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PM ACC 5/29/2016
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(ACC Mentioned) Environmental Rules Under Attack
May 29, 2017 | Chemical & Engineering News
By Britt E. Erickson
In keeping with his campaign promise to reduce regulatory burdens, U.S. President Donald J. Trump ordered federal agencies in late February to ferret out regulations that can be “repealed, replaced, or modified to make them less burdensome.” -
(ACC Mentioned) EU Struggles to Define What Constitutes an Endocrine Disruptor
May 29, 2017 | Chemical & Engineering News
By Paula Dupraz-Dobias
Nearly a year after the European Commission (EC) proposed criteria to define endocrine disruptors, experts say talks aimed at ultimately banning toxic chemical substances continue to be bogged down by a mix of politics and science. -
Big Rigs Pave Way for Second Shale Oil Boom
May 29, 2017 | Houston Chronicle (In Real Clear Energy)
By Collin Eaton
On a drilling rig towering above quiet cattle farms in Southeast Texas, Eric Williams perched inside the cabin of the 16-story machine, twisting a pair of joysticks to guide a gigantic wrench roaring into action, drowning out every sound as it reached for a 1,500-pound pipe... -
Trump’s Energy, Low and Dirty
May 29, 2017 | New York Times
By Paul Krugman
Donald Trump has two false beliefs about energy, one personal, one political. And the latter may send the world on a path to disaster. -
Some Railroads Are Not Ready to Meet a Safety System Deadline
May 28, 2017 | McClatchy (In The Daily World)
By Curtis Tate
Four of the nation’s commuter railroads are not on track to meet an end-of-next-year deadline to fully implement a collision-avoidance system Congress required nearly a decade ago. -
Top Dem: Trump’s Refusal to Back Climate Deal a ‘Striking Abdication of American Leadership’
May 29, 2017 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Jessie Hellmann
Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) on Monday said President Trump's refusal to affirm the Paris climate agreement represents a "striking abdication of American leadership." -
Can the Paris Climate Deal Survive a Trump-Style Renegotiation?
May 26, 2017 | New York Times
By Brad Plumer
As President Trump ponders whether the United States should stay in or leave the Paris climate agreement, many of his closest allies and advisers have been urging him to keep the country in but “renegotiate” the deal to better reflect his energy policies.
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(ACC Mentioned) Environmental Rules Under Attack
May 29, 2017 | Chemical & Engineering News
By Britt E. Erickson
In keeping with his campaign promise to reduce regulatory burdens, U.S. President Donald J. Trump ordered federal agencies in late February to ferret out regulations that can be “repealed, replaced, or modified to make them less burdensome.”
...The North American industry has complied with the rule for many years, they noted. The American Chemistry Council’s formaldehyde panel, which represents chemical manufacturers, claims that for wood products “there is no alternative that can provide a better combination of technical performance and economic value than formaldehyde-based resins.” Asbestos in schools, chlorine production EPA asked the public for feedback on whether any regulations have achieved their...
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Story can be found here:
http://cen.acs.org/articles/95/i22/Environmental-rules-under-attack.html?type=paidArticleContent
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(ACC Mentioned) EU Struggles to Define What Constitutes an Endocrine Disruptor
May 29, 2017 | Chemical & Engineering News
By Paula Dupraz-Dobias
Nearly a year after the European Commission (EC) proposed criteria to define endocrine disruptors, experts say talks aimed at ultimately banning toxic chemical substances continue to be bogged down by a mix of politics and science.
Horel claims that the European Chemical Industry Council and the European Crop Protection Association sponsored a 2016 EC impact assessment that invalidated a World Health Organization/United Nations Environment Programme scientific report on the health effects of endocrine-disrupting chemicals. Joining the European groups were the American Chemistry Council, which is an association of U.S. chemical makers, and the pesticide makers’ organizations CropLife America, CropLife Canada, and CropLife International, Horel asserts...
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Story can be found here:
http://cen.acs.org/articles/95/i22/EU-struggles-define-constitutes-endocrine.html?type=paidArticleContent
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Big Rigs Pave Way for Second Shale Oil Boom
May 29, 2017 | Houston Chronicle (In Real Clear Energy)
By Collin Eaton
On a drilling rig towering above quiet cattle farms in Southeast Texas, Eric Williams perched inside the cabin of the 16-story machine, twisting a pair of joysticks to guide a gigantic wrench roaring into action, drowning out every sound as it reached for a 1,500-pound pipe emerging from the earth - pipe that soon will feed oil into a second shale boom.
