U.S. Supreme Court ruling may unravel Paris accord

Climate change agreement at risk if America backs out of landmark commitment

WASHINGTON— The U.S. Supreme Court’s surprise decision Tuesday to halt President Barack Obama’s climate-change regulation could weaken or even imperil the international global warming accord reached with great ceremony in Paris less than two months ago, climate diplomats said.

The Paris Agreement, the first accord to commit every country to combating climate change, had as a cornerstone Obama’s assurance that the U.S. would carry out strong, legally sound policies to significantly cut carbon emissions. Over history, the U.S. is the largest greenhouse gas polluter, although its annual emissions have been overtaken by China’s.

But in the capitals of India and China, two of the world’s largest polluters, climate-change policy experts said the Supreme Court decision threw the U.S. commitment into question, and possibly New Delhi’s and Beijing’s too.

“If the U.S. Supreme Court actually declares the coal power plant rules stillborn, the chances of nurturing trust between countries would all but vanish,” said Navroz K. Dubash, a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. “This could be the proverbial string which causes Paris to unravel.”

The court’s ruling does not block the climate-change rule permanently, but halts its enactment until legal challenges against it have been decided, a process that could take a year or more. Legal experts said the justices’ unprecedented decision to stop work on the rule, before any court had decided against it, appears to signal that the regulation could ultimately be overturned.

“If the American clean-energy plan is overturned, we’ll need to reassess whether the United States can meet its commitments,” said Zou Ji, deputy director of the National Centre for Climate Strategy and International Cooperation, a government policy think-tank in Beijing.

“It had seemed that with the American commitments, it was possible to get on the right emissions path globally,” said Zou, who was an adviser to the Chinese delegation at the Paris negotiations. “But without those commitments, that could be a blow to confidence in low-carbon development.”

U.S. inaction has long been the chief obstacle to global climate-change agreements. India and China in particular resisted action absent a climate-change policy in the U.S.

Obama sought to change that by putting in place a set of aggressive but politically controversial rules to cut emissions from coal-fired power plants. On the basis of those rules, Obama won agreements from China and India to enact their own pollution reduction plans, and helped push other countries into signing on to the Paris measure.

Over the past year, Obama worked closely with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to bring India to the table for the Paris deal. Modi and many within India were resistant; the prime minister’s top priority is to make cheap electricity available to the 300 million Indians who live without power. If the U.S. reneges on its commitments, “it really would strengthen the hand of those who say Paris was ineffective and a bad deal for India,” Dubash said.

U.S. policy experts agreed that the Supreme Court decision might be the first of many fractures in the deal. “The honeymoon for Paris is now definitely over,” said John Sterman, a professor of management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who attended the Paris talks.