Two years ago, I travelled to Paris to research and witness the making of the Paris Climate Agreement. I returned from that trip and published this article to express how fearful I was regarding the agreement’s capacity to adequately address the very near and massive impacts of climate change. I am now, ironically, with the White House threatening to pull out of the Paris Accord, compelled to defend the agreement’s merits.
With the President promising a decision to either stay in or retreat from the Paris Agreement within the next few days, we shouldn’t just be thinking about how detrimental doing so would be for our country’s capacity to function internationally, as it would isolate the United States in a real and powerful way from nearly every major ally it has. Nor should we be dwelling solely on how bad retreating from negotiations would be for our national security, leaving our coastlines, our farmlands, our national parks, and many of our neighbors and allies in serious risk and dooming many of the world’s most war-torn regions to violence inducing droughts, famines, and floods. We shouldn’t dwell, either, on just how terrible doing this would be for the poorest and most marginalized across the world. After all, the worst impacts of climate change—forced migration and displacement, major storms, flash floods, and famines, impact those already on the margins of our economies. Struggling farmers, impoverished women, the elderly, children, especially orphans, the mentally ill, the sick, and the poor are those without the means of adequately reacting to the impacts of climate change and will be the casualties of the White House’ decision.
Rather, while the President and his cabinet weighs backing out of the Paris Climate Accord, we should take special consideration for how detrimental this decision would be for the American economy, realizing that the President’s agenda, whether agreeable or not, is predicated on the betterment and the expansion of that American economy. The voters for whom President Trump promised to pull out of the deal are all too often those at the bottom end of the changing energy economy. They’re the former coal miners, former steelworkers, and former oil refiners, and they’re reasonably and understandably eager to see America’s oil and industrial economy boom again. In the way that the President is telling the story, Paris is terrible and is an assault on their livelihood and lifeways in a very personal way; but that’s just not true. In reality, coal is declining not because of any laws in favor of renewable energy, but because the best coal seams in the country were mined a generation ago, because American legislation regarding worker’s rights and clean air and water protections make it more costly to mine here than in less equitable countries, and because renewable energies and natural gas are quite frankly cheaper than coal. There are already more jobs in wind energy than in coal in this country, for example, and the same is true for solar.
The future of jobs for American workers is in renewable energy and in sustainable industry. While modern American oil drilling and refining is the work of massive machines, mechanized factories, and fewer and fewer actual workers, the industry of building and maintaining the blossoming renewable energy economy is labor intensive and in need of many new employees. We need men and women to build solar panels and wind turbines. We need men and women to mine the materials we need to make them. We need men and women to sell and install the panels and turbines and men and women to maintain them. The world, whether or not the President chooses to listen or not, is ready and prepared to adapt to climate change. It is, therefore, a captive and willing market for the United States should our country choose to enter that market in a real and centralized way. It’s ours for the taking and is, to be frank, the only means by which the United States could reinvigorate its industrial economy.
To think, as the President does, that the United States is in a position to negotiate a better deal than the Paris Climate accord is both naïve and misguided. Realize, first, that Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of Exxon and now Secretary of State, the man in the White House with the most experience with and most reason to oppose the Paris Accord, has been consistently and emphatically advising the President to stay in the deal. Tillerson, perhaps because he has so many years of experience negotiating around the regulation of pollution, is keen enough to recognize that denying the validity and the necessity of what is for many world leaders their major responsibility is not an easy foundation from which to negotiate. General Mattis, the President’s Secretary of Defense, knowing full well how catastrophic unchecked climate change will be for the United States’ national security, is onboard with Tillerson in advising Trump to remain in Paris. Trump expects to walk into a room of nations working diligently to mitigate and adapt to climate change with the assumption that climate change is a hoax. He will, should he pull out of Paris and expect to be able to negotiate a “better deal,” as he’s promised, find a room of bitter faces and emboldened rivals. The next deal will, without a doubt, be bolder and more binding.
Retreating from our commitments, our friends, and our best interest will never make America great again. This move, though, would be a powerful and unilateral step towards appeasing the specific voter base the Trump wing of the Republican party has relied upon on for votes. With each campaign promise the President fulfills, the hope of a second Trump Presidency becomes more real. Retreating from the Paris Climate Accord would do more than just align us with Nicaragua and Syria, the only other countries to do so, it would help to move our nation’s political situation closer to theirs. Americans simply cannot afford a retreat from the Paris Accord.