Tag Archives: climate-change

This Climate Denying Lawmaker Has Proposed a Bill to Protect Climate Deniers

by DMPKellevsd Posted on March 23, 2017

Mother Jones

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A Maine lawmaker has introduced a bill that will safeguard political speech—with a special focus on climate change deniers.

Republican Rep. Lawrence Lockman, who told the Associated Press that whether or not human activity is causing global warming is an open question, proposed legislation that would ban the state from prosecuting people for their “climate change policy preferences.” The measure prohibits the state from discriminating against climate change deniers with respect to employment and hiring, and bars any state agencies or departments from refusing to purchase goods and services, or awarding grants and contracts, on the basis of a person’s opinion regarding climate change.

According to NASA, 97 percent of scientists acknowledge that our planet is getting warmer due to human activity.

The bill is in response the lawsuit filed by a group of state attorneys general, including Maine’s Janet Mills, against Exxon Mobil in 2016. The suit alleges that the oil giant misled the public about global warming and should pay a financial penalty.

Lockman told the Associated Press that the bill wasn’t just for climate deniers, because it would protect the free speech of others as well. “I don’t want to see a Republican attorney general issuing subpoenas for the records of progressive or liberal think tanks or public policy groups to chill their free speech,” he said.

But Democratic lawmakers do not seem convinced. Lois Galgay Reckitt, a Democrat in the state legislature, said that the entire Democratic caucus would oppose the bill, as would some Republicans.

“The issue for me is I’m a scientist and I live near the ocean,” she said to the Associated Press. “It’s absolutely clear to me that climate change is happening and it worries me. I will fight this tooth and nail.”

A public hearing is scheduled for April 6.

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This Climate Denying Lawmaker Has Proposed a Bill to Protect Climate Deniers

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Auto Execs Will Be Pleased With Trump’s Latest Gift to the Industry

by 4q4cv8v Posted on March 15, 2017

Mother Jones

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At an event for auto workers near Detroit, Michigan, on Wednesday, President Donald Trump will announce his latest gift to industry executives: the start of a potentially protracted process that will ultimately weaken carbon pollution standards for cars and trucks by reversing one of the last actions the Environmental Protection Agency took under President Barack Obama.

The EPA in January finalized a midterm review evaluating the program’s progress in which EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy affirmed the pollution standards that requires U.S. car manufacturers to raise efficiency from 27.5 miles per gallon to 54.5 mpg by 2025. Now, the Trump administration wants to restart this review process, moving the burden of responsibility for determining how far to roll back standards from the EPA to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the Department of Transportation.

The proposal doesn’t change any emission standards just yet, nor does it get into the thorny issue of whether to revoke waivers that California and 13 other states have in order to pursue tougher tailpipe emissions standards—although EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has suggested he is considering doing just that.

The logic for this plan was explained on a press call Tuesday with a senior White House official who asked not to be identified. The official said the EPA “sort of shoved it down their throats in December,” when it completed the midterm review before the required 2018 deadline. “I don’t think the industry and public had a lot of opportunity to gather their comments,” said the official who directed reporters to “read the Auto Alliance testimony” from the industry in order to learn more about the controversy. This was testimony presented to the House Energy and Commerce committee earlier last fall. Though it briefly embraced the standards in 2009, the industry has since said they are unattainable, and in the Auto Alliance testimony, CEO Mitch Bainwol stated the administration shouldn’t “jam standards that are inconsistent with consumer behavior.”

The EPA’s final determination found that the “standards are feasible at reasonable cost” based on market trends, without needing to manufacture many more electric cars or hybrid vehicles. They would cut down on greenhouse gas emissions, save 1.2 billion barrels of oil, and provide net benefits of $100 billion in savings, according to the EPA’s estimates for 2022 to 2025. If they are rolled back, the consequences could be less efficient cars made by U.S. manufacturers and tougher competition with countries in Asia and Europe that produce hybrid cars. It also could mean more money spent at the gas pump—the Obama-era rules were expected to cut down on gas bills, saving American buyers an average $8,000 over the lifetime of the vehicles.

