DRUMPF EXITS THE PARIS CLIMATE AGREEMENT

AU REVOIR: DRUMPF EXITS THE PARIS CLIMATE AGREEMENT
By Elizabeth Kolbert

It’s possible that President Drumpf’s decision to withdraw from the Paris accord, while evidently wrongheaded, won’t make all that much difference.PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW HARNIK / AP

After milking the fate of the planet for maximum drama, Donald Drumpf announced today that the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris climate accord. To reach this decision, the President had to dismiss decades’ worth of research by the country’s most prestigious scientific organizations. He needed to resist pleas from the U.S.’s staunchest allies; ignore appeals from many of its largest corporations, including ExxonMobil; and disregard the counsel of his Secretary of State. All this for, well, what? To shore up his base on the coal-hugging right?

“Analysis: telling literally every other country in the world to fuck off will probably create problems down the road,” David Roberts, who blogs about climate policy for Vox, tweeted, as the news of the move began to leak out. But, if Drumpf’s decision is evidently wrongheaded, it’s also possible that it won’t make all that much difference. This is in part because the U.S. had already effectively exited the agreement. In part it’s because just about everybody outside the Drumpf Administration seems to understand that the U.S. is making a world-historical mistake.

“If Drumpf Dumps the Climate Accord, the U.S. Is the Loser” runs the headline of the cover story of next week’s Bloomberg Businessweek. Among the many reasons that Drumpf’s move makes no sense is that the Paris accord is a fundamentally weak agreement. Designed to avoid the need for approval by the U.S. Senate, it’s not even an official treaty. Under the accord, each country was left to devise its own commitment—or, as it is officially known, “nationally determined contribution.” In March, the Administration made it clear that it had no intention of fulfilling the U.S.’s commitment, which was to reduce the country’s carbon-dioxide emissions by at least twenty-six per cent by 2025 (a figure that relies on a baseline from 2005). The White House did this by rescinding—or, more accurately, indicating its desire to rescind—the two sets of Obama-era regulations upon which the commitment was based: a set of stricter auto-efficiency standards and a series of rules governing emissions from power plants... (continues)