As the world prepares for President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration on Friday, pressure surrounding the future president’s policy on climate change has intensified.
Trump has been consistently blazé in his approach to global warming, including no reference to his future stance on climate change in his election campaign and being famously unwilling to accept scientific evidence that the phenomenon exists.
In one particularly memorable tweet made back in 2012, Trump even said global warming was a myth made up by China to have a negative effect on US manufacturing.
The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2012
He has since softened his stance, admitting after the election that there was “some connectivity between climate change and human activity”.
The Guardian are spending 24 hours focusing on climate change ahead of Trump’s inauguration in order to draw attention to the issue.
According to Professor James Hansen, the Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, the most important thing anyone interested in preventing climate change can do is to join the Citizens Climate lobby: “People that join are asked to write letters to the editor, op eds [comments in newspapers], write to representatives, legislators, and they do it in a respectful way”.
In terms of the international approach to the issue, Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, told the Guardian:
“There are very positive actions and signals from all areas of society post-Paris [climate agreement] including from governments and cities to business, investors and citizens. But the reality is also that greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere continue to rise and thus national and international ambition needs to rise even more.
“We are on the way towards a better, climate-secure world, but it will be a long journey and only a sense of urgency will get us to the ‘well below 2C target’.”
The Paris Climate Agreement was brought into force on 4th November of last year, with more than 170 countries pledging to drastically reduce carbon emissions in an effort to limit the rise in global temperatures.
On Tuesday, the Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday urged the president-elect to keep the United States in the historic Paris climate pact after Trump threatened to “cancel” it and pull the US out of the agreement when he becomes President.
Chris Goodall from Carbon Commentary illustrated to the Guardian how much power the people of a country can have in directing climate change policy:
“Politicians tend to do what their electorates want. The last major UK government survey showed that 82 percent of people supported the use of solar power, with only 4 percent opposed. A similar survey in the US showed an even larger percentage in favour. The levels of support for onshore wind aren’t much lower, either in the US or the UK. We need to actively communicate these high levels of approval to our representatives and point out that fossil fuel use is far less politically popular.”