Trump’s
dilemma: to please his friends by trashing the Paris climate deal, or
not?
Bill McKibben
Friday 18 November
2016 16.58 GMT
If
the president-elect sabotages last year’s agreement, he will own
every disaster – every hurricane a Hurricane Donald, every drought
a moment for mockery
It seems likely that
the Paris climate accords will offer one of the first real tests of
just how nuts Donald Trump actually is. For a waiting world it’s a
public exam, his chance to demonstrate either that he’s been
blowing smoke or deeply inhaling.
Think, if you will,
of the Paris agreement as a toy painstakingly assembled over 25 years
by many of the world’s leading lights. It has now been handed, as a
gift, to the new child-emperor, and everyone is waiting to see what
he’ll do.
His buddies – the
far-right, climate-denying, UN-hating renegades who formed his
campaign brains trust – are egging him on to simply break it, to
smash it on the floor for a good laugh. In fact, they’re doing
their best to give him no way out. “President-elect Trump’s
oft-repeated promises in the campaign are fairly black-and-white,”
said Myron Ebell, head of his Environmental Protection Agency
transition team, last week. (Ebell believes that the Paris deal is an
attempt to “turn the world’s economy upside-down and consign poor
people to perpetual poverty” – and that climate science is done
by “third-rate, fourth-rate and fifth-rate scientists”.)
On the other side
are the world’s business leaders, 365 of whom just signed a letter
asking Trump to keep America engaged in the Paris process to provide
“long-term direction”. These are not people who have spent their
lives in obscure rightwing thinktanks. They run stuff – like
DuPont, General Mills, Hewlett-Packard, Hilton, Kellogg, Levi
Strauss, Nike and Unilever. And it’s hard to run stuff if the rules
keep changing
There’s also a
gang of Americans who care what the rest of the world thinks. A group
of former military leaders this week sent Trump’s transition team a
briefing book arguing that climate change presents a “significant
and direct risk to US military readiness, operations and strategy”.
Ben Cardin, a Delaware senator and the top Democrat on the Senate
foreign affairs committee, said withdrawing from the Paris deal would
damage “our credibility on other issues”.
And then there’s
the rest of the world. Other nations can’t be “weak” or
“naive”, said France’s former (and perhaps future) president
Nicolas Sarkozy. If Trump pulls the US out of Paris, Sarkozy proposes
a carbon tariff on US goods. That won’t happen, but diplomats at
the current climate talks in Marrakech have made it clear that
leadership on the 21st century’s most important issue would pass
from Washington to Beijing.
So Trump faces a
dilemma. Does he please his most extreme friends? If so, he will own
every climate disaster in the next four years: every hurricane that
smashes into the Gulf of Mexico will be Hurricane Donald, every
drought that bakes the heartland will be a moment to mock his
foolishness. That’s how that works.
Or does he back
down? It’s clear he won’t do anything to enforce the Paris
accords anyway – to all intents and purposes Obama’s clean power
plan expires at noon on 20 January, and Trump’s guys will give the
green light to any pipeline anyone proposes. But if he doesn’t
actually smash the global architecture of the Paris accords, he’ll
win points from responsible people. That’s how that works.
It’s entirely
possible he’ll decide to do neither, and send the Paris accords to
the Senate for some kind of show vote, letting the entire Republican
party take the heat for its climate-denying views. This would
demonstrate weakness of a particularly childish sort – the
coat-holding boy who goads everyone else into a fight and steps back
to watch.
The irony here is
that the Paris accords aren’t even very strong. They represent a
lowest-common-denominator effort, one that will allow the world’s
temperature to keep climbing dangerously. They were passed in no
small part to allow the world’s leaders to strenuously pat
themselves on the back for having done something. But at least the
pact keeps the process moving – and there are mechanisms that might
allow the world to ratchet up its efforts as the temperature climbs.
It’s a tissue of compromise and gesture, a flimsy bulwark against
the climbing mercury and rising sea. But wrecking it would be an act
of political vandalism, one that would define Trump’s legacy before
he has even taken office.
So we’ll see.
China
looks for a new climate dance partner as the US waltzes away
EU,
China move to deepen ties. The potential gap left by the US will be
difficult to fill.
By KALINA
OROSCHAKOFF 11/18/16, 6:12 PM CET Updated 11/19/16, 5:50 AM CET
“I am fully
convinced that Europe now has to fill the gap, which the U.S. will
leave behind,” Germany's Environment Minister Barbara Hendricks
told reporters at the COP22 climate summit in Morocco
MARRAKECH, Morocco —
The United States and China went from being the bad boys of global
climate diplomacy to its champions.
