G-7 Statement
In an unprecedented step, the U.S. broke from the other six nations on Saturday in a joint statement issued at the Group of 7 summit, saying America is reviewing its policy. The political news website Axios reported that he’d told confidants he plans to pull the U.S. out of the deal.
“The big question is whether a U.S. withdrawal would lead to U.S. investors and utilities actually starting to build new plants that commit to high future emissions,” Myles Allen, professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute, said by phone.
So far, no other country, not even China or India has said they’d follow the U.S. in pulling out of Paris. Instead, it’s catalyzed support for the deal.
The key variables are what policies Trump enacts and how long they remain in force. The targets agreed on global warming through the UN are for 2100, and shifts in the energy industry take decades to play out. U.S. inaction on greenhouse gases may eventually discourage other countries from continuing their own efforts to cut back, said Oppenheimer at Princeton.
The Paris agreement was designed in such a way that legally, no other country’s action would be impacted by a withdrawal. Paris effectively sets up the reporting framework and the temperature goals, but each country’s individual target is voluntary.
In reality, an eight year delay on climate action would be accompanied by cuts to renewable energy research that could in turn harm emissions reductions rates. Those policies may encourage the use of polluting fuels such as coal.
All told, each of these changes could add a total of 350 billion to 450 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, if the rest of the world followed Trump, according to climate modelers, Ben Sanderson of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and Reto Knutti of ETH, Zurich. The chances of meeting the UN target of staying well below 2 degrees of warming would drop to about 10 percent, from two-thirds now, they say.
“Delay is the worst enemy for any climate target and can only be made worse by cutting research and energy technologies that would be crucial to get back on track again for target,” they wrote in the journal Nature earlier this year.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.