Twelve months after President Donald Trump pledged to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement on climate change, the nation remains a party to the accord even as the administration works domestically to roll back many of its environmental rules.
Although no countries have followed Trump's lead in deciding to leave the deal, experts say the president's announcement has undermined ongoing Paris accord implementation negotiations. Meanwhile, a number of U.S. cities, states and businesses have announced that they will step up their existing decarbonization efforts.
Environmental advocates see the accord as a fundamental step in ensuring that the world's largest countries tackle climate change, which a majority of scientists have tied to human-caused carbon dioxide emissions. The nearly 200 countries that signed the climate pact agreed to curb emissions enough to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius from preindustrial levels, which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said is necessary to avoid catastrophic impacts. Moreover, the signatories said they will pursue efforts to limit the global temperature increase even further, to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
President Donald Trump announces in the White House Rose Garden on June 1, 2017, that the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris agreement on climate change. Source: AP images |
Getting to either of those levels will require all participating countries to ratchet up their commitments over time and the private sector to make major investments and develop new technology. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development estimates that US$6.3 trillion in infrastructure investments need to be made annually around the world between 2016 and 2030 to meet development needs associated with climate change.
Since Trump in June 2017 announced that he would withdraw the U.S. from the Paris accord, however, Congress has ratcheted down funding for the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat, which is tasked with supporting the global response to the threat of climate change. And the administration has moved to roll back key regulations such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Power Plan, an important part of President Barack Obama's strategy for keeping the country's pledge to reduce economywide greenhouse gas emissions 26% to 28% below 2005 levels in 2025 and to make best efforts to reach the higher end of that range.
The U.S. State Department in August 2017 advised U.N. officials of the country's intent to withdraw from the accord, but under the agreement, notice cannot formally be made until November 2019, and the withdrawal cannot actually take place until 12 months later — in this case, shortly after the country's next presidential elections. According to a White House official, the U.S. position on the agreement has not changed, although no other action toward withdrawal has been taken thus far, possibly indicating that the Trump administration will follow the withdrawal requirements of the agreement rather than seek a quicker and more drastic exit.
Myron Ebell, a staunch supporter of withdrawal and former Trump campaign advisor who serves as director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Center for Energy and Environment, said in an interview that he wishes the administration would seek a swifter departure from the Paris accord. He pointed out that Trump has overhauled his panel of key advisors since the announcement — Rex Tillerson and Gary Cohn, who were proponents of remaining involved in the Paris agreement, have been replaced — and said he is confident that when Trump's new international affairs team of Mike Pompeo, Larry Kudlow and John Bolton turn their attention to the issue, they at least will consider making a quicker exit.
International negotiations take hit
Following the president's announcement, many critics of the plan said the U.S. should remain in the accord if only to keep a seat at the international negotiating table. The U.S. sent representatives to the most recent round of international climate talks in Bonn, Germany, in April and May, but such talks can only be so productive when the U.S. is on its way out the door, said Todd Stern, a former U.S. special envoy for climate change at the State Department, who was at the Bonn event.
The vacuum in leadership is hurting ongoing negotiations on the implementation rules for the agreement, which participants intend to finalize in Poland in December, Stern said. He also warned that some countries are pulling back a bit from the compromises they made in Paris during their "big moment" of working with the U.S. and China. He also noted that the U.S. stance appears to be dampening any interest some had in going beyond their initial commitments to ensure that the goals of the agreement are met.
"Don't underestimate the negative side of the U.S.' position," Stern said.
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who marked the one year anniversary of the announcement by touting the president's "courageous" action, said he does not believe that the U.S. has suffered any repercussions from its decision. He said during an interview with the Washington Free Beacon that the "dire consequences" some predicted had not materialized.
That assertion contradicts the position taken by climate advocacy groups and key agreement negotiators, who say the U.S. played a key role in pushing many countries to go beyond their comfort levels under the Paris accord, and the long-term consequences of abandoning the deal have yet to be seen.
"Were it not for the leadership of the U.S., we would not have had this ambitious of a global agreement," said Selwin Hart, Barbados' ambassador to the U.S. and former director of the U.N. secretary-general's Climate Change Support Team. For that reason, "it is absolutely imperative to have the U.S. at the table," Hart said at a May 30 conference in Washington, D.C., hosted by the World Resources Institute.
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Trump has publicly mused about renegotiating the agreement. "There could be a way back" into the Paris deal, Trump told journalist Piers Morgan in January, although he insisted that sticking with the agreement as it stands "would have been a disaster."
"If we could go back into the Paris accord, it would have to be a completely different deal because we had a horrible deal," Trump said. "As usual, they took advantage of the U.S. We were in a terrible deal. Would I go back in? Yeah, I'd go back in."
Ebell said a new deal would have to include a goal for the U.S. similar to one established for China, where emissions are allowed to continue rising for a decade or longer to allow for a manufacturing renaissance before reductions begin.
"I don't think the European Union can live with that from the U.S." Ebell said.
While parties to the accord say they want to see the U.S. at the table and providing constructive engagement, the other participating countries are not necessarily standing idle until that happens, Hart said.
States, businesses move forward
In the aftermath of Trump's announcement, many states and businesses eagerly stepped forward to lead the U.S. in mitigating climate change. But environmental advocates and some other groups acknowledge that states' and businesses' actions alone cannot keep the U.S. on target toward the goals Obama set. Rather, they see their efforts as a way to fill the gap and keep momentum going in the hope that Trump or a potential future president will decide to remain in the agreement.
Meanwhile, U.S. levels of energy-related carbon dioxide emissions in 2017 continued to decline for the third year in a row even as global emissions climbed 1.4%, the International Energy Agency reported in March.
"We're holding our own," Ceres CEO and President Mindy Lubber said in an interview.
Ceres, an organization that helps facilitate sustainability discussions between major companies and their shareholders, is helping coordinate Climate Action 100+, a five-year effort backed by more than 200 global investors that targets the top 100 largest greenhouse gas emitters. The group is the main force behind the "We are Still In" movement under which more than 2,700 local U.S. government officials, businesses and investors have pledged to continue pursuing the goals of the Paris accord.
At the state level, a coalition of 17 governors also is leading the charge on decarbonization under the U.S. Climate Alliance. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a member of the coalition, said on a May 24 conference call that the group's actions are "robust and growing." The Climate Alliance in a June 1 news release announced plans to accelerate climate action, including financing climate projects, grid modernization, renewable energy, appliance efficiency standards, resilience, carbon storage and clean transportation.
A number of the states that are part of that alliance are pursuing aggressive carbon reduction goals; for instance, Hawaii recently passed a bill that would make the state fully carbon neutral by 2045.
Many state environmental initiatives already were underway before the Paris accord withdrawal was announced, but Trump's declaration "gave us kind of a galvanizing point" from which to push forward even harder on those activities, Angela Navarro, Virginia state deputy secretary of commerce and trade, said at the World Resources Institute conference.
Ebell, however, believes that the U.S. Climate Alliance and other initiatives sparked by the Paris withdrawal will fizzle out, just as similar coalitions did in the aftermath of President George W. Bush's controversial decision to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol.
"History on this is that talk is cheap, and it's easy to do the kind of moral preening that [California Gov.] Jerry Brown and others have done, but ... it just turns out that actually reducing emissions is really hard and it's really expensive," Ebell said.
Inslee, however, is not deterred by the administration's efforts to repeal key Obama administration climate change policies such as the Clean Power Plan and vehicle emissions standards. "I'm happy about this alliance. It serves to tell the world that we're in it, and give other states confidence to see what we can do."