Now, the tag team of
the world’s top two polluters may be undone by Donald Trump, who
has pledged to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement.
Some Europeans want
the EU to be China’s new climate dance partner.
“We always had
very good relations with China, but in view of the coming
circumstances, we will become much more active,” said Miguel Arias
Cañete, European commissioner for climate action and energy, after
meeting China’s chief climate negotiator Xie Zhenhua in Marrakech.
The EU has long
played a key role in climate diplomacy. It helped engineer the final
push for an agreement in Paris last year by corralling a coalition
ranging from sinking island states to big industrial economies like
Japan and fast-growing emerging countries like India and Brazil.
Europe also pioneered many of the approaches now being pushed more
widely around the world, from its Emissions Trading System carbon
market, to investing heavily in renewable energy, which has helped
push down the price of solar and wind power to levels that are
increasingly competitive with coal and gas.
“I am fully
convinced that Europe now has to fill the gap, which the U.S. will
leave behind,” Germany’s Environment Minister Barbara Hendricks
told reporters at the COP22 climate summit in Morocco, where
deliberations ended Friday. “As Europeans we have to close ranks
with China.”
It’s unclear if
Brussels can be the same kind of partner for Beijing as Washington.
Unlike a nation state, the EU is a cumbersome and slow-moving body.
It took a lot of arm twisting and pressure for the EU to ratify the
Paris agreement (something not all member states have completed), a
process spurred by panic at being left behind when the U.S. and China
took the lead in speedily approving the climate deal earlier this
year.
The most likely
outcome of a U.S. retreat from climate diplomacy isn’t a
Beijing-Brussels axis but a multi-polar world of shifting alliances.
The EU also sends
mixed messages on climate change: Brussels is ambitious, and some
member countries like Germany — pushing to drop most nuclear and
fossil fuels by mid-century — are out in front when it comes to
going green. Others like Poland see a long future for coal.
Relations between
China and Europe — and in particular Germany — are strong, but
it’s not that easy for a bloc of 28 countries to simply decide to
take on a new leadership role — even if Germany and the European
Commission agree on deepening ties with China to push the climate
agenda, a European government source cautioned.
There is “a bit of
a question mark what Europe’s leadership capacity will be,” said
Liz Gallagher of E3G, an environmental think tank.
Trumpian confusion
China has been taken
aback by Trump’s unexpected presidency and its impact on climate
policy. Beijing has already fired back at Trump’s 2012 tweet,
saying climate change was a Chinese-inspired hoax aimed at harming
U.S. business, though it also says the U.S. remains a crucial climate
diplomacy partner.
“The recent
election of the U.S. has really awakened the world,” said Liu
Zhenmin, deputy foreign minister and vice-president of the Chinese
delegation. “Of course, people are worried” that the U.S. under
Trump will repeat what it did in 2001 under President George W. Bush,
when it backed away from the Kyoto Protocol, a pact that set binding
targets for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, he added.
It’s also opened
up an opportunity for China to take on a new leadership role. “The
way in which China made clear it’s going to continue to move
forward and wants to play a leadership role internationally on the
issue — I think that stands out,” said David Waskow of the World
Resources Institute.
Liu said he hoped
China’s place in international climate efforts would grow in the
coming years, building on the “very important” role it has
already played over the past few years.
Liu offered a
mini-history lesson, pointing out that the global climate negotiation
process was actually kickstarted under the Republican administration
of Ronald Reagan. “That’s why I hope that the Republican
administration will continue to support this process,” he said,
adding that China “will continue its effort to support the Paris
agreement.”
He also said that
China would look to “enhance” cooperation with the European
Union, the world’s third-largest greenhouse gas emitter.
The most likely
outcome of a U.S. retreat from climate diplomacy isn’t a
Beijing-Brussels axis to replace the Beijing-Washington one. Instead,
a multi-polar world of shifting alliances among the EU, China and big
polluters like India may emerge.
“The vacuum left
by if the U.S. withdrew, which is still not a foregone conclusion,
could be filled by [the EU],” said Thoriq Ibrahim, energy minister
for the Maldives and the chair of the Alliance of Small Island
States. “But I suspect China, India and other big countries would
also take on important leadership roles, as well.”
Authors:
Kalina Oroschakoff
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