‘The Trump withdrawal from the Paris accord fits well within the frustrating pattern of weak commitments and weaker climate action, accompanied by aggressive intervention in multilateral platforms, under Democratic presidencies, followed by the spurning or withdrawal from even these commitments under Republican incumbents’
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There can be no doubt that U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, which will legally come into effect in a year, is a major blow to global efforts to combat the threat posed by anthropogenic global warming. The U.S., the world’s richest nation, owning a third of the world’s wealth, and with the highest annual gross domestic product, is singularly responsible for global warming, having contributed well over a fifth of the cumulative emissions of carbon dioxide, from the pre-industrial era to date. Under the principles and terms of the United Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), to which the U.S. is a signatory, it is also supposed to take the lead in climate action while providing the financial and technological means to developing countries to do the same.
By any reckoning, climate action by the U.S. has always fallen well short of its responsibility under the global climate regime, irrespective of the dispensation in Washington DC. Its emissions steadily rose from 1992 to 2005, while its political class consistently swung away from serious efforts, resulting in the U.S. Congress, through a bipartisan consensus, keeping the country out of the Kyoto Protocol. Since then, its emissions have declined, though at a rate that is much slower than what it owes the world. The eventual move away from legally binding commitments on developed countries, as in the Kyoto Protocol, to voluntary contributions pledged by all countries in the Paris Agreement, with the pious hope of increasing ambition as time went by, was solely to accommodate the constraints of U.S. domestic politics which would not allow ratification of any binding emissions reduction commitment. Initiated at Copenhagen in 2009 and consolidated at Paris, six years later, this move was Barack Obama’s legacy.
After the Trump victory, much is being made of the Biden administration’s efforts at climate action. The U.S. became the world’s highest producer of crude oil under the Biden administration. The paltry target of $300 billion annually as climate finance, from COP29 at Baku, was the outcome of the joint obduracy of the U.S. and its developed country allies. Biden’s swan song, the updated nationally determined contribution submitted in December 2004, offered to reduce emissions by only 60% below 2005 levels by 2035, perpetuating the continued appropriation by the U.S. of a vastly disproportionate part of the global carbon budget. This does not represent any higher “ambition” as understood in the Paris Agreement, despite the U.S. hectoring the developing countries at the Dubai and Baku climate summits on the need for enhanced mitigation targets for all.
The Trump withdrawal from the Paris accord fits well within the frustrating pattern of weak commitments and weaker climate action, accompanied by aggressive intervention in multilateral platforms, under Democratic presidencies, followed by the spurning or withdrawal from even these commitments under Republican incumbents. In the event, other countries, notably the large emerging economies, are left with increasing burdens and commitments for climate mitigation. For the bulk of the developing world this has meant the withdrawal of aid and assistance, and even loans, for development and industrialisation, and enhanced energy use to meet basic human development needs. They are sought to be forced into early de-carbonisation that perpetuates global inequalities and deprivation, including rising risk of hunger and food insecurity.
Action and reaction
The reactions to the U.S.’s withdrawal from climate diplomats, national spokespersons, and the media in general, have been a mixed bag of resignation and bravado. The Secretary of the UNFCCC, Simon Stiell, and many others have suggested that it is the U.S. that will miss out on the sterling investment opportunities for private capital that green transitions now provide. If anything, this is a mark of the enduring success of the American contribution to climate discourse – that markets are the best route to deliver climate change mitigation. By this logic, all that the rich countries’ governments need to do is to provide signals to the private sector that will release the power of global capital, who will then innovate and invest to achieve the commitments to emissions reduction. The record shows however, that this logic leads to both underwhelming commitments to actions and the failure to achieve even these as promised.
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The fact that over 80% of primary energy use in the U.S. and over 70% of it in the European Union still comes from fossil fuels, 33 years after the UNFCCC was signed, is testament to the failure of markets as the golden bullet to solve the climate crisis. Developed and developing countries’ commitments fundamentally differ in the relatively large role that a public sector plays in the latter’s economies. This provides a measure of accountability to their commitments that those of the global North lack.
Academia and civil society in the global North have also been complicit in promoting the illusion that, despite national withdrawal, action by sub-national governments, corporations and local communities could substitute. Indeed, as a University of Colorado Law School paper, published in 2024, notes, the number of states moving to anti-regulatory or “emissions inaction” policies or at best marginal policies is much larger than those with active emissions reduction strategies. At the level of local communities, the paper notes that those with emission regulations are mere outliers with a huge majority having emissions inaction strategies. Without even the weak carrot and stick policies of an Inflation Reduction Act, action is much less likely to flow from actors traditionally unwilling to take the initiative.
The extent of this complicity of climate academia is demonstrated by the lack of any serious discussion of climate denialism in the U.S. within the context of global climate governance in the successive reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), including the first Trump activated withdrawal, which occurred during the period when the bulk of the Sixth Assessment Report was prepared.
Advice for developing countries
Developing countries, in the face of the U.S. withdrawal, need a calibrated strategy that must not fall prey to the illusion that they can make up the huge gap created by this withdrawal. Nor should it be forgotten that the reaction of other developed countries is likely to be more of rhetoric than substance. It may be recalled that the details of the implementation of the Paris agreement were finalised during the first Trump presidency, when the U.S. and other Northern negotiators actively colluded in transferring an increasing part of the burden of climate action on to the global South. The second Trump administration too may not walk out of the negotiations and remain to insist on increased commitments by the global South or at least collude in such calls. Indeed, with outstanding irony, the executive order initiating the withdrawal still refers to the global climate leadership of the United States.
It is equally bravado to call on developing countries to respond to the U.S.’s move by abandoning multilateralism in the climate arena. Adherence to multilateralism is not genuflection to a moral principle but necessitated by the inherent and irreducibly global nature of the global warming challenge. India, as indeed the rest of the global South, must hold its course on climate action, but also prepare for the future with increased attention to urgently bridging development deficits and far greater emphasis on adaptation than seen so far.
In the ultimate analysis, global climate action that is just, equitable and effective requires political will. The future of climate action and the safety of humanity requires concerted political action by all other nations to bring the U.S. back to the path of reason and the path of meaningful international cooperation.
Tejal Kanitkar is at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru. T. Jayaraman is at the M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, Chennai. The views expressed are personal
Published – January 30, 2025 12:16 am IST