With the start of the 29th U.N. climate summit, COP29, less than a week away, former U.S. environmental leaders said they have no delusions as to what the election of Donald Trump to the presidency means to the nation’s climate policies — and to the world. Gone are the misplaced hopes common in 2016 that U.S. President-elect Trump might listen to policy experts, be persuaded about the science, be open to not reversing course, to not undo environmental regulations, to stop calling climate change a hoax and heed dire warnings of the existential threat posed by global warming. He ignored them all. Thus, such hope was gone this week, as a former U.S. United Nations climate summit negotiator and former head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (both under President Barack Obama), spoke to international journalists two days after Trump became president-elect for the second time. Instead, there was pragmatic talk about current and future climate calamities smashing wealthy countries, climate action accelerating at the local level and the favorable economics of the green energy transition. Jonathan Pershing, Obama’s envoy at the climate summit in Marrakech, Morocco, in 2016, noted, “Not a single country followed the United States in withdrawing from the [2015] Paris Agreement, which is what the Trump administration did, and says it intends to do again. I don’t think anyone else will follow suit at this point either.” Gina McCarthy, EPA administrator during Obama’s second term, added, “Just as we did during the last Trump administration, we…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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