Paris Agreement Withdrawal
One of the most notable actions is of course Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement (more strictly, the announcement to withdraw end 2020, though given the nature of the accord, this is tantamount to withdrawing now). Before we can assess whether this is good or bad, we will need to understand a little more of what that means.
The Paris Agreement is an agreement between almost every country in the world to take action to combat climate change, and therefore avert the future global disaster if we remain on our current path. The main part of the agreement is that every nation sets and submits their target to combat climate change, and reports against the target that they set. Hence for the US the targets were set by the US, and were not dictated by any other country. There is no penalty enforced for not meeting those targets, no being dragged before an international court of law. As such, it is maybe much as the partnership between Roosevelt (representing the US) and Churchill (representing Britain) in WWII. There would have been no penalty, no legal fees, had the US forces sailed home on June 5th 1944, rather than towards Normandy the next dawn. There would of course have been the consequence of not defeating the common enemy (and, one suspects, we wouldn’t look back with such admiration on that generation of Americans).
So if nothing is binding, and every country can set its own targets, what’s the point? Because it’s a reasonable framework around which to promote global action, and to understand what each country is targeting, and how they are tracking towards that target, so as to understand the future implications. As such it does not bind the US by specific regulations but rather sets a framework for achieving a common goal. It also serves to address the obviously difficult questions posed by the fact that each country is at a different level of development, and are therefore wildly different both in the extent that they contribute to the problem and have the capacity to make investments. So we have obviously seen developed countries like the US and Europe emitting more CO2 over time, even compared to China and India with massively larger populations - until the takeoff and growth of China’s and India’s economies. So who now is responsible for tackling the problem? - China, because their annual CO2 emissions/year are the highest? Or the US and the EU, because they have fueled their growth with the fossil fuels, and over the years have emitted way more CO2 than China (and the US still has twice the per capita rate)? The answer is both of course, with some reflection that ‘fair’ targets per country should reflect their stage of economic development somewhat, but that these countries must never become as CO2 intensive per capita as the US is - otherwise we are screwed.
Side note: Again, if the Paris Agreement isn’t binding, is it pointless? I have certainly seen the same sort of situation during my career, where you are trying to achieve a joint goal, requiring action across a group with no common leadership. Everyone just nodding their heads saying the goal is important is useless - it leaves you utterly clueless as to whether the goal will be met. Get everyone to make some commitment to a part, and track them against that, and reconvene regularly to reassess. Now that’s a reasonable approach I’ve seen work - that’s analogous to the Paris Accord.
So what were the targets (called Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs) set by each country? I believe the actual targets are on the UN website [1 - one report per country, as submitted by that country] However, the best source of information I found was Climate Tracker which not only has the targets per country, but also information on how they are tracking towards those targets, and an assessment of what this would mean (as long as we can avoid emotional reactions to scores like “Critically Insufficient”).
So a summary of the commitments by country for some of the main players is shown below. Reflecting the differences in population and economic development, some countries like the US and EU express target in terms of reductions in absolute CO2 emissions. Developing countries with massively larger populations express targets largely in terms of carbon intensity (CO2 relative to GDP), though sometimes with absolute caps as well.
The second, much smaller, part of the agreement is that the developed countries will help finance necessary investments in some developing countries, helping them to adopt climate friendly energy from the start rather than have them follow the same trajectory as existing developed countries. The level of commitment from the US is $3B (total over multiple years, not per year). That’s $9 per person.
So the reasons the administration gave for the US leaving the Paris Agreement are:
- Other countries should not dictate what the US does. This has been repeated again and again by former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley “The rest of the world wanted to tell the US how to do it” “When international bodies attempt to force America into vague environmental commitments” [2] This is simply not true - the US, like every other country, set it’s own target. And there was nothing vague about it. By saying otherwise, Nikki Haley is either incompetent or, when she said this, lying.
- It was unobtainable. Again, Nikki Haley “The standards could not have been achieved” “We have to look at what’s realistic” [3]. So to remind ourselves of the US set target - Reduction of 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2025. This target was set at the end of 2015. The chart below shows what the US CO2 emissions were from 2005 till 2015. The black line shows the trend we would need to follow to hit that target of a 26% reduction from 2005 by 2025 (from 5851 Mton CO2 to 4330 Mton CO2)
So from this, it sure doesn’t look like the target was unobtainable - in fact, it seems as if with 10 years gone, and 10 to go, we were right on track back in 2015 - even more so by the end of 2016.
But what about since the new administration (as shown in red below)?
Not so great.
Was it that the US was just setting absurdly difficult targets, and it was unreasonable that the US was making such sacrifices in the years 2005-2016, compared to other countries. Well, that’s not true either. The chart below shows the US and EU emissions, along with what the EU emissions would need to be if the EU were to meet the same 26% reduction target that the US set.
