Nov. 11 (UPI) — Amid today’s extreme weather events and in the wake of Donald Trump’s re-election, U.S. climate adviser John Podesta said the climate fight is “bigger than one election.”
On Monday, the senior adviser to President Joe Biden for international climate policy, in remarks said, “For those of us dedicated to climate action, last week’s outcome in the United States is obviously bitterly disappointing,” Podesta said at the UN’s 29th climate change conference in Baku, Azerbaijan.
“Particularly because of the unprecedented resources and ambition” the administration “brought to the climate fight,” he added.
Currently, the United States has a 2030 goal to cut its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions by 50% to 52% below 2005 levels.
But the outcome of last Tuesday’s U.S. election threatens progress over the last few years amid the growing number of notable and destructive weather patterns and other deadly extreme weather events across the globe.
A recent study indicated that climate change exasperated rains that led this year to a series of deadly and “historic” floods spread across Europe and recently in Spain, which scientists say will be more likely and heavier going forward.
Trump is poised to once more take the United States out of the Paris climate accord and roll back many of the Biden administration’s significant advancements in the global fight against a rapid change in world climate, but “trends are not going to be reversed.”
Podesta said “it’s clear” the incoming Trump administration will “try to take a U-turn and reverse much of this progress.”
When he took office in 2017 in his first term, Trump took aggressive steps to reverse many of former President Barack Obama’s environmental and energy policies. Among them: slashing fuel emission standards and relaxing regulation.
The Paris climate agreement, according to Podesta, has now grown into “the most expansive coalition ever assembled” in support of U.S. climate action with more than 5,000 independent states, businesses, local governments, tribal nations, universities and other institutions taking part.
“And I know that this disappointment is more difficult to tolerate as the dangers we face grow ever more catastrophic,” said Podesta. “But that is the reality.” According to Podesta, Trump “has vowed to dismantle our environmental safeguards” and to once more withdraw the United States from the Paris agreement. “This is what he has said, and we should believe him.”
Climate experts have warned of looming catastrophic and irreversible effects on the planet if carbon and greenhouse gas emissions are not significantly reduced soon. Meanwhile, Trump has vowed to slash Biden’s clean energy initiatives and to pull back on stricter regulations.
In July’s debate between Biden and Trump, the president-elect did signal his plan to go the other way of Biden’s effort to cut emissions and curb climate change, and indicated he will again pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, an international treaty meant to help member countries mitigate climate change.
Trump also pledged to ease regulations so that he may “open up” the use of gas, oil and coal for energy — which are direct factors leading to perilous climate variations and other weather events.
“But what I want to tell you today is that while the United States federal government under Donald Trump may put climate action on the back burner,” Podesta said, “the work to contain climate change is going to continue in the United States with commitment and passion and belief.”
The White House says 57% of new clean energy jobs created since the Inflation Reduction Act passed are located in Congressional districts held by Republicans. And private companies committed more than $450 billion in new clean energy investments.
Meanwhile, Trump and a handful of Republicans in Congress have vocally opposed many of the Biden administration’s clean, “green” initiatives all while criticizing the real scientific research linking climate change to human activity and the perils it may bring or has already wrought.
But this year, 18 House Republicans signed a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., that urged him to not repeal the energy tax credits as part of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, according to Podesta.
“A full repeal would create a worst-case scenario where we would have spent billions of taxpayer dollars and received next to nothing in return,” the GOP leader reads.
On Monday, Podesta vowed to COP29 attendees “this is not the end” of the fight.
“Facts are still facts. Science is still science,” he added. “This fight is bigger than one election, one political cycle, in one country. This fight is bigger still.”
The climate adviser pointed to July 22 as “the hottest day in recorded history” with other days likely to outpace it.
“The consequences of living on a rapidly warming planet are all around us,” he said, “and not just in collapsing coral reefs and melting ice sheets.”
In his remarks, Podesta reminded those present of the recent Hurricanes Helene and Milton that “slammed into the southeastern United States, killing hundreds and cutting off power and water in communities for weeks.”
He also pointed to a “worst drought in decades” in southern Africa that’s putting 20 million kids at risk of malnutrition and starvation, recent catastrophic floods in Spain that poured a year’s worth of rain in a single day, Asian typhoons that killed hundreds and caused $16 billion in damages from the Philippines to Myanmar, wildfires in the Amazon forest and the Pantanal which, according to Podesta, is “destroying Indigenous communities and burning up an area the size of Switzerland.”
“None of this is a hoax,” he emphaszied. “It is real. It’s a matter of life and death.”
As for the COP29 going forward, the outgoing U.S. climate adviser called on the private sector to keep leading and make “bigger investments” in clean energy technologies “to continue to innovate and build a net zero economy.”
“Failure or apathy is simply not an option,” he said.
