Paris Climate Agreement
In 1992 at an Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was initiated. The UNFCCC, since ratified by 197 member nations, set forth a collaborative objective “to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” Through the UNFCCC, parties meet annually at the Conference of the Parties (COP) to evaluate the progress of international climate policy. In 1997, the third session of the conference, or COP3, in Kyoto, Japan, resulted in the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol as an effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions. 18 years later at COP21 in Paris, France, joint negotiations resulted in the formation of the Paris Climate Agreement.
The Paris Agreement is an international treaty which established a loosely-binding framework for nations to develop individualized climate strategies to achieve ambitious targets of greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Targets, or Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC), for all nations are separately set and voluntarily enforced, and every five years the member nations agree to reconvene to set more ambitious targets. The underlying goal of the agreement, which was signed in April 2016 and made effective in November, is to hold the increase of the global average temperature below the critical threshold of 2° C above pre-industrialized levels to mitigate the worst-case risks of climate change.
The flexible nature of the agreement facilitated the world’s largest emitters to engage, as it doesn’t have an enforcement mechanism to spook their involvements. As a result, China and the United States not only participated but also demonstrated leadership when they simultaneously set their targets and then jointly announced their ratifications of the deal, actions which paved the path for other nations to follow. In September 2006, President Obama stated, “Despite our differences on other issues, we hope that our willingness to work together on this issue will inspire greater ambition and greater action around the world.” The pledge made by the Obama administration is that the U.S., the world’s second largest carbon emitter, will work to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 26–28% over the next decade.
United States Withdrawal
On June 1, President Donald Trump announced the intention of the United States government to withdraw from the agreement with three direct words, “We’re getting out. But we will start to negotiate, and we will see if we can make a deal that’s fair. And if we can, that’s great. And if we can’t, that’s fine.” Coupled with the evident lack of urgency, international leaders quickly suggested that a renegotiation of the complicated, multilateral treaty is not on the table.
The Trump administration made the argument that the deal was not in the nation’s interests. The president suggested that American compliance with the deal would hurt businesses and cost the nation millions of jobs, largely in the fossil fuel industry. The fossil fuel industry was a focal point of many of Trump’s campaign promises, including the revitalization of the coal industry through the alleviation of environmental regulations.
In his comments, Trump quantified that the U.S. economic loss due to Paris compliance would be close to $3 trillion in lost GDP. The president also attacked the efficacy of the deal, noting that “even if the Paris Agreement were implemented in full with total compliance from all nations, it is estimated it would only produce a two-tenths of one degree…reduction in global temperature by the year 2100.”
Following Trump’s comments, Scott Pruitt, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), added that “this is a historic restoration of American Economic Independence — one that will benefit the working class, the working poor, and working people of all stripes. With this action, you have declared that people are the rulers of this country once again.”
In addition to withdrawing from the deal, the president also vowed that the U.S. would not be making any more contributions to the Green Climate Fund (GCF), which assists developing nations in adopting the climate policies consistent with the UNFCCC. Trump believes our commitments to the fund to be unfair, noting that “many of the other countries haven’t spent anything. And many of them will never pay one dime.” These comments capture the president’s broader notion that Paris involvement is partly an unfair conspiracy against the United States. At his speech, Trump insisted to his Rose Garden audience that “the rest of the world applauded when we signed the Paris Agreement…for the simple reason that it put our country…at a very, very big economic disadvantage,” and then asked, “at what point do they start laughing at us as a country?”
The Response
The president’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement was commended by many Republican Senators, including the 22 who had signed a letter urging the president to do so. The rationale for their advocacy was that remaining in the deal would disable the administration from curtailing punitive environmental regulations.
But the announcement also drew sharp condemnation from his impassioned critics as well as from leaders around the world. According to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, roughly seven in ten registered voters, including at least a 50% majority in every state, support remaining in the Paris Agreement. This position was also held by Secretary of State, and former CEO of ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson, who maintained at least a public profile in favor of the landmark deal.
Critics of the withdrawal, led by congressional democrats and environmental activists, framed it as a foreign policy blunder, and an abdication of international leadership, potentially to China, that will hinder further diplomatic efforts. By expressing intent to withdraw, the United States joins just Nicaragua, who believed the deal was not strict enough, and Syria, who remains engulfed by civil war, as nations not committed (Update: Nicaragua signed in October and Syria committed to the deal in November).
