CHINA, EU STAND BY
But a US withdrawal from Paris Climate Agreement will make it much more difficult to limit global warming to 3.6°C
BRUSSELS
CMAHESH CHANDRA SHARMA, Indian judge
HINA and the European Union (EU) are trying to save an international pact against climate change from which United States President Donald Trump appeared to be set to withdraw.
As China emerges as Europe’s unlikely global partner on areas from free trade to security, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang is meeting top EU officials at a two-day summit here that ends today.
In a statement backed by all 28 EU states, the EU and China commit to full implementation of the Paris Climate Agreement.
The joint statement, the first between the China and the EU, commits to cutting back on fossil fuels, developing more green technology and raising US$100 billion (RM428 billion) a year by 2020 to help poorer countries cut emissions.
“The EU and China consider climate action and the clean energy transition an imperative more important than ever,” the statement, by European Council President Donald Tusk, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and China’s Li, says.
“The increasing impacts of climate change require a decisive response.”
China asked that the annual summit, normally held in the middle of next month, be brought forward to press home Chinese President Xi Jinping’s defence of open trade at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, in response to Trump’s protectionist stance.
“No one should be left behind, but the EU and China have decided to move forward,” Miguel Arias Canete, the European commissioner who led climate talks with Beijing, said.
Arguments inside the West Wing of the White House over the future of the Paris climate accord became a messy public spectacle on Wednesday, with some aides saying that Trump had decided to abandon the landmark global warming agreement while others insisted that no decision had been made.
Three administration officials with direct knowledge of the debate said Trump was expected to withdraw the US from the 2015 accord that committed nearly every nation to take action to curb the warming of the planet.
On Wednesday, Trump tweeted that he had made his decision and would announce it in the Rose Garden today. Three officials said they expected him to withdraw from the agreement, though they said that decision could still change. The White House’s Legislative Affairs Office has suggested another route: sending the Paris agreement to the Senate for ratification as a treaty. Since it would require an impossible two-thirds vote, that alternative would also lead to withdrawal.
Other White House insiders disputed those reports, saying no verdict had been reached. Trump said only: “I’m hearing from a lot of people, both ways” and promised a decision “very soon”.
Signs have been increasing for weeks that Trump was heading towards pulling out of the agreement, apparently believing that it would harm the US economy, and hinder job creation in regions such as Appalachia and the West, where his most ardent supporters live, and undermine his “America first” message.
At home, Trump faced urgent pleas from corporate leaders, including Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, who told him on Tuesday that pulling out was wrong for business, the economy and the environment. Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, threatened to resign from two White House advisory boards if the president withdrew from the agreement.
On his recent trip to Europe, Trump waved aside a barrage of private lobbying by other heads of state to keep the US in the agreement. A frustrated JeanClaude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, said he opposed “behaving as vassals of the Americans” and assailed Trump for failing to even understand the mechanics of a withdrawal, which he said could take three or four years to fulfil.
“This notion — ‘I am Trump. I am American. America first, so I’m going to get out of it.’ — that is not going to happen. We tried to make that clear to Mr Trump in Taormina, but it would appear that he did not understand. Not everything in international agreements is fake news,” he said.
The exit of the US, the world’s largest economy and secondlargest greenhouse gas polluter, would not dissolve the 195-nation pact, which was legally ratified last year, but it could set off a cascade of events that would have profound effects on the planet. Other countries that reluctantly joined the agreement could now withdraw or soften their commitments to cut planetwarming pollution.
Once the fallout settles, Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University, said “it is now far more likely that we will breach the danger limit of 3.6°C” — the average atmospheric temperature increase above which a future of extreme conditions is considered irrevocable.
“We will see more extreme heat, damaging storms, coastal flooding and risks to food security. And that’s not the kind of world we want to live in.”
Retired US diplomat R. Nicholas Burns said: “From a foreign policy perspective, it’s a colossal mistake — an abdication of American leadership.” Agencies