Preview Newsletter
Paris Accord
-
Trump Announces U.S. Withdrawal From Paris Climate Accord
Jun 8, 2017 | NPR
By Camila Domonske and Colin Dwyer
President Trump has announced that the U.S. will be withdrawing from the Paris accord — the historic global agreement reached by 195 countries in 2015 to set targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and limiting the rise in average global temperatures. -
US mayors, governors vow to stick with Paris accord
Jun 2, 2017 | CNN
By Dakin Andone and Nicole Chavez
President Donald Trump's announcement Thursday that the United States was withdrawing from the Paris climate accord was met with defiance from governors and dozens of mayors who vowed to continue to honor the goals of the accord to reduce global warming. -
The U.S. Can’t Leave the Paris Climate Deal Just Yet
Jun 7, 2017 | The New York TImes
By Brad Plumer
Last week, President Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. But it will take more than one speech to pull out: Under the rules of the deal, which the White House says it will follow, the earliest any country can leave is Nov. 4, 2020. That means the United States will remain a party to the accord for nearly all of Mr. Trump’s current term, and it could still try to influence the climate talks during that span. -
Trump’s Paris Agreement withdrawal: What it means and what comes next
Jun 1, 2017 | Brookings
By William A. Galston, Samantha Gross, Mark Muro, Timmons Roberts, Rahul Tongia, David Victor, Philip A. Wallach, Rebecca Winthrop, Christina Kwauk, Nathan Hultman, Todd Stern, and Vinod Thomas
Today, President Donald Trump announced that he will withdraw the United States from the landmark Paris Agreement on climate change. It was adopted in 2015 by 195 nations, with 147 ratifying it—including the United States, which is the world’s second largest greenhouse gas emitter. Brookings experts offer their analyses on what the decision could mean and what comes next. -
Trump’s reasons for leaving the Paris climate agreement just don’t add up
Jun 1, 2017 | The Washington Post
By Chris Mooney
President Trump railed against the Paris climate agreement in the White House Rose Garden on Thursday, but it was hard to reconcile his description of the climate accord with the real one. -
Paris Accord Withdrawal Announcement
Jun 1, 2017 | The Situation Room with Wolf Blizter
By Wolf Blitzer
breaking news in a and a stunning move putting the nuns opposition to the rest of the world. president trump announced he is pulling the u.s. out of a nearly 200-nation paris accord aimed at limiting global warming. the move fulfills a campaign pledge and will find favor among his base especially in coal mining case and other hard hit areas of the economy. -
Why did Trump pull out of the Paris Accord?
Jun 2, 2017 | The 11th Hour With Brian Williams
By Michael Crowley
well, you know, this guy doesn't give up, brian. you know, maybe we are going to talk about the climate deal, the paris acard in the next segment. i think part of what was appealing to trump about pulling out of that paris accord was it was something he could unilaterally. trump is the chief executive. your jaws are all on the floor. just watch me because i did it. as opposed to health care reform, tax reform, where he has to go through the congress. it's boring, there are people challenging him and making it complicated. that's not how he likes to operate. i think with the travel ban it is a similar thing. he can do this by fiat. although he is fighting with the courts it is a not a long messy legislative process. i think he is going to keep ramming his head and try to get this done because it's something he can do in unilateral way and i think that's appealing to him.
Traditional Media
Broadcast Media
-
Trump Announces U.S. Withdrawal From Paris Climate Accord
Jun 8, 2017 | NPR
By Camila Domonske and Colin Dwyer
President Trump has announced that the U.S. will be withdrawing from the Paris accord — the historic global agreement reached by 195 countries in 2015 to set targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and limiting the rise in average global temperatures.
During a news conference Thursday in the Rose Garden at the White House, Trump said the withdrawal is aimed at keeping his campaign promise to put American workers first. But he added that the U.S. would begin negotiations to possibly re-enter the Paris accord or a similar deal that, he said, would result in a better deal for American workers.POLITICSTrump's Speech On Paris Climate Agreement Withdrawal, AnnotatedTHE TWO-WAYSo What Exactly Is In The Paris Climate Accord?
"The agreement is a massive redistribution of United States' wealth to other countries," Trump said. "It's to give their country an economic edge over the United States. That's not going to happen while I'm president. I'm sorry."
He later added: "Our withdrawal from the agreement represents a reassertion of American workers' sovereignty."
During his campaign, Trump vowed to "cancel" U.S. participation in the deal. World leaders and business figures had recently urged him to reconsider, but by Wednesday morning, reports began to surface that Trump had decided to leave the pact.
Barack Obama had used his authority as president to join the Paris accord without a vote in Congress. That means Trump can remove the U.S. from the accord without a vote. But it will take awhile: Under the terms of the agreement, he wouldn't actually be able to withdraw until November 2020.
Leaving the underlying treaty — the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change — would be faster and could be completed within a year. But that treaty was ratified by the U.S. Senate. Presidents have unilaterally exited Senate-ratified treaties before, but it's rare and controversial.
Urged to stay, urged to leave
A wide chorus of voices had called for Trump to recommit to the Paris agreement: other world leaders and hundreds of scientists, of course, but also CEOs of major energy companies and other big U.S. corporations. Even many of Trump's own advisers support the deal, according to The New York Times.
