Set your clocks! We’re roughly 24 hours away from the much-anticipated White House meeting to decide the fate of the US’s participation in the Paris Agreement.
While Trump’s children, secretary of state, and national security and economic advisors are reportedly advocating that he not blow it all up, Steve Bannon and Scott Pruitt have apparently gained a last minute upper-hand with some shady legal analysis.
Now, if Trump actually looked at the agreement’s merits, he’d know Syria and Nicaragua are the only countries not party to the agreement. The US pulling out would be out of step with not just the major global players, but almost every country on the globe, including petrostates like Saudi Arabia. And Trump would understand that if we leave, we can’t pressure countries he might not trust (let’s say China, for example) to keep up their end of the bargain. And perhaps some savvy diplomat can let Trump know that if he breaks America’s promise on Paris, global powers will be much less trusting when negotiating the sorts of labor deals Trump claims to care about.
Trump campaigned on creating jobs. There are more than three million people working in the US clean energy sector, a figure poised to grow with Paris. And as Trump’s Energy Secretary Rick Perry hopefully hasn’t forgotten, clean energy isn’t a blue state issue: Texas, Iowa and Oklahoma have the most wind power in the US. Across America, wind turbines going up at a rate of one every two and half hours are providing an incredible $245 million to landowners in lease payments, largely in rural, red states.
As we’ve pointed out before, the corporations Trump needs to fulfill his job creation promise are in favor of Paris, too. In fact, the four biggest companies in the US--Walmart, Exxon Mobil, Apple and Berkshire Hathaway--all support the agreement. So if they all agree it’s a good deal for Americans, who’s saying it isn’t?
Who indeed. Seems the only forces within Trumplandia advocating to pull out are Steve Bannon and Scott Pruitt. If Trump sides with them, it would be a pretty big break from character, as by all accounts loyalty matters most to Trump. By exiting Paris, he would be putting the desires of Bannon (whose characterization as President Bannon got under the layer of spray tan that constitutes Trump’s skin) and Pruitt (who embodies the special-interest-swamp Trump supposedly deplores) above the advice of his economic advisors, his national security experts, and the only person that it’s obvious Trump loves, his ever-loyal daughter Ivanka.
All that said, we may already have an answer for how the Trump administration is going to treat Paris, courtesy of the administration’s executive orders to date, and more specifically their response to inquiries from other nations as part of the formal Paris process. As Carbon Brief reports, Paris questions were answered six times with the same boilerplate language about reviewing policies to see if they are economically beneficial. Whether or not Trump accepts the realities of the positive economic aspects like those listed above, or ignores them for fossil fuel friendly talking points will decide, to a certain degree (two degrees?) our planet’s fate.
Though Star Wars day was last week, it still seems pertinent to ask: Will Trump submit to the shadowy figure of the dark side telling him to destroy his daughter’s planet?
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