US exits Paris climate agreement: what does it mean

Donald Trump Photos: depositphotos

On Thursday, US President Donald Trump decided to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement. Although the exit process will take several years, the United States may become one of the few countries on Earth that completely rejects the threat of climate change, and Trump’s decision may complicate America’s already tense relations with its European allies and growing powers such as China and India.

The POLITICO publication answered the main questions that arise when discussing the topic of the Paris Climate Agreement.

What is a climate agreement in Paris?

In 2015, representatives of 195 countries gathered in Paris and agreed to take measures aimed at maintaining the global temperature increase in the Fahrenheit region 3,6 in order to avoid possible destructive consequences associated with sea level rise or extreme weather conditions. At that time, the current US President Barack Obama said that America would reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 to about 27% below the level of 2005 of the year. Harsher conditions were applied to developed countries than to countries with less mature economies.

Why does Trump refuse agreement?

Trump has repeatedly called the problem of climate change a "hoax" invented by the Chinese to expand its coal industry, while the US will be obliged to reduce it. The issue related to the Paris climate agreement divided the Presidential Administration into two camps, but Trump seems to have taken the side of the nationalists, who believe that the fulfillment of the agreement is contrary to Trump’s “America First” plan.

What is happening now?

It's not clear yet, but it seems that Trump will follow the official procedure for withdrawing from the agreement, and it will take at least 4 of the year. Apparently, Trump decided not to treat the Paris deal as a treaty and if he submitted it for ratification to the Senate, the vote would certainly have failed. He stopped the closure of the previously ratified 1992 treaty of the year in which the basic tenets of the climate agreements were fixed, as a result of which the treaty was concluded. But even Republican senators who claimed that Trump should withdraw from the Paris deal did not insist on withdrawing from the wider United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Does this mean that the US Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) will not regulate greenhouse gas emissions?

Not really. The Trump administration is already in the process of canceling or revising Obama's climate change rules, such as Clean Power Plan, but this has nothing to do with whether the US remains part of the Paris Agreement. The main question is whether Trump is able to question the US EPA’s scientific findings that carbon dioxide is a danger to the environment, and its production should be controlled by the clean air law.

Will it save the coal industry?

It is doubtful. The biggest problem faced by coal-fired power plants is that they switch to cheap natural gas, which they began to produce using the hydraulic fracturing method. Over the past decade, the share of coal in the US electricity market has fallen from more than 50% in 2000 to about 30% today, and market analysts say that the share is likely to fall further. In fact, the largest US coal companies have urged Trump to stick to the Paris deal, seeking to provide greater support for technologies such as carbon capture and sequestration, which they believe are vital for the long-term future of the industry. However, some small mining executives, such as Murray Energy CEO Bob Murray, called on Trump to get out of the deal, stating that it was an “illegal” waste of taxpayers' money.

Who supports this solution?

The head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, was perhaps the most active member of the Trump administration in rejecting the agreement, arguing that the disputes behind the scenes of this transaction would complicate his efforts to cancel Obama’s climate regulation rules at EPA. A group of Republican senators, including majority leader Mike McConnell from Kentucky and Senate Chairman of the Environment and Public Works John Barrasso from Wyoming, reiterated this argument last week in an influential letter to Trump, saying the agreement could provide arguments for environmentalists in litigation against Trump’s energy policy.

Other supporters of leaving the agreement include White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and several smaller energy companies and conservative groups such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the American Energy Alliance.

According to a poll last month by POLITICO and the Harvard School of Public Health T. Chan, 56% of Republicans wanted Trump to withdraw from the agreement.

Who is against it?

Trump's daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner were among those who insisted that he adhere to this deal, along with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and several Republican members of Congress, including Senate Energy Speaker Lisa Murkovski from Alaska. They said that signing this non-binding deal would not prevent Trump’s broader energy goals, but would allow the US to maintain influence in international climate change negotiations and related diplomatic efforts.

The largest US and global energy companies, including ExxonMobil, the three largest coal producers in the US, and major tech companies such as Apple and Google, also tried to convince Trump to participate in the Paris deal.

According to the POLITICO-Harvard poll, about 62% of Americans generally supported a stay in the agreement, including more than six of the 10 independent and 87% of Democrats.

What does this mean for the planet?

This is not good, but the prospects were not rosy even before this decision by Trump. Obama's emissions-cutting policies were not enough to meet US goals in the Paris deal even if they were fully implemented - and Trump has already effectively put them all on the chopping block, making any further cuts difficult.

Many scientists say the climate agreement's goals are too modest to limit global temperature rise to 3,6 degrees, and that to achieve this, global carbon emissions would have to reach zero by the end of the century - an impossible task. Major new policy moves to reduce emissions will come from states like California and New York or foreign leaders in Europe and China, and activists will pressure oil and coal companies to reduce their carbon emissions.

Just a few hours after the news of Trump’s decision came this morning, Exxon shareholders voted in favor of a resolution asking the company to report annually on how it affects climate change.

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