Trump confirms US will pull out of Paris climate accord
The Paris Treaty, which the US is leaving, is hugely expensive and ineffective. We need a new approach
DONALD TRUMP announced last night that he was pulling the US out of the Paris climate accord, claiming other countries were taking advantage of America and that it was destroying jobs and driving wages lower.
Environmental campaigners warned his unilateral actions risked dire global consequences by undermining efforts to limit temperature rises to 2C (3.6F) by the end of the century.
However, Mr Trump held out the hope of a compromise, saying he would immediately start a process to develop a fairer deal that would protect American workers. The US president said he wanted to reassert American sovereignty. “We don’t want other countries and other leaders laughing at us any more,” he said.
He claimed that the current deal, which is the world’s first comprehensive agreement to tackle global warming, could cost the US as many as 2.7million jobs by 2025.
THE world united in condemnation last night of Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate change agreement.
Environmental campaigners said the decision risked undermining an international consensus that urgent action was needed to halt global warming, while critics closer to home said it heralded the end of America’s role as leader of the free world.
The chorus was led by Barack Obama who said his successor’s administration “joins a small handful of nations that reject the future”. Returning to the theme and fiery rhetoric that propelled
‘By denying climate change and failing to act, Trump has put us on a path beset with death for millions’
him to victory in last year’s election, Mr Trump said he had no choice but to abandon a deal that was costing jobs.
“The Paris climate accord is simply the latest example of Washington entering into an agreement that disadvantages the United States, to the exclusive benefit of other countries, leaving American workers, who I love, and taxpayers to absorb the cost,” he said.
But the decision deepens a rift with allies and leaves the US standing alongside only Syria and Nicaragua as nations that rejected the deal.
White House officials said Mr Trump spoke with Theresa May, along with the leaders of France and Canada, after the speech to explain his decision. That was not enough to prevent an embarrassing rebuff as Italy, France and Germany said they would not be prepared to renegotiate the Paris accord.
Theresa May told Mr Trump of her “disappointment” at the decision and stressed that Britain remained committed to the agreement, Downing Street said. The Prime Minister did not add her name to the joint statement by the leaders of France, Germany and Italy.
Environmentalists said the American absence will make it harder for the remaining 190 or so countries to reach their goals, given that the US is accounts for about 15 per cent of global emissions of carbon and had promised $3billion (£2.3billion) to help other nations.
Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth US, said: “By denying climate change and failing to act, Trump has put us on a path beset with increased famine, poverty, disease and death for millions of people in the US and across the globe.”
The US came under a last-minute flurry of pressure not to abandon the deal even as new data found that the Paris agreement had failed to stop greenhouse gas emissions rising in the European Union in 2015.
“Higher emissions were caused mainly by increasing road transport, both passenger and freight, and slightly colder winter conditions in Europe, compared to 2014, leading to higher demand for heating,” the European Environment Agency said, as it reported a rise of 0.5 per cent in 2015 despite the international accord.
Other nations insist they will continue their efforts to fight global warming. The EU and China are due to unveil an alliance to tackle the problem today.
Hours before Donald Trump announced that the US will quit the Paris carbon-cutting treaty, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres took to Twitter to declare that climate action is “unstoppable”. The clear message, reinforced by European Union and Chinese leaders, is that the rest of the world will continue the Paris Treaty without US involvement. Their resolve is quickly going to smash into three incontrovertible truths.
First, the Paris Treaty will be the most expensive global agreement ever. Cutting emissions without affordable, effective replacements for fossil fuel means more expensive power and less economic growth. Calculations using the best peer-reviewed economic models show that the global price-tag of all the Treaty’s promises would reach $1-$2trillion every year from 2030. Without US involvement, the rest of the world must cough up between $800billion and $1.6trillion annually. The Treaty also hinges on the delivery of $100billion a year in “climate aid” to developing nations from 2020 – a vow that, awkwardly, came originally from the US.
These huge costs have imperilled the Treaty since its signing. It is not hard to imagine other leaders balking.
Secondly, the agreement was always going to have a tiny impact on temperatures – but without the US it will achieve even less.
The little that any of us remember of the Paris Treaty is the bold rhetoric from leaders who said that they were committed to keeping temperature rises to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius. It was a startling pledge.
But the rhetoric masked the reality: that the Treaty’s actual carboncutting promises – which are not legally binding – only go up to 2030 and only commit the world to achieve less than 1 per cent of the carbon cuts that would be needed to keep temperature rises to less than 2 degrees Celsius. In other words, the Paris Treaty leaves 99 per cent of the problem in place.
Undoubtedly, we will hear lots of politicians talk a big game about future cuts, but experience doesn’t bode well for such promises. The Kyoto Protocol was sold to the world in 1998 as the fix for global warming, and started falling apart almost as quickly as Paris.
Third, and most problematically, green energy is nowhere near ready to take over from fossil fuel.
The rhetoric is relentlessly optimistic: a typical quote, from Bloomberg New Energy Finance chairman, Michael Liebreich, is that “renewables are robustly entering the era of undercutting” fossil fuel prices. We have heard this for decades, but it remains wishful thinking.
Green energy is so inefficient that its deployment is almost entirely reliant on subsidies. When the UK cut solar power subsidies, installations plummeted. Spain was paying almost 1 per cent of its GDP in subsidies for renewables, more than it spends on higher education. When it reduced subsidies, new wind energy production entirely collapsed.
Subsidising the deployment of renewable energy to reduce our CO2 emissions has been a dead end. After spending hundreds of billions of dollars on annual subsidies, we only get, according to the International Energy Agency, 0.5 per cent of the world’s energy needs from wind, and 0.1 per cent from solar PV. Even by 2040, if the Paris Treaty had stayed fully in place, after spending $3trillion in direct subsidies, the IEA expects wind and solar to provide just 1.9 and 1 per cent respectively of global energy.
All this means it is foolish for world leaders to stay fixated on Paris – not only will it likely falter, but it will be hugely costly and do almost nothing to fix climate change.
President Trump’s decision offers an opportunity to re-think the approach. What is desperately needed is significantly higher investment in green energy research and development, so renewable technology can compete with fossil fuels. Initiatives like the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, which Bill Gates has invested $2 billion into, are a good start. But a panel of Nobel laureates, for the Copenhagen Consensus on Climate project, found that we should not just double research funding but increase it more than six times over, to $100 billion a year.
A commitment to green energy research and development is what the planet needs now from world leaders, much more than bravado.
Bjorn Lomborg is director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and a visiting professor at Copenhagen Business School