By Pamela McElwee
On Wednesday, November 4, the day after Election Day, the United States is scheduled to formally withdraw from the Paris Agreement, the major global accord to tackle climate change. President Trump has consistently expressed his opposition to the agreement, calling it “a disaster.” He could not be more wrong.
The Paris Agreement, while not perfect, is our best chance at keeping global temperatures from continuing to skyrocket. If we can hold global warming to 2 degrees Celsius or less, we can avoid the scariest range of impacts that will make this year’s overactive hurricane season and raging Western wildfires seem like child’s play.
The president is incorrect both about the impacts of more ambitious climate action on the U.S. economy and on how to exercise global leadership on this issue. The president thinks bullying other countries and unilateral withdrawal are a show of power. Instead, they’re a sign of weakness. They’re an indication that the United States is happily giving up our scientific and business prowess in developing zero-carbon technologies to other countries. The results will be, as the president stated on a different issue during a debate with Vice President Joe Biden, China eating our lunch.
Sadly, while this should be a bipartisan issue, the Republican Party has long been inconsistent about how to tackle climate change. When I testified on the state of climate science before Congress earlier this year in front of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, the Republican side of the committee room didn’t want to hear about the increasingly dire forecasts. Instead, they wanted to bash the Paris Agreement for not holding China and India accountable, a theme the president has repeatedly returned to.
For example, at the hearing Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama asked me how to stop China and India from emitting so much carbon, and then interrupted me several times as I tried to explain that the whole point of the Paris Agreement was to ensure global cooperation on this very issue. By allowing for voluntary pledges from all countries that then ratchet up in ambition and scope over time, the Agreement encouraged countries that could go first in terms of more aggressive cuts to do so, hopefully serving as examples for other countries to follow.
While the Paris Agreement is not mandatory in establishing how deep targets and cuts have to be, the structure of the Agreement allows for creative, innovative approaches that fit with each country’s abilities, and taken in the aggregate, every action counts. We can imagine how quickly Republicans in Congress would have rejected an alternative version of the accord that required mandatory cuts from the United States. But the Trump administration and Republican Congressional leaders can’t have it both ways: you can’t demand a voluntary accord because you don’t want imagined impositions on the United States, while also denigrating said accord for not putting restrictions on others.
In fact, the voluntary ambitions approach to cooperative action is working. Earlier this month, President Xi Jinping announced at the U.N. General Assembly that China will aim for peaking emissions in 2030 and climate neutrality by 2060 as part of their next round of ambitions. How they will fulfill that pledge remains to be seen but certainly, the overall promise would not have happened if we did not have the framework of the Paris Agreement.
Thus, the United States rejoining the accord as soon as possible is absolutely necessary, but it is not sufficient. The Biden campaign has said the United States needs greater and faster ambitions, and if he is our next president, the United States should not only rejoin but also strengthen our pledge. Biden’s platform is promising a goal of net-zero emissions by 2050, in line with what is needed and which would enable us to become a global leader on climate again.
Such leadership is needed because time is running out. The situation is more dire than most people recognize. While there was widespread attention to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 2018 that said the window is rapidly closing to hold warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, nearly all of that report’s modeling projections require the deployment of a new technology to capture existing carbon dioxide from the air. Given that we are placing all our hopes for avoiding widespread climate damage on a technology that is speculative, expensive and barely in demonstration stages, we are in bigger danger than we know. And without U.S. leadership at the global level, time is not on our side.
So, how do we take these global concerns and get our friends, neighbors and communities to treat climate change like the urgent problem it is? The Paris Agreement is an abstract concept to most, but we can instead emphasize our local shared values. Places and activities that we love – boating on Lake Hopatcong, walking with our kids in Nat Turner park in Newark, sunbathing at the Jersey Shore, hiking the Pine Barrens – are all at risk from climate change.
Only by keeping our shared values in mind and making climate change the urgent social, economic and health issue that it is, can we forestall these changes bearing down on us. Rejoining the Paris Agreement is one way to do so. The other is for each of us to make sure we vote because our planet’s future, and our own, are on the ballot, too.
Pamela McElwee is an associate professor in the Department of Human Ecology at Rutgers University-New Brunswick’s School of Environmental and Biological Sciences.
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