Five months ago, Trump quickly cemented his legacy as the country’s worst-ever president by inexplicably starting the process to withdraw from the Paris climate accords. With even war-torn Syria now signing the agreement, the leadership of every world country has announced its intent to tackle the existential threat posed by human-caused climate change, except the United States.



It's the US vs. the rest of the world, as Syria agrees to sign Paris climate accord https://t.co/Q1tkxuiHas pic.twitter.com/hnV2wHmLHL — Akshat Rathi (@AkshatRathi) November 7, 2017

While this decision may seem puzzling to the rest of the world, the explanation is simple - a study published two years ago found that the Republican Party is the only major political party in the world that rejects the need to tackle climate change, and we know that voters follow elite cues. In 2016, American voters made the terrible mistake of putting that party in charge of the entire federal government, including electing this man president:

The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2012

Most Americans admit the mistake of 2016



However, a year later, Americans are already recognizing this error. Trump’s approval rating is around 38%, and has not touched 40% in over six months. Meanwhile, congressional Democrats enjoy an 8–10% lead over their Republican opponents. Those polling results translated into a landslide Democratic victory in the 2017 elections last week.

The clearest result came in Virginia’s gubernatorial election, in which Republican candidate Ed Gillespie ran a Trump-like culture war campaign. He also took the standard Trump administration line on climate change, acknowledging only that humans play some undetermined role while supporting America’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accords and opposing all policies to address the problem.

Gillespie’s campaign was praised by Trump and Steve Bannon, until he lost the race by 9%.

Translating the shift to election wins will be difficult

Last week’s election results showed that Trump has strongly mobilized Democrats to vote, even in off-year elections. In Virginia state House of Delegates elections, Democratic candidates similarly beat their Republican opponents by more than 9% in total votes. However, due to gerrymandering and geographical disadvantages (Democrats tend to cluster in cities), unless recounts change the results of close races, Democrats will only hold 49% of the seats in the Virginia House.

That structural disadvantage holds across the country. Estimates are that Democrats need to beat Republicans by 7–8% in overall congressional votes in order to win a bare majority of the seats. With a current lead of 8–10% in the generic congressional ballot, they have a chance to take the House in 2018, depending on what happens over the next year.

We saw that same structural advantage hand Trump the presidency in 2016. While he lost the popular vote by over 2% (nearly 3 million votes), Trump won the Electoral College, as was the case in 2000 with Bush v. Gore (Gore won the popular vote by a half million votes). America has a bizarrely unbalanced election system in which people who live in sparsely populated areas (predominantly rural Republicans) are disproportionately represented in the government.



It will take a landslide election for Democrats to overcome that structural disadvantage, but last week’s results demonstrate that Trump and the Republican Party have become so unpopular, it very well might happen in the 2018 and 2020 elections. That would give Democrats the opportunity to undo Republican gerrymandering after the 2020 census. The Supreme Court is also currently considering a critical gerrymandering case.

Regarding the presidency, betting markets currently give Trump approximately a 35–40% chance of winning a second term (which seems overly bullish), and Democrats a 55% chance of retaking the White House in 2020. If that happens, the next president can quickly begin reversing the damage the Trump administration has done to American climate policies and its standing in the world.



America’s divide is on display at COP23

At the UN climate talks in Bonn, the ‘We Are Still In’ coalition of US states, cities, tribes, and businesses has been given a US Climate Action Center. Meanwhile, the US government for the first time doesn’t have a pavilion, and the Trump administration perversely plans to promote fossil fuels and nuclear power in a presentation at the meeting. As Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) noted,

If you show up at a climate conference to talk about coal, you’re likely to be ignored. I think the We Are Still In delegation will get more attention than the executive branch. We’ve gone from the indispensable leader to being the only country not engaged in climate change. Many people in Congress are troubled not only from a climate standpoint but a geopolitical standpoint. China is happy to take that leadership from us.

Indeed, China is stepping into the global leadership role that the United States has shrunk from under Trump’s “America First” platform. Chinese carbon pollution is approaching a peak 15–20 years ahead of schedule, and its leaders relish the opportunity to take America’s place as a global leader.

America Last, for now

Americans embrace the notion that their country is the greatest in the world. But what does it say that the United States is the nation that is responsible for the largest fraction of overall carbon pollution and global warming over the past 200 years, and is the only country in the world that refuses to take steps to address the existential threat we created? That lack of responsibility and willingness to protect the well-being of future generation is not the behavior of a great nation.

However, that is almost exclusively a Republican Party position, and the party and its president are currently supported by fewer than 40% of Americans. Most of its leaders seem unwilling to reverse the party’s slide toward anti-climate culture wars-based isolationism, but with accelerating climate change and a growing population of non-whites, these are positions that will cost them elections. As we saw last week, the ‘Trump base’ is relatively small, and structural advantages won’t be enough to withstand landslide elections.

America’s withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement won’t take effect until the day after the 2020 elections. The next president can quickly reverse that withdrawal, making America the last country to sign on, but resuming its global leadership role. While the Trump administration has exceeded everyone’s fears in its anti-environment, anti-climate actions, the damage is temporary. While the American majority fights to wrest control of its government away from the isolationist climate-denying minority, the rest of the world (literally) is moving forward to tackle this problem.