The world’s second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide gas, the U.S., formally withdrew from the Paris Agreement on the day after the 2020 U.S. Election Day on November 3. This action becomes official as more and more nations, especially developing countries, are grappling with extreme events that are intensified by climate change, such as unprecedented high levels of floods, storms, droughts and increasing transmission of infectious diseases.
“If Covid-19 doesn’t kill us, climate change will,” world leaders warned at the 75th session of the United Nations General Assembly on September 26.
According to The World Bank’s Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2020, climate change will drive 68 million to 135 million into poverty by 2030, underlining that poor people in Sub-Saharan African and South Asian countries would suffer the most considerable consequences.
Food security will be a significant challenge in Sub-Saharan Africa due to droughts and shifts in rainfall. Cities such as Kolkata and Mumbai in India will face increased flooding, warming temperatures and intense cyclones. In Southeast Asia, Vietnam, which has suffered from severe flooding and landslides in its central region over the last month, is especially vulnerable to rising sea levels.
“Developing countries are more likely to disproportionately experience the negative effects of global warming,” noted Keith Wade and Marcus Jennings of the Schroders Economics Team in their comprehensive research on climate change’s impacts on the global economy. “Furthermore, developing countries are likely to have less capacity to rebuild [after natural disasters].”
The bothersome challenge is that these countries are hardly able to reverse this trend only by themselves because the negatively changing climate is almost entirely the result of energy use by high-income nations and large, rapidly growing middle-income countries, according to a World Bank analysis
China, the U.S., India, Russia, and Japan are the top five countries that produced the most CO2, as per recent data from the Global Carbon Project, comprising nearly 60% of the total global emissions. Notably, the U.S. has accounted for the largest proportion of cumulative carbon dioxide emissions on the planet since 1750, according to a calculation from the U.K.-based climate science website Carbon Brief.
Despite these facts, during the 2020 U.S. election, President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden have shown starkly different approaches to the topic, which prompted wide-ranging discussions on how the U.S. leadership in this issue could affect the world’s battle against climate change.
In a debate between the two candidates, Trump claimed that the U.S. has been “treated very unfairly” in the Paris Agreement, which would sacrifice tens of millions of jobs in the country. He argued that while China, Russia and India had “filthy” air, the U.S. still had the “cleanest air,” “cleanest water,” and that the U.S.’s joining the accord would have destroyed its businesses.
Scientists predict that the environmental damage would reach the irreversible tipping points within 10 years if nations continued its greenhouse gas emission rates. The Paris Climate Agreement, signed by nearly 200 state members globally, has been made to keep the globe from warming more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). Still, Trump’s administration decided to withdraw from this historic pact.
Biden said that the U.S. has “a moral obligation” to deal with climate change, which was the “number one issue facing humanity.” He affirmed that his climate plan of national transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy would create 18.6 million “new good-paying jobs” and $1 trillion more in economic growth than Trump’s proposal does.
Biden in September pledged to rejoin the Paris Agreement and set new standards towards reducing carbon emissions if he was elected in November.
“While he [President Donald Trump] turned against our allies, I will bring us back into the Paris Agreement. I will put us back in the business of leading the world on climate change, and I will challenge every other country to up the ante on climate commitments,” Biden said in a major policy speech on climate change.
This statement from Biden contented climate activists worldwide as it could raise the responsibilities and ambitions of big nations to take up the lead, including European Union, and increase pressure toward China’s commitment to climate action.
“There is a lot of damage has been done [by Trump’s administration] and there are some things that cannot be undone like the damage to climate,” said Kristiina Helenius, CEO of NordicWest USA and the former press counselor for the embassy of Finland in the U.S. “Things can be turned around if there is a strong leadership and if the alliances are built up again.”
Shastri Ramachandaran, a leading Indian journalist and China expert, believed that Joe Biden’s possibly becoming president would make a big difference to the South Asian and Southeast Asian regions. He agreed that Joe Biden has a “more nuanced understanding” on issues like climate change, carbon footprint and the global health emergency, which would lead him to “find ground to cooperate with China.”
The New York Times/Siena College poll two weeks ahead of the final Election Day showed the former vice president ahead of the incumbent in nearly every pressing issue, including coronavirus, national security, immigration, climate change and even overcoming Trump’s longstanding advantage on economic matters.
“Almost every journalist last time predicted that Donald Trump would lose and he was elected in the Electoral College,” said Rick Dunham, former Washington Bureau Chief of Houston Chronicle, emphasizing that the result could not be predictable until the final day.
The good news is that even if Trump wins the second term of presidency and the withdrawal comes into effect, according to the United Nations Foundation, at least 24 states and Puerto Rico have joined the U.S. Climate Alliance, which is enough to make it the third-largest economy in the world if it were a country, to support and realize the Paris Agreement mission.