But those supporting a departure won out. More than 20 Republican senators had called for Trump to leave the deal. Influential Trump advisers, reportedly Steve Bannon and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, also urged him to withdraw.ENVIRONMENT5 Things That Could Change When The U.S. Leaves The Paris Climate DealENVIRONMENTEnergy Companies Urge Trump To Remain In Paris Climate Agreement
And then, of course, there was the argument advanced by candidate Trump. On the campaign trail, he criticized the agreement that the U.S. formally signed on to last year. He called the deal "unfair" to the U.S., objecting in particular to the requirement that wealthy nations help developing countries build renewable energy sources.
He remained consistent with those criticisms Thursday.
"I cannot in good conscience support a deal that punishes the United States, which is what it does, while imposing no meaningful obligations on the world's leading polluters," Trump said — singling out China and India by name.
"In short, the agreement doesn't eliminate coal jobs, it just transfers those jobs out of America and the United States and ships them to foreign countries," he added. "This agreement is less about the climate and more about other countries gaining a financial advantage over the United States."
Though in his announcement Trump referred to himself as "someone who cares deeply about the environment," he has signaled, more broadly, that fighting climate change is not a priority for his administration. He has denied the existence of climate change and appointed as the head of the EPA a man who doesn't accept the overwhelming scientific consensus that humans are causing global warming by releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And he has already overturned several Obama-era efforts to reduce emissions.
A hard-fought diplomatic agreement
The Paris accord was reached in 2015 after lengthy negotiations. The deal relies on voluntary cuts in emissions by all member nations.
The agreement also, significantly, sets a global target to keep the rise in the average temperature to no higher than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. And it calls for some $100 billion a year in funding from developed countries toward developing countries to support green energy sources.
Still, it fell short of what some parties had hoped for. Island nations — which face an existent threat from rising seawaters — had pushed hard for a target of 1.5 degrees Celsius. (Why not even lower? Well, as of 2015, the global average temperature had already risen by 1 degree Celsius, and even with robust efforts to cut emissions, some further increase is essentially inevitable.)
And the agreement relies on voluntary cuts in emissions, seen by some critics as a major weakness.
Still, the fact that the world managed to agree on a target was celebrated as a diplomatic achievement, one that multiple world leaders have emphasized as crucial to support. After the recent G-7 meetings of leading industrial nations, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and vocally supported her commitment to action on climate change.GOATS AND SODAThey Need Millions — Make That Billions — To Cope With Climate Change
Modi said failing to act on climate change would be "a morally criminal act." Merkel had previously vowed to "convince the doubters" among world leaders that "protecting the climate matters to all of us."
The doubters are in the minority. Only two countries — Syria and Nicaragua — have completely rejected the deal.
Several dozen countries have signed but not fully approved — including Iran, Turkey and, most significantly, Russia, which is a major emitter of greenhouse gases. But three-quarters of the countries on Earth have fully committed to the accord.
A pact in name or in deed?
It is important to note that the Paris accord is only as strong as each nation's actual reduction in emissions. That means leaving the agreement isn't the only way to weaken it: Trump could have kept the U.S. as a signatory but continued to slash the programs that would actually make it possible to reach the target for emissions.
The opposite is also true: U.S. greenhouse gas emissions could continue to go down, at least in the short term, even as Trump withdraws from the accord.
As NPR's Christopher Joyce recently reported, emissions in the U.S. have declined by about 12 percent since 2005.ENVIRONMENTMarket Forces May Impact Emissions More Than Climate AgreementsListen· 3:38QueueToggle more options" style="display: flex; align-items: center; min-height: 35px; width: 110px; margin-top: 14px; padding: 5px 10px; border-width: 1px; border-style: solid; border-color: rgb(68, 68, 68); background: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: rgb(153, 153, 153); font-size: 1.2rem; cursor: text; user-select: all;">
"The U.S. has successfully bent its greenhouse gas emissions curve," Kate Larsen, of the economics research team Rhodium Group, told Christopher. "And we are going to continue to reduce emissions over the next 10 years, likely regardless of Trump policy."
But while the Paris accord isn't synonymous with U.S. emissions cuts, that doesn't mean Trump's decision on the accord is meaningless.
Economist Marc Hafstead, who is with Resources for the Future, told Christopher that exiting the deal "could potentially have political ramifications — to the extent that our pulling out of the agreement is going to cause other countries to do less."
It would also threaten the $100 billion a year pledged to help developing countries achieve emissions cuts, as Bloomberg has reported.
Meanwhile, many analysts see a U.S. departure from the deal as paving the way for China to take the lead on climate change.
It's not just a question of intangible moral leadership or even of the potential profits from green energy that would be on the table. The Atlantic reported last year that a U.S. departure would likely result in less-transparent mechanisms for actually enforcing the Paris accord — because Chinese "faulty and unreliable energy statistics" could play a prominent role.
By staying in the deal, the U.S. would have kept a spot at the negotiating table — and potential influence over how the agreement is enforced.
Reaction in the U.S.
Obama decried Trump's decision in a statement released Thursday.
"The nations that remain in the Paris Agreement will be the nations that reap the benefits in jobs and industries created," the former president said.