Years ago, a worker doing Williams' job would have stood outside on the rig floor, working a brake handle and knobs as men, drenched in sweat and syrupy fluid, worked the pipe by hand - a dangerous job. Now he sits behind six computer screens and a complex array of controls, piloting a 10-ton wrench on a so-called super-spec rig, one of a new breed of advanced drilling machines that are bigger and stronger than the ones that sparked the first U.S. shale oil bonanza a few years ago.
They're part of the fleet of new technologies paving the way for a historic surge of oil that could break the nation's 1970 production record next year and further erode the decades-long grip the Saudi-led Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries has had on global oil markets. The cartel's gathering in Vienna last week to extend oil production cuts put into place earlier this year showed how quickly the oil world's center of gravity has shifted.
Just a few years ago, even talking about production cuts would have sent crude prices skyrocketing. This time, when OPEC and other major producers agreed to reduce output by 1.8 million barrels a day into next year, prices fell nearly 5 percent as traders remained unconvinced the move would do much to shrink supplies in the face of rising U.S. production.
"OPEC's market influence is highly questionable," said Antoine Halff, director of global oil markets at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy. "We spent seven years revising shale forecasts upward because it went up much faster than anyone expected."
The market's cold response underscored just how much clout the cartel has ceded to U.S. oil companies, which found ways to wring a lot more oil from the earth at a profit - even at low prices.
Survival of the fittest
Those ways include the super-spec rig operated by Williams and owned by the Houston oil field services company Patterson-UTI Energy.
This particular $25 million machine, churning about 100 miles northwest of Houston, in the Bryan-College Station metropolitan area, has drilling systems more powerful than two semi-trucks screaming down the highway, and it can force fluid down a well with more than 100 times the pressure of a fire hose.
All told, it's capable of supporting a fully-loaded Boeing 747, and it walks the dozen feet between well sites on four 10-ton feet. It can drill an oil well in less than 10 days, shaving more than a week from the average drilling time in 2010, and allowing oil companies to drill a greater number of wells each year.
The rig isn't a product of the technological explosion that spurred the five-year oil boom that ended in 2014, but of the natural selection of the two-year oil bust that followed. Its appearance here in a northern spot of the Eagle Ford Shale marks yet another seismic shift in the world of energy.
More than 550 oil companies had at least one rig drilling in the United States at the height of the oil boom, but the collapse of crude prices whittled that number down to 150 in 2016 in a cascade of job cuts and bankruptcies. Now, the number of companies plowing U.S. fields with at least one rig has grown to nearly 300, a sign the industry didn't capsize despite the brutal free-market forces that cost Texas 1 in 3 oil jobs.
Patterson-UTI and its competitors have dispatched hundreds of these upgraded super-spec rigs to oil fields in Texas, Oklahoma and North Dakota in recent months, at the behest of U.S. oil companies whose watchwords have become cost and efficiency. Inside the rig manager's office, a $1 bill hangs on a wall with the words "SAVE 1 A DAY!" scrawled across it in thick, emphatic ink.
Andy Hendricks, chief executive of Patterson, a tall man with graying hair, stood in a white hard hat and dark coveralls at the foot of the Apex XK drilling rig on a sunny day earlier this month. As the rig hummed and whirred like an airplane engine above the Eagle Ford Shale, Hendricks recalled how the dense shale rocks underfoot were once considered an obstacle in the oil patch, back when he was a petroleum engineering student at Texas A&M University in the late 1980s.
Now, after technological breakthroughs pioneered by oil field legend George Mitchell, those rocks might as well be pure gold.
Half the time
About a decade ago, after the first wells in the Barnett Shale in North Texas produced commercial levels of natural gas, some of Patterson's oil-company customers wanted to know if the same techniques would work in the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania. Patterson had to bring about 20 pumps from its operations around the Northeast - not to mention other equipment - and line them up to frack the first Marcellus well.
"When the first well came in, they were all happy," Hendricks said. The Marcellus became the dominant U.S. shale gas play.
Today, Patterson has about 100 super-spec rigs, machines with masts and substructures that have a load capacity of 750,000 pounds, a proxy for the amount of drill pipe a rig can manage. Right now, they're all scattered across the nation, working jobs in various oil patches.
