Oh No! If Trump Withdraws from the Paris Accords We’ll have One Less Empty Promise To Help Make Us Feel Better

I usually write about international law developments specifically related to Israel and the Jewish community. However, with the next big international climate meeting (COP 29) set to begin and Trump’s promise to withdraw from climate agreements in the news I thought to also share these thoughts.

Trump has announced that he will withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accord, causing climate change activists to panic. Of course, having someone who denies that the climate crisis exists move into the White House isn’t good news. But blaming Trump for wrecking the Paris Accord just hides the reality that all the agreement does is provide world leaders a fancy legal framework they use to legitimize doing nothing on climate.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions requires leaders to make difficult decisions. There are many different ways to go about it, each with its own costs, benefits and tradeoffs. But the bottom line is that in order to reduce emissions costs have to be born, inconveniences suffered, and yes even some sacrifices have to be made.

So inevitably everyone points fingers at everyone else. Poorer countries say the wealthier ones should bear the bulk of the burden. Countries that are currently high emitters say everyone should make proportionate reductions together, allowing existing inequality to become locked in. When countries got together in 2015 to negotiate the Paris Climate Accords, the job was to cut through all this and hash out a plan everyone could agree to that specified who would do what and how it would be paid for. But the accords they come up with did nothing of the sort.

Instead, the accords require each country to submit a document called a ‘nationally determined contribution (NDC)’ in which each country sets whatever emissions goal it believes is appropriate for itself. Countries are free to take into account what the accords call ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ and ‘different national circumstances.’ So every country is free to do however much or little it thinks it should, with no reassurance that the sum total of all the countries’ commitments will even be in the ballpark of what’s necessary to meet climate goals. And by the way, whatever commitments countries do make in their NDC’s are still unenforceable and completely non-binding.

For example, in 2021 the U.S. submitted an NDC after rejoining the Paris Accords under the Biden administration (following Trump’s withdrawal the first time he was in office). Biden’s NDC presents modest greenhouse gas reduction goals for 2030 (conveniently two years after he would have left office had he won a second term), with more ambitious goals to be reached only by 2050. That is sufficiently far into the future that no one can be held accountable for doing anything today. The 24 page document is packed with useless filler, going on at length about how the United States borders Mexico and Canada, how it has three separate branches of government, the number of square miles of its territory and how when Hawaii is included it covers six time zones (I kid you not, see pages 11-12). But nowhere in the U.S. NDC is there any commitment to take any specific action on climate by any particular deadline.

No wonder that the Paris Accords have so far been a complete failure. The UN admitted as much in a recent evaluation, which begins by saying, “current national climate plans fall miles short of what’s needed to stop global heating from crippling every economy, and wrecking billions of lives and livelihoods across every country.”

The report then goes on to note that even in the highly unlikely event all the countries actually reach the targets they decided on in their NDC’s, it would only result in emissions 2.6% lower than 2017 levels by 2030. Lovely, but a 43% reduction is needed in order to reach even the low end goals for minimizing the effects of climate change.

Of course some very limited progress has been made, and the U.S. withdrawing from the Paris Accords won’t help. But to make it out like an affective global plan was being successfully implemented but then Trump came along and ruined everything is totally false. The Paris Accords were designed only to allow politicians to appease their climate worried constituents without taking any action that might perturb any other voters. Trump is merely a convenient scapegoat to cover up the fact that the international community has so far failed completely to meet this challenge.

As someone who cares deeply about the rapidly changing climate, it’s encouraging to hear a president speak of the urgency of the crisis and magnitude of the challenge the way Joe Biden sometimes did. And it’s of course frustrating and even infuriating when a president denies science and refuses to acknowledge that climate change is real. But what I really want is action, and that’s not happening. Neither from Biden nor from any other world leader. All we have are fancy reports listing lofty goals for the far off future without any plans to implement them or commitment to take any concrete steps.

So please don’t scream and shout that Trump withdrawing from the Paris agreement is ‘game over for climate.’ It was game over for climate when all the countries got together to negotiate an agreement, and instead of doing the hard work of making a plan that obligates each country to pitch in and take action they decided to just play games.