Time to Revive the Kyoto Protocol

Photo credit: “Cancelled” by Sue, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

This post was originally written on November 9th, 2016

As I write, delegates to the international climate change conference in Marrakech are waking up to the news of the U.S. election. Most will greet an unforeseen Trump presidency with consternation: of the many horrific consequences of a Trump presidency, the longest-lasting is likely to be the impact on the climate. Or better put, on the fight against climate change.

Trump has promised to “cancel” the Paris Agreement, betraying how little he understands of international diplomacy. While no country can unilaterally cancel a multilateral agreement, the U.S. could pull out. Fortunately, the Agreement, which just came into force last Friday, has been armored against just such a direct attack: the withdrawal procedure takes four years, which would take us to the end of Trump’s term in office. If Trump is in a real hurry, he could withdraw from the parent treaty, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), although this would be largely self-defeating: it would deny the U.S. a seat at the table without relieving it of any substantive obligations. Or the U.S. could simply fail to live up to its obligations, fraying the cooperative fabric of the treaty.

The greatest danger to the Paris Agreement is also the most likely: the withdrawal of U.S. political support. The Paris Agreement came about in large part due to the political commitment of two actors: Presidents Obama and Xi. An about-face in the U.S. position may be enough to take the wheels off this train just as it gathers steam.

This would not be the first time that the U.S. pulls the plug on international climate action. In 1997, U.S. representatives signed a treaty in defiance of its own Senate, which was needed to ratify. The resulting collapse of support doomed the Kyoto Protocol. In 2007, fed up with U.S. obstructionism under George W. Bush, the U.S. delegation was told to “lead, follow, or get out of the way.” By 2009, the world was preparing to move forward without U.S. cooperation, but the newly-elected Obama administration insisted on a global deal that applied equally to China and the U.S. The Copenhagen collapse resulted.

The world cannot afford to wait another 4 or 8 years for the U.S. to elect a different president, re-engage the international process, re-build consensus, and re-frame another treaty. It must continue moving forward, even at the risk of leaving the U.S. behind. Indeed, the atmosphere may not notice much difference: U.S. emissions reductions are being driven by market forces and technology changes rather than by climate policies, which have yet to come into effect.

Excluding the world’s biggest economy and largest historical emitter from the global climate compact is no easy task. The U.S. is particularly central to the Paris Agreement, much of which was designed around the peculiarities of U.S. political needs, including the need to avoid Senate ratification.

Fortunately, climate change is the rare international process that has actually experienced a vehicle for moving the rest of the world forward without letting the U.S. spoil the proceedings: the Kyoto Protocol. The Protocol got a bad name for its carbon trading mechanism, but that era (“commitment period” in the lexicon) is over. A new commitment period could take any other form — indeed, the contents could look just like the Paris Agreement. The secret sauce of the Kyoto Protocol is that it was a multilateral vehicle for moving forward negotiations, but it was only open to nations that ratified, thus excluding the U.S. (and other bad actors, such as Canada, which later withdrew). Reviving the Kyoto Protocol would give the rest of the world a vehicle to get on with the business of fighting climate change, without fearing a Trumpian veto at every step.