I recently had a heated discussion with my girlfriend about whether we all live in a simulation. I say no, and she’s open to the idea. It ended (it hasn’t) with me storming into my office with her chocolate to conduct thorough and unbiased research, the results of which have since been voluntarily suppressed to preserve international peace.

But after the Nov. 5 election, I’m starting to think she might be right. Not only did a climate change denier win a presidential election, the Earth had its hottest year in recorded history, and the world’s most important climate conference, COP29, is being hosted in the oil-rich hereditary dictatorship of Azerbaijan.

The oil-rich hereditary dictatorship of the United Arab Emirates hosted COP28 last year. Azerbaijan’s president opened the conference by calling oil and gas a “gift of God.” On the same day, Exxon CEO Darren Woods, cautioned Trump to keep the U.S. in the Paris Climate Agreement, which aims to encourage a transition away from the oil and gas that Exxon sells to renewable energy.

Surely these are all glitches or Hollywood twists that only humans could script?

These paradoxes, inconsistencies, and contradictions don’t end there. How else did JD Vance, who once compared Trump to Hitler, become the vice president? What about Matt Gaetz? He will likely go from being investigated by the U.S. attorney general to becoming the top lawyer in the country. RFK Jr., of Democratic royalty, was an environmental lawyer in a past life and will join an administration intent on dismantling any federal agency with environmental and climate oversight. Then there’s Trump’s pick for the Environmental Protection Agency, former U.S. House Rep. Lee Zeldin, who wants to vastly increase our energy needs by scrapping environment and climate rules to turn the U.S. into the artificial intelligence capital of the world.

Of course, a simulation would let that happen.

Simulation or not, we live here, and Trump will be a president intent on bringing chaos to the country’s environment and people while hobbling international climate change progress.

In the Meltdown this week, we examine Trump’s policies for this country and the world.

The point of no return

This year will be the first where the average global temperatures are 2.7 degrees above preindustrial levels, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service (CCCS), the European Union’s Earth Observation Program.

“This marks a new milestone in global temperature records and should serve as a catalyst to raise ambition for the upcoming Climate Change Conference, COP29,” said Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the CCCS, in a recent press release.

Trump won’t help.

His reelection to what is arguably the most powerful and influential office in global politics may feel like doomsday for many who fear his “drill, baby, drill” ideologies and brash disregard for the environment and climate change efforts.

He has promised to dismantle Biden’s climate change legacy by gutting environment and climate-focused agencies, roll back green regulations that hinder oil and gas and coal mining, and rescind all unspent funds from the $369 billion Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Biden’s landmark climate law that provides billions in subsidies for electric vehicles, solar power, and wind energy. He also wants to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement.

But the good news is that the rest of the world can manage climate change without U.S. leadership. China is leading the world in renewable energy, while India isn’t far behind.

“Climate action is not a wall where if you remove one brick, it falls down,” said Mo Adow, founding director of the Kenya-based climate and energy think tank Power Shift Africa, during a climate policy webinar in the aftermath of the U.S. election. “It is like a trampoline with many springs. If you take one out, others can bear the load. The impetus for climate action over the next four years will not come from the politics of the White House, it will come from the economics of clean energy, from Europe, emerging markets, and sub-national actors in the U.S. and around the world.”

At home, red states are the biggest benefactors of the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s landmark climate policy. Twenty GOP members of Congress warned the Speaker of the House in a letter about the consequences of changing IRA or scrapping it altogether. And then there’s Trump’s so-called “First Buddy,” Elon Musk, who is fanatically pushing solar power as the future, paradoxically at odds with Trump’s “Drill, baby, drill” ideology.

However, besides the broad signs that Trump 2.0 might not be as awful for the climate as we think, there’s a lot that points toward disaster.

Read more on what climate issues to expect from Trump’s second term

Mass deportations won’t be good

700%: increase in U.S. solar power adoption over the last decade

19: Republican counties listed in the top 20 counties benefiting most from the Inflation Reduction Act

88,000: U.S. citizen job losses for every one million undocumented immigrants deported under Trump’s radical immigration plan

30%: percentage of the world’s energy supply made up of renewable energy

42.6%: U.S., India, and China‘s contributions to all the world’s annual emissions

It’s getting hot in here

If we are in a simulation, maybe we’re nearing the end of it. We’ve crossed into the temperature range where the impacts of climate change become significantly more severe, with the potential for irreversible damage to ecosystems and human societies, according to COP29 organizers, the United Nations. Or maybe we’re just being taught a lesson we didn’t learn between 2016 and 2020.

Either way, we should be skeptical of an international agency that allows pro-fossil fuel dictatorships to host events aimed at saving the planet.

Anyway, see you in North Korea for COP30.

Thanks for reading The Meltdown. Please sign up, share, and be nice to people. Send environment and climate tips to: [email protected]

See you next week.

Chris Harress