A Climate Reckoning Is Coming for the Next President
If Donald Trump wins a second term, and his administration realizes conservative advocacy groups’ plans to dismantle environmental protections and drill, baby, drill, the United States is in for four years of relentless carbon pollution. In other words, another Trump presidency all but guarantees a complete abnegation of the country’s climate duties from 2025 to 2029. And as climate scientists say, emissions anywhere mean global warming everywhere: The United States’ heat-trapping contributions to the atmosphere during those years will make the world warmer than it would be without them. Already, the warming that humanity has locked in will bring many places to the edge of habitability, and adding to that damage would be an “unmitigated disaster,” the atmospheric-climate scientist Veerabhadran Ramanathan told me.
“But if it’s just four years, we can survive it,” he added, to my surprise. “Unless that four years becomes 20 years … But if it is just four years, then you can recover.”
A second Trump presidency is the open question looming over
