President Trump will make good on a campaign promise to “cancel” the Paris climate agreement, officials say, breaking away from a global effort to reduce greenhouse gases. The decision followed an intense struggle within the administration over the fate of the agreement, with Ivanka Trump, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and business leaders urging the president to remain a party to the accord, and conservatives such as Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt calling for an exit. [Vox / Brian Resnick]
- The process could take four years to complete, meaning a final decision would be up to the American voters in the next presidential election.
- This was expected; here’s our section on it in yesterday’s newsletter, if you need a refresher. [Vox / Dara Lind and Dylan Matthews]
- But it’s still a dramatic, and globally consequential, decision. In his speech explaining the decision, Trump condemned it as a "massive redistribution of United States wealth to other countries," leading to "millions and millions of families trapped in poverty and joblessness." Without the deal, Americans "won't lose our jobs. We're going to grow. We're going to grow rapidly." [Vox / Carly Sitrin]
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- Basically all of that is nonsense. The legal implications of the Paris deal are minimal; the Trump administration could still have worked to roll back clean power plant rules without exiting the agreement. Leaving mostly just serves to piss off our allies. [Niskanen Center / David Bookbinder]
- Trump declared in his speech that he was “elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” which makes it all the more striking that Bill Peduto responded by saying, "As the Mayor of Pittsburgh, I can assure you that we will follow the guidelines of the Paris Agreement for our people, our economy & future.” [Bill Peduto]
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HOW TRUMP GOT BOXED IN ON THE CLIMATE PACT: "[Trump's] chief strategist and EPA administrator maneuvered for months to get the president to exit the Paris climate accord, shrewdly playing to his populist instincts and publicly pressing the narrative that the nearly 200-nation deal was effectively dead - boxing in the president on one of his highest-profile decisions to date.” Politico’s Andrew Restuccia and Josh Dawsey report: "Steve Bannon and Scott Pruitt have sought to outsmart the administration's pro-Paris group of advisers, including Trump's daughter Ivanka, who were hoping the president could be swayed by a global swell of support for the deal from major corporations, U.S. allies,
Trump never liked the Paris accord, which he viewed as a “bad deal” and vowed to “cancel” during his presidential campaign, Ashley Parker, Philip Rucker, and Michael Birnbaum report. “[Trump’s] final, deliberative verdict was the same as his initial, gut-level one … Even [as he] moderated months of often heated, and at times downright contentious, discussions among his own advisers, as well as scores of outsiders. Nonetheless, the debate over what Trump should ultimately do — stay in the deal to push for changes or fully pull out — roiled the administration.
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“During meetings, Steve Bannon and Scott Pruitt and other allies came armed with ‘reams of documents’ -- filled with numbers and statistics showing what they claimed would be the negative impacts on the U.S. economy if the U.S. remained in the climate deal. ‘They were presenting facts and figures’ [Kellyanne] Conway said. Some of those opposed to pulling out of the pact, however, said much of the data the other side presented was either erroneous, scientifically dubious, misleading or out of date.”
Some of the efforts to dissuade Trump from withdrawing actually had the reverse effect, further entrenching his original position. When Trump heard advocates arguing that the era of coal was coming to an end — something Cohn told reporters on last week’s foreign trip … Trump only became more adamant that pulling out of the Paris pact could help rescue the U.S. coal industry, said a Republican operative … ‘When he hears people make comments like ‘Coal jobs don’t matter anymore’ or ‘Those are going away,’ he thinks of all those people who got the election wrong and didn’t realize that, no, these people are important to us,’ the operative said.”
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Everything Conservatives Said About the Paris Climate Agreement Is Already Wrong
It is worth recalling the principal argument that Republicans made against the Paris agreement from the outset was that it would have no effect on developing countries like India and China. “And you know what passing those laws would have — what impact it would have on the environment?” insisted Marco Rubio in 2016. “Zero, because China is still going to be polluting and India is still going to be polluting at historic levels … these other countries like India and China are more than making up in carbon emissions for whatever we could possibly cut.”
Why was the right so certain that India and China would continue to ramp up their carbon emissions regardless of what they said in Paris? Because, they insisted, dirty energy was and would remain the best path for them to raise their standard of living, which was and is well below American levels. National Review editor Rich Lowry, writing in December 2015, dismissed plans to steer the developing world onto a cleaner energy path as “a naive belief in the power of global shame over the sheer economic interest of developing countries in getting rich (and lifting countless millions out of poverty) through exploiting cheap energy — you know, the way Western countries have done for a couple of centuries.”
But this analysis has proven incontrovertibly false. Rather than lagging behind their promised targets, India and China are actually surpassing them. According to Climate Action Tracker, India, which had promised to reduce the emissions intensity of its economy by 33–35 percent by 2030, is now on track to reduce it by 42–45 percent by that date. China promised its total emissions would peak by 2030 — an ambitious goal for a rapidly industrializing economy. It is running at least a decade ahead of that goal.
Why are these countries blowing past their targets? Because the cost of zero-emissions energy sources is plunging. In India, solar energy not only costs less than energy from new coal plants, it costs less than energy from existing coal plants:
The virtuous cycle of political will and innovation is proving more potent than expected. As more governments bind themselves to emissions reductions, business creates the technology to meet those goals, which brings down the cost of reducing emissions, which in turn emboldens governments to raise their ambitions further still. The factual predicate upon which the American right based its opposition to Paris has melted away beneath its feet.
Likewise, the scientific basis for the right’s skepticism of the theory of anthropogenic global warming has collapsed. Conservatives used to dismiss the scientific consensus on heat-trapping gases on account of the fact that 1998 saw an anomalously big spike in global temperatures in the midst of an overall warming trend. For years, conservatives would triumphantly point out that there had been no warming since 1998, as if the data from this one year nullified decades’ worth of rising temperatures. In the meantime, 2014, and every year since then, has since exceeded the 1998 record, rendering the old, misleading talking point outright false. But no rethinking has followed on the right. As justifications for inaction are falsified, new ones take their place, while the conclusion remains the same.
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A crude tribalistic impulse overrides any reckoning with the problem. The proximate issue in conservative minds is not climate change itself but the fact that liberals are concerned about all these things. Disintegrating ice shelves, extinctions, or droughts are abstractions.
It is similar to the predominant response to liberal terror over the prospect of handing the most powerful office in the world to an impulsive congenital liar with authoritarian tendencies. Conservatives on the whole devoted less attention to pondering the risks Trump might pose to their own country and party than enjoying the liberal tears.
“Everybody who hates Trump wants him to stay in Paris,” argues conservative activist Grover Norquist. “Everybody who respects him, trusts him, voted for him, wishes for him to succeed, wants him to pull out.” Here is an argument that approaches, even if it does not fully reach, complete self-awareness: The Paris climate agreement is bad because it is supported by people who oppose Trump. Therefore, the opposing position is the correct one.