Only
future generations will be able to calculate the full consequences of
President Trump’s incredibly shortsighted approach to climate change,
since it is they who will suffer the rising seas and crippling droughts
that scientists say are inevitable unless the world brings fossil fuel
emissions to heel.
But
this much is clear now: Mr. Trump’s policies — the latest of which was
his decision to withdraw from the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change
— have dismayed America’s allies, defied the wishes of much of the
American business community, threatened America’s competitiveness as
well as job growth in crucial industries and squandered what was left of
America’s claim to leadership on an issue of global importance.
The
only clear winners, and we’ve looked hard to find them, are hard-core
climate deniers like Scott Pruitt at the Environmental Protection Agency
and the presidential adviser Stephen Bannon, and various fossil fuel
interests that have found in Mr. Trump another president (George W. Bush
being the last) credulous enough to swallow the bogus argument that an
agreement to fight climate change will destroy or at least inhibit the
economy.
Mr.
Trump justified his decision by saying that the Paris agreement was a
bad deal for the United States, buttressing his argument with a
cornucopia of dystopian, dishonest and discredited data based on numbers
from industry-friendly sources. Those numbers are nonsense, as is his
argument that the agreement would force the country to make enormous
economic sacrifices and cause a huge redistribution of jobs and economic
resources to the rest of the world.
In
truth, the agreement does not require any country to do anything; after
the failure of the 1997 Kyoto Accord, the United Nations, which
oversees climate change negotiations, decided that it simply did not
have the authority to force a legally binding agreement. Instead,
negotiators in Paris aimed for, and miraculously achieved, a voluntary
agreement, under which more than 190 countries offered aspirational
emissions targets, pledged their best efforts to meet them and agreed to
periodic updates on how they were doing.
Paris
did not, in short, legally constrain Mr. Trump from doing the dumb
things he wanted to do. Which he already has. In the last few months,
and without consulting a single foreign leader, he has ordered rollbacks
of every one of the policies on which President Barack Obama based his
ambitious pledge to reduce America’s greenhouse gas emissions by 26
percent to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025 — most prominently
policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gases from coal-fired power
plants, automobiles and oil and gas wells.
But
if withdrawing from the agreement will not make Mr. Trump’s domestic
policies any worse than they are, it is still a terrible decision that
could have enormous consequences globally. In huge neon letters, it
sends a clear message that this president knows nothing or cares little
about the science underlying the stark warnings of environmental
disruption. That he knows or cares little about the problems that
disruption could bring, especially in poor countries. That he is
unmindful that America, historically the world’s biggest emitter of
carbon dioxide, has a special obligation to help the rest of the world
address these issues. That he is impervious to the further damage this
will cause to his already tattered relationship with the European
allies. That his malfeasance might now prompt other countries that
signed the accord to withdraw from the agreement, or rethink their
emissions pledges.
Perhaps
most astonishing of all, a chief executive who touts himself as a
shrewd businessman, and who ran on a promise of jobs for the middle
class and making America great again, seems utterly oblivious to the
damage this will do to America’s own economic interests. The world’s
gradual transition from fossil fuels has opened up a huge global market,
estimated to be $6 trillion by 2030, for renewable fuels like wind and
solar, for electric cars, for advanced batteries and other technologies.
America’s
private sector clearly understands this opportunity, which is why, in
January, 630 businesses and investors — with names like DuPont, Hewlett
Packard, Pacific Gas and Electric — signed an open letter to
then-President-elect Trump and Congress, calling on them to continue
supporting low-carbon policies, investment in a low-carbon economy and
American participation in the Paris agreement. It is also why Elon Musk,
chief executive of the electric vehicle maker Tesla, said he would
resign from two presidential advisory councils if Mr. Trump exited
Paris.
Yet
Mr. Trump clings to the same false narrative congressional Republicans
have been peddling for years and that Mr. Trump’s minions, like Mr.
Pruitt at the E.P.A. and Ryan Zinke at the Interior Department, are
peddling now (Mr. Pruitt to the coal miners, Mr. Zinke to Alaskans) —
that environmental regulations are job killers, that efforts to curb
carbon dioxide emissions will hurt the economy, that the way forward
lies in fossil fuels, in digging still more coal and punching still more
holes in the ground in the search for more oil.
As
alternative realities and fake facts go, that argument is something to
behold. In actual fact, emissions of carbon dioxide in this country fell
nearly 12 percent in the last decade according to some estimates, even
as the overall economy grew by about 15 percent over the same period.
Under Mr. Obama’s supposedly job-killing regulations, more than 11.3
million jobs were created compared with two million-plus under Mr.
Bush’s antiregulatory regime. It’s true that the coal industry is losing
jobs, largely a result of competition from cheaper natural gas, but the
renewable fuels industry is going gangbusters: Employment in the solar
industry, for instance, is more than 10 times what it was a decade ago,
260,000 jobs as opposed to 24,000.
Therein
lies one ray of hope that the United States, whatever Mr. Trump does,
will continue to do its part in controlling greenhouse gas emissions.
Market forces all seem to be headed in the right direction. Technologies
are improving. The business community is angry. A Gallup poll found
that nearly two-thirds of Americans are worried about climate change,
and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that almost
70 percent of Americans wanted to stay in the agreement, including half
of Trump voters.
And
some states are moving aggressively, including New York. On Wednesday,
the State Senate in California, always a leader in environmental
matters, passed a bill that seeks to put California on a path to 100
percent renewable energy by midcentury. On the same day, Exxon Mobil
stockholders won a crucial vote requiring the company to start
accounting for the impact of climate change policies on its business.
These messages might be lost on Mr. Trump. Hopefully, not on the world.
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