They then took aim at the administration’s specious justifications. For example, that the decision was made to save the business interests of the United States directly contradicted the overwhelming support of the business community which urged the president to not vacate it. That a nonbinding structure, whereby all nations self-pursue goals and self-monitor progress, would unavoidably lead to oppressive unemployment and lost GDP, through the international machinations of foreign nations, as being divorced from logic. And that financial commitments to the Green Climate Fund from the U.S., the largest carbon polluter in history, being unfair as misguided, particularly when considering our to-date commitments are much less than several other nations on a per-capita basis. Like many of the multilateral trade deals and alliances that Trump has bemoaned, the president seemingly views the GCF as a zero-sum game in which those nations that contribute the most, lose the most.
The president has been accused by his detractors of dangerous climate denialism and economic nostalgia, that his improbable promises to revive the coal industry ignore both the decades of decline in coal industry employment and the rapid growth in green energy. According to a report from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), the 2016 rate of solar industry employment growth was 17 times greater than that of the overall U.S. economy.
MIT researchers also took exception to Trump’s mischaracterization of their research as immune to fact for the purposes of supporting his claim that the agreement would have a negligible impact (2/10ths of one degree) on the climate. “We certainly do not support the withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris Agreement,” stated Erwan Monier of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. “If we don’t do anything, we might shoot five degrees or more, and that would be catastrophic.”
2020 Election
Fast-forwarding three years, the president’s actions should have great implications for the 2020 election. As per Article 28 of the agreement, the United States cannot effectively extricate itself from the accord until four years after it entered it on November 4, 2016. The termination process permits any nation to submit a document of intent to withdraw no sooner than three years after entering the agreement, which would then enable official withdrawal no sooner than one year later. So ironically, the United States cannot officially exit the agreement until November 4, 2020, one day after the next presidential election.
Until that date, the expressed intent of the Trump administration to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement is just a verbal pledge. In the meantime, the United States remains a party to the agreement and is invited to engage in further negotiations including this November’s COP23 in Bonn, Germany, albeit it remains unclear how involved the administration would be given its pledge to abandon it.
But with the date falling directly after the next election, the issue of climate change should feature more prominently as a pivotal 2020 debate issue than it has in previous elections. This escalation of climate change would be palatable to those who want to see election discourse veer towards substantive subjects such as carbon taxation rather than hostile character assassinations, and particularly by those who view climate change as of epochal consequence. It could also pressure the Republican Party to confront climate change with a posture more consistent with the majority of Americans.
And while Trump could officially cancel our original ratification to the agreement that day, there is nothing to prevent the subsequent president from immediately re-entering the agreement through the much-quicker process of accession. So in reality, the fate of American participation in the Paris Agreement will actually be determined by the 2020 election. And unless President Trump is re-elected, or someone else like-minded on the issue is newly appointed, the United States would only fleetingly be divorced from the agreement.
Back to the Present
Trump’s withdrawal from the agreement was not a surprise. It fulfils a repeated campaign promise to cancel the agreement in accordance with his America First mantra, and echoes an inclination to rescind all things linked to his predecessor. It also comes from a president who, as a private citizen, has long branded climate change a conspiratorial hoax. In a now-famous 2012 tweet, Trump authored “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”
The Trump administration was in actuality never destined to promote American assurances with respect to the Paris Agreement. Thus far, it has taken actions to approve both the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Keystone XL Pipeline, as well as actions to rescind both the Clean Power Plant and the Clean Water Act, passed an executive order to expand offshore Arctic drilling, and has proposed steep budgetary cuts for environmental programs.
The bottom line is that Paris compliance is fundamentally at odds with the energy vision of Trump, who views environmental matters merely through the lens of corporate competitiveness, and his EPA head Scott Pruitt, who despite leading a national agency designed to protect the environment, is best known for dismantling an Oklahoma environmental protection agency as the state’s Attorney General and for spearheading a fracking revolution that has correlated to a surge in statewide earthquakes. Together with Trump, the avowed ‘EPA originalist’ Pruitt, who has sued the very agency he now runs 14 times for federal regulations overreach, is now energized to achieve his core objective of dismantling the so-called totalitarian tactics of the EPA in order to redistribute environmental authority within the structure of the American federalist framework back to the more pre-1970s localized levels.