He added: "I believe the United States of America should be at the front of the pack. But even in the absence of American leadership; even as this Administration joins a small handful of nations that reject the future; I'm confident that our states, cities, and businesses will step up and do even more to lead the way, and help protect for future generations the one planet we've got." FollowScott Detrow ✔@scottdetrow
President Obama responds on Paris decision3:39 PM - 1 Jun 2017 1,2721,272 Retweets 1,8571,857 likesTwitter Ads info and privacy
John Kerry, Obama's secretary of state and a key player in crafting the Paris agreement, also denounced the U.S. withdrawal as "a self-destructive step that puts our nation last."
"This is an unprecedented forfeiture of American leadership which will cost us influence, cost us jobs, and invite other countries to walk away from solving humanity's most existential crisis," he said in a statement Thursday. "It isolates the United States after we had united the world."View image on Twitter FollowMatt Viser ✔@mviser
Just in from John Kerry: "The President who promised 'America First'" has taken a self-destructive step that puts our nation last.”3:48 PM - 1 Jun 2017 214214 Retweets 210210 likesTwitter Ads info and privacy
Even before Trump announced his final decision, Democrats in the U.S. decried withdrawal as "a low point in modern American leadership," as Rep. John Garamendi, D-Calif., put it.
On Wednesday, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., wrote on Twitter that it would be "catastrophic for the President to cede our leadership on this issue."
Some Republicans in Congress, including several representing districts particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, also rebuked reports of Trump's decision. "Climate change is a serious issue," tweeted Rep. Vern Buchanan of Florida — with a photo of development near a Florida beach.
In a tweet Thursday, Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk announced that Trump's withdrawal from the deal means Musk will be withdrawing, as well — from the president's business advisory council. FollowElon Musk ✔@elonmusk
Am departing presidential councils. Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.4:02 PM - 1 Jun 2017 234,983234,983 Retweets 546,362546,362 likesTwitter Ads info and privacy
But GOP Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma strongly defended the decision to leave the accord.
"The main thing is, it's something that we couldn't do; it'd be impossible to do," he told Here & Now. "It's necessary, then, to make sure that we don't have a bunch of people out there suing us because we're not doing what the president said we're supposed to do."
And in a statement, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy applauded the move, calling it the "right call":
"The previous Administration refused to recognize that private innovation and American natural gas have achieved more than government mandates and misguided international agreements — and that naiveté led President Obama to sign a climate deal that will impose great costs with little gain. President Trump made the right call in leaving a deal that would have put an unnecessary burden on the United States."
Reaction from beyond U.S. borders
Immediately after Trump's speech, France, Germany and Italy issued a joint statement announcing that the accord could not be renegotiated, as Trump said he would try to do.
French President Emmanuel Macron spoke to Trump briefly by phone, expressing that fact directly to him and saying France would no longer be working with the U.S. on climate issues, The Associated Press reports.
A spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called Trump's decision "a major disappointment for global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote global security."
"The Secretary-General remains confident that cities, states and businesses within the United States — along with other countries — will continue to demonstrate vision and leadership by working for the low-carbon, resilient economic growth that will create quality jobs and markets for 21st century prosperity," the spokesman said in a statement.
The United States' northern neighbor weighed in as well.
"Canada is deeply disappointed at the U.S. position," the country's environment minister, Catherine McKenna, told reporters Thursday. "The Paris agreement is a good deal for Canada, and it's a good deal for the world. No one country can stop action on climate change."
-
US mayors, governors vow to stick with Paris accord
Jun 2, 2017 | CNN
By Dakin Andone and Nicole Chavez
(CNN)President Donald Trump's announcement Thursday that the United States was withdrawing from the Paris climate accord was met with defiance from governors and dozens of mayors who vowed to continue to honor the goals of the accord to reduce global warming.StatesGovernors who have proclaimed their continued support for the accord include:-- Charlie Baker, Massachusetts-- Jerry Brown, California-- Kate Brown, Oregon-- Andrew Cuomo, New York-- John Hickenlooper, Colorado-- David Y. Ige, Hawaii-- Jay Inslee, Washington-- Dannel P. Malloy, Connecticut-- Terry McAuliffe, Virginia-- Gina M. Raimondo, Rhode Island"California will resist this misguided and insane course of action," Brown said in a prepared statement.Related: Top CEOs tell the CEO president: You're wrong on ParisCitiesA group of 61 mayors said they "will adopt, honor, and uphold the commitments to the goals enshrined in the Paris Agreement."The group includes:-- Mayor Martin J. Walsh, Boston-- Bill de Blasio, New York City-- Rahm Emanuel, Chicago-- Eric Garcetti, Los Angeles-- Jim Kenney, Philadelphia-- Mitch Landrieu, New Orleans-- Ed Murray, SeattleSome of them also decided to show their support by lighting up their city hall buildings Thursday night.View image on Twitter FollowMayor Marty Walsh ✔@marty_walsh
City Hall is green tonight. Boston stands with the environment. We must protect our future. #ParisAccord10:05 PM - 1 Jun 2017 13,74513,745 Retweets 39,34139,341 likesTwitter Ads info and privacy"City Hall is green tonight. Boston stands with the environment. We must protect our future. #ParisAccord," Walsh wrote on Twitter.View image on Twitter FollowBill de Blasio ✔@NYCMayor
City Hall shines green tonight because New York City will honor the goals of the #ParisAgreement.10:14 PM - 1 Jun 2017 8,7158,715 Retweets 30,17730,177 likesTwitter Ads info and privacy"City Hall shines green tonight because New York City will honor the goals of the #ParisAgreement," de Blasio said.Climate Alliances formThe governors of California, New York and Washington State created the United States Climate Alliance to convene states upholding the Paris Agreement and those "taking aggressive action on climate change," they said in a statement.US buildings light up in solidarity with Paris climate accord"This administration is abdicating its leadership and taking a backseat to other countries in the global fight against climate change," Cuomo said.The alliance plans to promote the sharing of information, environmental best practices and also "implement new programs to reduce carbon emissions from all sectors of the economy.""While the President's actions are a shameful rebuke to the work needed to protect our planet for our children and grandchildren, states have been and will continue to step up," Inslee said.
