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Trump’s Paris Withdrawal: The Nail in the Coffin of U.S. Global Leadership?

The announcement on June 1^st by U.S. President Donald Trump that he will withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement was, in my view, misguided; and the justifications Mr. Trump provided were misleading, and to some degree, untruthful. In this essay, I seek to explain why I believe that withdrawing from the Paris Agreement will be damaging both to the United States and the world. Sadly, Trump’s withdrawal announcement gave the impression that the President has little understanding of the nature of the Agreement, the process for withdrawal, or the implications of withdrawal for the United States, let alone for the world. Rather, Mr. Trump appears to be channeling talking points from his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, and his supporters among Alt-Right nationalists, isolationists, and anti-globalists.

Some Context

Let’s start with a few numbers. The United States accounts for about 14% of global greenhouse gas emissions, with China the largest emitter at 30%, followed by the European Union (10%) and India (7%). But climate change is a function of atmospheric concentrations, and when looking at cumulative emissions since 1850, the United States is first with 29% of the total, then the European Union (EU) with 27%, and then Russia and China with 8% each. With Trump’s announced withdrawal, the United States will join Syria and Nicaragua as the only countries among 195 that are not Parties of the Paris Agreement.

Global Implications of U.S. Withdrawal from the Paris Agreement

With the United States out of the Paris Agreement, it loses the ability to pressure other countries, such as the large emerging economies, to do more. Worse yet, the announced departure may encourage some countries to do less than they had planned. In the worst possible outcome, the U.S. announcement might eventually even lead to the broad Paris coalition unraveling. However, initial indications from the EU, China, India, and other key Parties to the Agreement is that they will maintain their targets, and some may even make them more aggressive because of President Trump’s short-sighted action. Only time will tell.

What Does President Trump’s Announcement Actually Mean?

In several ways, the President’s announcement was both confused and confusing. The President stated that the country “will withdraw from the Paris climate accord but begin negotiations to re-enter either the Paris accord or an entirely new transaction on terms that are fair to the United States. We are getting out. But we will start to negotiate, and we will see if we can make a deal that’s fair. And if we can, that’s great.”

First, the notion of re-negotiating the Paris Agreement is a non-starter. Within hours of the President’s announcement, the idea of renegotiation was rebuked by French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Italian Premier Paolo Gentiloni, British Prime Minister Theresa May, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, among many other world leaders.

Second, what could Mr. Trump even mean by his assertions of the deal’s “unfairness” to the United States, and what should we to make of his statement that such unfairness could be addressed through renegotiation? According the Paris Agreement’s own provisions, there is a required three-year delay from November, 2016 (when the Agreement came into force) before any Party (country) can even begin the process of withdrawing, and then there is another year of delay before that process is completed. So, what the President actually announced – in effect – was the U.S. government’s intention to begin the process of withdrawing some two and a half years from now, and to complete that withdrawal process in November, 2020.

Thus, the announcement was equivalent to stating that the U.S. will remain a Party to the Agreement for virtually the entire term of this administration (which it will). The administration could – in theory – submit a revised Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) that is consistent with what the country can accomplish in emissions reductions (possibly a 15-19% reduction by 2025 compared with 2005, according to a recent Rhodium Group analysis, instead of the Obama NDC of a 26-28% decline), consistent with the broad rollback of Obama-era climate regulations that President Trump has initiated. The country-specific NDC is the key element that can be thought of as affecting “fairness” of the U.S. role under the Paris Agreement, because it is only through the self-determined, voluntary, country-specific NDCs that any national targets or actions are specified.

Given that the Administration had already begun the process of unraveling Obama-era climate regulations (that were to be used achieve the Obama NDC), the announced withdrawal from the Paris Agreement has no additional effects on U.S. emissions mitigation actions. Hence, it is fundamentally dishonest to claim as a justification for the withdrawal that this will reduce costs for the U.S. and save jobs.