“Making this U-turn on fuel economy is the wrong way to go for our security, economy and environment,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) says. “Innovation has been driving our historic progress on fuel economy, and we cannot let Donald Trump put us in reverse.”

Further actions targeting the EPA and the Department of the Interior could be released this week, and executive orders targeting climate regulations for new and existing coal-fired power plants are expected any day.

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Auto Execs Will Be Pleased With Trump’s Latest Gift to the Industry

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One Thing Environmentalists and Trump Actually Agree On

by CindaMoreau Posted on March 14, 2017

Mother Jones

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Environmental groups cheered when President Donald Trump pounded the last nail into the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s coffin, finalizing the United States’ anticipated withdrawal from the controversial trade deal. But the global trade and environment debate isn’t over by a long shot. Since the TPP’s demise, environmental groups like the Sierra Club have quickly refocused their efforts around NAFTA—the 1994 trade deal brokered by the Bush and Clinton administrations between the United States, Canada, and Mexico—which Trump repeatedly criticized during his campaign and has indicated he wants to renegotiate quickly.

The original trade deal that set a precedent for many of the TPP’s provisions, NAFTA has never scored well with environmentalists, despite being lauded by supporters (PDF) as the first international trade deal ever to incorporate environmental and labor side agreements. Though its renegotiations could theoretically provide an opportunity to address the deal’s criticisms, some groups fear that Trump will use the opportunity to further expand corporate interests and intensify environmental risks.

Here’s a pocket guide for understanding the implications.

What’s up with environmentalists hating NAFTA so much?

They don’t hate everything about it—at least not in theory. Environmental groups have argued in the past that effective trade deals can be used as a positive reinforcement mechanism for advancing international climate and human rights goals. NAFTA, however, “included unenforceable labor and environmental commitments and side agreements that were not part of the core text and that had no teeth to them,” says Ilana Solomon, director of the Sierra Club’s Responsible Trade Program.

But environmentalists’ main objection to NAFTA has to do with a section called Chapter 11, which outlines a mechanism called the investor-state dispute settlement system (ISDS).

The ISDS process states that whenever a federal government introduces a new regulation that negatively affects the value of a foreign investment, the investor has the right to sue the government in private trade tribunals. If the investor wins, the settlement amount, undisclosed to the public, is footed by taxpayer money. In other words, the ISDS process “essentially gives private corporations the status of nations under international law and the incredibly powerful and very secretive tribunal,” says Martin Wagner, the managing attorney of Earthjustice’s International Program.

Though this may not seem like it’s directly related to the environment, the majority of investor-state cases brought up under NAFTA have had nothing to do with traditional trade issues. Instead, they have attacked environmental, energy, public health, and land use policies, to name a few. Some of the most controversial cases have included a challenge to Quebec’s temporary fracking ban (still pending), a challenge to California’s phase-out of toxic chemical fuel additives (dismissed after six years), and most recently, a challenge to Barack Obama’s decision to block the Keystone XL pipeline, in which TransCanada sued the US government for $15 billion. (The case is still pending.)

As of October 2016, pending NAFTA claims totaled over $50 billion, according to an analysis performed by Public Citizen.

Then why don’t we just get rid of the investments part?

Good question. Supporters argue that it’s an important tool for foreign investors to protect their rights against governments and thereby encourages more foreign direct investment. But environmentalists aren’t the only ones who find fault with Chapter 11.

Simon Lester, a trade policy analyst at the libertarian CATO Institute, says he believes the proponents’ arguments are outdated. “I just don’t see any evidence that Chapter 11 does anything for trade liberalization or investment liberalization or the economy,” he says, or that “domestic courts couldn’t do a good job” in the international tribunals’ place. “So I say delete it and be done with it. But there’s a lot of pushback” from business groups, like the US Chamber of Commerce, and the State Department. “The people who wanted it in there want to keep it in there,” he says.

“Really what proponents are left with…is that corporations want it,” echoes Matt Porterfield, a Georgetown Law adjunct professor who studies the interplay between international trade, investment rules, and environmental policy. Precedent for the elimination and restriction of ISDS also already exists. India recently came out with a new investment treaty model that imposes limits on the investor-state model, for example. During negotiations for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP) between the United States and the European Union, widespread opposition to investor-state also prompted the European Union to propose a replacement system.

