Imagining Paris Without the U.S.

November 13, 2016

As the world recovers from the shock of Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. elections, one of the first questions is, what does this mean for the Paris Agreement on climate change that was signed with so much celebration last year?

First, the good news: Trump cannot, as he has promised, “cancel” the Paris Agreement. He can pull the U.S. out of it (Dan Bodansky has the definitive discussion of those options), but the Agreement would remain in force, and would provide a framework for the rest of the world to continue negotiating and cutting emissions.

It is not clear that a U.S. exit from the Paris Agreement or the UNFCCC would have much of a practical impact. The U.S. has two primary obligations: to cut its own emissions and to provide funding for developing countries (both to cut their own emissions and to adapt).

The U.S. emissions trajectory is largely being driven by changes in the energy and transportation markets, not by policy, and certainly not by international law. The U.S. has been careful not to commit to anything internationally that it does not have sufficient authority to enact domestically. Even the Clean Power Plan, when and if it comes into effect, is not expected to have a significant impact on emissions (its primary role is to prevent a zombie-like revival of the coal industry).

As for financial support, expectations of the U.S. were always low. Contrary to most Americans’ impression, the U.S. has a paltry foreign aid budget, and a Republican-controlled Congress gave little hope of that changing. The Obama administration’s $300 million contribution to the Green Climate Fund was a welcome surprise, but no one expected it to set a precedent. A lack of U.S. financial support for international climate action will certainly be decried, but it will not change the fundamental calculus of the negotiations.

The real danger to the Paris Agreement is the withdrawal of U.S. political support. This treaty is really owned by Washington. The U.S. team spent more than a decade killing off its predecessor, the Kyoto Protocol, in order to put in place a new framework that was conceptualized, designed, and crafted by the U.S. State Department. The rest of the world got on board because they saw the U.S. take ownership of the process and the final product; and with the U.S.-China bilateral agreements, they saw serious movement toward emissions reductions.

If the U.S. walks away now, it will certainly take the wind out of the Paris Agreement’s sails. It is unclear if the Agreement now has sufficient momentum on its own to survive without American leadership.

A U.S. retrenchment will also create a leadership vacuum. That may not be bad, depending on who steps in to provide leadership. The E.U. might reclaim its leadership role; the BRICS might get their act together. Or China, battling pollution and high emissions, may become the driving force in the international arena. Then the U.S. would find itself sidelined in the most important international negotiations of the 21st century.

Photo credit: “Empty seat” by Luca Sartoni, CC BY-SA 2.0