As promised, just hours after President Trump took office he signed an order to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement.
The Paris Agreement is the agreement reached at the Conference of the Parties (COP) in Paris in 2015, which set a goal of limiting global temperature change to 2.0 C above preindustrial levels, with a secondary goal of limiting warming to 1.5 C.
It is important to distinguish between the Paris Agreement and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The UNFCCC is the main international agreement which governs negotiation and action around climate change. The Paris Agreement is an agreement reached by the process established in the UNFCCC. The order signed by President Trump this week removes us from the Paris Agreement only, not the UNFCCC.
Climate experts believe that the 2.0 C goal is still within reach, but that we are in a critical decade for taking action. Taking action means cutting emissions of greenhouse gases and transitioning away from the use of fossil fuels.
This move was promised many times during the Trump campaign, so this announcement does not come as a surprise. The question of whether the US might withdraw from Paris was the main topic of conversation at this year’s COP in Baku, Azerbaijan.
The bad news: Withdrawing from Paris, along with turning away from the renewable energy transition and encouraging expanded fossil fuel development, other promises President Trump made during his inaugural address and flurry of executive orders shortly after taking office, confirms the suspicions of the rest of the global community: the US is not a serious partner and leader in the effort to fight climate change. If our commitment to climate comes and goes dependent on the party controlling the executive branch, then we cannot be counted on. This leaves a leadership vacuum in the area of climate action of all types.
The good news: As we learned during COP29 in Baku, the executive is not the only part of government that sets the tone on climate action. Subnational governments, in the US this is state and local government, have led the way on climate action at a level of government that is arguably more able to be effective on taking concrete action than the federal government. While the federal government can set goals and provide financing, state and local governments implement the policy that ultimately leads to emission reductions. Many state and local governments in the US are committed to climate action. The “America is All In” movement reports that governors who have committed to the pledge to continue working on climate action represent 2/3rds of the US population and 74% of the US GDP.
The process of leaving the agreement takes one year from the date of the order. This is the time to lean in to state and local advocacy for climate action. In states resistant to climate action, you can still make progress by talking to your elected officials about things like transportation and air quality, or developing extreme heat protections for workers, all of which have co-benefits beyond climate. Renewable energy has broad appeal for its ability to lower energy costs for consumers and its role in stabilizing the electrical grid. You could join the Climate Action Team for weekly updates and discussion of state and federal climate policy.
The 2023 Yale Climate Communications Study finds that 72% of the US adult population agree that global warming is happening. 61% answer affirmatively to the statement “Global warming will harm people in the US.” Those numbers are higher than ever, likely driven in part by the parade of weather- and climate-related disasters the US has experienced in the last decade. It stands to reason that the devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene and the wildfires in Los Angeles, both of which are examples of the kind of impacts we expect to see in a warming climate, might convince some of the remaining skeptics.
And that is the true folly of President Trump’s environmental policy approach. The impacts of climate change are real, they are here, they are dangerous, and they are affecting every single person in the United States. Without climate action, including a rapid transition away from relying on fossil fuels, we can expect more heat waves, more floods, more droughts, higher insurance premiums, and more tragic losses. Try as the administration might to distract us, the US electorate can clearly see that the emperor is in fact, wearing no clothes.