29/05/2017

Scoop: Trump Tells Confidants U.S. Will Quit Paris Climate Deal

AXIOS - Jonathan Swan | Amy Harder

Evan Vucci / AP
President Trump has privately told multiple people, including EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, that he plans to leave the Paris agreement on climate change, according to three sources with direct knowledge.
Publicly, Trump's position is that he has not made up his mind and when we asked the White House about these private comments, Director of Strategic Communications Hope Hicks said, "I think his tweet was clear. He will make a decision this week."

Why this matters
Pulling out of Paris is the biggest thing Trump could to do unravel Obama's climate policies. It also sends a stark and combative signal to the rest of the world that working with other nations on climate change isn't a priority to the Trump administration. And pulling out threatens to unravel the ambition of the entire deal, given how integral former President Obama was in making it come together in the first place.

Caveat
Although Trump made it clear during the campaign and in multiple conversations before his overseas trip that he favored withdrawal, he has been known to abruptly change his mind — and often floats notions to gauge the reaction of friends and aides. On the trip, he spent many hours with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, powerful advisers who back the deal.

Behind-the-scenes
The mood inside the EPA this week has been one of nervous optimism. In a senior staff meeting earlier this week, Pruitt told aides he wanted them to pump the brakes on publicly lobbying for withdrawal from Paris.
  • Instead, the EPA staff are quietly working with outside supporters to place op eds favoring withdrawal from Paris.
  • The White House has told Pruitt to lay off doing TV appearances until Trump announces his decision on Paris. (In past weeks, the EPA Administrator has gone on TV to say the U.S. needs to quit Paris, but Pruitt told aides he'll be keeping a lower profile. He doesn't want a Paris withdrawal to be seen as his victory. "It needs to be the President's victory," one source said, paraphrasing what Pruitt has told aides.)
  • Pruitt's aides have told associates in recent days that they remain confident the President will withdraw from Paris but they've been worried about him being overseas and exposed to pressure from European leaders and the environmentalist views of his top aides like Ivanka and economic adviser Gary Cohn. Top EPA staff were relieved when Trump refused to join the other six nations of the G7 in reaffirming "strong commitment" to the Paris agreement.
One level deeper
If Trump follows through and announces publicly he plans to withdraw from the Paris deal, an administration official laid out three ways he could do that:
  1. Trump could announce he is pulling the U.S. from the deal, which would trigger a withdrawal process that wouldn't conclude until November 2020 at the earliest. Under the deal's terms, any country can't send notice of its intent to withdraw until three years after the deal entered into force, which was Nov. 4, 2016. The actual process of withdrawal would then take one year. In this time, it's feasible Trump could change his mind, the administration source said.
  2. Trump could declare that the Paris deal is actually a legal treaty that requires Senate approval. Such a vote would fail, and then Trump would have Senate backing to not abide by the deal, which he deems a treaty. A letter that 22 Senate Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, sent to Trump this week urging him to withdraw from the deal, increases the odds of this happening, the source said. Trump could also call for a Senate vote in combination with either the first or third option.
  3. Trump could withdraw the U.S. from the treaty that underpins the Paris deal, which is called the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This would be the most extreme option because it would take the U.S. out of all global climate diplomacy. This process would take just one year.
Will we always have Paris?
All of these scenarios take more time and maneuvering than a simple announcement, which ensures the debate about what to do with the climate deal won't be over with any time soon.

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Climate Change: Trump Keeps World Waiting On Paris Deal

BBC

Antonio Guterres: "The agreement doesn't collapse if a country leaves the agreement"

Donald Trump has said he will decide whether to pull out of a key climate change deal in the next week, having apparently shrugged off pressure from US allies in recent days.
The US president tweeted he would make his "final decision" on the Paris accord after his return to Washington.
Mr Trump left the G7 summit in Sicily on Saturday without reaffirming his commitment to the accord, unlike the other six world leaders in attendance.
He previously threatened to pull out.
Mr Trump, who has called climate change "a hoax" on occasion, has reportedly indicated this is still his position to key members of his inner circle.
The uncertainty over his position on the Paris agreement puts him at odds with other members of the G7.

What is the Paris accord?
The Paris deal is the world's first comprehensive climate agreement, set out in 2015, with the aim of keeping the global average rise in temperatures below 2C.
In order to do that, countries pledged to reduce their carbon emissions.
Barack Obama, pictured with Chinese President Xi Jinping during the Paris summit, signed the agreement in 2016. Reuters
But it came into force only after being ratified by 55 countries, which between them produce 55% of global carbon emissions.
Barack Obama signed the US up in September 2016, and members of the G7 are keen for the US to continue to back it, not least because the country is the second largest emitter of greenhouse gasses after China.

Why doesn't Donald Trump like the agreement?
Mr Trump told voters on the campaign trail he wanted to scrap agreements "contrary to the national interest", while repeatedly promising to strengthen the coal industry.
Coal power is a major contributor to carbon emissions. However, Mr Trump wants to boost coal production to create more jobs.
He has also expressed doubt about the causes of climate change, saying it is a "hoax" made up by China.

Will the US withdraw?
The Axios news site suggests Mr Trump is leaning that way currently, citing three sources who say his mind is made up, and that the wheels are quietly being put in motion behind the scenes.
This is despite US defence secretary James Mattis saying in an interview to air on Sunday that the president is now "wide open" on the issue.
Withdrawal would risk making Mr Trump unpopular not only with his allies abroad, but also with activists at home.
Mr Trump's attitude to climate change made discussions at the G7 "very difficult". AFP
It was noted his attitude to climate change was one of the major hurdles during the summit in Sicily - the first time he has met his fellow G7 leaders as a group.
His stance left him isolated, with Mr Trump's reluctance to reaffirm his commitment clearly annoying German chancellor Angela Merkel, who told reporters: "The entire discussion about climate was very difficult, if not to say very dissatisfying."