-
The U.S. Can’t Leave the Paris Climate Deal Just Yet
Jun 7, 2017 | The New York TImes
By Brad Plumer
Last week, President Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. But it will take more than one speech to pull out: Under the rules of the deal, which the White House says it will follow, the earliest any country can leave is Nov. 4, 2020. That means the United States will remain a party to the accord for nearly all of Mr. Trump’s current term, and it could still try to influence the climate talks during that span.
So the next four years will be a busy time for climate policy. Mr. Trump’s aides plan to keep working to dismantle domestic climate programs like the Clean Power Plan. And the world’s nations will meet regularly to hash out details of the Paris agreement, even as the United States’ exit looms. Here is what comes next.November 2017
Negotiators for 195 nations will meet in Bonn, Germany, to discuss how to carry out the Paris agreement. Every country has already submitted an initial pledge for curbing greenhouse gas emissions. But officials now have to write rules for monitoring and verifying those pledges.
Technically, the United States is still the co-chair of a key committee on transparency measures. In the past, American officials have taken a keen interest in this topic, pushing for robust oversight of emissions. By contrast, countries like China have argued for looser scrutiny for developing nations.Continue reading the main story
AdvertisementContinue reading the main story
Mr. Trump has offered to “renegotiate” the Paris deal, because he says other countries are “laughing at us” while they renege on their pledges. While countries like France and Germany have ruled out a broad renegotiation of the agreement, the United States could nonetheless try to shape the rules from within.
“The question is whether the Trump administration still shows up for those discussions,” said Andrew Light, a senior climate change adviser at the State Department under President Barack Obama. “If they really are pushing to ‘renegotiate’ the deal, as they say, I don’t see why they wouldn’t go.”
Another thing to watch this fall: a growing coalition of states, cities and companies that are pledging to do as much as they can to meet the United States’ climate goals on their own. They will probably send a delegation to Bonn to reassure other countries that the United States is not completely out of the game.November 2018
Everyone agrees that current pledges under the Paris agreement are nowhere near sufficient to keep total global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius, the threshold widely deemed unacceptably risky.
So, starting in 2018, countries have agreed to meet every five years to take stock of their emissions-cutting efforts to date, compare them with what is needed to stay below 2 degrees of warming, and then figure out how to ratchet up their ambitions. As part of this effort, countries will urge one another to make their existing pledges on emissions stronger. The Paris deal was meant to work through peer pressure, and experts say this “global stocktake” exercise is crucial for that.
The United States is also free to join these discussions, but it seems unlikely that the Trump administration will submit a stronger pledge. Some experts also fear that the United States could play a spoiler role in these discussions, in much the way that major oil producers like Saudi Arabia or Russia have done in the past.Nov. 4, 2019
This is the earliest date that the United States can submit a written notice to the United Nations that it is withdrawing from the Paris deal — exactly three years after it came into force. As soon as that happens, the United States can leave the accord in exactly one year. (The Trump administration could also change its mind at any point beforehand and decide to stay in.)Nov. 4, 2020
This is the earliest that the United States could officially withdraw from the climate accord. By coincidence, it would happen one day after the next presidential election.
Also by 2020, other countries are scheduled to offer new or updated commitments for how they plan to tackle climate change under the Paris deal. One question is whether the American exit might make these plans weaker than they otherwise would be. “My biggest worry is the corrosive effect on global ambitions,” said Elliot Diringer, executive vice president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions.PhotoPresident Barack Obama on Dec. 12, 2015, the day representatives from 195 nations approved the Paris climate accord. CreditPool photo by Dennis Brack
The Obama administration originally pledged that the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions would fall roughly 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. Emissions are currently about 12 percent below 2005 levels, and it remains uncertain how much further they will fall. The Trump administration is scrapping federal climate policies like the Clean Power Plan, but many states are pushing to expand renewable energy and shift away from coal power. If the United States comes close to its 2020 target, experts say, that may help persuade other countries in Paris not to scale back their own efforts.January 2021
If a new president enters the White House on Jan. 20, 2021, he or she could easily submit a written notice to the United Nations that the United States would like to rejoin the Paris accord. Within 30 days, the United States could re-enter the agreement and submit a new pledge for how the country plans to tackle climate change.Newsletter Sign UpContinue reading the main storyInterested in Climate Change?
