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. 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.
Authors
Rebecca Winthrop
Director - Center for Universal Education
Senior Fellow - Global Economy and Development
Vinod Thomas
Visiting Professor - Asian Institute of Management, Manila
Former Senior Vice President - World Bank
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.
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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.
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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 attribu