What would be the effect?
There are fears the US pulling out may lead to other, smaller countries following suit.
Even if they do not, as the US has such a large carbon footprint, it will mean the impact of the agreement will likely be lessened significantly.
Whatever the US chooses, the EU, India and China say they will stick to their pledges made in Paris.
And what's more, some of Mr Trump's own country is likely to ignore his scepticism.
New York and California have already pledged to combat climate change without the Trump administration's support.

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Scientists Explain What Will Happen If Donald Trump Pulls Out Of Paris Climate Change Agreement

The Independent - Seth Borenstein (Associated Press)

 The Earth will get dangerously warm even sooner if the U.S pulls out of pledge to cut carbon dioxide pollution

 Earth is likely to hit more dangerous levels of warming even sooner if the US pulls back from its pledge to cut carbon dioxide pollution, scientists said. That's because America contributes so much to rising temperatures.
President Donald Trump, who once proclaimed global warming a Chinese hoax, will soon decide whether the United States stays in or leaves a 2015 Paris climate change accord in which nearly every nation agreed to curb its greenhouse gas emissions.
Other global leaders have been urging him to stay during high level security and economic meetings in Italy that began Friday. Pope Francis already made the case with a gift of his papal encyclical on the environment when Trump visited the Vatican earlier this week.
In an attempt to understand what could happen to the planet if the U.S. pulls out of Paris, The Associated Press consulted with more than two dozen climate scientists and analysed a special computer model scenario designed to calculate potential effects.
Scientists said it would worsen an already bad problem, and make it far more difficult to prevent crossing a dangerous global temperature threshold.
Calculations suggest it could result in emissions of up to 3 billion tonnes of additional carbon dioxide in the air a year. When it adds up year after year, scientists said that is enough to melt ice sheets faster, raise seas higher and trigger more extreme weather.
"If we lag, the noose tightens," said Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer, co-editor of the peer-reviewed journal Climatic Change.
Mr Trump has said he needs more to time to decide whether to pull out of the Paris climate change agreement (Evan Vucci/AP)
One expert group ran a worst-case computer simulation of what would happen if the U.S. does not curb emissions, but other nations do meet their targets. It found that America would add as much as half a degree of warming (0.3 degrees Celsius) to the globe by the end of century.
Scientists are split on how reasonable and likely that scenario is.
Many said because of cheap natural gas that displaces coal and growing adoption of renewable energy sources, it is unlikely that the U.S. would stop reducing its carbon pollution even if it abandoned the accord, so the effect would likely be smaller.
But others say it could be worse because other countries might follow a U.S. exit, leading to more emissions from both the U.S. and the rest.
Another computer simulation team put the effect of the U.S. pulling out somewhere between 0.1 to 0.2 degrees Celsius (.18 to .36 degrees Fahrenheit).
While scientists may disagree on the computer simulations they overwhelmingly agreed that the warming the planet is undergoing now would be faster and more intense.
The world without U.S. efforts would have a far more difficult time avoiding a dangerous threshold: keeping the planet from warming more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.
The world has already warmed by just over half that amount — with about one-fifth of the past heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions coming from the United States, usually from the burning of coal, oil and gas.
So the efforts are really about preventing another 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit (0.9 degrees Celsius) from now.
"Developed nations — particularly the U.S. and Europe — are responsible for the lion's share of past emissions, with China now playing a major role," said Rutgers University climate scientist Jennifer Francis. "This means Americans have caused a large fraction of the warming."
Even with the U.S. doing what it promised under the Paris agreement, the world is likely to pass that 2 degree mark, many scientists said.
But the fractions of additional degrees that the U.S. would contribute could mean passing the threshold faster, which could in turn mean "ecosystems being out of whack with the climate, trouble farming current crops and increasing shortages of food and water," said National Center for Atmospheric Research's Kevin Trenberth.
Climate Interactive, a team of scientists and computer modellers who track global emissions and pledges, simulated global emissions if every country but the U.S. reaches their individualised goals to curb carbon pollution. And then they calculated what that would mean in global temperature, sea level rise and ocean acidification using scientifically-accepted computer models.
By the year 2030, it would mean an extra 3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in the air a year, according to the Climate Interactive models, and by the end of the century 0.3 degrees Celsius of warming.
"The U.S. matters a great deal," said Climate Interactive co-director Andrew Jones. "That amount could make the difference between meeting the Paris limit of two degrees and missing it."
Climate Action Tracker, a competing computer simulation team, put the effect of the U.S. pulling out somewhere between 0.1 to 0.2 degrees Celsius (.18 to .36 Fahrenheit) by 2100. It uses a scenario where U.S. emissions flatten through the century, while Climate Interactive has them rising.
One of the few scientists who downplay the harm of the U.S. possibly leaving the agreement is John Schellnhuber, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the scientist credited with coming up with the 2 degree goal.
"Ten years ago (a U.S. exit) would have shocked the planet," Schellnhuber said. "Today if the U.S. really chooses to leave the Paris agreement, the world will move on with building a clean and secure future."
Not so, said Texas Tech climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe: "There will be ripple effects from the United States' choices across the world."

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