Beyond the national targets and actions specified by the U.S. NDC, there is one other aspect of pledged action under the Paris Agreement that could be considered to affect fairness, and that is the set of pledges of financial contributions to the Green Climate Fund, to which industrialized countries have voluntarily pledged $10 billion since 2013 to help low-income countries reduce their GHG emissions and adapt to the effects of climate change. If the U.S. were to fulfill its original $3 billion commitment to the Fund, this would amount to $9.41 per capita, ranking 11^th among country pledges, starting with Sweden’s at $59.31 per person. However, the President had previously announced that no funds will be going to the GCF (beyond the $1 billion already delivered during the Obama administration). That makes the per capita U.S. contribution a bit more than $3 per capita, ranking close to the bottom of the list, only above South Korea’s pledge of about $2 per capita. So, with this financial element, as well as with regard to domestic emissions mitigation actions, withdrawal from the Paris Agreement can have no real effects on the “fairness” of the U.S. role.

The Paris Agreement Was the Answer to U.S. Prayers

The very structure of the Paris Agreement itself was and is the answer to U.S. prayers, going back to the bipartisan Byrd-Hagel Resolution of 1997, in which the U.S. Senate – in a 95-0 vote – said that it would not ratify an international climate agreement that did not include the large emerging economies (China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico, and Korea). After more than 20 years of negotiations, an important breakthrough came with the signing of the Paris Agreement, which increased the scope of participation from countries accounting for just 14% of global emissions (under the current, second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol) to countries accounting for 97% under the Paris Agreement.

Furthermore, in addition to including all countries, the Paris Agreement answered a second key U.S. demand by granting all countries the right to determine their own targets and their own paths of action (through their respective NDCs).

And the third of three U.S. wishes was also granted by the Paris Agreement by providing for transparency around how countries report their emissions and demonstrate progress toward their respective targets.

Thus, the Paris Agreement was truly the answer to bipartisan U.S. prayers going back at least twenty years, and was eminently “fair” to the United States. What, then, can renegotiation possibly accomplish that would make this President happy? Perhaps one option would be to rename precisely the same agreement the “Mar-a-Lago Accord” (or simply the “Trump Agreement”)! That might change this President’s mind.

A Rebuke to Countries around the World … and to U.S. Businesses

Mr. Trump’s decision is a remarkable rebuke to countries and heads-of-state around the world, as well as corporate leaders in the United States, and some key senior officials in the Administration, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. However, the announcement does attempt to fulfill the President’s campaign pledge to “cancel” the Agreement that he claimed would “destroy American jobs.”

But dropping out of Paris will have no meaningful employment impacts. Again, Trump had already launched the process of undoing domestic climate regulations from the Obama administration. Also, the much-talked-about coal jobs are not coming back. The losses that have taken place over decades are due to increased productivity (technological change) in the coal sector, and more recently, market competition from low-priced natural gas for electricity generation, not environmental regulations — and certainly not CO2 regulations that had never been implemented.

Support for Trump to keep the United States in the Paris Agreement was broad-based within U.S. private industry – from electricity generators such as PG&E and National Grid, to oil companies such as Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon-Mobil, BP, and Shell (the last two having large operations within the U.S.), and a very long list of manufacturers, including giant firms such as General Motors and General Electric. Even some of the largest coal producers, such as Arch Coal, Cloud Peak Energy, and Peabody Energy, told the President about their support for the U.S. remaining in the Agreement. This broad support was due to a simple reality – leaders of successful businesses make decisions not on the basis of ideology, but based on available evidence.

Damages to U.S. International Relations

The potential damages to U.S. international relations are grave, but should we be surprised? After all, this is the same President who withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership days after inauguration, thereby handing over to China economic leadership in Asia; and the same President who just last month dismissed and diminished NATO and insulted our key European allies, thereby granting Russian President Vladimir Putin one of his greatest wishes. Former Mexican President Vincente Fox may have summed it up best with the shocking assessment that “the United States has stopped being the leader of the free world.”

At a time when the U.S. wants and needs cooperation from a large and diverse set of countries around the world on matters of national security, trade, and a host of other issues, it is counter-productive in the extreme to willingly become an international pariah on global climate change, but that is what President Trump has accomplished.

