How the prospect of Trump 2.0 is emboldening the Coalition on climate change

Australia has already dealt with a Trump presidency — but what could it look like the second time around?See all 5 stories.

In early June, a fortnight before the northern summer began, the world passed its 12th straight month of record high global average temperatures just as Donald Trump began a swing through US south-western battleground states.

As the freshly convicted former president prepared to speak at a megachurch in Phoenix, Arizona, the temperature hit 44 degrees and fans began to collapse in the long queues outside. Eleven would be hospitalised.

The heat continued with the rallies over the coming days. In Las Vegas at the end of the week, the temperature hit a record for that time of year of 43.8 degrees. At that rally, 24 were treated on-site and six were taken to hospital.

Donald Trump spoke at a Las Vegas rally where several listeners had to receive medical attention because of the heat.Credit: AP

Trump did not wilt in the heat, nor let it shift his message.

“I don’t want anybody going on me,” he said of the heat. “We need every voter. I don’t care about you. I just want your vote.”

He later added that he had been joking.

Each line was punctuated with a slogan he had picked up and deployed in the 2016 election and has used ever since: “Drill baby, drill!”

Attitudes to climate change have long been divided along ideological fault lines, with conservatives suspicious that calls for action have been used to turbocharge collective action and government intervention.

But even on the populist right of Western politics, leaders have normally adorned their antipathy for climate action with nods towards accepting the basic science of global warming and vague promises to hit long-term targets.

Not Trump.

As far back as 2012, he declared climate change was “created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive”. Later, when the comment became a passing political inconvenience, he would dismiss it as a joke, too.

During the 2016 election cycle, when his Twitter feed remained a direct link to his endlessly shifting political stances, a constant was his antipathy to climate science (and experts more broadly) and climate action.

In January 2017, Trump was inaugurated as president and could begin to give effect to his scepticism.

He began dismantling Obama-era climate action such as diluting the former president’s Clean Power Plan with a set of new, weaker regulations, seeking to end fuel efficiency standards and prevent California – always a leader in this field – from introducing its own tough standards.

But his most significant symbolic act was to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, under which members of the United Nations have agreed to pursue action to stabilise global warming later this century under 2 degrees and as close as possible to 1.5 degrees.

So chaotic was Trump’s first term that it took him months to make this announcement. Few believe that will be the case if he wins again.

The implications for Australia and the world of any or all of these outcomes could be catastrophic.

Observers expect him to actively overturn massive progress made in the US under President Joe Biden and undermine international headway by ending climate diplomacy with China and either withdrawing again from the Paris Agreement or sabotaging it from within.

When it comes to the Paris Agreement, it is the latter option that prompts the most concern.

Should Trump entirely abandon the Paris Agreement, his views would become irrelevant to a world already determined to get on with the job, says Alden Meyer, a senior associate with the global climate think tank E3G.

“The real depressing scenario would be if he stayed inside the talks and tried to build alliances with the Saudis or the Russians or others that have been destabilising forces for ambition over the years,” Meyer says.

“Their view would be, ‘Let’s try to roll back things, you know, rather than just pulling out and being on the sidelines’.”

Trump’s bellicose attitude towards China could also slow action. The only real chance the world has to stabilise its climate is if these nations work together. Under both the Biden and Obama administrations, senior diplomats successfully quarantined climate talks from the two nations’ wider competition.

Back-channelling between the two countries before COP climate talks in Glasgow and Dubai led to significant advancements in global agreements to act on climate.

According to Meyer, there are already rumblings that China and the European Union have begun to discuss how they might act on climate in the face of a Trump victory. The roles of other major players such as India and Brazil would also be critical to the global reaction.

Meyer says this could only make life more difficult for middle powers that are close to the US, such as Australia. Do they align themselves with the world or with their traditional friend and ally?