How likely is Trump to ditch Chapter 11?

It’s difficult to predict what will happen during renegotiations, given that Trump has made little indication of what he’s looking for.

But Earthjustice’s Wagner doesn’t have high hopes. “We see that the administration is full of corporate representatives who absolutely show no interest in promoting the public good—real interests of human beings and the environment—in any way, much less in the place where the corporate interest has the opposite desire.”

There is a small possibility that the administration will update NAFTA’s Chapter 11 to the most recent investment treaty model, says Porterfield; the United States put together this model in 2012 with the intention to “clarify the government’s ability to defend itself,” says Porterfield’s colleague Robert Stumberg, director of the Harrison Institute for Public Law. He adds that there really is “no assurance” that Trump will keep the pro-government edits, given his pro-investor record.

Can Trump screw over the environment even more during the renegotiation process?

Aside from expanding existing investors’ rights, a renegotiated NAFTA could also dramatically increase the number of investors who are granted those rights.

Currently, Mexico’s energy industry is excluded from NAFTA’s ISDS provisions because the industry was controlled by Pemex, a state-owned enterprise, when the deal was first negotiated. But in the last few years, Mexico has reprivatized its oil and gas under President Enrique Peña Nieto to stimulate foreign direct investment.

“It’s very easy to see how the US oil and gas industry, how the Mexican oil and gas industry, how the Canadian industry could easily pressure the Mexican government into coming in line with the other NAFTA parties and allowing those suits,” says Carroll Muffett, president of the Center for International Environmental Law. He fears that such a move—which has been recommended by the Heritage Foundation, a far-right policy think tank—will leave very few legal protections left for halting damaging fossil fuel infrastructure projects.

What are environmentalists planning to do next?

Unless Trump only renegotiates NAFTA’s tariffs, any newly drafted trade deal will need to get Congress’ approval. Solomon says the Sierra Club plans to mobilize an opposition campaign to stop the deal in Congress, and she encourages people to take advantage of their representatives’ town halls.

NAFTA’s provisions, once settled, can’t be challenged in court like most other policies, says Wagner, emphasizing the consequences of waiting until after the renegotiations to speak out. “That’s one of the things about these trade agreements that is really nefarious—they establish law that applies domestically that doesn’t go through the democratic lawmaking process.” On top of that, he points out, “it’s really hard to reopen a trade agreement.”

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One Thing Environmentalists and Trump Actually Agree On

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No, big snowstorms like this aren’t normal

by MurielSnell Posted on March 13, 2017

The calendar might say March, but winter isn’t done yet on the East Coast. And in a year where traditional signs of spring have arrived nearly a month early, it’s looking like this year’s winter season will be compressed into a single day, with an impending blizzard on par with historical greats.

Snowstorms and cold weather traditionally bring out the science deniers (we’ll never forget you, Senator Snowball), but in an atmosphere that is being fundamentally changed by human activity, every weather event is influenced in some way by climate change, and this week’s storm is no exception.

If you live on the East Coast, you might have become complacent about epic snowstorms like this one. Twenty inches or so doesn’t seem like such a big deal when you’ve lived through similar storms. But looking at the data, you’ll see that 20-inch snowstorms are a relatively new phenomenon in places like New York City.

For the first 100 years that meteorologists kept weather records at Central Park, from 1869 through 1996, they recorded just two snowstorms that dumped 20 inches or more. But since 1996, counting this week’s storm, there have been six. (You’ll find similar stats for other major East Coast cities.)

Basically, we’ve become accustomed to something that used to be very rare.

There are a few reasons why this is happening. Just like on land, ocean temperatures are getting warmer. This matters because the ocean is where nor’easters — the particular brand of coastal storm that brings the biggest snow potential — derive most of their moisture. Warmer ocean waters provide more energy to growing coastal storms, and the Gulf Stream current, which carries subtropical waters northward just off the East Coast, is experiencing record warmth right now.

