Short Wave - The U.S. Wants Out Of The Paris Agreement

Episode Date: November 5, 2019

It's official, but not a surprise. The U.S. has told the United Nations it wants to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, the global accord to fight climate change. President Trump announced his intention to leave it back in 2017. Climate reporter Becky Hersher tells us what the Paris Agreement is, why the Trump Administration wants out and what it means now that the U.S. has made it official. Follow host Maddie Sofia on Twitter @maddie_sofia. Email the show at [e-mail]. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Maddie Safaya here with NPR climate reporter Rebecca Hersher. Hey, Becky. Hey. So now it's official. Yep. The Trump administration has formally told the U.N. that the U.S. is pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement.

The State Department sent a letter to the United Nations, and the letter said, basically, we don't want to be part of this anymore. Now there's a one-year waiting period before that fully takes effect. But in a nutshell, It means the U.S. is no longer going to work with other countries on climate change stuff. So today on the show, we're talking about what changes and what doesn't with the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement. Okay, Becky, first things first about this deal. It was adopted in 2015 by almost 200 countries around the globe.

So, like, you know, pretty simple to put together. Extremely simple. It didn't take any time at all. No, it took years. I mean, you literally have delegations from all these countries sitting in rooms, like meeting after meeting, arguing about every. single word. Every country has veto power when you write this. So doesn't that sound like a nightmare? Yeah. Literally like if Suriname doesn't like the word promise in paragraph 86, promise is strong. We all go back to the drawing board. Wow. So they did that for years and years and years and years. But they did figure it out because at the end of the day, everyone seemed to basically agree that working

together is better than not working together on global warming because everyone is messed up by it. I think you can say screwed if you want. Everyone's screwed. Okay. So now that the U.S. is leaving, it's the only country that's doing it. We're like an outsider. Yeah. And it actually, it takes some real resolve to leave this thing because all that time that we spent writing it, we were really focused on making sure that it was hard to leave.

It's designed to be easy to join and hard to leave. And that's because we were worried, you know, something could happen. Another country could have an election. A new leader would come in. And in fact, it seems like a good idea. because there's been a lot of political turmoil since it was signed. You know, since 2015, Brazil, India, Turkey, China, Japan, these big emitters, they've all had a lot of political turmoil. Right.

And that's one of the ironies of all this. Even though we're the ones who've been pointing to these potential scenarios for problems with other countries, we seem to be the biggest problem. That guy's named Andrew Light. He used to be a top climate official at the State Department. He actually helps negotiate the Paris Agreement back in the day. These agreements are just only as good as the commitments from each country. Okay, and what were those commitments? Like, what did we sign up for? So the American commitment under the Paris Agreement is to reduce national greenhouse gas emissions by about a quarter.

It was like 26 to 28 percent compared to where they were in 2005. It's like a moderately ambitious promise. A lot of wealthier countries, including the U.S., also promised to help pay poorer countries for the costs of switching to cleaner energy sources for adapting to a warmer world. But here's what's really cool about Paris, what sets it apart. everyone gets to choose their own adventure. Ooh, I like those books. Exactly. Just because the U.S. promised this emissions reduction and this amount of money doesn't mean

everyone else has to. So, like, China, for example, they have a really different economy from us. They're growing a lot faster for one thing. Their promise was basically that their emissions would stop growing by a certain year. They're actually ahead of schedule. So a lot of people hope they'll set a bigger promise coming up. But all of those individual promises from China, from us, from everyone else, it all has to add up to keeping global temperatures from rising more than two degrees,

or really ideally 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to when we didn't have any factories, like pre-industrial levels. How are we doing on that, Herscher? Real bad. We're not on track. Like, as a global community, we are not on track to do it. And in part, that's because even though President Trump has just formally said that we're withdrawing, the Trump administration has been moving to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement and rolling back all of the things that help us reduce emissions for years. It goes back to June 2017.

