comes to vocabulary.”

 

That was apparent this week after Trump’s Day One announcement that he was, in his words, “immediately withdrawing from the unfair, one-sided Paris climate accord rip-off.”

 

Gone were the robust public defenses of the Paris deal that were so frequent in 2017, when France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Angela Merkel personally lobbied Trump to hold to the 2015 agreement and castigated him when he ignored them.

 

Instead, Trump’s announcement was accepted with little fuss. Macron and his German counterpart Olaf Scholz said nothing. United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office refused to be drawn in, telling reporters the prime minister wouldn’t provide a “running commentary” on the American president’s first days in office. China’s Foreign Ministry noted its concern via a spokesperson.

 

Notably, climate veterans were, by and large, sanguine about the missing fire and brimstone. It’s not what they think is needed now. 

 

“I don't think we'll see many politicians trying to make the moral argument because it's not a politically strong argument at the moment,” said Nigel Topping, a British expert who was formerly the United Nations’ high-level climate action champion. “They need to make economic and competitiveness arguments.”

 

Talking Trump

The Paris Agreement may not even need a full-throated public defense, others argued. U.S. or not, it’s here to stay, proving its fundamental resilience.

 

Pushed by lawmakers on Tuesday to say something about Trump’s move, Britain’s Energy Secretary Ed Miliband argued that — apart from the U.S. — governments worldwide “believed it was in their national self-interest to remain in the Paris Agreement.” The clean energy shift is “unstoppable,” he said, and countries want to grasp the “advantages of moving forward on this.”

 

Trump is primed to test that theory.

 

Already, the U.S. president Sharpied a spate of executive orders designed to favor fossil fuel production and reverse progress on solar and wind power.

 

One of the ironies of his first day in office was Trump co-opting the climate world’s language of calamity, declaring an “energy emergency.” There is no evidence of such a crisis. Americans pay significantly less for gasoline than any other G7 nation and the U.S. is the world's largest natural gas exporter. The Biden administration also sparked a clean energy manufacturing boom.

 

 

Rhetoric aside, before Trump’s return the world had already begun shifting away from the lofty ideals of multilateralism and collective problem solving that created the Paris deal.

 

It’s a dynamic that Biden himself did as much as anyone to hasten, with his protectionist made-in-America climate subsidy program. Everyone’s a Hobbesian now — seeing the world in terms of self-interest and mutual distrust. As the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen put it Tuesday: “The cooperative world order we imagined 25 years ago has not turned into reality. Instead, we have entered a new era of harsh geostrategic competition.”

 

That raises vexing questions for climate advocates who have, for decades, insisted that working together was the only solution to a global common problem like climate change.

 

For some, Trump’s early moves did, indeed, leave a sense of dread.