Last year, two studies were published that provided evidence that basic weather patterns over the East Coast are getting more extreme, too, as Arctic sea ice melts and modifies the behavior of the jet stream. At times, the weather pattern can get stuck in a manner that provides extra cold air from the north and extra moisture from off the ocean — which is what is happening more often now.

That sets the stage for epic snowfalls. This week, high-resolution weather models are insistent that an intense band of very heavy snow will form, bringing snowfall rates of up to five inches per hour to New York City and New England. That’s nearing the upper limit of what is physically possible in our current climate.

With just hours to go before the flakes start flying, meteorologists are running out of words to describe the impending blizzard, which is on track to dump one to two feet of snow across a wide swath of the Northeast and bring winds of tropical storm force to prematurely flowering trees in parts of the mid-Atlantic.

The National Weather Service is ringing all available alarm bells — an experimental winter storm severity index is maxed out over New York City — and warning of widespread power outages and the impossibility of travel during the height of the storm. But even they don’t have much experience with a storm of this scale happening so late in the season — it just doesn’t happen very often. So it’s hard to tell what to expect.

Perhaps the most consequential circumstance for this particular storm is that, according to the plants and trees, spring is already here. The combination of flowering tree branches with tropical storm force winds and heavy, wet snow isn’t a good one — power outages could be widespread. And this year’s crop of some economically important flowering trees, like the apple and cherry orchards on Long Island, could see significant damage.

I mean, seriously, the Washington Cherry Blossom Festival starts Wednesday! It’s crazy. We now live in a world where one of D.C.’s biggest March snowstorms and one of its earliest Cherry Blossom Festivals are happening in the same week.

We’re not just getting freak weather anymore. We’re getting freak seasons.

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No, big snowstorms like this aren’t normal

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6 Ways President Trump Wants to Hamstring the EPA

by AntwanGrinder Posted on March 6, 2017

Mother Jones

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President Donald Trump promised during the campaign to get rid of the Environmental Protection Agency “in almost every form.” That probably isn’t going to happen, but if recent reports are correct, the White House is planning massive cuts to the agency, potentially wiping out up to a quarter of its $8.1 billion budget and eliminating as many as 3,000 jobs.

Cleanup projects, scientific research, and the office responsible for enforcing air quality standards are all reportedly on the chopping block. Any funding related to climate change is at risk of being zeroed out. The Oregonian has a list of 42 EPA cuts outlined in a leaked version of Trump’s proposed budget. Not all of these cuts will necessarily be enacted by Congress; a few Republicans, including EPA administrator Scott Pruitt himself, have already balked at some of the proposed reductions to state environmental grants. Nevertheless, here’s a selection of just some of what could happen if Trump does get his way:

Environment Justice

The EPA’s environmental justice program focuses on reducing the burden of pollution that falls disproportionately on communities of color—for example, lead in drinking water and poor air quality. In 2016, the agency released a four-year roadmap for improving the health of the most vulnerable communities, which would incorporate justice concerns into new rulemaking, scientific studies, enforcement, and permitting decisions. The Washington Post reported that the program could “vanish” under the White House budget.

EPA Enforcement

The EPA currently spends $171 million per year enforcing environmental protections.The proposed budget cuts that by 11 percent to $153 million, according to a Reuters source. The agency’s enforcement arm goes after polluters that violate clean air and water laws, such as when Volkswagen was caught cheating on emissions tests. Shrinking the enforcement budget would be the easiest way the administration could undermine regulations already on the books—regulations that otherwise could only be repealed through a lengthy rulemaking process.

Pruitt wants the EPA to partner with states rather than telling them what to do. But states can’t fill the vacuum left by the federal agency for a variety of reasons—one of them is that state enforcement is partially funded by the federal government. If grants to states are also cut, as proposed, the Trump administration could undermine state enforcement as well.

Lead Cleanup

The EPA sends funds to states to enforce monitoring and treatment standards for drinking water. According to Reuters, Trump wants to cut 30 percent of state grants for lead cleanup and funding for lead testing and education. The EPA’s program to certify that renovated buildings don’t contain lead paint also faces a 29 percent cut.

