What does Donald Trump’s election victory mean for climate change?

This year has been a terrifying reminder of what is at stake for humanity, with hundreds dead in Spain’s flash floods, wildfires charring the Amazon, and warnings the UK could return to freezing conditions with the collapse of Atlantic ocean currents.

While climate change did not feature heavily in either US presidential election candidates’ pitch to voters, it is an issue set to define the coming decades.

So now Donald Trump has crushed Democrat hopes for a green(er) administration in the White House and officially won the 2024 US presidential election, where does he stand on environmental issues and what is his climate plan?

It’s a question many are asking after his win, with fears the former Republican president’s return could lead to a breakdown in global climate cooperation and new drilling for fossil fuels in the Alaskan Arctic.

Does Donald Trump believe in climate change?

Trump said he didn’t believe in climate change for years, famously tweeting in 2012 that the concept of global warming was ‘created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive’.

He later claimed his reference to China was a ‘joke’, but was still calling climate change a ‘hoax’ during his election campaign in 2016 and even later on.

In more recent years, he has come around to the idea that ‘something is changing’, but said he doubted it was due to human activity and that the world’s climate had always been changing.

Asked by Piers Morgan whether he believed in climate change in 2019, he said: ‘There is a cooling, and there’s a heating. I mean look, it used to not be climate change, it used to be global warming.

‘That wasn’t working too well because it was getting too cold all over the place. The ice caps were going to melt, they were going to be gone by now, but now they’re setting records. They’re at a record level.’

While it is true that Earth’s climate has gone through many changes, the rate of change since the mid-20th century is ‘unprecedented over millennia’ and ‘it is clearly the result of human activities since the mid-1800s’, according to Nasa.

Last year was the hottest globally since records began 174 years ago.

What is Donald Trump’s climate change policy?

Not reassuring, if you were hoping this was all bluster.

Last month, Trump called himself an ‘environmentalist’ and said he wanted ‘really clean water’ and ‘really clean air’, but has used ‘drill, baby, drill’ as a slogan at campaign rallies saying he will loosen regulations on drilling for new oil and gas, including in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, and allow companies to access ‘liquid gold beneath our feet’ (AKA oil and gas) on federal land.

As president previously, he did his best to abandon many of the policies put in place by his predecessor Obama, including the Clean Power Plan, aimed at reducing carbon emissions.

Trump has also pledged to ‘terminate’ Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act which included $369bn in subsidies for clean energy and green technology, saying he will ‘rescind all unspent funds’.

He vowed to encourage new natural gas pipelines and roll back Biden’s electric-vehicle mandates, arguing that the US needs to be able to boost energy production to be competitive in developing artificial intelligence systems, which consume large amounts of power.

In 2017, he fulfilled his promise to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement, a global treaty where countries pledged to curb fossil fuel emissions with the aim of keeping the increase in average global temperature below 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

When Joe Biden became president, he rejoined the treaty on his first day in office, reinstating the decision initially made by Barack Obama.

But Trump is likely to seek to quit again in a tit for tat, and told NBC it would be done so fast ‘your head would spin’, calling the treaty a ‘rip-off’.

UN Secretary General António Guterres told the Guardian that if so, the landmark 2015 agreement would still survive, ‘but people sometimes can lose important organs or lose the legs and survive’.

Fearing that a second US departure could encourage other countries to quit, he said: ‘We don’t want a crippled Paris agreement. We want a real Paris agreement.’

It is feared that Trump could even seek to leave the United Framework Convention on Climate Change, the underlying treaty to the Paris Agreement.

America is the world’s second largest carbon emitter after China, and its position on reducing emissions will be crucial at this month’s COP 29 UN Climate Change Conference in Baku.

With a climate sceptic as the incumbent president, it will be much harder for US delegates to offer any incentive to other countries to reduce their own emissions and tackle the crisis.

What have UK politicians said about his climate record?

During her term as prime minister, Theresa May challenged him on the environment after 250 climate scientists signed an open letter urging her to do so.

‘The President’s refusal to tackle climate change, and particularly his initiation of the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement, is increasing risks for lives and livelihoods in the United States, the United Kingdom and around the world,’ the letter said.

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, who has made air pollution a key focus of his administration, has had a long-running feud Trump and named climate change as a major anxiety for Londoners after last night’s result.

‘The lesson of today is that progress is not inevitable,’ he said, adding that ‘London is – and will always be – for everyone’ and ‘we will always be pro-women, pro-diversity, pro-climate and pro-human rights’.

Many senior Labour figures have had harsh words about Trump in the past, but are now trying to row back and find ‘common cause’ now they have to work with him in office.

In 2017, Foreign Secretary David Lammy called him a ‘racist and KKK/neo-Nazi sympathiser’ while Energy Secretary Ed Miliband called him a ‘groper’ and a ‘racist’ in November 2016, telling the BBC we should be ‘deeply worried about the implications for many of the things that we care about’, citing climate change in particular.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer congratulated him today, saying that ‘as the closest of allies, we stand shoulder to shoulder in defence of our shared values’.

How will Donald Trump differ from Kamala Harris on climate?

Analysis by climate and energy website Carbon Brief in March estimated that a Trump victory could lead to an additional 4bn tonnes of US emissions by 2030 compared with incumbent Joe Biden’s plans.

The site said this would be ‘enough to negate – twice over – all of the emissions savings from deploying wind, solar and other clean technologies around the world over the past five years’.

Kamala Harris did not make the climate a focus of her campaign, and her administration was not on track to meet targets on reducing emissions by 2030, but she did acknowledge climate change as a ‘crisis’ and ‘existential threat’, taking measures to address it during her term in office as vice president.

The Biden-Harris administration strengthened restrictions on drilling in the Arctic, however this was only after approving an $8 billion oil drilling project called Willow in the Alaskan wilderness last year, a controversial decision which will see hundreds of millions of barrels of crude produced over 30 years.

While Harris was no eco-warrior, she would not have rolled back the initiatives made by her administration on climate change and the US would not be seeking to quit global cooperation on it.

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