Defining U.S. Climate Policy Geographically, Rather than by Federal Government Action

Of course, this is not the end of all climate change policy action in the United States. Climate policies in California, Oregon, Washington, and the Northeast will remain in place, and quite possibly be strengthened. And more than half of all states have renewable energy policies; just since Election Day, the Republican governors of Illinois and Michigan have signed legislation aimed at increasing solar and wind generation. At the federal level, important tax credits for wind and solar power will likely continue to receive bipartisan support in the U.S. Congress.

But it is highly unlikely – in the absence of a significant economic recession – that those policies (plus others from cities across the country) will be sufficient to achieve the climate targets that made up the Obama administration’s anticipated contribution (NDC) under the Paris Agreement.

Trump’s Core and a Sad Bottom Line

For President Trump’s core supporters, the move was probably perceived in very positive terms. As Cary Coglianese, a professor of law and political science at the University of Pennsylvania, has said, “For Trump supporters it looks like he’s delivering on a campaign promise — it looks like he’s standing up for Americans against the rest of the world.” The opposition to Paris among Trump’s electoral core (and a considerable share of Congressional Republicans) seems to be linked with their admiration for his “America First” battle cry, which builds on nostalgia for an earlier (and whiter) America with its long-gone manufacturing-based economy, plus doses of xenophobia, hostility to immigration, fear of globalism, and opposition to multilateral agreements of any kind.

The President’s announcement of withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement will indeed appeal to his core constituency, and thereby may help galvanize his base, and that may be the central White House objective at this time when the administration is facing grave questions and challenges from Congressional hearings and Justice Department investigations. As Ban Ki-moon, former Secretary-General of the United Nations, and I wrote in April in The Boston Globe, “reducing emissions will not be cheap or easy, but the greatest obstacles are political.”

The announcement by President Trump that he will withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement was based neither on real science nor sound economics. Rather, it was confused, misguided, and – in some ways – dishonest. Sadly, that makes it consistent with much of this President’s behavior – in a variety of policy realms – during the campaign and since he assumed office.

Why the U.S. Should Remain in the Paris Climate Agreement

It was widely reported last week that a White House meeting scheduled for Tuesday, April 18^th, was to consider whether the United States should remain a party to the Paris Climate Agreement. At the last second, that meeting was postponed. As of today, there is no public information about when it may occur. All that is known is that the Trump Administration had indicated previously that it will make known its position on the Paris Agreement before the G7 Summit, which takes place in Italy in late May.

With that in mind – and with Earth Day being celebrated on April 22^nd – I was pleased to co-author with Ban Ki-moon an op-ed which just appeared in The Boston Globe, “Why the US Should Stay in the Paris Climate Agreement” (April 21, 2017). As you no doubt know, Ban Ki-moon was Secretary-General of the United Nations (2007-2016), but what you may not know is that he is currently my colleague at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he is the Angelopoulos Global Public Leaders Fellow.

Before the Secretary-General Emeritus and I produced the final version of our Boston Globe op-ed, we had written a considerably longer, more detailed essay on the same topic, and so in today’s blog essay, I’m pleased to provide below an expanded version of that longer essay, with hyperlinks added. I hope you find this of interest.

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Why the U.S. Should Remain in the Paris Climate Agreement: An Earth Day Message for President Trump

by Ban Ki-moon and Robert N. Stavins

In the five decades since the first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970, remarkable economic growth around the world has inevitably been accompanied by significant environmental challenges. While tremendous progress has been made to address concerns about air and water quality, hazardous waste, species extinction, and maintenance of stratospheric ozone, leaders around the world continue to struggle to address the threat of global climate change in the face of the steady accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The Necessity of International Cooperation

There is broad scientific consensus that human-based emissions of greenhouse gases – including carbon dioxide (CO₂) from fossil-fuel combustion and land-use changes – will change the earth’s climate in ways that will have serious environmental, economic, and social consequences. Sixteen of the warmest years on record have occurred since 2000, including 2016 as the warmest of all. At the same time, winter arctic sea ice is at its lowest extent in recorded history.