Radon Testing

About one in 15 homes have high levels of radon, an odorless, colorless gas that is a leading cause of lung cancer in nonsmokers. For some reason, the EPA’s relatively small educational program to promote testing in homes is at risk of being zeroed out, according to the Washington Post.

Abandoned Industrial Sites

Since 1980, the EPA has been in charge of identifying and cleaning up former industrial sites and the dirtiest hazardous waste. When the polluting company can’t pay for the full cleanup, the government does—through the Superfund and brownfields programs. There are more than 1,300 Superfund sites and 450,000 brownfield sites in the country. While Pruitt has said he would not want to see these programs cut, the Trump budget proposal would reportedly reduce funding to brownfields by roughly 40 percent.

Environmental Restoration

Trump is reportedly proposing cuts of at least 90 percent to programs to restore the Chesapeake Bay, whose watershed stretches across six states; the Puget Sound, the second-largest estuary in the United States; and the San Francisco Bay. Meanwhile, an effort along the US-Mexico border to reduce litter affecting San Diego and the Pacific Ocean would be cut by almost two-thirds.

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6 Ways President Trump Wants to Hamstring the EPA

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Proposed NOAA cuts would make predicting extreme weather even harder.

by FreemanUZNB Posted on March 6, 2017

The Trump administration reportedly plans to make deep cuts to the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, a key provider of information about the climate and weather.

All told, the proposed cuts amount to a full 17 percent of the agency’s budget, according to various reports. But the deepest would slash money for NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service, which operates a squad of satellites monitoring the environment. These satellites tell scientists about climate variability, weather, oceans, and much else.

Roughly 90 percent of weather data in the United States comes from NOAA. So the cuts would stymie efforts by scientists and meteorologists to measure and predict not just everyday weather patterns, but also tornadoes, hurricanes, and severe thunderstorms.

Predicting hurricanes is already challenging enough, but it’s increasingly important as climate change adds fuel to big storms.

The administration would also scrap federal money for NOAA’s Sea Grant, a program that supports university research to assess the vitality of coastlines and their ecosystems.

Over the weekend, scientists and climate realists took to Twitter to vent their outrage.

Apart from accurate climate data, there’s another thing we’ll certainly miss if satellites wind up on the chopping block:

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Proposed NOAA cuts would make predicting extreme weather even harder.

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Antarctica’s sea ice just hit the lowest level ever seen.

by DewayneBrower16 Posted on March 2, 2017

In some parts of the country, the season just breezed in three weeks ahead of schedule. Balmy weather may seem like more good news after an already unseasonably warm winter, but pause a beat before you reach for your flip-flops.

According to the “spring index,” a long-term data set which tracks the start of the season from year-to-year, spring is showing up earlier and earlier across the United States.

The culprit behind the trend? Climate change. And it’s bringing a batch of nasty consequences. Early warmth means early pests, like ticks and mosquitoes, and a longer, rougher allergy season. Agriculture and tourism can be thrown off, too. Washington D.C.’s cherry blossoms usually draw crowds in April, for instance, but they’re projected to peak three weeks early this year.

Spring isn’t shifting smoothly, either. It’s changing in fits and starts. Eggs are hatching and trees are losing their leaves, but temperatures could easily plunge again, with disastrous consequences for new baby animals and plants.

Play this out another 80 years, and it’s easy to imagine a world out of sync. Sure, your picnic in December sounds nice. But bees could lose their wildflowers, and groundhogs may never see their shadows again.

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Antarctica’s sea ice just hit the lowest level ever seen.

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Republicans Beg Their Party to Finally Do Something About Global Warming

by tfem31x Posted on February 8, 2017

Mother Jones

You wouldn’t know it by looking at Congress or the White House, but the GOP isn’t in complete lockstep when it comes to climate change denial. The deniers just happen to be the ones who hold all the political power within the party. They drown out the other side—the conservatives who are urging their party to actually do something about global warming.

