Trump further retreats from global climate cooperation

In June 1992, President George H. W. Bush signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change at the Rio Earth Summit. It was the first global treaty to explicitly address climate change, with the goal of stabilizing greenhouse gas emissions to prevent dangerous human interference in the climate. After unanimous Senate approval later that year, the United States became the first industrialized nation to ratify the treaty. 

“There are those who say that economic growth and environmental protection cannot be compatible,” Bush said in a speech to delegates at the Rio conference. “Well, let them come to the United States.”

Though few would call Bush a climate leader — he built his fortune in the Texas oil industry, and resisted setting targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — the framework he helped negotiate set the table for global cooperation, and eventually led to the landmark Paris Agreement, in which 194 countries and the European Union committed to limiting global warming to “well under” 2°C (3.6°F) above pre-industrial levels.

More than three decades after that Rio summit, the U.S. has now become the first country to say it’s leaving the treaty, after President Donald Trump announced plans this month to withdraw from the UNFCCC and dozens more international organizations and agreements he said are contrary to U.S. interests. Trump had already initiated the process of leaving the Paris Agreement — for the second time.

“The Framework Convention on Climate Change is the foundational climate treaty for the world,” said Joanna Lewis, a professor of energy and environment at Georgetown University. “Every nation is a part of it, and while it serves to organize important international negotiations, it actually doesn't itself bind countries to anything.”

Lewis has attended many of these negotiations as an observer. For three and a half decades, she said, through Republican and Democratic administrations, the United States has played an influential role.

“Ultimately, the United States has very little to lose in being a part of the framework convention, but potentially a lot to gain in terms of influencing the international response to climate change,” Lewis said. 

Pulling out opens the door for other countries to fill the vacuum — including China, which has made huge investments in solar energy and electric vehicles and recently positioned itself as a stable leader on climate cooperation, while the United States vacillates.

U.N. climate chief Simon Stiell called Trump’s decision “a colossal own goal” that will only hurt the U.S. economy, in the form of more costly disasters and less affordable food, energy and insurance.

Some worry that U.S. withdrawal will prompt other countries to reduce their participation, but Kaveh Guilanpour, vice president for international strategies at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions in Washington, D.C., said that hasn’t happened yet.

“Countries realize that the science is there,” he said. “The impacts are getting worse. They're getting more frequent in every country of the world, not just in the poorest countries, but even in the richest like the United States. And countries also realize where the economic opportunities are.”

Economics will continue to drive a transition away from fossil fuels, Guilanpour said, as the cost of renewable energy falls.

Leaving the framework convention is just the latest example of U.S. retreat on climate. The Trump administration is also pulling the U.S. government out of the IPCC, which produces the leading scientific assessments of climate change. Trump and the Republican-led Congress have gutted investments in wind, solar and electric vehicles, and rolled back regulations on emissions – all in the name of boosting oil, gas and coal production, which the Administration says will lead to “American energy dominance” and lower prices for consumers.

U.S. innovation on renewable energy hasn’t ground to a halt, said David Hart, a senior fellow in climate and energy at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“There are a couple of areas that the current administration strongly favors, notably nuclear power and geothermal power, that are aligned with climate goals and could still be areas of U.S. strength going forward,” he said. 

But Hart said current U.S. policy will slow the pace of the energy transition, and therefore progress on slowing the heating of the planet. This week the Rhodium Group, an independent research group said U.S. greenhouse emissions increased last year, after two years of declines — and that was before Trump’s policies had a chance to take full effect.