'Donald Trump's victory as US President can delay America's green transition — but it can't block this'

Thomas Hale is Professor in Global Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford University. Speaking to Srijana Mitra Das, he discusses climate strategies — and the ecological impacts of a new Donald Trump presidency:

Q. What is the core of your research?
A. I focus on how to solve global and long-term challenges in a world composed of many countries and diverse priorities.

How do you define what you term ‘a long problem’ in your research — and does this ever have quick solutions?
A ‘long problem’ is one whose cause and effect span more than one human generation — for example, the emissions put in the atmosphere during the Industrial Revolution over 250 years ago are still up there, causing global heating. The emissions we put up today will be there for many centuries to come.

There are other examples, from pensions to infrastructure and the management of technology — all these require governments and societies to operate with long-term goals. The difficulty is, our political institutions tend to be focused on the here and now. There are solutions though, which I write about in ‘Long Problems: Climate Change and the Challenge of Governing Across Time’.

Which institutions have evolved to meet the global warming challenge?
Climate change is forcing us to think of ways to protect our long-term interests and many systems worldwide are grappling with this. There is no one panacea but a useful tool is relying on what I call ‘trustee institutions’ — those are slightly arms-length decision-making leaders with a longer-term mandate. Hence, we’re seeing many central banks starting to work on climate change, courts taking up climate for the defence of future generations, etc. These are more technocratic in nature but there are also different participatory and democratic mechanisms. Many people are joining climate assemblies or decision-making fora where they can discuss what kind of future they seek for their community — in that context, they can take a longer-term view than they would in the gladiatorial politics of day-to-day business. Such groups help us deal with this long problem — our challenge is to galvanise more of them around the world.

Can obstruction to decarbonisation be seen in the fossil fuel industry?
Oil and gas is a huge contributor to climate change — it is also a very concentrated industry where certain countries and companies are highly dependent on revenue from the extraction and sale of gas and oil. With more decarbonisation, these groups face an existential threat — they are fighting very hard against this and that’s one of the biggest barriers against climate action since these vested interests are very powerful.

To address this, we must take obstructionism seriously and ensure that the influence of such companies in, say, our democratic processes does not unduly influence our future interests. We also need the best transition plans for communities, especially workers and countries overly dependent on fossil fuels. Germany, for instance, has a coal phase-out program which is ambitious, given how much it relied on this historically. It has a 40-billion Euro transition package to support areas and communities facing a loss of livelihoods from this.

COP 2024 will be held soon in Baku — which areas should be central in deciding climate action there?
This COP meet comes at a very pivotal moment — it’s in the year before countries are due to submit their new pledges under the Paris Agreement. So, this COP needs to send a clear signal to countries to both increase their targets and deliver more action as well to implement these on the ground. The second point is that this particular COP is also where we will hopefully have a deal on the New Collective Quantified Goal on climate finance or the targets for the world on climate funds. This is a key enabling condition and we need a trust-building outcome on this at COP 2024 for global climate action to progress.

So far, we’ve seen many targets set at these summits over the years, which is a very important first step — but we can also see an ongoing implementation gap. The recent United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) Annual Emissions Gap Report shows we have to radically increase our action before 2030 in order to remain on track for the Paris Agreement goals — this makes COP 2024 even more critical. We need to undergird these climate goals with concrete implementation plans now. Governments need to adopt policies and regulations that actually weave climate goals into the fabric of the economy. Alongside, companies can’t just set targets and then walk away — they need to report on what they are doing and deliver on their aims. Interestingly, we are seeing a huge surge of regulations around the world on climate goals — these are still emerging but they are very decisive, including a host of new instruments coming online in 2023, requiring companies to disclose what they’re doing on climate change.

Given its seriousness, shouldn’t climate action be legally enforceable?
Yes but we lack the political support to do this. There are other interesting strategies though. The Paris Agreement takes what I term a ‘catalytic approach’ — instead of saying, here’s a global deal and you must enforce this, it tries to get countries to make the pledges they can and enhance these over time, driving further environmental action. The Paris Agreement doesn’t seek a global police force on climate thus — it creates self-reinforcing positive trends which help to then unlock further ecological action.

This is working in many areas now — consider the huge growth of renewable energy technology, electric vehicles and batteries. With efforts made by climate leaders over time, many of these technologies are cost-competitive today — and are out-competing fossil fuel technologies around the world.

With Donald Trump now elected America’s 47th President, how do you foresee climate action proceeding?
Two things are simultaneously true. A victory for Donald Trump is a huge setback for climate action — it will delay America’s own progress towards decarbonisation and make it much more at risk to storms and hurricanes. However, importantly, the United States, like India, is a federal country — what happens there not just in Washington D.C. but across the states and different companies is very important. After President Trump withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement in his first term, we saw a huge movement emerge in the US called ‘We Are Still In’ — this grew across states, cities, companies, universities, tribes, etc., all saying they would maintain the goals of the Paris Agreement, despite what D.C. decided.

This time, with Trump winning, we see a very changed landscape in America — in 2016, not one US state had a net zero target. Today, 16 states have legally binding net zero targets which are locked into their state laws. Climate action in America is much more resilient and robust today — we could see delays, with their associated costs, but not a blocking of the transition now.

Views expressed are personal