As it pertains to environmental policy, the term cooperative federalism refers to the joint interactions of tiered governments to resolve broad-based issues. But as the Trump administration works to disengage the United States from international climate collaboration, and Pruitt works to undermine the current model of cooperative federalism to shape a reduced regulation energy policy, a new paradigm of cooperative federalism is already emerging in its place to shape collaborative subnational energy policies to comply with Paris. Several bipartisan groups have formed, including We Are Still In and Climate Mayors, to unite cities, states and businesses to collaborate in order to shape national energy policy and to uphold the U.S. carbon targets established through Paris. We Are Still In for example has already gained the support of nine states governors, over 125 cities and more than 1000 businesses.
Moreover, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is consolidating cities and states in opposition to the Trump administration to submit a parallel NDC pledge to the United Nations. “Americans don’t need Washington to meet our Paris commitment, and Americans are not going to let Washington stand in the way of fulfilling it,” Bloomberg said. “That’s the message mayors, governors and business leaders all across the U.S. have been sending.” In addition to negotiating directly with the U.N., Bloomberg pledged $15 million to the UNFCCC to offset funding it stands to lose from Washington.
While these counter-organizing coalitions are constitutionally unable to forge an actual membership to the Paris Agreement, the U.N. will still embrace their commitments. Patricia Espinosa, UNFCCC executive secretary, stated, “The UNFCCC welcomes the determination and commitment from such a wealth and array of cities, states, businesses and other groups in the United States to fast forward climate action and emissions reductions in support of the Paris Climate Change Agreement. The Paris Agreement recognizes the indispensable role of all these actors in achieving the transformations that will take us to a low emission, resilient world offering opportunities for all.”
At the July G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, the issue of climate change isolated President Trump from the other 19 members. Trump’s intransigence on the issue prevented him from agreeing on all points made in a joint declaration. Each of the other leaders reaffirmed their support for the Paris Agreement, dissenting from the decision made by the U.S. president the prior month. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the host of the summit, said she “deplored” the decision.
Recognizing this rift, some mayors and governors have even extended their intranational efforts into international efforts. Bypassing the federal government, Governor Jerry Brown of California, autonomously the world’s sixth largest economy, traveled to China to sign an agreement with President Xi Jinping. The deal between China and California pledges increased trade of green technologies and a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. “We want to further strengthen our relationship with China,” Brown stated. “The world is moving in a direction that I want California to be a part of.”
Canadian Prime Minster Justin Trudeau has also reportedly been reaching out to U.S. state governors to initiate cross-border collaborations. In July, Trudeau delivered the keynote address at the National Governors Association summit in Providence, Rhode Island.
In Conclusion
The president’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement was controversial, encouraging to some, startling to others. For those who believe the removal of environmental regulations will unshackle the fossil fuel industry and weaken our dependence of foreign oil, the decision was welcomed. Or for those who felt that compliance with the agreement would cost the U.S. jobs and economic gains, the decision was righteous.
But for those who believe in the confronting the issue of climate change, the decision was discouraging. Yet again, by comparing the outcomes of President Trump pledging to remain committed to the agreement versus pledging to withdraw, those committed to climate change might look back on the decision as a blessing in disguise. The president could very easily have remained in the non-enforceable agreement without ever intending to comply, and enacted energy policies that would all but ensure we would have failed to meet our preset goals. But by articulating his intentions, the president’s verbal pledge to withdraw in the future has activated real action in the present which could all but ensure we exceed our preset goals. In the long run, the United States may be able to achieve more in terms of emissions reductions now than if the Trump administration had remained committed to the agreement through its words, but not its actions. But instead, the administration’s decision has spawned subnational activism, led to unlikely collaborative partnerships between U.S. states and foreign nations, and promoted the relevance of climate change in a 2020 election which will more conclusively determine the fate our involvement in the accord.
But despite these causes for optimism, remains the reality that U.S. leadership matters greatly in the world. Just as U.S. leadership helped to construct the landmark treaty, U.S. leadership can also help topple it. Already, in the wake of the U.S. pledge to withdraw, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has stalled Turkey’s ratification of the agreement, citing the U.S. exit as its justification.
