President Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord was a symbolic promise to the world that the U.S. will not do its part in preventing catastrophic climate change. The Trump administration is following through on that symbolic promise.
A United Nations-sponsored global climate conference in Bangkok last week ended in disappointment. The conference aimed to prepare guidelines for implementing the Paris agreement. The guidelines are supposed to be officially adopted in December at the COP24 conference in Poland.
This conference failed because a group of wealthy nations, led by the U.S., sought to remove expectations for wealthy countries to finance climate change mitigation efforts in poor countries that can’t afford it. The U.S., Japan and Australia proposed removing these financial commitments.
Even as the U.S. is set to leave the agreement in 2020, it is using its existing membership to derail implementation.
The U.S. is making an insufficient deal even weaker; as the Pacific Islands Development Forum noted in its Suva Declaration in September 2015, the Paris agreement is not legally binding, and its upper limits for global temperature rise are high enough to jeopardize the very survival of Pacific island nations.
Notwithstanding, the Paris agreement is the best we’ve got. It is the only international agreement in which virtually every world government set specific targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Without bold action on the part of governments — particularly of countries that have contributed to more than their fair share of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, such as the U.S. — we are hopeless to combat the gravest threat humanity has ever faced.
Climate change will not be solved by the free market. It’s the ultimate externality. In the modern world, the production of almost every commodity affects the environment through pollution, greenhouse gas emission, habitat fragmentation, deforestation and/or countless other damages.
While many consumers change their purchases to limit their contributions to climate change, it is simply unrealistic to expect consumer conscience alone to make anywhere near the economic changes we need to slow, let alone stop or reverse, the devastation that climate change is wreaking.
Even if everyone could afford to buy eco-friendly products, there will never be a time when everyone is willing to change their lifelong habits for no guaranteed personal benefit. In the U.S., a rich country with a relatively educated population, we’re still working on convincing a sizeable portion of our population that climate change is real, threatening and caused by humans.
Don’t expect any high-tech billionaire-funded magic fixes either. Technologies like carbon-capture machines, ocean alkalinity enhancement and injecting sulfate particles into the atmosphere may be worth exploring, but scientists have not developed a single climate engineering technology for combatting climate change that would not have massive side effects that could be more dangerous than climate change itself. And there’s no reason to believe they will.
While there are certainly downsides to placing all our faith in governments, the reality is that highly coordinated efforts by states all over the world are only hope for saving the planet. These efforts should include both regulations to limit or prohibit environmentally damaging activities and proactive programs to install and subsidize alternative energy infrastructure.
The Paris agreement, despite its inadequacies, was a landmark achievement in coordinating those efforts. Given the current administration’s actions in Bangkok, it is now the responsibility of the American public to pressure our government to stop derailing the international community’s efforts to save the planet.
