Two years ago, President
Trump announced he would begin the formal process of withdrawing the
United States from the Paris Climate Agreement. At the time, the media and
climate alarmists went ballistic—for example, famed physicist Stephen
Hawking said Trump’s action would push Earth “over the brink.” And
yet, as I’ll show in this article, the Paris Agreement has always been a
giant exercise in symbolism over substance; it wouldn’t come close to solving
the climate “problem,” even on the terms of the alarmists. Whether one thinks
climate change is a minor issue to watch, or a full-blown existential crisis,
either way Trump’s action should be welcomed. By challenging the reverence
for the Paris Agreement, Trump’s pullout gave permission for scientists and
others to think about alternative approaches rather than globally-coordinated
political control over energy and transportation.
Paris Agreement Was Going to “Fail” Even On Its Own Terms
The most important point to emphasize is that the Paris Agreement
was not going to deliver humanity from the scourge of
climate change, if we stipulate the alarmist rhetoric for the sake of
argument. From the website ClimateActionTracker.org,
here is the latest estimate of the Paris pledges and the implied level of
global warming through the year 2100:
As the figure shows, even if all of the countries (including the U.S.,
which is still technically part of the Agreement) met their Paris pledges,
warming is projected to hit 3.0 degrees Celsius—well beyond the “safe” levels
of either 1.5 or at most 2.0 degrees, which are the now-fashionable targets.
What’s worse, the figure also shows that the actual policies now
in place will yield projected warming of 3.3 degrees Celsius,
because it’s easier to promise to do something than to
actually do it.
For another piece of evidence, consider that back in April 2017, David
Roberts at Voxupdated his article arguing that no country on
Earth was taking the then-popular 2 degrees Celsius target
seriously. Note that this was before Trump made his
announcement about Paris.
For these reasons, we shouldn’t take seriously the argument that Paris
would’ve worked just great, thank you very much, except that Donald Trump
came along and ruined it. (Rob
Bradley patiently dismantles that particular claim over at
MasterResource.)
Empty Pledges Are a Feature, Not a Bug
Now to be sure, the fans of the Paris Agreement would dismiss my criticism
above, by arguing that once the basic framework of a global agreement is in
place, then we can tighten down the screws and get some
serious emission reductions.
Yet this is foolish optimism. The only reason so many
countries signed up for Paris is that the pledges were non-binding, and
beyond that, in many cases the pledges were virtually meaningless.
For example, Oren
Cass back in 2015 explained that the “Intended National Determined
Contributions” (INDC) of India and China were arguably less ambitious than
what would probably happen under business-as-usual. In other words, India and
China’s initial “bids” for what they could do to help in the battle against
climate change, involved no actual sacrifice since it’s normal for
countries to reduce their emissions-per-unit-of-GDP over time.
Even more hilarious, in
a 2017 article Cass quoted from Pakistan’s pledge, which was
“committed to reduce its emissions after reaching peak levels to the extent
possible.” If you think about it, every country could
quite confidently make such a pledge: Once emissions reach their peak, they
would come down thereafter. That’s why the peak level would be a peak, after
all.
To repeat, this is not a coincidence. The only way to get all of the
governments of the world to sign on to Paris, was for them each to realize
that they weren’t actually on the hook for anything. (Incidentally, the
reason it’s the Paris Agreement and not the Paris Treaty is
that the framers didn’t want the U.S. Senate during the Obama years to get a
crack at rejecting it—the way they voted down the Kyoto Protocol during Bill
Clinton’s Administration. This isn’t my conspiracy theory; the fans of
aggressive government intervention on climate say
the same thing.)
For this reason, it’s duplicitous for fans of Paris to cite it as a robust
political framework with which to “get serious” about emission reductions.
The near-unanimity of the deal would fall apart, once individual countries
were expected to sacrifice their economic growth and take one for the team.
Just look at the squabbling and chaos as more and more governments experience
voter backlash against restrictions on conventional energy. Here’s how
a lamenting
New York Times article explained the situation back in
December:
In August [2018], an effort in Australia to transition away from
coal…resulted in the ouster of the prime minister. The man who succeeded him,
Scott Morrison, endeared himself to the industry by bringing a lump of coal
into Parliament.
In November, Brazilians elected Jair Bolsonaro, who had pledged to
promote agribusiness interests in the Amazon forest…
In Poland, the host country of the latest United Nations talks, the
right-wing president, Andrzej Duda, opened the negotiations by
saying flatly that his country did not intend to abandon coal.
…Emissions in China have grown for the past two years, signaling the
difficulties of shifting the country away from its coal-dependent industrial
economy. Germany is having a hard time moving away from lignite because of
political opposition in the country’s coal-rich east. The French president,
Emmanuel Macron, faces unrest at home over a layer cake of taxes that
working-class people say burdens them unfairly.
As the examples above indicate—and they ignore the plunging
fortunes of aggressive climate action in Canada too—this is
certainly not the fault of Donald Trump. Around the world, the natives are
getting restless, and finally saying “enough is enough” to the technocratic
“solutions” that drive up energy prices without even solving the ostensible
problem of climate change.
Conclusion
President Trump has followed through on his campaign promises to roll back
counterproductive regulations on energy, far more than most of us thought
would be politically feasible. The Paris Agreement never had a chance of
seriously denting global emissions, and all along has been a vehicle to
redistribute wealth, to the tune of trillions of dollars, as I
explained here at IER several years ago.
Since even the most ardent environmental activists admit that the Paris
Agreement hasn’t come close to “solving” the problem of climate change, they
should actually be thanking Trump for being the first to announce that it
doesn’t work and ending this farce.