Donald Trump will destroy the environment if he follows through on climate change rhetoric

Pulling the US out of the UN Paris climate agreement

In May 2016 Trump told a conference in Bismarck, North Dakota, that he would "cancel the Paris climate agreement and stop all payments of US tax dollars to UN global warming programmes".

"I will be looking at that very, very seriously, and at a minimum I will be renegotiating those [Paris] agreements, at a minimum. And at a maximum I may do something else," he told Reuters.

No more federal spending on climate change programmes

Trump told a rally in Warren, Michigan, on 31 October that he would save $100 billion over eight years by cutting climate programmes.

"We're going to put America first. That includes cancelling billions in climate change spending for the United Nations, a number Hillary wants to increase, and instead use that money to provide for American infrastructure including clean water, clean air and safety," he said. "We're giving away billions and billions and billions of dollars," he said.

Scrapping Obama's Clean Power Plan

Trump has said that he would scrap Barack Obama's "job-destroying Obama executive actions", most likely including the Clean Power Plan, which aims to reduce power plant carbon emissions. Trump has also suggested abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency.

Trump "is not a big believer in man-made climate change"

In August 2016 Trump told the Miami Herald that climate considerations are making US businesses suffer: "Our businesses are unable to compete in this country because other countries aren't being forced to do what our businesses are being forced to do and it makes us noncompetitive, which is something that I feel very strongly about. And I feel that it puts at a great economic disadvantage for jobs and other things."

Trump says climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese

Then he denied the statement in during the first presidential debate in September 2016.

Climate scientists' views: This election is an "environmental disaster"

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said: "President-elect Donald Trump's stance on global warming is well known. Ironically, he contributed to the popularity of our recent 'Turn Down the Heat' report series for the World Bank by attacking it on Twitter. Yet apart from this, science cannot expect any positive climate action from him. The world has now to move forward without the US on the road towards climate-risk mitigation and clean-technology innovation."

Doug Crawford-Brown, director of the Cambridge Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research, said: "His election does not bode well for climate or more broadly environmental matters. I am willing to give him a chance to prove himself, however, because he is an unknown quantity at the moment."

It is too early to say exactly what this election will mean for the environment, says Crawford-Brown. "Trump says he is a climate sceptic, but his positions on such matters fluctuate. There is a significant chance that he will try and row back on the climate commitments already made, but it has not been tested whether he can or will want to do so.

"My only guess at the moment is that the US will step back partially from its recent position of leadership on climate policy. However, many business leaders in the US want to keep movement going forward, and Trump is a businessman first and foremost. So my hope is that he will listen to these business leaders."

Peter Cox, professor of climate system dynamics at the University of Exeter, said: "If we are to take Donald Trump by his words during the last few years, which includes a denial of climate change and a threat to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, his election as president is an environmental disaster.

"We can only hope that being in the White House will allow Donald Trump to see things more clearly, and that his most unfounded views are corrected by those around him. This includes the importance of international action to slow climate change. We can all hope, right?"

Corinne Le Quere, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia said: "The election of Donald Trump as president of the USA could bring a new dimension to how we address climate change, if he chooses to. Donald Trump is a businessman. The biggest leap forward we could make to address climate change is to develop the business economy that will produce energy without the carbon." Le Quere said that particular opportunities lie in the US's leadership in the Silicon Valley, including the car industry, bioenergy and the circular economy.

"As Trump gets reminded of the damages that climate change is already making to the US economy, particularly through flooding and increasing damage in US coasts from the combination of sea level rise and hurricanes, he might chose a different view on climate change than he's expressed in the past," she said.