After deep job cuts in the worst of the oil bust, Patterson has doubled its active rig count and has recruited back more than 1,000 people to work on its rigs and hydraulic fracturing trucks over the past year. And even though these rigs have become more and more automated, driven by increasingly advanced computer technology, there's so much work in the U.S. oil patch that Patterson has had to hire larger crews to work on each rig.
"There's more to do on the rig," Hendricks said.
For example, it now takes only 48 hours for the rig to fold like a lawn chair and break down into 46 truckloads to move to the next drilling location. That's down from four days, but doubling the speed requires more roughnecks to handle the workload.
Patterson's new hires include about 400 in its hydraulic fracturing business, after it activated four fleets of pumps, blenders, trucks and other equipment. The company, Hendricks said, has earmarked $145 million for technology upgrades this year that would bring dozens of its advanced rigs into the super-spec category, a term that originated among oil investors last year to refer to the fastest rigs in the U.S. fleet.
With the acquisition of Oklahoma drilling contractor Seventy Seven Energy this year, Patterson has become the second most-active U.S. drilling contractor behind Oklahoma's Helmerich & Payne. Twenty-two years ago, the Houston company, now with around 6,000 employees, began as a $16 million firm with 20 rigs and a small pressure pumping business, which provides hydraulic fracturing services to stimulate oil wells. It's now worth $4.7 billion and occupies a high perch in the two business - drilling and pressure pumping - at the epicenter of another potential shale boom.
Home, sweet home
Mark Siegel, Patterson's chairman, said Saudi Arabia meant to crush the U.S. shale industry when it decided against oil production cuts in November 2014, sending prices into free-fall under the weight of a global oversupply. U.S. oil production dropped by about 1 million barrels a day, but ultimately, Siegel said, OPEC's efforts failed to wipe out the companies pumping crude from shale oil fields, which adapted to lower oil prices.
"We've learned to become economic at $50 oil," Siegel said. "It looks as if we could produce more oil than the country has ever produced in its history."
The nation's active rig count has climbed from its recent low of 404 about a year ago to 901, according to Baker Hughes. With prices hovering around $50 a barrel and drillers mastering the feat of pumping more oil at lower costs, companies have sent new workers from the outskirts of Odessa and Midland in West Texas to even more remote fields in North Dakota.
Williams, the Patterson-UTI rig operator, recalled the first rig he saw, looming over his hometown of Midway 16 years ago. "I kept asking them what it did," recalled the former construction worker. "I figured I'd give it a shot."
Williams has been stationed in Laredo for the past few years, far from his home near College Station. But with drilling rigs now moving to the many different corners of the oil patch, he jumped at the chance to leave Laredo to drill in southeast Texas - at least, until the next oil company calls Patterson-UTI.
"I'm glad to be back home," he said, "for a little while."
http://www.realclearenergy.org/2017/05/29/big_rigs_pave_way_for_second_shale_oil_boom_283451.html
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May 29, 2017 | New York Times
By Paul Krugman
Donald Trump has two false beliefs about energy, one personal, one political. And the latter may send the world on a path to disaster.
On the personal side, Trump reportedly disdains exercise of any kind except golf. He believes that raising a sweat depletes the finite reserves of precious bodily fluids, I mean energy, that a person is born with, and should therefore be avoided.
Many years of acting on this belief may or may not explain the weird and embarrassing scene at the G-7 summit in Taormina, in which six of the advanced world’s leaders strolled together a few hundred yards through the historic city, but Trump followed behind, driven in an electric golf cart.
More consequential, however, is Trump’s false belief that lifting environmental restrictions — ending the supposed “war on coal” — will bring back the days when the coal-mining industry employed hundreds of thousands of blue-collar Americans.
How do we know that this belief is false? For one thing, coal employment began falling long before anyone was talking much about the environment, let alone global warming. In fact, coal jobs fell by two-thirds between 1948 and 1970, the year the Environmental Protection Agency was founded. This happened despite rising, not falling, coal production, mainly reflecting the replacement of old-fashioned pick-and-shovel mining with strip-mining and mountaintop removal, which require many fewer workers.