Increased temperatures – which might be welcome in some places – are only part of the story. More important are changes in precipitation, decreased snowpack, glacier melting, droughts in mid to low latitudes, decreased cereal crop productivity at lower latitudes, increased sea level, loss of islands and coastal wetlands, increased flooding, greater storm intensity, species loss, and spread of infectious disease.

These biophysical impacts will have significant economic, social, and political consequences. Estimates of economic damages of unrestrained climate change vary, with most falling in the range of 1 to 3% of world GDP per year by the middle of the current century.

In order to have a 50-50 chance of keeping temperature increases below 2^o C (a long-term goal acknowledged by most national governments), it would be necessary to stabilize atmospheric concentrations at 450 parts per million, which in principle could be achieved by cutting global emissions by 60 to 80% below 2005 levels by 2050.

Reducing emissions will not be cheap or easy, but the greatest obstacles are political. The severe political challenges are due to the fact that greenhouse gases mix in the atmosphere, and so the location of damages is independent of the location of emissions. Any political jurisdiction that takes action incurs the direct costs of that action, but the climate benefits are spread globally. Hence, for any country, the direct climate benefits of taking action will likely be much less than the costs, despite the fact that the global benefits may exceed, possibly greatly, the costs. Therefore, due to the global commons nature of the problem, meaningful international cooperation is necessary.

The Paris Climate Agreement: A Breakthrough After 20 Years

The countries of the world have been struggling to come up with a solution since they agreed in 1992 to establish the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). After more than 20 years of negotiations, an important, historic breakthrough came with the signing of the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, a path-breaking approach that increased the scope of participation from countries accounting for just 14% of global emissions (in the current, second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol) to countries accounting for 97% under the Paris Agreement!

Contrary to some claims, China, India, Brazil, Korea, South Africa, Mexico, and the other large emerging economies do have obligations under this new approach. Far from being a “bad deal” for the United States, as EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has asserted, the Paris Agreement is actually the answer to U.S. prayers going back to the U.S. Senate’s bipartisan (95-0) Byrd-Hagel Resolution in 1997, which rejected the Kyoto approach and called for an agreement that would include not only industrialized countries, but the large emerging economies as well. That is precisely what the Paris Agreement has finally delivered!

Will the U.S. Remain Part of the Process?

This is a pivotal moment. President Trump’s recent executive order in which he laid out his plans to roll back much of the Obama administration’s climate policy, was silent on the Paris Agreement, reportedly reflecting disagreements among the President’s closest advisers.

During the campaign last year, the President said he would “cancel” the Paris Agreement. But because it has already come into force, under its rules, any party must wait three years before requesting to withdraw, followed by a one-year notice period. The United States is part of the agreement for the next four years. Any White House announcement of pulling out of the pact will have no direct effects for this Presidential term.

In theory, the President could try to bypass that four-year delay by taking the one-year route of dropping out of the overall UNFCCC — signed by President George H.W. Bush and ratified by the Senate in 1992. But that could require another two-thirds vote of the Senate, would be challenged in the courts, and would be unwise in the extreme, given that the U.S. would then be the only one among 197 countries in the world not to be a party to the Climate Convention. At a time when the United States wants cooperation from a diverse set of countries around the world on matters of national security, trade, and a host of other issues, it would be counter-productive in the extreme to willingly become an international pariah on global climate change.

Key Support Inside and Outside the Administration

Fortunately, key voices in the Administration have argued for remaining in the Paris Agreement. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has stated that it is better for the U.S. to be at this table of ongoing negotiations. More broadly, Secretary of Defense James Mattis said in Congressional testimony that he views climate change as a national security threat.

