Today marks the one year anniversary since President Trump stood in the White House Rose Garden and announced that he intends to pull the US out of the Paris Agreement.
While there was an undercurrent of fear among greens that other countries would follow suit or backslide on ambition, the reaction was instead quite the opposite. After Trump’s announcement last June, the last two countries that hadn’t already joined the accord, Syria and Nicaragua, signed on. What’s more, a massive group of more than 2,700 state, local, and business leaders across the country took up the mantle of climate leadership that Trump had unceremoniously abandoned just days before. This Still In coalition, representing more than half of Americans (and the US economy), is still pushing to meet the Paris Agreement goals.
Another coalition that has emerged from the wreckage of America’s reputation is America’s Pledge. The group has a new “One Year Later” page up on their website touting all that has been accomplished in the past year, despite the absence of federal leadership. This list provides a straightforward rebuttal to the hyperbolic claims of Pruitt, Trump and the deniers, so let’s take a look.
According to deniers, meeting Paris goals would destroy the economy, put Americans in the poor house and bring all sorts of other communist calamities. In reality, per America’s Pledge, while carbon emissions have fallen to their lowest point in 25 years, the clean energy economy employs 790,000 workers.
Deniers attack wind and solar as being way too expensive, but prices have fallen by 70% over the last decade, and only appear to be going lower as renewable deployment continues to grow.
Trump is, as we all know, in love with “clean beautiful coal.” But like everything he loves (#FreeMelania), coal isn’t returning the sentiment: there were more coal plant retirements in January of 2018 than there were from 2009-2011.
During Obama’s tenure, deniers like those at the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page attacked his supposedly tyrannical leadership as though he was forcing states to clean up their air. But in the past year we’ve seen new states rise to climate leadership, like New Jersey and Virginia, who are moving ahead on clean energy and considering joining the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. And of course there’s the brewing battle between 17 states and Trump on fuel mileage standards, where conservatives like Pruitt are opposed to the state’s right to set higher fuel standards than the federal government.
Ultimately, then, Trump’s proposed pull-out hasn’t really changed anything. Whether or not we stay in Paris makes no difference to Pruitt, who’s trying to repeal the Clean Power Plan anyway. And Trump’s abandonment of American leadership created a void which thousands of other leaders have now filled. So although Paris didn’t necessarily have the “teeth” to punish non-compliance, the normative pressure of basically every nation on the planet agreeing on something is not without consequence.
And did we mention, thanks to the architecture of the Paris Agreement, the first day the US could actually leave is the day after the 2020 presidential election?
Whether Trump likes it or not, there are plenty of us that when asked about Paris, are saying Oui’re still in.
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