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Donald Trumpit’s new US presidency poses a grave threat to the planet if it blows up the international effort to curb dangerous global warming, stunned climate experts have warned in his wake. decisive electoral victory.

Trump’s return to the White House is expected to see the U.S. again withdraw from the Paris climate accord and could even end American involvement in the United Nations framework for dealing with the climate crisis.

While campaigning for president, Trump called climate change “a big hoax,” disparaged wind power and electric cars, and promised to eliminate environmental rules and the “new green scam” of the Inflation Reduction Act, a bill of major legislation passed by Democrats to support. clean energy projects.

Trump’s agenda, analysts they foundrisks adding several billion metric tons of additional heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere, further jeopardizing goals to avoid disastrous global warming that governments. they already fail to meet. Michael Mann, a climate researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, said the US is now a “failed democracy” and that “we now pose a major threat to the planet”.

The election result will send shockwaves through the UN’s annual climate change talks starting Monday in Azerbaijan. “Electing a climate change denier to the US presidency is extremely dangerous for the world,” said Bill Hare, a senior scientist at Climate Analytics, who warned that the Trump administration could “damage efforts” to prevent the world from warming by more than 2.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, a Paris target that now seems even further out of reach.

while Joe Bidenhis administration will send a delegation to The Cop29 Summit Next week, that will be overshadowed by a new Trump administration threatening to divest from other major carbon emitters, such as China, to tackle the climate crisis. “The nation and the world can expect the incoming Trump administration to take a wrecking ball to global climate diplomacy,” said Rachel Cleetus, policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Across Europe, climate change activists and politicians who support stronger action to cut pollution reacted with dismay to the news of Trump’s win. “It’s a dark day in the US and globally,” said Thomas Waitz, an Austrian MEP and co-chair of the European Green Party.

Luisa Neubauer, a German climate activist with the Fridays for Future movement who knocked on the door for Harris, compared the feeling to a bad breakup. “A decision was made about certain parts of the near future and most of us didn’t have a say in it,” she said. “And for a moment it feels like the world is going to end. It is not. But the pain is real.”

But they also urged climate action advocates not to give up.

Areeba Hamid, joint chief executive of Greenpeace UK, said it was “an election won by corporate money, big polluters and disinformation”, but that a global movement was already fighting to control the damage.

“We simply have no more time to waste,” she added. “Whatever the Trump presidency chooses to do about global action on climate change, we know the damage can be limited if the adults in the room speak up.”

When he was last president, Trump took months to decide to pull the US out of the Paris accord, sparking fears that the accord would collapse. The countries managed to avoid such a fate before Biden re-entered the pact, and there is some optimism that the transition to cleaner energy is not something Trump, despite his calls for the US to “drill, drill, babies” for oil and gas. , can be reversed.

“The US election result is a setback for global action on climate change, but the Paris agreement has proven to be resilient and stronger than any country’s policies,” said Laurence Tubiana, executive director of the European Climate Foundation and an architect key to the Paris Agreement.

“The context today is very different from 2016,” she said. “There is a strong economic momentum behind the global transition, which the US has led and gained from, but is now at risk of losing. The devastating toll of recent hurricanes has been a grim reminder that all Americans are affected by worsening climate change.”

As with the previous withdrawal, US cities and states committed to climate action will try to fill the void of federal indifference, acting as de facto representatives at global summits and even engaging with other countries on how to reduce emissions.

“No matter what Trump says, the transition to clean energy is unstoppable, and our country is not turning back,” said Gina McCarthy, former climate adviser to Biden and co-chair of the Council. America is all the coalition of states and cities concerned about the climate.

“Our coalition is bigger, more bipartisan, better organized and fully prepared to deliver climate solutions, boost local economies and drive climate ambition,” she said. “We cannot and will not let Trump stand in the way of giving our children and grandchildren the freedom to grow up in safer and healthier communities.”

Domestically, environmental groups have said they will try to fight back Democratsas well as some republicansto oppose Trump is dismantling climate policieswhich is expected to include major cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency and loosened pollution rules for coal plants, cars and fossil fuel drilling. “President Trump will face a wall of bipartisan opposition if he tries to gut clean energy incentives now,” said Dan Lashof, director of the World Resources Institute.

However, Trump’s election victory was deeply troubling for those concerned about the climate crisis. The issue was barely supported by Kamala Harristhe Democratic nominee, with polls showing voters saw him as a minor priority, despite scientists’ warnings about record temperatures and two devastating, fed with heat the hurricanes that hit the southeast just weeks before election day.

“This should be a wake-up call — the climate change movement urgently needs more political power because the climate crisis is moving infinitely faster than our politics right now,” said Nathaniel Stinnett, founder of the Environmental Voter Project. which tried to develop the US environmentalist vote.

“We must work every day to build an unstoppable bloc of climate change voters because we are running out of time.”