Sign up to receive our in-depth journalism about climate change around the world.Sign UpReceive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services.PRIVACY POLICY OPT OUT OR CONTACT US ANYTIME
If the United States does rejoin Paris, however, it could take time to regain the credibility it once had within climate discussions. “Other countries are certainly going to wonder if the American political system is just too volatile to be relied on for consistency on this issue,” Mr. Light said.November 2023
Negotiators will meet again in 2023 to see how their second round of pledges and actions stack up against the 2-degree goal. The idea is that they will continually increase their ambitions and meet every five years to adjust accordingly.2025
The Obama administration vowed to cut greenhouse gas emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025 as part of the Paris deal. Even before Mr. Trump came into office, that target would have been difficult to reach without new policies, and it may prove unattainable now.
Other countries will be watching how close the United States may come. A recent analysis by the Rhodium Group estimated that United States emissions will now most likely fall 15 to 19 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, when taking into account both the effects of Mr. Trump’s policies and initiatives that states are pursuing.
But emissions could fall further if technologies like electric cars or solar power proliferate faster than expected, or if Congress or a new administration enacts additional policies, like a price on carbon. All of those factors could influence what actions other countries decide to take on climate change.
-
Trump’s Paris Agreement withdrawal: What it means and what comes next
Jun 1, 2017 | Brookings
By William A. Galston, Samantha Gross, Mark Muro, Timmons Roberts, Rahul Tongia, David Victor, Philip A. Wallach, Rebecca Winthrop, Christina Kwauk, Nathan Hultman, Todd Stern, and Vinod Thomas
oday, President Donald Trump announced that he will withdraw the United States from the landmark Paris Agreement on climate change. It was adopted in 2015 by 195 nations, with 147 ratifying it—including the United States, which is the world’s second largest greenhouse gas emitter. Brookings experts offer their analyses on what the decision could mean and what comes next.
William Galston: President Trump’s advisers may have suggested that withdrawing from the Paris climate accord would be a popular move. This is what they told him about the firing of FBI Director James Comey, and he seems to have believed it. This could become yet another self-inflicted wound, because vast majorities of Americans want to remain in the Paris accord, including many of Trump’s own supporters.
In a survey of registered voters taken just weeks after the 2016 election, 69 percent said that the United States should participate in the agreement. This figure included 86 percent of Democrats, 61 percent of Independents, and 51 percent of Republicans. By a margin of 40 to 34 percent, even a plurality of self-described conservative Republicans backed the agreement.
The administration has argued that the Paris Agreement is “unfair” because large polluting countries such as India and China are not required to do anything until 2030. The voters don’t buy this argument. Two-thirds of them—79 percent of Democrats, 56 percent of Independents, and 51 percent of Republicans—say that the United States should reduce its greenhouse gas emissions regardless of what other countries do.
This piece is excerpted from a longer blog post, read more: Paris Agreement enjoys more support than Donald Trump
Samantha Gross: The Trump administration’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement is a huge foreign policy blunder that will reverberate through our relationships with our allies. During the negotiation process, the United States pushed to make the agreement flexible to bring all countries on board and to keep them in the fold even if their situations and priorities changed. This flexibility means that our withdrawal would be completely unnecessary—the administration could have remained party to the agreement while still pursuing its policy goals.
Abdicating U.S. responsibility in climate change mitigation and the coming clean energy transition is likely to make other international negotiations more challenging, particularly with respect to trade. Our withdrawal also opens up a geopolitical space in climate leadership that may or may not be filled. The United States was a crucial force in bringing the Paris Agreement to fruition, especially in bringing China into the fold. Chinese President Xi Jinping expressed strong support for the Paris Agreement, and globalization in general, in his keynote address in Davos this January. Might China be looking to fill the leadership role that the United States is vacating?
Finally, the United States has been the major voice pushing for transparency and verification of compliance with nations’ stated goals, or Nationally Determined Contributions, throughout the process that led to the Paris Agreement. The measurement and reporting portions of the agreement are to be negotiated and put into place from now through 2020. U.S. leadership in this process will be sorely missed and implementation of the agreement may suffer in our absence.
Read more: Far from the White House, the energy industry remains focused on climate
Nate Hultman: The decision itself is a major error. The loss of American leadership hurts the ability of the international community to reach our scientifically grounded, global, long-term goals for reducing emissions to safer levels, and the president’s choice to lead the country back toward a 19th century energy economy will likely prove to be ill-conceived and bad for the American economy.
The decision also goes against the advice most of the country’s business elite. In his justification of the withdrawal, Trump cast Paris—a nonbinding structure to encourage international action on climate—as an unfair and heavily oppressive deal, and as the fount of phantasmagorical ills such as joblessness, economic stagnation, and trainloads of cash en route to a tricky cabal of conspirator states, including our allies. None of these claims is true or based on reputable analysis. To emphasize just two points, in contrast to Trump’s assertions, the structure of Paris means that nobody else dictates what the U.S.’s own goals should be, and China and India have indeed made significant commitments to emissions reduction and clean energy, which they are likely to meet or even exceed.
The piece is excerpted from a longer blog post, read more: The galvanized world response to Trump’s Paris Agreement decision
Mark Muro: My take is at once crestfallen and cautiously optimistic.
