Why Trump Will Make the Wrong Decision on Paris
As the Trump Administration lurches from one crisis to the next, the deadline for its decision on how to deal with the Paris climate accord keeps getting pushed back. The latest word is that the White House won’t make the call until after the President returns from the G7 meeting, to be held in Taormina, Italy, next week. Here’s a prediction (admittedly not a bold one, given the record so far): whatever the Administration decides, it will make the wrong choice.
Let’s review the bidding so far. During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump promised to “cancel” the Paris Agreement. Taken literally, this pledge cannot be fulfilled, since the agreement has already been ratified by a hundred and forty-five countries, including the United States, and formally entered into force four days before the election. What Trump can do—and, presumably, what he intended when he said that he would “cancel” the accord—is withdraw the U.S. from the agreement. As he may have known, but probably did not, this process, under the terms of the pact, would take three years.
As Trump assembled his team—the word here is used loosely—it quickly split into two camps on Paris. In one are the hardcore denialists, led by the White House chief strategist, Steve Bannon, and the E.P.A. administrator, Scott Pruitt. Speaking last month on “Fox & Friends,” Pruitt called the agreement a “bad deal for America.” He added, “It’s something we need to exit.”
In the second camp—let’s call it the soft-core camp—are Secretary of State Rex Tillerson; the director of the National Economic Council, Gary Cohn; and the First Daughter, Ivanka Trump. “We’re better served by being at that table than leaving the table,” Tillerson said during his confirmation hearing, in response to a question on the accord. While the repeated delays in announcing a decision on Paris have heartened proponents of the agreement, the hardcore camp has reportedly been gaining in the most recent meetings. This, according to several accounts, is owing to the fact that, at one of the sessions, the White House counsel, Don McGahn, argued that the U.S. would open itself up to legal challenges if it remained a party to the agreement while backing away from its Paris commitments.
If Trump accepts this argument, Foreign Policy noted, it will “almost certainly” prompt him to “exit from the deal.” Significantly, almost no one outside the White House does accept this argument. The commitments that the U.S., and indeed all countries, made under the Paris accord are known as “nationally determined contributions,” or N.D.C.s. They are not considered legally binding, an arrangement that was devised in an effort to stave off precisely the sort of debate now taking place in the White House. The State Department’s legal team disagrees with McGahn’s claim, as do most other experts on the accord. “I think what we’re clearly seeing is a political maneuver, using a spurious legal argument as a pretext for shutting off a Cabinet debate that was probably leaning towards staying in the agreement,” Paul Bodnar, the former climate chief of the White House’s National Security Council, recently told Climatewire.
Already it is clear that the U.S. will not live up to its Paris commitments, which were to reduce the country’s carbon emissions by at least twenty-six per cent by 2025. (This is against a baseline year of 2005.) According to the Obama Administration, the target would have been met through a combination of tougher fuel-efficiency standards for cars and new regulations aimed at reducing emissions from power plants. Most analyses concluded that the Obama-era regulations were, on their own, insufficient to meet the target, and that future Administrations would need to adopt stronger measures. Now the Obama-era regulations are being dismantled. Just about the only effective actions that the Trump Administration has managed to take have involved rolling back environmental regulations: the E.P.A. has initiated the process of revoking a slew of environmental rules, including the fuel standards for cars and the rules for power plants. Meanwhile, last month, the agency removed its climate-change pages from its Web site. Visitors to the site are told that the pages are being updated “to reflect EPA’s priorities under the leadership of President Trump and Administrator Pruitt.” It’s not clear what the Administration hopes to gain by pretending that the climate isn’t changing, or that the data documenting the trends don’t exist, but, of course, it’s also unclear what Trump hoped to gain by firing James Comey. As Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago, said recently, in a press release announcing that his city was posting the Obama-era version of the pages on its own Web site, “Burying your head in the sand doesn’t erase the problem.”
If, when the Administration finally makes the call, it decides to remain a party to the Paris Agreement, this will be interpreted as a victory for the more “moderate” voices in the President’s inner circle, and as a win (albeit it a modest one) for the planet. But would it really do the world any good to have the U.S. remain in the agreement purely for the sake of flouting it? As Jorgen Henningsen, a former climate negotiator for the European Commission, wrote in the Financial Times, “The US has already de facto left the agreement, insofar as President Trump has done everything within his powers not to deliver the policies and actions necessary for the US to be a serious party to it. Ignoring this fact, and accepting that the US remains a partner in the discussions . . . would only underline how weak the Paris agreement is.”
In other words, the Administration has already passed up the chance to make the right decision on Paris. The only choices that remain are different shades of wrong.
