OPINION - Donald Trump good for the planet? You better believe it
Environmentalists are worried about the Trump win. But there is no time to sulk. Every year sees biodiversity plummeting and ecosystems irreversibly trashed. The stakes couldn’t be higher and it is our responsibility to try to figure out what a Trump administration could do for the environment.
The answer is: a lot. Trump is a climate sceptic, and that is unlikely to change. But that is not the same as being an environment sceptic. The Republican Party is full of people who are allergic to climate politics but who do care about the actual natural environment. Right now, even in these increasingly turbulent times, there is objectively nothing more important. And given the very public and passionate calls made by the UK’s new Foreign Secretary for the world to come together to repair our relationship with nature, this also presents an opportunity for the UK to build bridges to the new US administration.
As a lifelong environmentalist I would far, far prefer a climate sceptic who recognises the importance of nature than a technocratic climate activist for whom a forest is nothing more than a cluster of carbon sticks. Tragically, that is what so much environment politics has been reduced to: carbon counting. Of all the public money channelled into tackling climate change, just a few per cent goes on nature, and then only usually where it is a nature-based solution to climate change. Public funding for purely protecting and restoring nature remains practically non-existent. Only last week I was with pioneering elephant conservationists who were looking for funding. Their pitch was based on the ability of elephants to store carbon, through the manner in which they relate to forests. The conservationists knew that without a carbon angle, they’d be unlikely to get the funding.
It’s not just the politics. I am often asked to speak to broadcasters or write articles about “the environment.” But when I press for clarity about the likely discussion, it emerges — every single time — that the discussion is about carbon politics and never about the environment.
It is madness. We cannot survive without the world’s forests. But by the time you have finished reading this article, the world will have lost the equivalent of around 450 football pitches worth of tropical forest; forests that are home to 80 per cent of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity, that regulate our water and climate systems and underpin the livelihoods of more than a billion people.
When we convert complex ecosystems, we not only lose irreplaceable biodiversity, we lose the free services these systems provide and on which we rely for life. We know this, yet we continue to do damage to the natural world at a rate it cannot possibly sustain. And yet in terms of political priorities, this barely features.
In a sane world this would be reversed. Climate change is just one of many symptoms of our abusive relationship with nature. It is the fever. And while we should of course be accelerating the transition to clean and renewable energy, it will be for nothing if we fail nature. There is no solution to climate change, no pathway to “net zero,” without nature.
There’s another reason our focus should shift from carbon to nature: the “market” has already decided on a massive energy transition. Each year vastly more money is invested in new clean technology than in fossil fuels. There is a question of speed, but politicians aren’t going to be able to change the fundamentals. In President Trump’s first term, coal use fell faster than it had in Obama’s term, despite their very different priorities.
None of this is true for nature. The market continues to drive environmental destruction because it is blind to the value of nature. It sees value in nature only once it is “cashed-in.” The financial incentive to destroy a forest is roughly 40 times greater than the incentive to protect it. This despite the fact that in the real world we cannot survive without them.
We need leadership at the highest levels. And if Trump were to put his bullish, hyperactive energy and impatience into tackling this crisis, there is no limit to the good a Trump administration could do. Imagine if, for example, he took on perhaps the greatest market distortion of all, something conservatives instinctively oppose, and set about reversing the billions in environmentally harmful subsidies dished out annually around the world? We are told the cost of turning the tide on nature destruction globally is around £550 billion a year. That is also roughly how much is spent each year by the top 50 food-producing countries subsidising often highly destructive land use.
At this point, there is little to suggest Trump will step up. But the Republicans have a proud history of environmentalism that he could be persuaded to tap into.
The environment was Teddy Roosevelt’s overriding passion. He created a network of national parks and monuments to nature that remains unrivalled to this day. Even Richard Nixon is enjoying something of a revival as environmentalists begin to acknowledge that his administration introduced more environmental protection legislation than any of his predecessors.
There is nothing more conservative than stewardship, conservation, looking out for future generations, living within our means, making the polluter pay; fundamentally these are conservative values. Or should be.
Back to Trump. One of his closest allies today and a person likely to hold considerable sway in the next four years is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a man heralded by Time magazine as a “Hero for the Planet.” Trump the environmentalist? For all our sakes let us hope he surprises us.