It was a mild day in June 2017 when Donald Trump addressed the White House rosewood lectern to announce the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris climate agreement, the only comprehensive global pact to address the spiraling crisis.
Todd Stern, who was America’s top negotiator when the deal closed in Paris in 2015, forced himself to watch the speech.
“I found it disgusting, he was a liar from start to finish,” Stern said. “I was furious … because here we have this really important and here is this joker who does not understand anything he is talking about. It was a fraud. “
The terms of the deal mean that no country can leave before November this year, so due to a whim of time, the US will officially abandon the Paris deal on November 4, in 100 days and only a day after the 2020 presidential election.
The end of Stern’s misery, and possibly any realistic hope of avoiding disastrous climate change, is largely based on the outcome of the elections, which will pit Trump against former Vice President Joe Biden, who promised to join the climate deal.
The Paris Agreement, signed in a wave of optimism in 2015, has seen the five hottest years ever recorded on Earth, unprecedented forest fires that torched cities from California to Australia, record heat waves that baked Europe and India. and temperatures that briefly exploded beyond 100F (38C) in the Arctic.
These kinds of impacts could be a mere appetizer, scientists warn, given that they have been fueled by global warming levels that are on the road to triple, or worse, by the end of the century without drastic corrective action. The hesitant global effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions and prevent further calamity largely depends on whether the US decides to re-enter the fray.
“The choice of Biden or Trump in the White House is huge, not only for the United States but also for the world at large to tackle climate change,” Stern said. “If Biden wins, November 4 is a problem, as if a bad dream had ended. If Trump wins, seal the deal. The United States becomes a non-player and Paris’ goals become very, very difficult. Without the United States in the long term, they certainly are not realistic. “
Nearly 200 countries gave their names to the Paris accords, pledging to tackle the climate emergency and limit the average rise in global temperature to “well below” 2 ° C above the era before mass industrialization began to pumping huge volumes of gases that heat the planet into the atmosphere from cars, trucks, power plants, and farms. A more ambitious goal of stopping temperatures with a 1.5 ° C rise was also included, although, just five years later, the planet is already dangerously approaching this mark.
The Paris agreement brought major and growing emitters on board, such as China and India, with the quest to shift to cleaner energy sources, in part due to the impulses of Barack Obama, who claimed that the agreement showed that the United States was now a “world leader in the fight against climate change”.
Trump, who once called climate science a “hoax”, was never friendly to the deal, which he framed as an international effort to harm the United States and leave China lightly. In his Rose Garden speech, Trump commented that he was chosen to “represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.” In reality, each country is free to choose its own emission cuts without any application. “Paris is like a container, like a glass: you can pour water or wine,” said Sue Biniaz, a former attorney for the US state department who drafted parts of the Paris agreement. “The design of Paris is not the problem, it is that there is no political will to do enough.”
Abandoned climate efforts
In practice, the US government abandoned any concerns about the climate crisis a while ago, and the Trump administration has so far reversed more than 100 environmental protections, including an Obama-era plan to curb emissions from coal-fired power plants, limits to pollution emitted from cars and trucks and even energy efficiency standards for light bulbs. In an often chaotic presidency, Trump’s position on climate change has been unusually consistent: American fossil fuel production must be tightened, restrictive climate regulations must be removed.
Undeterred by growing alarm among Americans about the climate crisis, Trump is bringing this same message to the election. “Biden wants to massively re-regulate the energy economy, rejoin the Paris climate agreement, which would kill our energy entirely, would have to shut down 25% of its businesses and kill oil and gas development,” the president said this month, without citing evidence, since it announced another setback, this time from environmental assessments of pipelines, roads and other infrastructure.
Despite all this, U.S. emissions have continued to decline, largely due to the collapse of a coal industry that Trump has attempted to support. However, the international ramifications have been revealing: in the absence of any kind of positive coaxing by 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 objectives of the Paris agreement, with a global temperature rise that will exceed 3 ° C by the end of the century, even if current promises are kept. Paris was supposed to be just the beginning: countries are supposed to continually increase their levels of ambition until the most extreme ravages of climate change, such as floods, heat waves, crops and the loss of reefs, are avoided. coral.
“There has been less political will from other countries to take action to some degree because the United States is not pushing for it,” said Biniaz. “During Trump’s first four years it is easier to say that it is likely to be an aberration, a short-term deviation, but if it is eight years it is more difficult to hold together the coalition of countries that are concerned about this.”
‘Another meteorite is coming’
Another four years of a Trump administration with no interest in the climate crisis could delay global emissions cuts by a decade, according to a published analysis, making the chances of meeting the Paris goals almost impossible.
Hakon Saelen, an environmental economist at the University of Oslo who led the study, said the withdrawal from the United States is a “major blow” to mitigating the climate crisis. “The world cannot afford any delay if it wants to reach goal 2C,” he said. “Our model indicates that the possibility of achieving it is already very low, but close to zero with another Trump term.”
But even with a committed Biden administration that can somehow get Congress to agree on a $ 2 trillion plan to shift the US toward renewable energy, the challenge is immense. The world has avoided reducing emissions for so long that only an unprecedented and rapid review of the way we travel, generate energy and eat will keep humanity within the safety limits described in Paris.
According to the United Nations, the world will have to cut emissions by more than 7% a year in this decade to have any hope of reaching the 1.5C target. This annual cut will be achieved this year only through the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic, which shut down much of the global economy. A more sustainable path to decarbonization will need to be immediately identified and implemented.
“The more it heats up, the worse it gets and the [Paris] the goals are generally at a level where things are going to get really bad, “said Zeke Hausfather, director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute.” We don’t want people to lose hope, the human race will not go extinct in 2C But that’s an unnecessarily high bar. There are still big threats and many good reasons to keep warming below that.
Stern said that American voters will naturally be “supersonic focused” on the coronavirus and the economic consequences. “But climate change cannot be forgotten in these elections,” he said. “The Covid crisis has shown us that countries can do remarkable things in a short time when they think they have to. It shows us that we need leaders who also understand what we must do regarding climate change, because that is another meteorite that is heading towards us. ”
.
