Obama’s Gamble

This post was originally written on 12 November 2016

The Obama administration has received copious praise for the unprecedented success of the Paris Agreement, but with Donald Trump’s election, its drawbacks are beginning to come into focus.

The immediate danger is that a Trump administration could pull the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement (or perhaps out of the UNFCCC entirely). This would have little legal impact on the international framework, but would seriously undermine the political momentum that has been the biggest achievement of the UNFCCC in recent years.

What has gone largely unremarked is the lost opportunity of 7 years of climate action. Since Obama took office, his climate team continued George W. Bush’s mission of razing the Kyoto Protocol to the ground. Destroying Kyoto, we were told, was the prerequisite to put in place a better, smarter climate agreement: Paris.

There is no doubt that the Kyoto Protocol had its problems. The distinction between developed and developing countries was unacceptable to the U.S., and its carbon market was a widely-acknowledged disaster. But both problems were tractable, if parties (including the U.S.) had only applied a dollop of the policy ingenuity that was used to devise the Paris Agreement.

Rather than work within the internationally-agreed, if flawed, framework, the U.S. spent the better part of a decade tearing it down to prepare the ground for a Paris Agreement. Those were crucial lost years. We saw global emissions soar, Arctic sea ice collapse, coral reefs die, spikes in methane releases, and more. There is no way to get back those lost years of climate action.

And now the other shoe drops: the long delay until a new agreement could be signed means that its success may hinge not on Obama’s commitment to the international process, but on his successor’s. With Donald Trump in the White House, that is little cause for optimism. It would have been far better for Obama to spend his years consolidating real gains. Instead, his team allowed the perfect to become the enemy of the good.

Photo credit: “Dice” by Toshiyuki IMAI, CC BY-SA 2.0