It’s true that in the past few years coal production has finally begun to fall, in part due to environmental rules. Mainly, however, coal is fading because of progress in other technologies. As one analyst put it last week, coal “doesn’t really make that much sense anymore as a feedstock,” given the rapidly falling costs of cleaner energy sources like natural gas, wind and solar power.
Who was that analyst? Gary Cohn, chairman of the National Economic Council — that is, Trump’s own chief economist. One wonders, however, whether he’s expressed those views — which pretty much represent the consensus among energy experts — to the president.
There was a time, not that long ago, when advocating clean energy was widely considered an impractical, counterculture sort of thing. Hippies on communes might talk about peace, love and solar energy; practical people knew that prosperity was all about digging stuff up and burning it. These days, however, those who take energy policy seriously see a future that belongs largely to renewables — and definitely not a future in which we keep burning lots of coal, let alone employ a lot of people digging it up.
But that’s not what voters from what used to be coal country want to hear. They enthusiastically backed Trump, who promised to bring those coal jobs back, even though his real agenda would punish those voters with savage cuts in programs they depend on. And Trump cares a lot more about public adulation than he does about serious policy advice.
Which brings me back to Trump’s European trip, which was remarkable not for what Trump did but for what he didn’t do.
First, in Brussels, he declined to endorse NATO’s Article 5, which says that an attack on any NATO member is an attack on all. In effect, he repudiated the central plank of America’s most important alliance. Why, it was almost as if he’s more interested in appeasing Vladimir Putin than he is in defending democracy.
Then, in Taormina, he was the only leader who refused to endorse the Paris climate accord, a global agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions that may be our last good chance to avoid catastrophic climate change. Why?
At this point, claims that trying to limit emissions would cause vast economic harm have lost all credibility: The same technological progress in alternative energy that is marginalizing coal would make the transition to a low-emissions economy far cheaper than anyone imagined a few years ago.
True, such a transition would accelerate the decline in coal. And that’s a reason to provide aid and new kinds of jobs for coal miners.
But Trump isn’t offering coal country real help, just a fantasy about turning back the clock. This fantasy won’t last for long: In a couple of years it will be obvious, whatever he does, that the coal jobs aren’t coming back. But the fantasy won’t even last that long if he goes along with the Paris accord.
So am I suggesting that the world’s most powerful leader might put the whole planet’s future at risk so that he can keep telling politically convenient lies, which will soon be exposed in any case? Yes. If you find this implausible, you must not have been reading the news the past few months.
Now, maybe Trump won’t really pull the plug on Paris; or maybe he’ll be gone from the scene before the damage is irreversible. But there’s a real possibility that last week was a pivotal moment in human history, the moment when an irresponsible leader sent the whole world careening off to hell in a golf cart.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/29/opinion/trump-g-7-summit-energy.html?_r=0
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Some Railroads Are Not Ready to Meet a Safety System Deadline
May 28, 2017 | McClatchy (In The Daily World)
By Curtis Tate
Four of the nation’s commuter railroads are not on track to meet an end-of-next-year deadline to fully implement a collision-avoidance system Congress required nearly a decade ago.
Three of the country’s largest freight railroads will not be able to finish their systems until 2020, according to reports filed this month with the Federal Railroad Administration.
That’s in spite of lawmakers extending the original deadline for completing positive train control, originally December 2015, to December 2018. A spending bill lawmakers approved earlier this month included $199 million in funding to help the commuter railroads get the equipment installed on locomotives and track, and to train employees.
The system automatically slows or stop trains to prevent collisions and to prevent trains from taking curves too fast. It also slows or stop trains when railroad workers are present.
“It’s moving incredibly slowly,” said Sarah Feinberg, who was a Federal Railroad Administration chief in the Obama administration. “That money should be going out the door.”
While the railroads expressed confidence in meeting the requirements, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., one of the industry’s sharpest critics, said he was “deeply concerned that we’re going to see deja vu all over again.”
In the months leading up to the original 2015 deadline, the railroads threatened to shut down until Congress granted the extension.
“The history here is that the railroads seek one delay after another,” Blumenthal said.
Railroads have cited technological and legal complexities for the delays in rolling out the technology on 60,000 miles of track. Freight carriers have also cited cost as a factor. To date, they’ve spent about $8 billion of their own funds on PTC deployment.
Passenger railroads will wind up spending an estimated $3.5 billion on their systems. They’re getting help from the federal government in the form of grants and loans.