Remarkably, support for the Paris Agreement is broad-based within U.S. private industry – from electricity generators such as PG&E and National Grid, to oil companies such as BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon-Mobil, and Shell, mining companies such as Rio Tinto, and a very long list of manufacturers, including giant firms such as General Motors. Even some of the largest coal producers, such as Arch Coal, Cloud Peak Energy, and Peabody Energy, have told the President about their support for the U.S. remaining in the Agreement. This broad support is due to a simple reality – leaders of successful businesses make decisions not on the basis of ideology, but based on available evidence.

True enough, there is also opposition from some especially vocal coal industry executives, and the President seems to have shaped his domestic climate policies around their interests, with his repeated pledge to “bring back coal.” But the job losses in coal mining over the past decades have been due to technological change (increased productivity) in the coal sector, and more recently by low natural gas prices, not by environmental regulations (particularly not by regulations – such as the Clean Power Plan – that have not even been implemented).

The Paris Agreement Provides Flexibility

The U.S. could stay in the Paris Agreement, and seek to revise the Obama-era numerical target of a 26% reduction in emissions below 2005 levels by 2025, an approach recommended by North Dakota Republican Representative Kevin Cramer. However, by 2016, energy-related emissions were already down by 14% below 2005, so it is not clear that the existing pledge even needs to be re-assessed. Also, state climate policies in California, Oregon, Washington, and the Northeast will remain in place, and likely be strengthened. And more than half of all states have renewable energy policies; just since election day, the Republican governors of Illinois and Michigan have signed legislation aimed at increasing solar and wind generation. At the Federal level, the important tax credits for wind and solar power continue to receive bi-partisan support in the Congress.

Putting it All Together

In summary, climate change is a serious threat, which requires international cooperation because of its global commons nature. After twenty years of negotiations, the path-breaking Paris Climate Agreement, with its exceptionally broad participation, is the answer to long-standing, bipartisan appeals, and provides an excellent foundation for progress.

The President cannot “cancel” the Agreement, and it would take four years for the U.S. to withdraw. Pulling out of the foundational United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change might be quicker, but would be unwise in the extreme, jeopardizing U.S. relationships with countries around the world on a host of pressing issues, ranging from national security to international trade.

Fortunately, key voices in the Administration have argued for keeping the U.S. in the Paris Agreement, and support from the business community is exceptionally broad and deep. If necessary, the U.S. can seek to revise the specific U.S. pledge under Paris made by the Obama administration, while remaining a party to the Agreement. But given the pace of emissions reductions already achieved, combined with ongoing state and Federal climate policies, it is not clear that those targets need to be changed.

Having considered this diverse set of considerations that should bear upon this U.S. decision, we find the arguments for the country remaining in the Paris Climate Agreement to be compelling. The truth is that in the 47 years since the first Earth Day, much has been accomplished. But much of that remarkable progress could be undone in the short span of 4 years or less. We are confident – or at least hopeful – that this will not happen.

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Ban Ki-moon was Secretary-General of the United Nations (2007-2016), and is the Angelopoulos Global Public Leaders Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. Robert Stavins is the Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and was Coordinating Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

What Does the Trump Victory Mean for Climate Change Policy?

Those of you who have read my previous essay at this blog, “This is Not a Time for Political Neutrality” (October 9, 2016), know that my greatest concerns about a Trump presidency (then a possibility, now a certainty), were not limited to environmental policy, but rather were “about what a Trump presidency would mean for my country and for the world in realms ranging from economic progress to national security to personal liberty,” based on his “own words in a campaign in which he substituted impulse and pandering for thoughtful politics” … and “built his populist campaign on false allegations about others, personal insults of anyone who disagrees with him, and displays of breathtaking xenophobia, veiled racism, and unapologetic sexism.”

That’s a broad indictment, to be sure, but whatever real expertise I may have is actually limited to environmental, resource, and energy economics and policy, and so that has and will continue to be the real focus of this blog, “An Economic View of the Environment.” With that in mind, I return today from last month’s brief immersion in partisan politics to discuss climate change policy.

