Donald Trump good for the planet? You better believe it

With RFK Jr at his side, nature could benefit from an unlikely dynamic duo

- Zac Goldsmith

Environmentalists are worried about the Trump win. But there is no time to sulk. Every year sees biodiversity plummeting and ecosystems irreversibly trashed. The stakes couldn't be higher and it is our responsibility to try to figure out what a Trump administration could do for the environment.

The answer is: a lot. Trump is a climate sceptic and that is unlikely to change. But that is not the same as being an environment sceptic. The Republican Party is full of people who are allergic to climate politics but who do care about the actual natural environment.

Right now, even in these increasingly turbulent times, there is objectively nothing more important and given the very public and passionate calls made by the UK's new Foreign Secretary for the world to come together to repair our relationship with nature, this also presents an opportunity for the UK to build bridges to the new US administration.

As a lifelong environmentalist I would far, far prefer a climate sceptic who recognises the importance of nature than a technocratic climate activist for whom a forest is nothing more than a cluster of carbon sticks. Tragically, that is what so much environment politics has been reduced to: carbon counting. Of all the public money channelled into tackling climate change, just a few per cent goes on nature, and then only usually where it is a nature-based solution to climate change.