Global Thoughts: Trump Can’t Hurt Climate Much
By Gwynn Dyer
“Drill, baby, drill”, exulted the new President of the World (American branch), but he will find that the oil and gas industry isn’t listening. As Darren Woods, CEO of ExxonMobil, tactfully put it in November: “I’m not sure how ‘drill, baby, drill’ translates into policy.”
For those who prefer plainer speaking, here’s Peter McNally, analyst at oil industry research firm Third
Bridge, on the same topic. “Nobody’s got crazy plans to be drilling at accelerated rates. The futures curve doesn’t actually inspire your typical oil producer in west Texas or Oklahoma to do it.”
It’s been all Trump all the time for more than a week already, as the great showman hijacks the world’s media with the shocking news that he’s still going to do exactly what he has been saying he will do for months or, in many cases, years. Much ado about almost nothing new, but the media are lazy, it’s cheap and easy, why not?
However, most of his actions will directly affect only Americans. Let’s focus instead on the Trump policy
that is most likely to hurt the interests of the rest of the human race: climate change.
He is pathologically hostile to any attempt to stop or slow global warming, regarding it as a scam and
a ‘Chinese plot’. He is pulling the United States out of the Paris climate treaty (again) and ending federal
government subsidies for electric vehicle sales.
Above all, he has declared a ‘national energy emergency’. Exactly what that means is unclear, but the remedy will theoretically involve a lot more drilling for oil and gas in the United States. This causes alarm elsewhere, because the US still accounts for 27% of the global economy.
Most people in other countries see the effort to contain global warming as a high priority requiring a concerted international response, and a second US defection from the task feels like a betrayal. But while it is regrettable, it is not all that big a deal in practice.
For almost any purpose except transportation, non-fossil energy (solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, nuclear) is cheaper than oil or gas. Almost two-thirds of all oil goes into vehicles of various sorts (mostly cars and trucks, but also aircraft and ships) – but that is a sector where overall demand for oil is not growing.
It’s still huge in the United States, where fewer than one-tenth of new cars are electric, but in China, now a bigger market in terms of sales, ownership and production, market share for electric vehicles is already half and rising fast. Unsurprisingly, Chinese demand for oil suddenly stalled last year. Most of the rest of Asia will follow, as will Europe.
So regardless of Trump’s rhetoric, US oil companies have no motivation to drill for more oil. On the contrary, they are restricting production and shutting down higher-cost wells in order to keep oil prices and their own profits up. ‘Excess capacity’ is just a kinder way of saying ‘stranded assets’.
Indeed, there’s a good chance that by the end of Donald Trump’s second term in 2029 the United States will be the only major producer still making millions of fossil-fuel cars, and Americans the only people buying them in the millions. The only threat here is commercial suicide for the US car industry, not sabotage of the global trend away from fossil fuels.
Most of the damage Trump does will be domestic, but he may trigger trade wars with China, Mexico and
Canada. He might even invade Greenland, which would probably wreck both NATO and the United Nations.
However, he didn’t manage to sabotage the global response to climate change (feeble though it was) in his first term, and he won’t do it this time either. He simply doesn’t have the leverage.
Of course, the rest of the world could still screw up on the climate front even without his help.
Gwynne Dyer’s new book is ‘Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers’. The latest previous book, ‘The Shortest History of War’, is also still available.
