As I sift through the fallout, these are my takeaways.
1. The federal government plays a critical role in stimulating trade and innovation, through grants, appropriations, and deals with other governments. We often set environmental and labor conditions for funding or engaging in joint economic ventures with other nations. Now, these other nations are signatories to the Paris Accord. We aren't likely to care any longer if a country burns its pristine rainforest and slaughtered its indigenous peoples with U.S. funds, but if we do, they will laugh at us. To be sure, we paid lip service to these concerns, we rarely enforced, but companies were required to design sustainably, to make concessions that became part of the industrial fabric of any new venture. As bad as things are in our overly industrialized world, they will now be measurably worse.
2. Conservatives and libertarians worry about the government nationalizing industry. Instead, while we weren't looking, large companies became multinational. Their home base is everywhere. There is a reason CEOs of companies like GE spoke forcefully against leaving. They don't want to play by two sets of rules. They want support and incentives to play by Paris Accord rules to remain in force in the US, since they must meet them everywhere else. Far from encouraging businesses to invest in the United States and to maintain their home bases here, we will become their dumping ground for outmoded practices while they compete and innovate elsewhere.
3. The United States has always, since its earliest conception, been locked in a struggle between both parts of its name. What does it dedicate, in terms of power and funds, to the country as a whole, and what does it cede to the states? Republicans see state's rights as a critical component of small government and a way to push socially unpopular agendas, such as LGBTQ discrimination, which lack broad national support. Gun control and reproductive rights have been two right wing agendas that are pushed very successfully at the state level, which always amazes me. For some reason, industry and convention trade don't plummet when states go all in for open carry or restricting reproductive choice. Whenever I am in the Atlanta airport and see the sign, no guns from this point, two feet from the security checkpoint where they are x-raying my carry on, I am amazed at the absurdity of keeping me safe in the air but not on the ground before I board.
However, we are already seeing state's rights and local rights being pushed very forcibly within minutes of the President's announcement. States are claiming not only their right to set environmental standards, but their right to negotiate with other countries and multinational industries in place of the United States. California, a leader in this movement, has an economy larger than many of the signatory countries. This is not a case of each state going its own way with a hoped-for domino effect on other states, but states banding together to completely bypass the federal government. The Paris Accord Exit (Parexit?) may strike the biggest blow to the United States since the Civil War, which, as Lincoln rightly observed, was a test of whether a “nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal... can long endure." I think Parexit will prove a greater test of not only the endurance of a united nation but also whether citizens in states with no water or air quality controls can be considered the equals of citizens paying higher taxes but living longer and raising healthier children.
4. Which brings me to my final point. The federal government controls a great deal of land in its own right, including jurisdiction over the oceans. I close by bidding a sad, heartfelt and tearful farewell to the Grand Canyon, soon to be a giant uranium mine, Yellowstone National Park, soon to be fracked to oblivion, the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, soon to be vast timber enterprise where theTrump sons can hunt unlimited numbers of bear cubs as trophies. And good night to all the ships at sea, returning empty handed and needing to scrape the carcasses of dead and starving whales off their hulls before they can set out again and try that far corner of the Atlantic where rumor has it someone saw a school of fish swimming between the girders of an immense forest of deep sea oil rigs.
Good night to us all.