Guest essay by Eric Worrall

Climate change consistently ranks dead last on people’s list of priorities, only 36% of US people believe humans are “mainly” responsible for climate change, the USA elected President Trump in 2016, but the Washington Bubble still hasn’t gotten the message.

How bad can the climate crisis get if Trump wins again?

US greenhouse gas emissions are up since 2017 and Trump’s administration has ripped up curbs on climate polluters

Emily Holden in Washington
Sun 12 Jan 2020 20.00 AEDT

Climate pollution in the US is up under Donald Trump and threatens to undermine international efforts to stall the crisis, especially if he wins re-election this year and secures a second term in the White House.

…

“What they have done is created confusion within the business community and the environmental world as to what are going to be the standards,” said Christine Todd Whitman, who led the Environmental Protection Agency under the Republican president George W Bush. “Essentially every regulation the agency promulgates gets a lawsuit that goes with it, almost inevitably … that’s the only good thing you can say about it.”

Whitman called the approach “mindless” and said “whoever is a bigger donor gets to tell them what the environmental policy should be, it seems”.

…

Andrew Light, a climate negotiator for President Barack Obama’s state department, said the world is taking note of those efforts, but if Trump is re-elected “you are going to see a lot of people who are worried anew about what the US can do.”

Americans choosing Trump would send the signal that they don’t care about the climate, Light said.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/12/climate-crisis-if-trump-wins-again

Here’s my prediction for 2020 – I think Tom Steyer will win the Democrat nomination. Not because he is better or more popular than the other candidates, but because “Clinton Cash” author Peter Schweizer might be about to obliterate most of the Democrat front row.

Steyer will run the climate change campaign he is promising to run – and will lose badly to President Trump, because Trump focuses on issues people actually care about.

Will Washington get the message in 2020?