Without doubt Trump’s withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement represents a tragic, rash error in judgment. In diplomatic and moral terms, the withdrawal represents a willful abdication of America’s leadership role in the world. And as a business mistake, the decision means the U.S. will miss out on some the $1.4 trillion global business opportunity that the global low-carbon economy represents. That the limited binding force of the agreement is nil makes the whole drama unnecessary and therefore even more distressing.
With that said, I believe that progress will continue. Internationally, other leaders—maybe India, maybe China—will assert themselves to fill the vacuum created by U.S. retreat.
Domestically, the problem isn’t so much the withdrawal from Paris as the more general problem of Trump’s efforts to actively dismantle U.S. climate policy at the federal level. And here, while there is much to worry about, including draconian cuts to the entire suite of clean energy innovation and deployment programs, there are real grounds for compensatory optimism. Ambitious state-level policies will continue to support the transition to a cleaner energy system. And for that matter, so will the increasingly impressive efforts of municipalities and businesses. Beyond that, there are signs that state and local actions may ratchet up as federalism allows states and cities to push back against federal irresponsibility and fill some gaps, even if their efforts are no substitute for a cohesive national stance.
To that extent, at least for the near term, the largest problem isn’t the withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. It’s President Trump and continued climate denialism in Washington.
Read more: Clean energy’s shifting reality: Venture capital recedes, but what’s next
Timmons Roberts: Why would the Trump administration take on this hail of criticism from home and abroad? Elsewhere, I’ve argued that Paris is not an “America second- or third-” agreement, as EPA Director Scott Pruitt has claimed. To the contrary, it is non-binding and has no enforcement mechanism if countries don’t meet their emissions targets. Trump has wavered on a number of other issues, but climate change was apparently one of the few where he wanted to stick to his campaign promise. Most explanations of this so far have been inadequate, and the issue needs serious investigation.
As with all Trump administration decisions, it is difficult to attribute causation, but the fact that the Paris Agreement is even being disputed, and the huge political capital expended by the White House to pull out, for me boils down to a two-decades-long campaign by the oil, coal, and gas industries. These actors started sowing the seeds of doubt about the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change with a 1997/1998 effort in response to the Kyoto Protocol. Fossil fuel corporations have spent billions of dollars on the effort since then.
The case of Trump’s withdrawal from Paris provides an opportunity to understand the way industries are influencing politics and policy in our country, and what it means for our democracy. I would speculate that this past weekend’s letter from U.S. Senator Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) along with 21 colleagues, and Ted Cruz’s—both of which provided cover for Trump’s decision—were both almost certainly written and orchestrated by fossil fuel companies, their industry organizations, or the PR firms they hire. As if to confirm this, in the past two weeks the Competitive Enterprise Institute ran 70 ads calling for the United States to leave Paris, over all major media outlets in D.C. The American Petroleum Institute has a $244 million a year budget to influence policy. There are many other fossil fuel firms and groups at work. These private voices creating distraction and delay on the existential problem of our time were heard by our leader, drowning out those of the majority of Americans who support American engagement with the rest of the world in solving this issue.
Read more: Trump dumps Paris: Now what?
Todd Stern: It succeeds where every effort before, for some 20 years, had come up short. It breaks new ground in numerous ways, articulating a long-range goal to drive global efforts, creating a bottom-up structure for ambitious national action, outlining a continually renewing set of commitments, bridging the differences between developed and developing countries, establishing a hybrid legal structure. And it did this all in the context of an agreement that is not just a statement of shared global principles, but a joint undertaking in which all countries are expected to do their part to shape the global economy in a productive and sustainable manner.
The idea that it is rational to support climate action but reject Paris does not, in fact, make sense. The idea that an agreement materially different from Paris could win the consensus support of countries everywhere is a fiction. Paris is an imperfect, but nonetheless remarkable agreement. It needs to be defended, supported and implemented.
The piece is excerpted from a longer blog post, read more: Why the Paris Agreement works
Vinod Thomas: The Trump administration’s decision to pull out of the agreement flies in the face of all this reality. (The only other two non-participants are Syria, who is in a civil war, and Nicaragua, who actually wanted a stronger agreement). The decision is against the U.S.’s own economic and geopolitical interests. It also shirks responsibility for the country’s share of the carbon footprint driving everyone’s fortunes.
Sri Lanka’s floods and India’s heatwaves are stark reminders of the needed priority for disaster resilience in national programs. But for these programs to have any chance of success, climate mitigation, especially by the biggest emitters, must take center stage.
The piece is excerpted from a longer blog post, read more: The climate crisis
Rahul Tongia, with a view from India: India’s current views on climate change have little to do with the United States, or any other country. In the past, issues of “who’s to blame” underpinned all negotiations. The current leadership is focused on growth and action, and, in fact, treats sustainability (especially growing renewable energy, or RE) as “an article of faith.” Whatever calculations India has on its NDCs remain independent of U.S. actions, and there are virtually no immediate or direct negative implications for India, and there are no global carbon prices to jump or fall.
Some may argue that India is no longer bound to undertake undue or heroic efforts, but with falling prices for clean tech, it’s possible that much of India’s actions are more market driven than a costly choice just to “do the right thing.” In fact, it’s possible that any reduction in U.S. clean tech deployment may make more technology and funding available for India. Global funding remains attractive for India, and almost all the RE India is deploying is by the private sector. India welcomes global capital for its scale and low interest rates.
