Trump breaks the deal
Last Thursday, on “a fine spring day in Washington DC, Donald Trump took the podium in the White House’s Rose Garden and announced that he was pulling the United States out of the Paris climate change agreement”, said John Cassidy in The New Yorker. All his big speeches have been distinguished by their “alarmism, fearmongering and negativity”. This was no exception. The president portrayed the 2015 Paris accord not as “the well-meaning, non-binding and in many ways modest deal” it is, but as yet another attempt to rip off and exploit the US. “This was Trumpism in its full glory – the world as a conspiracy against its sole superpower.” At what point, he asked, “do they start laughing at us as a country”? The answer is that the laughing stopped a good while back.
The rest of the world, led by the EU and China, declared that they would stick to the accords without the US, said Bjørn Lomborg in The Daily Telegraph. But at some point their resolve will weaken, for the simple reason that the Paris treaty “will be hugely costly”, and will do “almost nothing to fix climate change”. It demands the delivery of $100bn a year in “climate aid” to developing nations; and the global price tag for all its promises will reach at least $1trn a year by 2030. Yet green energy is nowhere near ready to take over from fossil fuels, and the pledges in the Paris treaty, even if implemented in full, will come nowhere near to meeting its target of keeping temperature rises below 2°C. All this means that “it is foolish for world leaders to stay fixated on Paris”. “By pulling out, Mr Trump has made good on a campaign pledge,” said The Times. He has also offered an opportunity to take a new approach, less reliant on subsidies for renewable energy “that come at the expense of growth and the worst-off”.
“The Paris agreement is not perfect,” said The Guardian, but it is a start. It is designed to “ratchet up slowly to achieve the target of holding global warming to 2°C”, and it has already encouraged the rapid development of renewable energy sources. Declaring that he represented “the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris”, Trump claimed to be defending America’s jobs and industry, particularly its coal miners, said the FT. The irony is that the solar and wind industries now employ almost three times as many people in the US as coal mining. Many of America’s corporate giants, who have invested heavily in green technology, including General Electric, Apple, Amazon and Goldman Sachs, condemned Trump’s move (so too did the mayor of Pittsburgh). Both in terms of jobs and “geopolitical influence, America stands to lose most from this decision”. A “truly businesslike president” would have exploited the US’S leading position in green energy, said The Economist. Instead, by joining Syria and Nicaragua in rejecting the Paris treaty, Trump has chosen “to abuse the health of the planet, the patience of America’s allies, and the intelligence of his supporters”.