MARRAKESH, Morocco — While federally mandated actions to address climate change may be a thing of the past under President-elect Donald Trump, states, cities, and businesses are not going to stop their own efforts, public and private sector officials said here Tuesday. “The United States is a federalist system, which means that the states have an awful lot of autonomy,” Deb Markowitz, Vermont secretary of natural resources, said during a side event at the 22nd session of the Conference of the Parties (COP22) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The Nov. 8 election of Trump, a vocal climate change skeptic who has pledged to undo the climate agenda of the Barack Obama administration, has been an underlying topic at nearly every event at COP22, with national representatives and civil society actors seeking confirmation that his presidency will not derail global climate efforts.
Other nations’ commitment will sustain this work globally, and Trump also will not derail domestic climate efforts, Markowitz suggested. “I’m not going to say the name of ‘he who shall not be mentioned’ here, but we should keep you calm,” she said, assuring attendees to the event that “the states will continue to lead.”
Pointing to past Republican administrations that did not support climate action, most recently that of George W. Bush, Markowitz noted that lack of support from the federal government has not done much to curb states’ activities in this sphere. “During that time there was a vacuum that was filled by states and local governments, our urban cities, and that’s important, and that will be enduring. That is, I think, the glimmer of hope. At the same time, our economy really has changed to a new clean energy economy,” she said.
Several states have been taking climate action independent from federal mandate. Along both coasts states have developed market based systems to reduce carbon emissions and many states have adopted renewable performance standards.
This new “clean energy economy,” Markowitz said, makes it hard for anyone to argue against climate action. “[Climate action] will make economic sense. Other states are going to be coming along. I really, truly believe it,” she said.
Markowitz also noted the decline of the coal industry as proof that the nation is moving in a clean direction. “We’re not building new coal power plants, and it’s not because of the Clean Power Plan, it’s because it’s not economical. Coal, the coal industry, as much as it’s been promised that there are going to be coal jobs again, well, there’s not going to be coal jobs if no one’s buying coal,” she said, referencing Trump’s pledge to open the coal mines back up.
Speaking at a different event earlier in the day, Kevin Rabinovitch, global sustainability director at candy and pet food maker Mars Inc., shared a similar view on the economics of climate action. U.S. companies are not taking climate action because the government says they must, but because it is good for their businesses, he said. “We’re an agricultural business at heart. We’re a food business, which means that all of our raw materials start on farms somewhere. Those farms are outside and therefore are exposed to the climate, so when the climate starts to change those farms start to change, and what they’re able to do and their productivity starts to change, and that affects our business very directly in a financial sense,” he said.
Mars has pledged to reduce eliminate 100 percent of greenhouse gas emissions from its operations by 2040 and too pursue more renewable energy projects like its 200 megawatt windfarm brought online last year.
Climate action in business is not a competition, Rabinovitch said, but rather it needs to be a collaborative effort among all businesses. “No matter what Mars does on its own without the work of other companies … we won’t tackle this problem collectively, and we won’t solve for the risk that climate change represents to our supply chain,” he said.
U.S. federal officials in recent days have also noted the efforts to address climate change at the state and local levels and have pointed to the shift to a clean energy economy to calm fears that the next administration will undo all the work on climate that has been accomplished in recent years.
Speaking on a panel with Markowitz, Brian Deese, special adviser to the president, noted that even Texas’s energy system has grown to include a large wind power capacity. “This structural shift and the trajectory being changed in the United States, where our economy is projected to continue to grow and carbon emissions [will continue to fall], is a function of the market and it’s a function of businesses making decisions and allocating capital in ways that they did not before and that they are doing that projected out into the future,” he said. “And it’s a function of creative and aggressive action at the state and local level that is going to sustain into the future as well.”