The teal and blue lines show actual emissions for the US and EU, and the grey line shows the path that the EU would need to be on to meet the same % reduction target as the US, and as we can clearly see they are doing better than that (and still get to boil the kettle for a cup of tea even if the wind’s not blowing - ok, I promise to not make that joke again).
Looking at individual countries makes it even clearer that a reduction of 26% in 20 years (2005- 2025) is achievable, given that three countries in Europe (UK, Denmark,Sweden) have already done better than that, achieving that reduction in 13 years, by 2018 (whilst all maintaining >13% growth - other countries also passed the 26% reduction, but without significant GDP growth)
But maybe the EU’s own target, that they set for themselves, gives them headroom to not reduce anymore, and indeed increase. Again - not so. The EU target is “40% reduction below 1990 levels by 2030”, and once we do the irritating maths to account for each country choosing a different time period and target reduction %, we see that for the EU to be on track to meet their 2030 goal, they would need to have emissions down to 2830 MTon by year 2025, which is well below what just having the same target as the US would be. The more complex chart below shows this - this just extends the period shown back to 1990-2030, and the purple line shows what the goal as set by the EU looks like.
So the claim repeated again and again by the administration “What President [Barack] Obama submitted to the U.S. was not achievable under our standards or any other country’s standards” [4] is absolutely, demonstrably false, given that other countries have already achieved it, and the evidence that the US was already on the path to doing so.
- It’s not fair to the US. Ensuring that all countries are making progress towards this common goal certainly raises questions as to what “fair” means. Firstly, there’s the obvious huge discrepancy in country size. It would clearly be absolutely preposterous for a small country like, say, Ireland (about the same population as Arizona), to come to the Paris Agreement meeting and say that it’s target was to grow to have the same total emissions as the US (in 2018 Irelands emissions were 0.7% of the US, with less than half the per capita emissions). That wouldn’t be vaguely fair. Similarly it is preposterous to demand that Ireland reduce their CO2 emissions by the same amount as the US reduce theirs. This is because the emissions of the US are so high that if the US were to reduce them by just 1%, the Irish would need to turn everything off and permanently park their cars. So the only meaningful way of defining a contribution is % reductions, and/or reductions in the carbon intensity (emissions per GDP) or emissions per capita. That’s obvious (yet EPA head Pruit talked of Americas leadership on exactly this ‘total per country’ basis [5]).
A more difficult, and therefore contentious, question is what reductions are fair reflecting the current state of development of a country. The world didn’t create this problem with the CO2 pumped into the atmosphere overnight - it’s not what the world emitted last week, or last year, or even the last decade. It’s what has happened over multiple decades, where obviously countries like the US and EU have been dominating CO2 emissions, until the relatively recent explosion in China. Looking back till 1965 shows this:
The first chart shows CO2 emissions by year, the second total emissions over the period 1965-2018. So even since 1965, the US alone emitted ¼ of the global total CO2. The US and the EU combined account for 45%. Note that it’s not as if 1965 is a magical start point, just the earliest this dataset had. Go back further towards the industrial revolution and of course it just makes the totals even more dominated by the US and EU. Russia was omitted from the pie chart only because the earliest data available for Russia was 1985.
So the world cannot afford having huge developing countries like India follow the same trajectory that that the US and UK did in the past. But India is responsible for just 4% of the total since 1965, and still, despite recent growth, has per capita emissions less than 1/8th that of the US. Would it then be “fair” to demand that India immediately bear the same responsibility for reducing emissions? I think it is fairer to recognize that recently developing countries like India should have some leeway to get some of the development benefit that the US and EU have already enjoyed, whilst putting in place plans and targets to head of the problem if they continued on their current course (i.e. continued to follow exactly the same path that the US and EU enjoyed!). The same argument applies to China to some extent - they are still ½ the per capita emissions of the US, they are earlier in development than the US, they could argue that they have thus far emitted less than 70% the total of the US - though certainly given their horrendous recent rise in the last 20 years, the world cannot afford for them to remain on their current path.
- Other countries are not doing anything: This is just a more detailed aspect of “it’s not fair to the US”. In Oct 2019, Haley justified leaving the agreement by saying [6] “... the biggest abusers - China & India & Russia & Saudi Arabia - aren’t doing anything. China didn’t have to make the first change to what they were doing for 10 years… I know in 10 years, China will have found a reason to get out of it.... We can’t make a dent in what’s going on if we can’t get those countries to start getting in line”
That certainly sounds like it was a ridiculous deal for the US! As we saw in the chart above, certainly something’s got to change in China. So let’s look at carbon intensity, which is emissions relative to GDP - if you can produce the same GDP but with fewer emissions, that’s a good thing. When the agreement was set up in 2015, China was terrible. For the world overall, the intensity was 0.33 MTon of CO2 per $1000 of GDP (shown by the dotted line in the chart below). So countries near the dotted line are ‘average’, those below are good. So China was terrible, with an intensity of 0.58 (compared to 0.31 for the US, and even better 0.19 for the EU). So back in 2015, China should absolutely have been targeting a large reduction in carbon intensity.