Most railroads will have their PTC systems complete by the end of next year. Six railroads, however, won’t have PTC fully implemented until 2020: the three freight railroads and three commuter lines:
—Canadian National, a large Canadian freight carrier with extensive operations in the central U.S.
—CSX, the largest freight carrier in the Eastern U.S. and host railroad for Amtrak and commuter lines.
—Norfolk Southern, the primary rival to CSX in the East and also a host of Amtrak and commuter trains.
— Chicago’s Metra, the country’s fourth largest commuter-rail system.
—Boston’s Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, the country’s sixth largest commuter-rail system.
—Florida’s SunRail, a commuter line that serves the Orlando, Fla., area.
Trinity Railway Express, a commuter railroad that connects Fort Worth and Dallas, will have its system complete in 2019.
A collision between a Metrolink commuter train and a Union Pacific freight train in southern California in 2008 that killed 25 people was the impetus for Congress to pass the Rail Safety Improvement Act, the law that required the safety system.
The National Transportation Safety Board had been calling for such a system since 1970.
Additional accidents since Congress required positive train control have only increased the sense of urgency for installing it.
An Amtrak train derailed in Philadelphia in 2015, killing eight passengers. The train had sped into a 50 mph curve at more than 100 mph.
In the Bronx in 2013, a Metro-North Commuter train derailed on a 30 mph curve at 82 mph. Four passengers were killed.
“We cannot have delays getting commuter railroads the money they need,” Feinberg said.
Metro-North and Amtrak will have PTC ready by the end of next year, according to their most recent progress reports.
Jessica Kahanek, a spokeswoman for the Association of American Railroads, the industry’s principal advocacy group in Washington, said the nation’s largest freight carriers were all on schedule to have their PTC systems installed by the 2018 deadline, though the law allows carriers until 2020 to make the systems fully operational.
Richard White, acting president and CEO of the American Public Transportation Association, which represents commuter railroads and transit systems, said in February that commuter railroads were making “significant progress” on installing PTC.
Rob Doolittle, a spokesman for Florida-based CSX, said the railroad would have all the necessary technology deployed by the end of 2018 and a fully operational system in place in 2020.
https://www.thedailyworld.com/news/some-railroads-are-not-ready-to-meet-a-safety-system-deadline/
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Top Dem: Trump’s Refusal to Back Climate Deal a ‘Striking Abdication of American Leadership’
May 29, 2017 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Jessie Hellmann
Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) on Monday said President Trump's refusal to affirm the Paris climate agreement represents a "striking abdication of American leadership."
"The United States worked hard to bring other nations onboard in 2015 to pledge limits to the carbon pollution that is changing weather patterns and dirtying the air that our children breathe. Now, this President is willfully undermining America's global role, which puts Americans' safety and economic security at risk," Hoyer said in a statement.
"I urge him to right the ship and take steps to reassure our allies that we stand by our NATO commitments without qualification and that we will continue to join them in the work of mitigating climate change," Hoyer said on Monday.
Trump last Saturday refused to participate with his Group of 7 (G7) counterparts in a pledge of support for the 195-nation Paris climate deal.
While on his first foreign trip as president last week, several European leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel tried to encourage Trump to stay in the agreement, The Associated Press reports.
Merkel, speaking at a campaign event Saturday, said Germany can no longer rely on the U.S. under Trump.
"The entire discussion about climate was very difficult, if not to say very dissatisfying," she told reporters.
"There are no indications whether the United States will stay in the Paris Agreement or not."
Trump tweeted last week that he would make his final decision this week, but multiple reports indicate the president will pull the U.S. out of the Paris agreement on climate change, a 2015 pact aimed at reducing carbon emissions signed by nearly 200 nations.
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/335530-hoyer-trumps-refusal-to-back-climate-deal-a-striking-abdication-of
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Can the Paris Climate Deal Survive a Trump-Style Renegotiation?
May 26, 2017 | New York Times
By Brad Plumer
As President Trump ponders whether the United States should stay in or leave the Paris climate agreement, many of his closest allies and advisers have been urging him to keep the country in but “renegotiate” the deal to better reflect his energy policies.
In the short run, that compromise might satisfy leaders in Europe and elsewhere who are lobbying heavily for the United States to remain in the Paris accord, lest other nations also race for the exits. But it is still unclear what new terms the White House might demand as a condition of staying.