The United States will withdraw from the Paris. So the administration is formalizing something. Climate accord. They've already been doing. We've been seeing signs that they're done with this relationship, but they are making it real. Exactly. Yes. And those signs start with saying, we're leaving way before we were.

actually able to leave. Right. But it's not just words. Like, we didn't just say we're leaving. The Trump administration has systematically been rolling back all the federal laws or many of the federal laws about climate change. So things like how much pollution can cars and trucks and power plants emit? The Trump administration has been saying more. More is okay. And they've given a couple different reasons for why they're doing this. Like what? Okay. In that speech that we just heard from 2017. One reason that President Trump gave was that the Paris Agreement is too expensive. The Paris Agreement handicaps the United States economy in order to win praise from the very foreign capitals and global activists that have long sought to gain wealth at our country's

expense. So like all those requirements to transition to cleaner energy sources, you know, stop burning so many fossil fuels, help other countries do the same. It would be way too expensive. That doesn't really square with most economic analyses. Okay. When you add up all the costs, because it does cost a lot, you know, you need to build new power plants and get new appliances and new cars and they have to charge instead of have gas. And it is expensive.

Right. It's going to cost us money. Yeah. For sure. But there are also a lot of costs to deal with all the effects of climate change. If we do nothing, right, more frequent and severe storms. Think of how much it costs to rebuild a home that's been damaged or destroyed and wildfires to adapt to hotter temperatures in cities that requires all sorts of infrastructure upgrades. We have

agriculture that's being affected. You have to like adapt to that. That costs a lot, especially when you look in the long term. And on top of all of that, there's actually an economic benefit to be had from adapting, right? If you're the person who's providing all the new technology, you make money. You make money. Right. So if American businesses, for example, are the ones doing that, that's a boon for our economy. In theory, basically, though, when you add it all up, it's hard to imagine a situation where it makes the most economic sense to do nothing. Right. Okay. So what comes next? Now that the U.S. has said, we're done, we're out of Paris. Well, we have to wait a year. Right. Because as I said, easy to join, hard to leave. Yeah. If at any point in that year we say,

oh, wait, we're not sure. That's fine. Oh, that's what you mean by hard to leave. You have multiple opportunities to stay. They just keep asking, are you sure you want to leave? Are you really like grad school? It's just like grad school. And at the end of that, year will be out. But before that, the U.S. State Department is actually going to send a delegation to the meeting of all the countries that are in the Paris Agreement because we're technically still in. Right. And that's going to be a little bit awkward. Like last year I went to the meeting and it was sort of like, hey, what are the Americans up to? Are they in? Are they out? This year, it's going to be like, okay, they're out. But are we? Becky? You know what I mean? Like, that's the

question because what's to stop a new administration, if that happens in 2021, from just re-entering this thing and restarting the policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Nothing. There's nothing stopping them. On inauguration day, 2021. That's Andrew Light again. You know, they can communicate to the United Nations that the United States intends to get back in and we want to get back in the Paris Agreement. It takes 30 days for that to happen.

So that's pretty much the easy part. The hard part that comes after that will be actually getting the U.S. back on track to reduced greenhouse gas emissions. So U.S. missions went up last year. If we were to get back into the Paris Agreement in a serious way, there would be a real rush to get us back on track. Back on track. Right. Okay. So what changes once we're out? Like, for real, if in one year we are out, what happens? Okay. So for one thing, there are these meetings where all the countries that are in the agreement come together and talk about it. The U.S. will no longer have a formal role in those. So that's kind of a big deal because the U.S. is one of the biggest greenhouse gas emitters in the world.

So it's kind of strange, right? Yeah. To have these meetings where you're talking about it, but one of the biggest emitters isn't there. Okay, NPR science reporter Becky Herscher. Thank you, Becky. I appreciate you. Thanks. I appreciate you too. If I committed to a climate agreement with you, I would never leave it. Okay. The U.S. said that. Before we go, if you're enjoying the show, do us a favor.

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Those ratings and reviews help the show get recommended to other people who are looking for a little daily brain snack, but just haven't heard of us yet. Okay? Okay. I'm Maddie Safaya. Thanks for listening to Shorty. from NPR.