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Opinion: Climate losers

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Thursday, June 1, 2017

 
David Leonhardt
 

David Leonhardt

Op-Ed Columnist
If President Trump pulls the United States out of the Paris climate treaty, he would hurt the planet, make people (especially children) sicker and aggravate geopolitical tensions.
But you probably knew much of that. Less obviously, he would also do substantial damage to American interests — the country’s global power and its economy.
An exit from the Paris accord would be a remarkable lose-lose proposition: bad for the rest of the world and bad for the United States. This is lost on Trump and his aides for many reasons, but one is their oversimplified, zero-sum understanding of international affairs.
“The world is not a ‘global community,’” H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn, two of the most highly regarded Trump advisers, wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.” If something is bad for the rest of the world, it’s probably good for America, according to this view.
The miserable irony of a Paris withdrawal is how bad it would actually be for the United States. An exit would, as Hannah Waters of the Audubon Society tweeted, “accelerate U.S. decline. World economy moves towards renewables; U.S. left behind.”
Both Waters and John Upton of the nonprofit Climate Central noted that virtually the only industry that favors an exit from the accord is coal (and not even all of coal). Other energy industries understand that their future success depends on growing renewable energy.
Trump, alas, seems happy to do coal’s bidding — at the expense of the rest of the country and the rest of the world. He probably won’t even succeed at bringing back many coal jobs, as Paul Krugman has written.
For a needed dose of hope on this potentially dark day, I recommend:
— Waters’s Twitter feed, which points out that, even with an American exit, the accord today includes countries accounting for about 65 percent of global emissions; when it was ratified, that number — including the United States — was 55 percent.
— A Rhodium Group report (via David Roberts), which points out that America’s “ability to meet its 2025 Paris commitment will depend in large part on the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election.”
— And the work of Michael Bloomberg and various groups connected with him, which emphasizes the impact that states, local governments, companies and others can still have on the climate.
The full Opinion report from The Times follows, including Nicholas Kristof on American heroism in Portland and an Op-Doc on children who race Shetland ponies.

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