India and the United States collaborate extensively on energy and clean energy, including through the U.S.-India Clean Energy Finance Task Force, which also draws in the private sector through complementary mechanisms. These efforts will likely continue as India represents an enormous (and now even more important) market for U.S. suppliers. The energy market is far more vibrant in India as overall demand is still growing by some 6-7 percent annually, and RE is targeted to grow by 25 percent annually, based on Indian plans announced even before the Paris Accord.
Is the United States leaving a vacuum? Numerous analysts talk of Chinese leadership, in which case India may not publicly embrace them, despite the fact that Chinese manufacturing fuels much of Indian solar panels (no solar cells are made in India, just assembled in to panels in India). India is also positioning itself as a sustainability leader, with Prime Minister Modi spearheading the International Solar Alliance (ISA) at Paris. Again, this effort benefits from U.S. support, but isn’t dependent on it.
Before we examine how India could react, we’d first need to ask why it would react. Given its actions and plans are domestically driven, it’s hard to make a case for “retaliation.” Leaving aside any theoretical but unlikely formal measures, it’s even unlikely India would join any global bottom-up efforts to counter “Make in America” with “Don’t Buy American.” Indian consumers don’t directly buy so many “Made in USA” products. What they do buy often no immediate alternative, especially in the IT world, with the “big five” of consumer tech—Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook—all being American. Notably, these companies are quite “green” in their energy purchases. Perhaps the world may evolve towards corporate differentiation on carbon, instead of national frameworks, which, like city and state efforts in the United States, might be a way forward to reducing global carbon emissions. Any consumer backlash would likely be more symbolic than impacting the bottom line, though it might hurt selected American companies more than others, especially where alternatives exist.
So does the U.S. withdrawal mean nothing for India? It may impact posturing, and even some amount of mindset, especially below the national leadership, but it will likely have less impact on on-ground activities. India may even double down on its efforts.
Read more: The future of electric vehicles in India
David Victor: Now that the United States is leaving the Paris Agreement, what’s next for international cooperation on climate change?
Some foreign policy analysts suggest that other countries will also head for the exit. I suspect the opposite will happen. For most countries, Paris does not require that they do much beyond what they were planning anyway. Despite the bold goal of stopping warming well below 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels—a goal that never could be met—Paris has always been about process. Countries make pledges for the efforts they will undertake and then periodic reviews check to see what is working and not. Over time, this process would make deeper cooperation easier. Chuck Sabel, a law professor at Columbia, and I have been calling this experimentalist governance of climate change. Countries, firms, and NGOs are committed to do something about global warming, but nobody really knows what will work and scale—policy experiments and learning are essential. And Paris was designed to achieve just that.
America’s exit isn’t good news for Paris, despite what some people have argued. America almost always plays a key role in building effective international institutions. Without America, leadership is diffused and harder to muster. The list of things left undone in Paris remains very long, and leadership is essential to turning the Paris framework into something truly effective. But the American exit is not fatal to the process. Indeed, the U.S., China, France, and others designed Paris so that it would be highly flexible—able to change in response to new realities, even the exit of the world’s most powerful nation. Even if the U.S. formally stayed inside the Paris agreement the lack of support for the process from the president on down has severely undermined the country’s ability to lead. Events like the recent G-7 meeting—which on climate and much else has now become the G6+1—will become more common.
This piece is excerpted from a longer blog post, read more: America exits the climate stage
Philip Wallach: A moment like this was, unfortunately, always a foreseeable possibility. Paris’s non-binding structure was chosen in large part to allow President Obama to sign without seeking Senate approval, which everyone understood he would be unlikely to get for any climate treaty given the abysmal relationship he had with Republicans during his second term. Climate activists in the United States largely wrote off the possibility of winning Republican support for any climate policy, deeming the task near-impossible. Instead they and the administration adopted a strategy that sought to circumvent the GOP, which they presumed could be treated as a manageable, if yippy, minority for years to come. They were wrong—and the Paris Agreement is now suffering the consequences.
The decision to withdraw will be endlessly analyzed, and many observers will inevitably focus on the interpersonal dramas of the Trump White House. But the truth is that this moment is mostly a function of party, rather than anything distinctive about Trump or his advisors. All of the leading Republican candidates for the presidency signaled their hostility to the Obama administration’s Paris pledge, and Republican legislators have largely maintained their opposition as their party has come into a position to follow through on its anti-Paris talk. Had Hillary Clinton won the presidency in 2016 but lost it in 2020, many of the same dynamics might have played out in 2021. If the United States is to achieve a more politically sustainable national climate policy, it will have to run through Republicans rather than around them.
This piece is excerpted from a longer blog post, read more: An America not in Paris
Rebecca Winthrop and Christina Kwauk: As the world reels from the news that the U.S. intends to pull out of the global Paris Agreement, there are still reasons to hope that our children can inherit a healthy planet. Paul Hawken, the well-known environmentalist, has a plan. His recent book is called Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming and it does just what the subtitle suggests. Under his coordination, researchers and scientists around the globe spent the last three years modeling what it would take to reduce carbon emissions or sequester carbon from the atmosphere. The book presents 100 proven interventions to immediately begin to stem the tide of climate change.
