THERE are no surprises to any aspect of the withdrawal of the United States from the UN’s Paris climate agreement. On his way to the White House, President Donald Trump promised voters he would quit the deal. This week was the earliest under the agreement’s rules that Washington could serve formal notice. The actual end to its involvement in the Paris Agreement will be in a year’s time, exactly one day after the US presidential election.
Nor has the reaction been surprising. While other governments have been restrained in their expressions of disappointment at the American move, Trump’s many detractors, including the vocal and well-organized environmentalist campaigners, have howled with anger and damned him in the most vituperative and indeed violent terms.
Yet the one thing of which Trump cannot be accused is inconsistency. His Secretary of State on Monday echoed those campaign promises by saying the Paris Agreement imposed an “unfair economic burden” on the United States but promised that Washington would follow “a realistic and pragmatic model ... using all energy resources and technologies cleanly and efficiently”.
This chimes perfectly with Trump’s “America First” leitmotif. Every government should be expected to look after its own people but adhering to international accords can mean some, albeit limited, sacrifice of those interests.
The Paris Agreement of 2016, known formally as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), has been ratified by every one of the organization’s 195 sovereign bodies. That the world’s climate is changing is incontrovertible. The dispute lies in why this is happening. And unfortunately the argument has become deeply confused by the shrill rhetoric of an influential minority. This seeks to hijack the debate by turning it into a campaign against capitalism in general and Big Business in particular. The extremist case is that pollution is man-made and therefore it is within human power to stop it.
After China, the United States is the world’s second largest generator of greenhouse gases. It is of no consequence to the environmentalists that America is also the largest generator of wealth and technology, the benefits of which filter down to the rest of the world. In Trump’s simplistic — he would say “no-nonsense” worldview, it is ludicrous that the Paris Agreement’s international rules and regulations hobble the American economy and his drive to make it once again an “energy superpower”.
But by quitting the Paris deal, the United States has given up the chance to influence the UNFCCC’s direction of travel. It has also diminished its ability to argue the case that a significant proportion of climate change is coming about as result of a natural global cycle. There is certainly a role for ingenious science and technology to do something to mitigate the effects of climate change, but by leaving the Paris Agreement, the United States has deprived itself of the opportunities to help spearhead such developments on a global scale. Now US ingenuity will be devoted for instance to working out how to stop New York and other coastal cities from being submerged by the expected rise in sea levels. But many, not least Americans, may regret the fact that Trump has decided that his nation will go it alone. Whatever the underlying causes, climate change is surely a global problem which invites global action, a global response.
