President errs in speech on Paris climate agreement
Vanessa Schipani, Eugene Kiely, Lori Robertson and Robert Farley
In announcing that the U. S. would withdraw from the Paris Agreement, a global accord aimed at addressing climate change, President Trump made more than a few false and misleading claims.
The Paris Agreement, reached Dec. 12, 2015, builds on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and was accepted by all but two of the 197 countries that were party to the convention.
Trump made his announcement on the Paris Agreement in a speech in the White House Rose Garden. The president, who promised during the campaign to withdraw from the climate deal, said that “the United States will withdraw from the Paris climate accord but begin negotiations to re- enter either the Paris accord” or another “entirely new transaction, on terms that are fair to the United States.”
The process for withdrawal isn’t easy. It will take nearly four years to complete the process, meaning the final decision would not happen until after the 2020 presidential election.
‘ MASSIVE LEGAL LIABILITY’?
In listing his reasons why the U. S. should pull out of the Paris climate agreement, Trump claimed that the U. S. would be exposed to “massive legal liability if we stay in.” But international environmental law experts say that is not true, and there is no liability mechanism in the accord.
Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, said Trump is wrong about the legal ramifications of staying in the accord. He said the U. S. actually might be more exposed to lawsuits if it withdraws from the agreement. James Salzman, a professor of environmental law at the UCLA School of Law and at UC Santa Barbara, agreed that Trump got his “legal liability” claim wrong.
“No. It is not true,” Salzman wrote in an email. “There is no liability mechanism under the Paris Agreement. There was language in the agreement about loss and damage from climate change but the accompanying decision text stated clearly that this does not provide a basis of liability and compensation for claims. Ironically, this text had been added to address U. S. concerns.”
WHO EMITS THE MOST?
Speaking about carbon emissions, Trump called China and India the “world’s leading polluters” and the U. S. the “world’s leader in environmental protection.” That’s not entirely accurate.
China and the U. S. were the top emitters per kiloton in 2015. In fact, Americans emitted more than twice as much as the Chinese and more than eight times as much as Indians per capita in 2015. According to the European Commission’s Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research, in 2015 China came in first for total kilotons of carbon dioxide emitted. The U. S., the European Union and India trailed China in that order. On average, each individual living in the United States contributed 16.07 tons to the country’s total. Each individual in China and India contributed 7.73 and 1.87 tons on average, respectively.
China still emits the most overall because its population is almost 1.4 billion vs. nearly 325 million in the U. S. More than 1.3 billion people live in India.
ECONOMIC IMPACT
Trump claimed that the “cost to the economy at this time would be close to $ 3 trillion in lost GDP” under the Paris Agreement.
That figure is for the year 2040 and for one scenario in a report that found a smaller impact under a different scenario. But a November 2016 report by the economic analysis group Resources for the Future used a carbon tax rate that would be needed for the U. S. to meet its pledged emissions target under the Paris Agreement by 2025. That analysis con- cluded that “the size of the 2025 carbon taxes and their corresponding economic costs are modest.” And the researchers said “the cost of delaying the implementation of a carbon tax is high.” Delaying implementation of the agreement would raise the cost of a carbon tax needed to meet the 2025 emissions target.
In his June 1 speech, Trump cites an estimate from the National Economic Research Associates Economic Consulting in a report from this March.
That report estimated an annual loss in GDP of “nearly $ 3 trillion by 2040.” That’s under one scenario that assumes emissions caps are set for four broad sectors in order to meet the U. S. emission targets under the Paris Agreement. The study created “different scenarios to reflect different ways in which reduction programs might be implemented or regulated.” The final, or fifth, scenario “layers regulatory measures on top of a cap- and- trade approach, a hybrid approach.” That scenario has a much lower impact on GDP, the study says.
‘ A MILLION JOBS’?
Trump again took credit for job gains, saying the economy has added more than a million private- sector jobs since his election. That’s true, but only 493,000 of them were added since he took office. Moreover, Trump suggests the economy is only now “starting to come back,” but jobs data show the U. S. has been steadily adding jobs every month since early 2010.
It’s true the U. S. has added just over a million private sector jobs since November, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Just counting the job gains in February, March and April — the only figures available from BLS when Trump made his speech — the total number of private sector jobs added since Trump took office is 493,000.