Donald Trump’s experience as a “businessman” would help ensure that progress on international climate change accords weren’t derailed, Union environment minister Anil Dave said on the sidelines of a seminar on Wednesday.
Dave returned from Morocco last week after the United Nations’ annual Conference of Parties climate summit. Unlike the climate summit of 2015 in Paris, where global leaders agreed to ensure that the globe didn’t heat up more than 2 degrees Celsius this century, this year’s conference in Marrakech saw little progress on how countries ought to go about managing their emissions.
The surprise victory of Donald Trump in the US elections triggered concerns whether the US — the world’s second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases — would continue to be part of the Paris deal. During his election campaign, Donald Trump had said that he would pull the United States out of the 2015 Paris climate accord, if elected, and that climate change was a “hoax” perpetrated by the Chinese. This week, however, he appeared to backtrack, after telling the New York Times that there was “some connectivity” between global warming and human activity.
“We have to wait and watch how the United States will continue (its commitment to greenhouse gas reductions),” Mr. Dave told The Hindu, “But he (Donald Trump) has successfully run a business empire…so we can all work together.”
In his address here at the seminar, organised by the think-tank Club of Rome, Dave spoke on steps required to effectively conserve forests and land resources and added that in the fortnight that he’d spend in Morocco he had also encountered “arrogant and obdurate” negotiators during discussions on how countries ought to shoulder the burden of climate change. This, he noted, stemmed from a “colonial” perspective. In the Indian context, this attitude had led to laws that saw forest dwellers and tribals as enemies rather than protectors of forests. “We may have become free in 1947 but the process of (mental) decolonisation has still not happened,” said Mr. Dave, “and that is evident in the way our forest laws are structured. I’m working to change this perspective.”
