On June 1, President Trump announced “The United States will withdraw from the Paris climate accord, but begin negotiations to re-enter either the Paris accord or an entirely new transaction on terms that are fair to the United States.”
Immediately three countries — France, Germany, and Italy — stated renegotiating the agreement was not going to happen, and multiple media outlets — including NPR, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others — published fact-checking articles outlining Trump’s ignorance of both the science and the Paris Agreement.
A Washington Post article the next day stated, “Reasons Trump gave for withdrawing seemed at best, strained and, at worst, unfounded.” Michael Gerrard, Columbia University environmental law professor and director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, said. “Trump obviously didn’t read the Paris Agreement and his statement was written by people who willfully misrepresented its contents.” Jody Freeman, Harvard Law School professor and director of the school’s Environmental Law and Policy Program, added, Trump’s “portrayal is at odds with reality.”
In the week after Trump’s announcement, 125 mayors and nine governors across the U.S. denounced the withdrawal, stating they will remain in the Paris Agreement. Many more will follow.
Space doesn’t allow review of all Trump’s misinformed statements. The following are just examples:
Trump said the deal puts the U.S. at a “disadvantage,” yet the agreement is nonbinding, each nation sets their own targets, there are no consequences for not meeting those targets, and both developed and developing nations are shouldering responsibility. How could he get a better deal?
Trump said the agreement “punishes” the U.S., but all parties to the agreement set their own contribution toward the goal of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations. The U.S. pledged to reduce emissions by 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, but these targets can be changed without punishment.
Trump said China would be “allowed to build hundreds of additional coal plants. So, we can’t build the coal plants, but they can?” But there is nothing in the agreement preventing the U.S. from building coal plants, or giving China permission to do so. The agreement doesn’t allow or disallow specific actions. Regardless, China has already taken steps to stop building coal plants. In January, China stopped 103 new coal-fired plants, many that were already under construction. The key benchmark under the Paris Agreement is the overall reduction in emissions. Climate Action Tracker, a project of three research groups, reported in May that “China’s carbon dioxide emissions appear to have peaked more than a decade ahead of its Paris Agreement commitment.”
Trump stated “The current agreement effectively blocks the development of clean coal in America.” Yet, there is nothing in the agreement blocking the development of clean coal.
Trump said, “The Paris Agreement would result in lost jobs, lower wages, shuttered factories and vastly diminished economic production.” Trump cited a number of negative statistics about the predicted economic impact from the climate deal, all of which come from a March 2017 study by NERA Economic Consulting, prepared for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a leading climate change denier. Reactions to the study by several experts at ClimateFeedback.org indicate the NERA model makes assumptions that generate an extreme result. Yale professor Kenneth Gillingham said the NERA model tends to result in higher costs than other economic models, “The study assumes certain hypothetical regulations, but one could easily model other actions with much lower costs, and it also ignores the benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, like avoiding the negative effects of climate change.”
Trump misrepresented an MIT study that the Agreement would only produce 0.2 degrees Celsius less warming than business-as-usual by 2100. “Think of that, this much (holding his thumb and forefinger a fraction of an inch apart) Celsius reduction in global temperature by the year 2100. A tiny, tiny amount.” But the author of the study, John Reilly, co-director of MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, stated “Unfortunately, they got it wrong.” Reilly explains that all Paris commitments would reduce the increase in global temperature this century 1 degree Celsius, equivalent to warming over the past century and a half. “Bottom line, we think the Paris accord accomplishes something significant for the climate and that the U.S. should stay in it. The administration shouldn’t suggest that our research concludes otherwise. The intent of the research was to say the Paris deal was a small step, and that more incremental steps need to be taken.”
Also, Trump stated, “As someone who cares deeply about the environment, which I do, I cannot in good conscience support a deal that punishes the United States, which is what it does.” Trump has stated many times that he is a strong environmentalist, but where is the evidence? There is none.
William Gran, now retired, was an adjunct instructor at Greenfield
Community College on global warming and climate change. He can be reached at whgran@gmail.com