When the Trump regime made the formal announcement Monday that the United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement come November 4, 2020, the day after next year’s general election, it was hardly a surprise. The denier in chief made clear to everyone during his campaign for the presidency that he opposed the agreement. And in June 2017 in his infamous Pittsburgh-not-Paris address, he made withdrawal official in a 27-minute speech drenched in nonsense, fantasy, and outright lies. He would have withdrawn right then if he could have.
But as intensely frustrating as the wait surely is for the squatter in the White House, the first legal opportunity for any signatory nation to pull out is three years from the November 2016 start of the agreement. While Trump’s expected move is depressing and damaging, it should be remembered that a U.S. withdrawal next November could be followed by a U.S. return come January 21, 2021, if there is a green Democrat in the Oval Office. There is no three-year waiting period to re-sign the agreement.
Because of that, and for other reasons, Trump’s move should not drive us to despair. One reason can be seen in the Virginia election Tuesday night. Environmentalists reportedly spent a lot of money to get better results at the polls. The Virginia League of Conservation Voters, for instance, put up $1.5 million statewide. And the outcome paid off.
Here’s Benjamin Storrow at ClimateWire:
Democrats wrested control of Virginia's General Assembly away from Republicans yesterday, paving the way for the Old Dominion to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and pursue legislation to boost renewable energy. RGGI membership has been a tenet of Gov. Ralph Northam's climate agenda.
But the Democratic governor's attempts to join the cap-and-trade compact of 10 states had been thwarted by Republican lawmakers, who had controlled the General Assembly in Richmond. That roadblock no longer exists. [...]
"When it comes to climate, there has been dramatic failure of leadership at the federal level, which has created the opportunity for states to lead. Virginia, based on these election results tonight, is planning to be at the forefront of the state movement to combat climate change," said Will Cleveland, a lawyer at the Southern Environmental Law Center.
Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam has been stymied in getting Virginia into the RGGI compact, and now he won’t be. Two months ago, by executive order, he set renewable energy goals—generating 30% of Virginia's power from renewables by 2030 and all of it from carbon-free sources by 2050.
Said Harrison Wallace, Virginia director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, "Our big push will be a bill for a pathway to 100% carbon-free electricity. We plan to make it happen here, too."
If these moves are implemented, Virginia won’t, of course, be the first state to adopt serious clean or green energy goals. California, New York, Hawaii, Nevada, Maine, Minnesota, Washington state, Washington, D.C., New Jersey, New Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Wisconsin have established 100% renewables by 2050 or sooner as a goal, a law, or an executive order. In addition, 141 cities and 11 counties have committed to 100% renewables, with six of them already getting all their power from those sources.
However, even if these numbers were tripled, it would not be enough. Congress needs to set a national deadline for getting to 100% clean energy. That will, of course, also have to wait until Democrats control the House, Senate, and White House.
Establishing a hard and near-term deadline for getting the world off fossil fuels is essential if we’re going to have any chance of ameliorating climate impacts baked into our future by greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere and of preventing worse impacts. While the Paris agreement is flawed—though not because it is inherently unfair to the United States—abandoning it is a reckless retreat from a pact that is specifically designed to allow for steady improvement in regular reviews.
In support of his fossil-fuel-friendly decision, Trump in Pittsburgh two years ago publicly misinterpreted the results of a study tallying the alleged economic costs of fulfilling America’s Paris pledge. Sticking with Paris, he snarled, would block further development of America’s prodigious fossil-fuel resources. Totally unfair to the United States in his view. He pledged to renegotiate the treaty and get a better “deal.” But two years later, as Robinson Meyer points out, no such effort has been launched.
In fact, placing obstacles in the path of developing more fossil fuels is exactly what needs to happen. This can’t be done by shutting off the spigot tomorrow, obviously, but positing decades of delay before taking effective action is a recipe for catastrophe.
Fixing the Paris Climate Agreement requires active U.S. participation. Right now, according to four prominent past leaders of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, signatory nations are nowhere near fulfilling their pledges to reduce greenhouse gases enough to keep the global average temperature in 2100 below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), much less the more ambitious 1.5 degree C goal. In fact, meeting those pledges would mean warming of 3-4 degrees C. Describing results of that requires a tougher word than “disastrous.”
One of the four who wrote the report—Sir Robert Watson, director of Strategic Development for the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia—said: "It's absolutely urgent that we need to get to grips with this issue; otherwise, we're going to affect most socio-economic sectors, human health and nature biodiversity. And at this moment in time, we're not seeing the signals from either government or industry that's going to put us on the pathway that we need."