The contrast was especially clear this week. Just a day after Republicans on the House science committee accused government scientists of fabricating climate research, a group of Republican luminaries who don’t currently hold public office held a press conference calling for climate action. Specifically, they released a report—titled “The Conservative Case for Carbon Dividends“—in which they advocated a tax on carbon emissions.

The report, which was published by the Climate Leadership Council, calls for a tax on carbon starting at $40 per ton and rising over time, with revenue returned to taxpayers in the form of quarterly Social Security dividends. The authors include James Baker, who served as secretary of state and secretary of the treasury in the Reagan and first Bush administrations; Henry Paulson, who served as treasury secretary in the second Bush administration; Reagan Secretary of State George Shultz; and Martin Feldstein and Gregory Mankiw, who chaired the President’s Council of Economic Advisers under Reagan and George W. Bush, respectively. They see the tax as a replacement for the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulations on greenhouse gases, including the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan. The proposal would also include a border adjustment designed to tax products from countries that do not have a similar carbon price.

For these conservatives, a carbon tax would be like insuring against the worst risks of climate change—and they see it as a more efficient solution than EPA regulations. They describe their plan as “win-win”—even if some of them still claim to quibble with the science.

“For too long, we Republicans and conservatives haven’t occupied a real place at the table during the debate about global climate change,” Baker said at a Wednesday press conference. “Instead, we have tended to dispute the fact of climate change and particularly the extent to which man is responsible for any changes in the Earth’s climate. Now I need, in the interest of full disclosure, to tell you that I was and remain somewhat of a skeptic about the extent to which man is responsible for climate change. But I do think that…the risks are too great to ignore, and that we need some sort of insurance policy.”

None of the report’s authors currently hold public office. But Baker was scheduled to meet Wednesday with Vice President Mike Pence, Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner (who serves as a presidential adviser), and Trump adviser Gary Cohn to discuss the recommendations.

There’s a very different conversation underway in the House, where Republicans are obsessed with finding a smoking gun that would expose global warming as a myth. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), who chairs the science committee, held a hearing yesterday titled “Making EPA Great Again,” during which he and his colleagues accused federal agencies of falsifying data and pushing a climate hoax.

Smith cited allegations made by former NOAA data scientist John Bates that the agency mishandled data used in a 2015 study challenging the belief that global warming had “paused” in recent years.

“Everything I have read suggests that NOAA cheated and got caught,” Smith said. At another point, he said NOAA scientists wanted to “falsify data to exaggerate global warming.” (Bates, for the record, told the Associated Press that his concerns don’t undermine the scientific consensus that humans are warming the planet and that his NOAA colleagues had done “nothing malicious.” He said the controversy is “really a story of not disclosing what you did. It’s not trumped up data in any way shape or form.”)

For the conservatives behind the Climate Leadership Council report, the debate about science isn’t the point. Benefits of a carbon tax “accrue regardless of one’s views on climate science,” the paper’s authors write.

But this message has hardly gotten anywhere with GOP politicians in the past. And even Baker cautioned against optimism that Trump’s White House will reverse course. “We have no assurance at all that this is going to be something that the administration will grab hold of,” he said. “We happen to believe that this will help make America great again, but that’s our view.”

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Republicans Beg Their Party to Finally Do Something About Global Warming

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You can thank climate change for adding delicious mercury to your seafood.

by JaniceWakehurst Posted on January 30, 2017

The People’s Climate March will descend on D.C. with an intersectional coalition of green and environmental-justice groups, indigenous and civil-rights organizations, students and labor unions. The march will take place on Saturday, April 29, exactly 100 days into Trump’s presidency.

In January, the Women’s March gathered half a million demonstrators in D.C. alone. There have also been talks of an upcoming Science March, which has no set date but almost 300,000 followers on Twitter.

April’s climate march is being organized by a coalition that emerged from the People’s Climate March of 2014, a rally that brought 400,000 people to New York City before the United Nations convened there for a summit on climate change. It was the largest climate march in history — a record that may soon be broken.

“Communities across the country have been working for environmental and social justice for centuries. Now it’s time for our struggles to unite and work together across borders to fight racism, sexism, xenophobia, and environmental destruction,” Chloe Jackson, an activist with Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, said in a statement. “We have a lot of work to do, and we are stronger together.”