Richie Merzian, a former climate negotiator for the Australian government who now heads the international program for the Smart Energy Council, agrees the worst outcome for the world would be Trump keeping the US in the Paris Agreement and forming a “coalition of the unwilling”. Either way, he says, the implications of a Trump presidency are particularly difficult for Australia.

Australia has bound climate action with its broader foreign and security efforts, particularly in the Pacific. To that end, it hopes to win the right to co-host the COP climate talks with Pacific nations in 2026. Should it be out of step with its key security partner, its voice in those talks would be diluted.

Merzian believes Trump’s sheer proximity to power is already having an impact on climate policy in Australia.

“A Trump victory will fuel the hard right, who are never interested in joining a global effort, who don’t want to see any transition happen, who were very happy to let the status quo operate and to run coal for as long as possible.”

He says this influence can be seen in Australian politics with the opposition’s decision to abandon Australia’s 2030 Paris target and focus on nuclear power.

“I don’t think [Opposition Leader Peter] Dutton and [Nationals leader David] Littleproud would have moved into this space if it hadn’t been for the long shadow cast by the Trump presidential race.”

A similar shift in rhetoric has already been noticed in Europe, with a right-wing resurgence and a lack of progress in United Nations climate talks held in Bonn this month.

“There’s a high likelihood we’ll soon be in a world where the US submits its second withdrawal from the Paris Agreement,” said Michai Robertson, a negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States, referring to Trump’s 2017 decision to leave the global climate pact, Politico reported.

“That’s one reason the European Union and others haven’t put forward a number. People are preparing for that possibility.”

Whatever happens globally, Trump’s most profound impact will be domestic.

Meyer’s view is that should he be re-elected, Trump will prove a far more effective and efficient climate wrecker this time.

The widely reported Project 2025 document, a 920-page blueprint for his first term drafted by conservative ideologues and private sector cheerleaders under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation think tank, is actively hostile to climate action.

Its language is laced with culture war invective in which climate action is commonly dismissed as an artefact of the “woke agenda”. It also outlines massive concrete action.

The Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act have turbocharged climate action under the Biden administration by offering massive tax incentives for the development of clean energy and technology, such as batteries and electric vehicles.Credit: NYT

Heritage’s Paul Dans, director of Project 2025, told The New York Times one of its aims was to “investigate whether the dimensions of climate change exist”.

Beyond that, it details a comprehensive dismantling of the US government’s climate machine, including replacing all senior officials in departments with Trump loyalists and eliminating clean energy programs and offices within the Department of Energy.

It would also seek to overturn the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, two packages of law that have turbocharged climate action under the Biden administration by offering massive tax incentives for the development of clean energy and technology, such as batteries and electric vehicles.

The Environmental Protection Agency would be gutted with an immediate executive order that requires “reconsideration of the agency’s structure” including freezing existing regulations, eliminating employees, stopping all grants to community groups and dramatically cutting its budget.

It is difficult to exaggerate the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act but, according to the Clean Investment Monitor, it helped drive up clean energy deployment in 2023 by a staggering 32 per cent.

As Meyer notes, the act was drafted to be “Republican proof”, with much of the economic activity it has stimulated occurring in Republican states. He believes the economic inertia alone will see climate action continue under a Trump presidency, though he fears it will slow.

The race to stabilise the climate is, if nothing else, a race against time.

According to an analysis by the leading United Kingdom climate publication Carbon Brief, 4 billion more tonnes of greenhouse gases would be dumped into the atmosphere by 2030 under a second Trump presidency compared to a government that pursued Biden’s climate agenda.

This would cause global damage of about $900 billion.

As ever, Trump remains fixed on his personal interests.

Over a dinner of chopped steak with oil executives at his Florida resort and home Mar-a-Lago in April, he was bluntly transactional.

If they donated $US1 billion ($1.5 billion) to his campaign, he would slash regulation and taxes on their industry as soon as he returned to the White House, The Washington Post reported.

“You’ll get it on day one.”

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for the weekly What in the World newsletter here.