Fair Plan 10: Post-Trump Global-Warming Mitigation

Abstract

With the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States of America, it appears likely that the initiation of mitigation of human-caused Global-Warming/Climate-Change will be delayed many years. Accordingly, here we calculate the Emission Phaseout Duration, D = YE - YS, where YS and YE are the Start and End Years of the emissions reduction, for YS = 2020, 2025 and 2030, and maximum Global Warming targets, ΔTmax = 2.0°C, 1.9°C, 1.8°C, 1.7°C, 1.6°C and 1.5°C. The 2.0°C and 1.5°C maxima are the “Hard” and “Aspirational” targets of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. We find that D decreases with increasing YS from 2020, and with decreasing ΔTmax. In particular, D decreases from: 1) 76 years for YS = 2020 to 53 years for YS = 2030 for ΔTmax = 2.0°C, and 2) 34 years for YS = 2020 to 7 years for YS = 2030 for ΔTmax = 1.5°C. Thus, delaying the initiation of the phaseout of greenhouse-gas emissions from 2020 to 2030 makes it more difficult to achieve ΔTmax = 2.0°C and impossible to achieve ΔTmax = 1.5°C.