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You can thank climate change for adding delicious mercury to your seafood.

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Leading Climate Experts Have Some Advice for Donald Trump

by GladisK22jhqjwt Posted on January 20, 2017

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

To fulfill his campaign slogan of “Make America great again,” Donald Trump must back the boom in green technology—that was the message from the leading climate figures ahead of his inauguration as president on Friday.

Unleashing US innovation on the trillion-dollar clean technology market will create good US jobs, stimulate its economy, maintain the US’ political leadership around the globe and, not least, make the world a safer place by tackling climate change, the experts told the Guardian.

The omens are not encouraging. Trump has called global warming a hoax and is filling his administration with climate change deniers and oil barons. But reversing action on climate change and championing fossil fuels will only “make China great again,” said one top adviser.

Here are the messages to Trump from some of the key figures the Guardian contacted.

Michael Liebreich, founder of analyst firm Bloomberg New Energy Finance who has advised the UN and World Economic Forum on energy: “If I had one minute with president elect Trump my message would be that the best way to ‘Make America great again’ is by owning the clean energy, transportation and infrastructure technologies of the future. Not only will this create countless well-paid, fulfilling jobs for Americans, but will also lock in the US’ geopolitical leadership for another generation.”

John Schellnhuber of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, who has advised Angela Merkel, the Pope and the EU: “Mr. President, if you want to make China great again, you have to stay the course you have promised. I think it would be the end of US domination in innovation, in economics. If you try to take the US backwards to the days of mountain top removal for coal in West Virginia and all those things, then you will just make sure China becomes No. 1 in all respects. In the end, you would produce precisely what you promised to avoid to your electorate.”

Dame Julia King, an eminent engineer and one of the UK government’s official advisers at the Committee on Climate Change: “If President Trump wants to deliver greater job security for Americans, he should focus on clean and sustainable industries where the US has a competitive advantage. Those are the sectors that are set to prosper. He needs to build an economy for 2050, not one for 1950.”

Lord Nicholas Stern, a leading climate change economist at the London School of Economics: “If you want to make America great again, building modern, clean and smart infrastructure makes tremendous commercial and national sense. In the longer term, the low carbon growth story is the only growth story on offer. There is no long-term, high-carbon growth story, because destruction of the environment would reverse growth.”

Mark Campanale, founder of the Carbon Tracker Initiative think tank: “If you’re interested in quality, high paying and skilled jobs for the American middle classes, then renewable energy has to absolutely be the place to look. It’s a sector with more employees now than in the US coal industry and with a long way to grow.”

James Hansen, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University: “If Trump wants to achieve the things that he claimed he would: improving the situation of the common man, the best way he could do this would be a program of a rising carbon fee with the money distributed to the public.”

Jennifer Morgan, co-executive director of Greenpeace International: “Mr. Trump, you might not realize it yet, but your action, or inaction, on climate will define your legacy as president. The renewable energy transformation is unstoppable and, if the US chooses to turn its back on the future, it will miss out on all the opportunities it brings in terms of jobs, investment and technology advances. China, India and others are racing ahead to be the global clean energy superpowers and surely the US, led by a businessman, does not want to be left behind.”

Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists in the US: “Trump’s stance threatens to diminish America’s standing in the world and to weaken the ability of US companies and workers to compete in the rapidly growing global market for clean energy technologies.”

May Boeve, head of climate campaign group 350.org: “Quit. But if you have to stick around, realize that the clean energy economy is the greatest, biggest job creator in history.”

Some leading figures, who will have to deal directly with the Trump administration, chose more diplomatic messages to the new president, while emphasizing the vital need to act on global warming:

Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change—the UN’s climate chief: “I look forward to working with your new administration to make the world a better place for the people of the US and for peoples everywhere in this very special world.”

Scientist Derek Arndt, at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, presenting the temperature data showing 2016 was the hottest year on record: “We present this assessment for the benefit of the American people.”

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Leading Climate Experts Have Some Advice for Donald Trump

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