It didn’t really matter what the outcome was on Tuesday night, at least not when it comes to this. Because Donald Trump pushed this bus off a cliff months ago, and now we’re finally crashing into the rocks. This is the day that the United States leaves the Paris Agreement.
The Paris Agreement was created in 2015. It crossed the boundary of having enough signatories to go into effect on Oct. 5, 2016, meaning that it had only been in place for a month when Donald Trump staged his victory rally. Other nations kept signing on, and eventually all 196 members of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change signed on.
Only one of them has ever left. And it’s us.
Despite the way that Trump painted the agreement as some kind of burden that would destroy the economy, the truth is that each nation participating in the Paris Agreement sets its own goals, makes its own plan, and reports its own progress. There is nothing in the agreement that forces a country to reach a specific target, or even set a specific target.
If there is a criticism to be leveled against the the Paris Agreement, it’s that it’s far too weak to accomplish the self-described goals of holding increases in the global average temperature to below 2 °C while looking for ways to reduce it still further. There is no mechanism in the agreement to constrain, fine, or punish those who violate the terms. It’s essentially a global gesture of goodwill, in which everyone acknowledges the importance of the goal; promises to take some action, however trivial; and agrees to enough transparency to explain the data on how it’s approaching the goal.
But even before Donald Trump, that was too much for many on the far right. The simple fact that the Paris Agreement acknowledges that humans caused climate change is a problem, and that there are steps that can be taken to address that problem, is a step way too far for them, even if it means no one takes action. It’s like admitting that guns kill people. It might not regulate anything, but it gives people a reason why it could be regulated.
Naturally, Trump set out to paint the Paris Agreement as a huge international intrusion into the U.S. economy, and also one that, somehow, helped China. Even though China, like every other nation, was just setting its own goals, making its own commitments, and offering up its own data. To do this, he could lean back onto a solid year of lies coughed up by Fox News, right-wing radio, and social media, all of them bolstered by “facts” provided by the helpful people of the fossil fuel industry.
So today is the day. We’re out. That’ll show them … something something.
The Paris Agreement, like previous climate agreements, was really supposed to start leading to some real changes, beginning with another round of meetings in 2018. Meetings the U.S. skipped. The absence of the United States from these talks has been a major factor in preventing real progress. And still, the whole world has benefited from plunging prices of wind and solar that has made them cheaper than merely maintaining a coal-fired power plant, much less building a new one. In many cases, that’s meant nations have actually exceeded the goals they originally set for the Paris Agreement—without really having to try.
Which only shows we’re not trying hard enough.