Climate crisis Second Trump term will 'pose major threat to the planet'

Donald Trump's second term as US president will pose a major threat to the planet if he blows up the international effort to curb global heating, climate experts said yesterday.

- Oliver Milman, Ajit Niranjan

Trump's return to the White House is widely expected to result in the US again exiting the Paris climate agreement and may even remove Washington's involvement in the underpinning UN framework to deal with the climate crisis.

Trump has called climate change "a big hoax", poured scorn upon wind energy and electric cars, and vowed to gut environmental rules and the "green new scam" of the Inflation Reduction Act, a law to support clean energy projects.

Trump's agenda, analysts have found, risks adding several billion tonnes of heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere, further imperilling goals to stave off global heating that governments are already failing to meet. Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, said the US was now a "failed democracy" and that "we now pose a major threat to the planet".