Yesterday, an editor at The New York Times asked me to write a 500-word essay giving my view of what the Trump victory will mean for climate policy. This morning, my very brief essay was published under the headline, “Goodbye to the Climate.” Given the brevity of the piece, it does not touch on many issues and subtleties (I come back to that at the end of today’s blog post), but rather than take the time to expand it, I want to get this to you quickly, and so I am simply reproducing it as it first appeared in the Times (along with an interesting group of other essays, under the overall heading, “What Happened on Election Day: How the election and Donald Trump’s victory looks to Opinion writers.”

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The New York Times

Goodbye to the Climate

By Robert N. Stavins

Donald J. Trump once tweeted that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing noncompetitive.” Twitter messages may not be clear signs of likely public policies, but Mr. Trump followed up during the campaign with his “America First Energy Plan,” which would rescind all of President Obama’s actions on climate change.

The plan includes canceling United States participation in the Paris climate agreement and stopping all American funding of United Nations climate change programs. It also includes abandoning the Clean Power Plan, a mainstay of the Obama administration’s approach to achieving its emissions reduction target for carbon dioxide under the Paris agreement.

What should we make of such campaign promises? Taking Mr. Trump at his word, he will surely seek to pull the country out of the Paris pact. But because the agreement has already come into force, under the rules, any party must wait three years before requesting to withdraw, followed by a one-year notice period.

Those rules would seem to be mere technicalities. The incoming Trump administration simply can disregard America’s pledge to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 26 to 28 percent below the 2005 level by 2025. That is bad enough. But the big worry is what other key countries, including the world’s largest emitter, China, as well as India and Brazil, will do if the United States reneges on its pledge. The result could be that the Paris agreement unravels, taking it from the 97 percent of global emissions currently covered by the pact to little more than the European Union’s 10 percent share.

In addition, Mr. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency probably will stop work on regulations of methane emissions (a very potent greenhouse gas) from existing oil and gas operations. Undoing complex existing regulations, such as the Clean Power Plan, will be more difficult, but a reconstituted Supreme Court will probably help President Trump when that plan inevitably comes before the court. Also, the new president will most likely ask that the Keystone XL pipeline permit application be renewed — and facilitate other oil and gas pipelines around the country.

On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump promised to “bring back” the coal industry by cutting environmental regulations. That may not be so easy. The decline of that industry and related employment has been caused by technological changes in mining, and competition from low-priced natural gas for electricity generation, not by environmental regulations. At the same time, Mr. Trump has pledged to promote fracking for oil and gas, but that would make natural gas even more economically attractive, and accelerate the elimination of coal-sector jobs.

If he lives up to his campaign rhetoric, Mr. Trump may indeed be able to reverse course on climate change policy, increasing the threat to our planet, and in the process destroy much of the Obama legacy in this important realm. This will make the states even more important players on this critical issue.

Robert N. Stavins is a professor at Harvard, where he directs the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements.

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Given the brevity of the piece, it is not intended to be comprehensive of the many implications for climate change policy of the Trump victory (nor the implications of the Republicans continuing to hold majorities in both houses of Congress).

And I did not get into the many subtleties of the issues I identified. At a bare minimum, these would include:

the possibility of the new administration trying to bypass the four-year delay involved in dropping out of the Paris climate agreement by taking the one-year route of dropping out of the overall United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – signed by President George H.W. Bush and ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1992;

federal “climate change policies” that have been bipartisan and are therefore much less likely to be repealed, such the latest CAFE and appliance efficiency standards, and the recently extended wind and solar tax credits; and

the myriad of sub-national climate change policies, ranging from AB-32 in California to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative in the northeast (It’s not a coincidence that there’s a high – although not perfect – correlation between the states Secretary Clinton won in the election and the location of the most ambitious climate change policies).

On another occasion, after I’ve had an opportunity to reflect more calmly and carefully on the implications of the forthcoming Trump presidency for environmental, natural resource, and energy policy, I will return to this topic. But for now, I have to prepare for my trip in a few days to Marrakech, Morocco, for the annual UNFCCC negotiations. Given the election results, my meetings there may be quite strange, if not surreal. I hope to write about that in my next essay at this blog.