US president-elect Donald Trump’s plan to quit a landmark 2015 accord to fight climate change is likely to dent rather than derail the pact, with almost 200 governments defiantly saying this week that a trend towards cleaner energy is irreversible.
The 2015 Paris Agreement, more than 20 years in the making, won a renewed vote of confidence from governments from China to Saudi Arabia and companies who foresee a shift from fossil fuels towards solar and wind power as technology prices fall.
Trump has called man-made climate change a hoax and says he will pull out of the Paris deal and will instead bolster the domestic coal, oil and shale industries.
Almost 200 nations at two-week talks on climate change in Marrakesh, Morocco agreed a statement on Thursday night that the fight against climate change was an “urgent duty” and “irreversible”, and reaffirming support for the Paris Agreement.
Still, Trump’s threats cast a long shadow, with worries ranging from a drying-up of US climate finance for developing nations to a spread of nationalist, populist sentiment that could undermine global action to limit greenhouse gases.
Average world temperatures this year are set to be the warmest on record, beating 2015. The Paris Agreement, which entered into force on November 4, aims to phase out net greenhouse gas emissions in the second half of this century to limit floods, droughts, heat waves, extinctions of animals and plants and a rise in sea levels.
Hundreds of businesses including DuPont, Gap, General Mills, Hewlett Packard, Nike, Mars Incorporated, Schneider Electric, Starbucks and Unilever also reaffirmed action on climate change during the Marrakesh talks.
Trump’s promises to drop out of all UN climate programmes could jeopardise a plan by rich nations to provide $100bn in funds a year by 2020, from public and private sources, to help developing nations cope with global warming.
But delegates say any setback is likely to be less than the near-mortal blow when former US president George W Bush in 2001 decided against joining the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that bound about 40 other developed nations to cut emissions.
Badly wounded, Kyoto only entered into force in 2005 and now has the backing of only the European Union and a few allies.
The Paris Agreement, built on a looser model proposed by US President Barack Obama’s administration, lets all nations set their own goals to curb emissions with no penalties for non-compliance.
Another problem for climate diplomacy is that governments will have no breakthroughs in 2017. They began work in Marrakesh on a detailed set of rules for the often vaguely-worded Paris Agreement, likely to take two years until 2018.