Share Donald Trump’s victory has triggered fresh calls for a rolling back of climate action, but such arguments are based on lazy and dangerously flawed assumptions – in an end of year essay BusinessGreen editor James Murray asks, what next for the climate movement? Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. The Second Coming – W.B. Yeats How bad could it get? The second Trump presidency brings with it an avalanche of potentially existential questions. Is the NATO Charter no longer worth the paper it is written on? Will Trump repeal the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and pursue policies that result in an additional four billion tonnes of carbon emissions by 2030? Is polio about to make a comeback? Are we entering a new era of brutal realpolitik and nuclear sabre-rattling? Or is nuclear brinkmanship now the best-case scenario? The more serious-minded apologists for Donald Trump – yes, Boris Johnson, in this instance you qualify as serious-minded – who argue the West would benefit from a US President with a foreign policy that mixes isolationism with muscular self-interest, should acknowledge none of these questions are unreasonable. The worst-case scenario is now apocalyptic in a literal sense. Comparisons between the current period and the 1930s have become tired to the point of cliché, but that doesn’t make them any less valid. We are entering a new and considerably more dangerous era, assuming we haven’t been living in it for the best part of a decade already. You can make a strong case the age […]
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