“Au Revoir: Trump Exits The Paris Climate Agreement”, The New Yorker

By Elizabeth Kolbert, Daily Comment, June 1, 2017

After milking the fate of the planet for maximum drama, Donald Trump announced today that the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris climate accord. To reach this decision, the President had to dismiss decades’ worth of research by the country’s most prestigious scientific organizations. He needed to resist pleas from the U.S.’s staunchest allies; ignore appeals from many of its largest corporations, including ExxonMobil; and disregard the counsel of his Secretary of State. All this for, well, what? To shore up his base on the coal-hugging right?

Analysis: telling literally every other country in the world to fuck off will probably create problems down the road,” David Roberts, who blogs about climate policy for Vox, tweeted, as the news of the move began to leak out. But, if Trump’s decision is evidently wrongheaded, it’s also possible that it won’t make all that much difference. This is in part because the U.S. had already effectively exited the agreement. In part it’s because just about everybody outside the Trump Administration seems to understand that the U.S. is making a world-historical mistake.

“If Trump Dumps the Climate Accord, the U.S. Is the Loser” runs the headline of the cover story of next week’s Bloomberg Businessweek. Among the many reasons that Trump’s move makes no sense is that the Paris accord is a fundamentally weak agreement. Designed to avoid the need for approval by the U.S. Senate, it’s not even an official treaty. Under the accord, each country was left to devise its own commitment—or, as it is officially known, “nationally determined contribution.” In March, the Administration made it clear that it had no intention of fulfilling the U.S.’s commitment, which was to reduce the country’s carbon-dioxide emissions by at least twenty-six per cent by 2025 (a figure that relies on a baseline from 2005). The White House did this by rescinding—or, more accurately, indicating its desire to rescind—the two sets of Obama-era regulations upon which the commitment was based: a set of stricter auto-efficiency standards and a series of rules governing emissions from power plants.

Even under these rules, it would have been a stretch for the U.S. to meet its Paris “contribution”; without them, meeting the contribution has become, for all intents and purposes, impossible. (Instead of declining, the U.S.’s emissions are now predicted to remain steady through 2030.) But, since the country’s commitment was, essentially, voluntary, the U.S. could have remained a party to the Paris accord while at the same time ignoring the agreement’s terms. (In fact, technically, it will remain a party to the accord, as the process of formally withdrawing will take years.)

Many in the climate-policy world argued that this course was preferable and that, despite the Trump Administration’s atrocious behavior, it would be best to keep the U.S. at the negotiating table. Others worried that Washington’s bad manners might be contagious. “A rogue US can cause more damage inside rather than outside the agreement” is how Luke Kemp, a climate-policy expert at Australian National University, put it recently, in the journal Nature Climate Change. Trump’s decision has obviously rendered this debate moot. By withdrawing, the U.S. will join a select group of non-participants. Only two other countries, Syria and Nicaragua, are not part of the Paris agreement—Nicaragua because it objected to the voluntary nature of the commitments.

One way to think about the Paris accord is as a diplomatic version of “Stone Soup.” In the folktale, reluctant villagers contribute tidbits to a collective pot, and in the end everyone gets a meal. The story turns on a trick that overcomes the villagers’ reflexive stinginess; by the logic of the scheme, the working-out of the illusion transforms it into reality.

In the climate treaty, instead of soup, the objective is a radically transformed energy system. If everyone believes that the transformation is going to happen (“everyone,” in this case, meaning the world’s major energy producers and the banks that finance them), then it will, in fact, take place: the illusion has the power to become self-fulfilling. This is the promise of Paris—and, of course, the peril. The dynamic can run in either direction.

The U.S.’s withdrawal could prompt other countries to reconsider their contributions. Or it could have the opposite effect. The Trump Administration is leaving the energy technologies of the future to other countries to develop, and many nations see an economic opportunity. As the headline of a recent post on Foreign Policy’s Web site put it,“If Trump Dumps the Paris Accord, China Will Rule the Energy Future.” It is telling that several of the U.S.’s largest tech companies, including Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Intel, signed an open letter to Trump, urging him to “keep the United States in the Paris Agreement.” The letter states, “By expanding markets for innovative clean technologies, the agreement generates jobs and economic growth.” On Tuesday, Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, reportedly put in a call to the President, urging him to remain in the agreement.

In another open letter to the President, which ran as a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal, the heads of thirty other mammoth companies, including 3M, Cargill, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley, wrote to express their “strong support for the United States remaining in the Paris Climate Agreement.” The C.E.O.s saidthat they were concerned about the “strong potential for negative trade implications if the United States exits from the Paris Agreement.”