Trump wrong on what climate pact asks

When President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris climate agreement, he said, “China will be allowed to build hundreds of additional coal plants. So we can’t build the plants, but they can, according to this agreement.”

We asked the White House to tell us what part of the Paris agreement gave China permission to build coal-fired plants and what part banned them for America. We did not hear back.

The international declaration is big on the word “should” and light on the word “shall.” As Boston College law professor David Wirth wrote in 2016, the distinction is crucial.

“Even the most cursory review of the text of the Paris Agreement discloses a careful, purposeful alternation between the mandatory ‘shall’ — indicating a binding obligation governed by international law — and the hortatory ‘should’ — nonbinding statements of strictly political intent without legal force,” Wirth wrote.

The agreement says nations shall say publicly how much they will aim to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and they shall report their progress. It’s up to each country to come up with its own plan to meet the overall goal to limit the world’s temperature to 1.5 degrees centigrade over pre-industrial levels.

But then it says signatory countries “should strive to formulate and communicate long-term low greenhouse gas emission development strategies.” So the public plan and reporting are must-dos, but the actual doing is optional.

“China will be allowed to build hundreds of additional coal plants. So we can’t build the plants, but they can, according to this (Paris) agreement.” — Donald Trump on June 1 in a speech at the White House

The agreement treats developed and developing countries differently:

“Parties aim to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible, recognizing that peaking will take longer for developing country parties.”

Wirth told us Trump’s words are technically inaccurate.

“Nobody is allowing China to do anything, and nobody is prohibiting China from doing anything,” he said. “And the same is true for the United States.”

The agreement never uses the word coal, nor spells out how many coal-fired plants any country can build.

China’s blueprint for what it plans to do gives itself until 2030 for its greenhouse gas emissions to peak. In contrast, the U.S. blueprint says it “intends to achieve an economy-wide target of reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 26-28 percent below its 2005 level in 2025.”

Critics of the arrangement point to China’s rising emissions as evidence of a fundamental unfairness. As Trump put it, the Chinese “can do whatever they want for 13 years.”

Again, Trump’s language gives the agreement more legal weight than it actually has, but he also overlooks other parts of China’s plan that aim to “control total coal consumption” and increase the use of renewable energy supplies.

China said it would reduce the carbon intensity of its economy by 60 to 65 percent below 2005 levels and increase the share of non-fossil energy to around 20 percent. And to get there, it would start changing its policies today.

China’s carbon dioxide emissions have held steady for the past three years. China just halted the construction of 103 new coalfired power plants, and its energy agency at the start of the year announced plans to pour more than $360 billion into renewable energy by the end of the decade.

Wirth said, “Either China or the United States can build as many power plants as they want as long as they are offset in other sectors.”

Our ruling

The White House offered no legal argument to back up Trump’s assertion, and the text of the agreement does not support it. The Paris agreement never mentions coal, and in Trump’s own words, it is nonbinding.

China’s voluntary plan does allow emissions to rise until 2030, but it also moves the country away from reliance on coal, and it has canceled more than 100 new coal-fired plants.

We rate this claim False.