Some observers worry that the Trump administration, by remaining in the deal, could undermine it from within, refusing to take any significant steps on climate change and bogging down the global push for more ambitious action.
“I think you can make a strong case that the world would be better off if the United States just left,” said Luke Kemp, a climate expert at Australian National University who made this case recently in an article for Nature Climate Change. “They can do more damage within the talks than by leaving outright.”
One leading proponent of the renegotiation strategy has been Representative Kevin Cramer, a North Dakota Republican and a Trump energy adviser during the campaign.
“It seems to be very important to a lot of other countries for us to stay in Paris,” Mr. Cramer said in a recent interview. “But if they really think we’re the hinge-pin of this deal, then that gives us a lot of leverage to change the terms.”
So what would it mean for the Trump administration to remain in but try to reshape the Paris deal?
The broad outlines of the accord, agreed to by 195 countries in 2015, are no longer up for revision. Every country is required to submit a voluntary pledge to curb its greenhouse-gas emissions over time. Nations will then meet regularly to assess their progress and pressure each other to intensify action in an attempt to keep the overall global temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. They will also haggle over issues like aid to poorer countries or how to compensate nations for “loss and damage” caused by a rise in sea level and other climate impacts.
If Mr. Trump decides to keep the United States in, however, he will have leeway to scale back its commitments, because those pledges are largely nonbinding. President Barack Obama vowed to cut domestic greenhouse gas emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. With the Trump administration repealing domestic regulations like the Clean Power Plan, it is highly unlikely the United States will meet that goal, and the White House can either ignore the pledge or submit a new, less stringent one.
Mr. Obama also pledged $3 billion in aid to help poorer countries scale up clean energy and adapt to global warming under the United Nations-based Green Climate Fund — and $1 billion was paid in before he left office. That promise, too, is most likely dead: Mr. Trump’s recent budget proposal would eliminate any further payments to the fund.
One potential risk is that these rollbacks could sap any momentum for stronger global climate action. “Developing countries were counting on that aid as a condition of participating,” said David G. Victor, professor of international relations at the University of California, San Diego. “The concern is that they’d become less amenable to working together in the future and the whole machinery gets gummed up.”
But Mr. Cramer argues that the United States could play a constructive role in future talks, just on different terms. Rather than emphasizing the importance of pollution restrictions for tackling climate change, the Trump administration might work with China and other nations to promote certain low-carbon technologies, like nuclear power or more efficient coal plants. Or the United States could push to export more natural gas to China to displace its coal. A similar substitution has helped lower emissions in the United States.
“If we’re at the table, we have a much better chance of being able to partner with other countries or export U.S. technologies that could help provide solutions,” Mr. Cramer said. He argued that by staying in the Paris accord, the United States could provide a counterweight to European countries that place a greater emphasis on promoting renewable energy. A number of American coal and oil companies have asked the Trump administration to stick with the Paris deal for just these reasons.
Outside experts say it is at least possible to imagine situations in which the Trump administration works to make headway on emissions within the Paris deal. Paul Bledsoe, a former Clinton White House aide, points out that the Trump administration could, in theory, work more closely with China to develop carbon capture technology for its large number of coal plants, something in which some Trump aides have signaled an interest.
The United States could also try to pressure China to further bolster its national goal on greenhouse gases. China’s current pledge aims for the country to reach peak emissions by 2030, but many analysts now believe it can easily beat that target as demand for new coal wanes.
“There are definitely opportunities for the United States to try to improve international climate efforts,” Mr. Bledsoe said. “The question is whether they actually care.” As reason for skepticism on that score, he pointed out that Mr. Trump’s latest budget proposal would make deep cuts to research funding for nuclear energy and carbon capture. “That’s hard to square with the idea that they’re really serious about a more technology-focused approach.”
Others, like Mr. Kemp, fear that the Trump administration, which frequently plays down the threat of global warming, has no interest in assuming a constructive role in climate talks and could bog down future discussions on things like how to review and strengthen individual national pledges.
By contrast, he argues, other countries could actually be galvanized into taking even stronger action if the United States left altogether.
“I worry that letting the United States just stay in the agreement and do whatever it wants could show how weak Paris is,” Mr. Kemp said. “It sends the message that the agreement is more about symbolism than action.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/climate/can-the-paris-climate-deal-survive-a-trump-style-renegotiation.html?_r=0
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