Reaffirming the US commitment to the Paris Agreement was always a longshot under the Trump Administration. None the less, I held out hope that the overwhelming arguments in favor of maintaining participation in the agreement would prevail. This was clearly naïve on my part. The president has announced that the US will stop participating in the nonbinding agreement, which will take four years to formally exit (one small silver lining: the US is not pulling out of the underlying United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which would have been a more extreme step). Naturally, I am despondent at the news, though setbacks are sadly a part of following climate policy developments. So I wanted to write up a quick take on what this means and why it is a terrible idea. The US is the largest historical contributor to the problem of global warming. The evidence is very clear: the United States has released more greenhouse gas emissions than any other country historically. That is, the country became rich in large part through the burning of fossil fuels without taking into account their contribution to environmental problems like global warming. One could correctly argue that this accumulation of wealth has not benefited everyone equally, though the distributional issue is a separate question in this case. The United States was the largest contributor to global warming, and therefore it should make the sharpest reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Doing so does not mean we are being taken advantage of by other countries. On the contrary, not reducing means that we are essentially forcing other countries to reduce more than their fair share. While that may be precisely Trump’s point, it is a shortsighted strategy in any case. It is likely that other countries will attempt to reduce cooperation with the United States on other international issues, and there is a remote possibility that countries could ban together to impose carbon tariffs on US goods (which are legal under WTO rules). The fossil fuel industry and its allies have been most successful at having Americans question the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change
Let me be clear: climate scientists are virtually certain that the climate is warming because of human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases. There is no serious dissent within the climate community. A 2016 article finds that 97% of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming. Multiple studies find that those very few (less than 3%) who do question anthropogenic climate change demonstrate less subject matter knowledge than those who do not. There is no serious debate within the scientific community about this. However, the public is less convinced. The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, which regularly surveys people in the United States on questions of climate change and energy policy, finds that 70% of adults agreed in 2016 that the climate is getting warmer, though only 53% believe that humans are causing that warming. However, only 49% of adults agree that most scientists think global warming is happening, and 71% trust climate scientists about global warming. Further, only 40% of American adults think that global warming will harm them personally. All of these numbers vary drastically by states, according to patterns that one might expect. This represents the success of a campaign of misinformation and promotion of conspiracy theories by the fossil fuel industry and its allies over several decades. Leaving the Paris Agreement will not bring back coal jobs. One campaign promise made by Trump that garnered much attention was a promise to bring back jobs in the coal industry. While roughly 180,000 Americans were employed in coal mining in 1986, today, about 50,000 are. That is fewer people than employed by Arby’s nationwide, and it is far fewer than the 260,000 people employed by the solar industry or the 100,000 employed by the wind industry in 2016. Further, as I have explained elsewhere, nothing that Trump does is likely to bring coal mining jobs back. His own economic advisor recently admitted this. Trump sees international relations as a series of isolated zero-sum games. This is a terrible mistake to make. In his speech explaining the decision to leave the Paris Agreement, Trump argued that the treaty was a bad deal for the US and that we risk other countries “laughing at us.” A consistent theme in Trump’s vision of international relations, extending across views on NATO or NAFTA or Asian security is that if other countries benefit, the US must be losing out, somehow. Trump seems to be incapable of believing in a positive-sum game in which both parties benefit. He also seems to underestimate the extent to which parties, such as the Europeans, might genuinely care about climate change and be less likely to cooperate with the US because of this announcement. Trump has set the stage for undermining US leadership and action on a wide variety of issues because of this. What happens next is anybody’s guess. From here, several things could happen. The rest of the world could unite on stronger climate action and isolate the US here, penalizing it on other issues. Or, key emitters like India and China could decide that it’s not worth making serious reduction commitments when the largest historical emitter is unwilling to take this seriously. Landslide losses for the GOP in 2018 could lead to a Congress willing to force the administration to take the issue seriously, and a loss by Republicans of the White House in 2020 could lead to re-engagement on the issue of climate change (though the world will be rightly wary of signing up for more action with the US if they suspect it will abandon any commitments it makes once the GOP regains the presidency). With the issue of climate change, time is of the essence. The longer serious action is put off, the greater the risk of catastrophic warming and the more expensive limiting global warming to any given level will become. To be sure, states like California, and major cities are and will continue to be committed to aggressive reduction goals. But the abandoning of any action on this issue by the federal government is nothing short of a moral and ecological disaster.
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AuthorEconomist. Professor. Environmentalist. Archives
July 2017
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