After decades of negotiations, all 197 nations in the
world decided to voluntarily cut the heat-trapping pollution that is causing
the climate crisis by signing the Paris climate agreement. Only a handful of
countries have not ratified the deal.
But on 4 November, in a coincidence of timing just 24
hours after its presidential election, the US will formally exit the agreement,
joining Iran and Turkey as the only major countries not to participate in the
pact, which is seen by many as the minimum effort the world needs to make on
cutting emissions.
How the global climate fight could be lost if
Trump is re-elected
The US will officially exit the Paris accord one day
after the 2020 US election and architects of that deal say the stakes could not
be higher
Oliver
Milman in New York
@olliemilman
Mon 27 Jul
2020 08.00 BSTLast modified on Mon 27 Jul 2020 08.48 BST
It was a
balmy June day in 2017 when Donald Trump took to the lectern in the White House
Rose Garden to announce the US withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, the
only comprehensive global pact to tackle the spiraling crisis.
Todd Stern,
who was the US’s chief negotiator when the deal was sealed in Paris in 2015,
forced himself to watch the speech.
“I found it
sickening, it was mendacious from start to finish,” said Stern. “I was furious
… because here we have this really important thing and here’s this joker who
doesn’t understand anything he’s talking about. It was a fraud.”
The terms
of the accord mean no country can leave before November this year, so due to a
quirk of timing, the US will officially exit the Paris deal on 4 November – 100
days from now and just one day after the 2020 presidential election.
The
completion of Stern’s misery, and possibly any realistic hopes of averting
disastrous climate change, rests heavily upon the outcome of the election,
which will pit Trump against former vice-president Joe Biden, who has vowed to
rejoin the climate agreement.
The
lifetime of the Paris agreement, signed in a wave of optimism in 2015, has seen
the five hottest years ever recorded on Earth, unprecedented wildfires torching
towns from California to Australia, record heatwaves baking Europe and India
and temperatures briefly bursting beyond 100F (38C) in the Arctic.
These sort
of impacts could be a mere appetizer, scientists warn, given they have been
fueled by levels of global heating that are on track to triple, or worse, by
the end of the century without drastic remedial action. The faltering global
effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions and head off further calamity hinges,
in significant part, on whether the US decides to re-enter the fray.
“The choice
of Biden or Trump in the White House is huge, not just for the US but for the
world generally to deal with climate change,” said Stern. “If Biden wins,
November 4 is a blip, like a bad dream is over. If Trump wins, he seals the
deal. The US becomes a non-player and the goals of Paris become very, very
difficult. Without the US in the long term, they certainly aren’t realistic.”
Nearly 200
countries put their name to the Paris accords, pledging to face down the
climate emergency and limit the average global temperature rise to “well below”
2C above the era before mass industrialization started pumping huge volumes of
planet-warming gases into the atmosphere from cars, trucks, power plants and
farms. A more aspirational goal of halting temperatures at a 1.5C rise was also
included although, just five years on, the planet is already creeping
perilously close to this mark.
The Paris
deal brought major, growing emitters like China and India on board with the
quest to shift towards cleaner sources of energy, in part due to the urgings of
Barack Obama, who claimed the agreement showed the US was now a “global leader
in the fight against climate change”.
If Trump wins,
he seals the deal. The US becomes a non-player and the goals of Paris become
very, very difficult
Todd Stern
Trump, who
once famously called climate science a “hoax”, has never looked kindly on the
deal, which he framed as an international effort to damage the US while letting
China off too lightly. In his Rose Garden speech, Trump remarked that he was
elected to “represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.” In reality, each
country is free to choose its own emissions cuts without any sort of
enforcement. “Paris is like a vessel, such as a glass – you can pour water or
wine into it,” said Sue Biniaz, a former US state department lawyer who drafted
parts of the Paris deal. “It’s not the design of Paris that’s the problem, it’s
that there’s not the political will to do enough.”
The US
government in practice abandoned any concern over the climate crisis some time
ago, with the Trump administration so far rolling back more than 100
environmental protections, including an Obama-era plan to curb emissions from
coal-fired power plants, limits on pollution emitted from cars and trucks and
even energy efficiency standards for lightbulbs. In an often chaotic
presidency, Trump’s position on climate change has been unusually consistent –
American fossil fuel production must be bolstered, restrictive climate
regulations must be scrapped.
Unswayed by
growing alarm among Americans over the climate crisis, Trump is taking this
same message to the election. “Biden wants to massively re-regulate the energy
economy, rejoin the Paris climate accord, which would kill our energy totally,
you would have to close 25% of your businesses and kill oil and gas
development,” the president said this month, without citing evidence, as he
announced another rollback, this time of environmental assessments of
pipelines, highways and other infrastructure.
Despite all
this, US emissions have continued to fall, due in large part to the downfall of
a coal industry that Trump has attempted to prop up. The international
ramifications have been telling, however – in the absence of any sort of
positive cajoling from the US, global emissions have remained stubbornly high
and most countries are lagging behind their own promised actions.
According
to the Climate Action Tracker, only Morocco is acting consistently with the
Paris agreement’s goals, with the global temperature rise set to exceed 3C by
the end of the century even if the current pledges are met. Paris was meant to
be only the beginning – countries are supposed to continually ratchet up their
ambition levels until the more extreme ravages of climate change, such as dire
flooding, heatwaves, crop failures and the loss of coral reefs, are avoided.
“There’s
been less political will from other countries to take action to a certain
extent because the US isn’t pushing for it,” said Biniaz. “During the first
four years of Trump it’s easier to say it’s likely to be an aberration, a
short-term deviation, but if it’s eight years it’s harder to keep together the
coalition of countries that care about this.”
‘Another
meteorite is coming’
Another
four years of a Trump administration uninterested in the climate crisis could
set back global emissions cuts by a decade, according to one published
analysis, making the chances of meeting the goals of Paris near to impossible.
Hakon
Saelen, an environmental economist at the University of Oslo who led the study,
said the US withdrawal is a “significant major blow” to the mitigation of the
climate crisis. “The world cannot afford any delay if the 2C target is to be
reached,” he said. “Our model indicates that the chance of reaching it is very
low already, but near zero with another Trump term.”
Trump after announcing the US would withdraw from
the Paris Climate Agreement at the White House in DC in June 2017.
But even
with an engaged Biden administration that is somehow able to get Congress to
agree to a $2tn plan to shift the US on to renewable energy, the challenge is
immense. The world has dithered on cutting emissions for so long that only an
unprecedented, rapid overhaul of the way we travel, generate energy and eat
will keep humanity within the bounds of safety outlined in Paris.
The world
will have to slash emissions by more than 7% a year this decade to have any
hope of meeting the 1.5C target, according to the United Nations. This annual
cut will be achievable this year only through the devastation of the
coronavirus pandemic, which shuttered much of the global economy. A more
sustainable path to decarbonization will need to be immediately identified and
implemented.
“The warmer
it gets the worse it gets and the [Paris] targets are broadly at a level where
we things will get really bad,” said Zeke Hausfather, director of climate and
energy at the Breakthrough Institute. “We don’t want people to give up hope,
the human race won’t become extinct at 2C but that’s an unnecessarily high bar.
There are still large threats and a lot of good reasons to keep warming below
that.
Stern said
American voters will naturally be “supersonic focused” on coronavirus and the
economic fallout. “But climate change can’t be forgotten this election,” he
said. “The Covid crisis has shown us countries can do remarkable things in
short order when they believe they have to. It shows us we need leaders who
also understand what we need to do on climate change, because that is another
meteorite heading our way.”
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