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During the 2016 election campaign, Donald Trump said he would remove the United States from the Paris Agreement. He did too.
A few months after Trump’s inauguration as president, a request to resign from the deal was sent in the summer of 2017. The conditions mean that it takes a long time to withdraw from the agreement, so a formal withdrawal would not occur until after the next presidential election.
Now we are there. The presidential election was on November 3. On Wednesday, November 4, the United States formally withdrew from the Paris Agreement. Almost 200 countries are part of the agreement, but the world’s largest economy and the second-largest issuing country are excluded.
As of this writing, it is unclear whether Trump or Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States and that means everything for whatever happens with the Paris Agreement. If Biden wins, he has said the United States will re-enter. It is a relatively simple and fast process. The president can make the decision himself and send a statement that the United States wishes to return to the agreement and attach a plan for the country’s national climate commitments. Then 30 days pass before the United States joins.
If Trump wins, the United States will still be out of the Paris Agreement, but the country remains a party to the UN climate convention. Within the convention, some of the climate work is controlled, so the United States is not completely out of global cooperation.
The fact that the United States is not a party may have important, probably decisive, significance for the objectives of the Paris Agreement. The agreement is structured from the bottom up. Rather than setting global rules for climate work from above, before the Paris meeting in 2015, countries had to come up with plans for what they would do to curb climate change.
All countries of the agreement have submitted such national commitments. The ones that exist so far are not enough to keep the heating around 1.5 degrees, rather they would end around 3-4 degrees. Therefore, the agreement also states that countries must tighten their national commitments every five years.
This year, countries would have submitted stricter commitments ahead of the UN’s grand climate summit, which would have been held in Glasgow but has been postponed for a year due to the corona pandemic. But countries have yet to come up with stricter plans this year.
If climate change is to be stopped, it is urgent. Emissions must be reduced by just over 7 percent per year if the targets are to be achieved. This is almost all that is expected to decline this year, as much of the world has been shut down due to the crown.
The United States accounts for about 15 percent of global emissions and is after China, with about 28 percent, the second largest emitting country in the world. The fact that such a dominant issuer is not included in the deal means that all other countries can bear a significantly greater burden.
“If Donald Trump continues as president, it will probably be impossible to achieve global climate goals,” Michael E. Mann, a professor at Penn State University, tweeted and even said in an interview with The Guardian.
A significant part of the Paris Agreement is financing, that rich countries should support poor countries in climate work. The Green Climate Fund is central to the commitments made by developing countries under the agreement. Trump has withdrawn two billion US dollars, equivalent to 18 billion crowns, which had previously been pledged to the fund. That money is necessary for the world to change.
Even if the United States remains outside the Paris Agreement, large and strong internal forces demand that the country join the agreement and continue to pursue its goals. Several cities, states, businesses and organizations have come together in the “America’s Pledge” network. Together, they account for nearly 70 percent of the country’s GDP, if they were a single country, the group would be the second largest economy in the world.