The good news is that the most effective intervention is not even in the Paris Agreement. Empowering girls and women through a combination of education and family planning is the number one thing the world can do to address climate change, ahead of switching to solar energy, wind energy, or a plant-rich diet. Investing in both girls’ education around the globe and enabling women access to contraception and reproductive healthcare would result in 120 gigatons of carbon reduced by 2050, a staggering amount compared to the 90 gigatons that could be reduced by better management of harmful chemical refrigerants like chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).
This piece is excerpted from a longer blog post, read more: Concerned about the Paris Agreement? There’s still home through girls’ education
-
Trump’s reasons for leaving the Paris climate agreement just don’t add up
Jun 1, 2017 | The Washington Post
By Chris Mooney
President Trump railed against the Paris climate agreement in the White House Rose Garden on Thursday, but it was hard to reconcile his description of the climate accord with the real one.
“As of today, the United States will cease all implementation of the nonbinding Paris accord and the draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country,” Trump said — a phrase seeming to contain a logical contradiction. If the agreement is nonbinding, then what burdens can it impose?
And that contradiction gets to the heart of why Trump seemed, on Thursday, not to be arguing against the Paris agreement itself, but rather, against the Obama administration’s pledge under that agreement, in which the United States would cut by the year 2025 its emissions by 26 to 28 percent below their 2005 levels.
But the agreement does not require a particular level of emissions cuts for a particular country; rather, the United States and any other nation can choose its own level of emissions reductions. Play Video 2:02Nine reactions to Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate dealFormer president Barack Obama on June 1 said President Trump’s administration “joins a small handful of nations that reject the future” by withdrawing from the Paris climate deal. (Video: Bastien Inzaurralde/Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
“It seems very unnecessary to have to withdraw from the Paris agreement if the concern is focused on the U.S. emissions target and financial contributions,” said Susan Biniaz, who served at the State Department as the United States’ lead climate change lawyer from 1989 until earlier this year. “The U.S. can unilaterally change its emissions target under the agreement — it doesn’t have to ‘renegotiate’ it — and financial contributions are voluntary.”
“If the president believes the Paris agreement is a bad deal for the U.S. because our voluntary emission commitments are more stringent than those of other large emitters, the U.S. can reduce the ambition of our domestic policies while still remaining part of the agreement, rather than giving up our seat at the table and undermining U.S. leadership and credibility,” added Jason Bordoff, who heads the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University.
Similarly, Trump argued that the United States would try to “begin negotiations to reenter either the Paris accord or [a] really entirely new transaction, on terms that are fair to the United States, its businesses, its workers, its people, its taxpayers.”
But it seems near-impossible to reassemble every country in the world to start from scratch on the Paris agreement, when those countries are already busily implementing it.
“The notion that other nations would ‘renegotiate’ Paris is absurd, since they have already bent over backwards in the Paris deal to accommodate all major U.S. priorities, including voluntary emissions limits, action by developing countries and a nonlegally binding agreement,” said Paul Bledsoe, who served as a climate policy adviser in the Clinton administration and is now a lecturer at American University’s Center for Environmental Policy.
“Other countries are very unlikely to be interested in renegotiating the Paris Agreement or in negotiating an alternative agreement,” added Bob Perciasepe, president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, in a statement. “But the United States still retains the right to adjust the terms of its participation in the Paris Agreement by revising its target.”
And then, there were Trump’s claims about how other countries, such as China and India, would presumably take advantage of the Paris deal, to the United States’ disadvantage.
Niklas Höhne, a professor at Wageningen University in the Netherlands and a founder of the NewClimate Institute, commented by email that this part of the speech, too, didn’t add up:
As a scientist, I was amazed by the many wrong assertions that he used. He said that China will be allowed to build hundreds of additional coal plants. This is true in principle, but China canceled the building of new coal power plants and absolute coal use has declined in three consecutive years. He said that India may double their coal production, but also India is slowing its growth of coal use and just stated that the recent coal plants in construction may not be necessary until 2022.
And then there are Trump’s assertions about what the agreement would actually do to the climate.
Energy and Environment newsletter
The science and policy of environmental issues.Sign up
“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 – think of that, this much – Celsius reduction in global temperature by the year 2100,” Trump said.
But that’s not correct, according to John Sterman, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who works to analyze climate change scenarios, and Andrew Jones, a researcher with the think tank Climate Interactive.
Their analysis shows that the current country level pledges under the Paris agreement would reduce the planet’s warming by the year 2100 down from 4.2 degrees Celsius (7.6 degrees Fahrenheit) to 3.3 degrees Celsius (5.9 degrees Fahrenheit), or nearly a full degree Celsius.
And of course, that’s just the beginning — the Paris agreement is structured so that it increases the ambition of the countries that belong to it over time, always in a voluntary manner, asking each to do what it can. So over time, the agreement’s ability to reduce the warming of the planet should improve.
And that will probably still be the case — even though, for now at least, the United States won’t be a part of it.
-
Paris Accord Withdrawal Announcement
Jun 1, 2017 | The Situation Room with Wolf Blizter
By Wolf Blitzer
-
Why did Trump pull out of the Paris Accord?
Jun 2, 2017 | The 11th Hour With Brian Williams
By Michael Crowley
Traditional Media
Broadcast Media
Add recipients
Suggested