So what did China set as its target? A large reduction in its carbon intensity! The target they set was: Reduce carbon intensity by 60%-65% below 2005 level by 2030. So again doing the maths, this translates into a target of getting their carbon intensity down below 0.34 by 2030 i.e. to about the overall average/US figure (Chinas intensity was 0.84 in 2005, so the goal of a 60%-65% reduction means getting it down to 0.34-0.29 by 2030). So it’s totally incorrect to say “China didn’t have to do anything”. Yes, the target was set as a number to hit some years ahead, just like the targets of other countries, including the US. And, again just like the US and other countries, China could theoretically hit their target overnight at the last minute, but we can track whether China is truly moving towards their stated target. The grey region below shows what China would need to be doing to be on a path towards their goal of reducing intensity by 60-65%, vs. the red line indicating the actual changes.
We can see that as of end 2018, they are on track to beat even their more ambitious target. This is confirmed by the Climate tracker, that looks more frequently at data and trends. According to them: “[Chinas] carbon intensity target would be strengthened from 60-65% below 2005 levels to approximately 68%” [7 - update Dec 2019]. Did China commit to reducing total emissions from 2015? - no, because they and other countries argue they are much earlier in their development/industrialization. They did set the target to peak emissions by 2030, and increase the share of renewable energy to 20% by 2030. Climate tracker reports that they are also on track for both of those. For Haley to present the idea that China will “get out of it in 10 years” is ridiculous, when the whole world can track their progress year by year.
Similarly India, as another large and fast developing countries, have stated commitments and are tracking towards fulfilling them [8]
As for the final comment from Haley: “We [the US] can’t make a dent in what’s going on if we can’t get those countries to start getting in line” As of 2018, the US is still the 2nd largest offender, emitting 14% of annual emissions, 1.5 times that of the EU (that has a 50% larger population and larger GDP). If you are contributing 14% to a problem, you can certainly make a dent in the solution. And this statement becomes indefensible if you consider the history - the problems with climate change were becoming increasingly apparent back in 1990 (when the USGCRP was formed by President Bush). At that time, the US accounted for 22% of the world’s annual emissions. Germany was the country in Europe with the largest emissions, with 4.5% of the world’s total, followed by the UK with 2.6% etc. Hence every single country in Europe could have similarly argued that they couldn’t make a dent. Yet that did not stop them taking action, and collectively they reduced emissions by 20% whilst the US added 4%. Put another way - through this whole period the UK was more energy ‘efficient’, with a carbon intensity about ⅔ that of the US. So if the US had even got to the same carbon intensity as Europe, that would have saved about 50,000 Mton of emissions since 1990 with the same GDP growth (i.e. about 1.5 years of current emissions of the whole planet) - quite a sizeable dent. Other countries might reasonably consider that it’s the US that’s “out of line”, to use Haley’s phrase.
So every single sentence from Nikki Haley’s speech in Oct 2019 [9] justifying the withdrawal was untrue. And she was just repeating that standard reason given directly by the president [10].
- “The US can’t afford it”. This point is made with regard to both the payments that developed countries make to poorer developing countries, and the negative impact that tackling climate change will have on the US economy. The first point is somewhat irrelevant, given the sums involved are relatively tiny ($3 per person so far), so not really worth discussing further. Yet what of the impact on jobs and the economy? Again, from the same Nicki Haley speech [11] "The US is being put under all these regulations that hurt our economy.” Again, the agreement didn’t add/enforce/bind the US to any regulations. Any regulations related to climate change action were passed through the houses as normal, as part of normal US self-determination. Can we argue that “we cannot afford it”? In many regards this is a ridiculous question - once you have accepted that there is a crisis that must be addressed, you have to pay the cost to do so. It would be shameful for the US, the wealthiest country on the planet, to claim that they cannot afford it, when other less wealthy countries are taking on the burden.
But would taking action hurt the economy and lose jobs? Obviously it might, in the short term. Indeed we might think it unfair for countries with no gas, oil and coal deposits to argue for a reduction of fossil fuel use, preventing us from exploiting our fossil fuels right now by digging them up and burning them as quickly as we can. Yet as discussed before, there are only short term economic benefits of doing that, because today fossil fuel prices do not reflect the true price, as it ignores the future costs resulting from the damage done. Given that some predictions of our future course are apocalyptic, this choice becomes extreme - limit ourselves a relatively small amount now, or risk untold cost and suffering that will occur within our kids lifetimes. Our fossil fuel reserves have been in the ground for millions of years - they can stay there for a few more years till we have built the technology to use them responsibly.
Further, we can see from Europe that addressing the problem doesn’t kill the economy. In any such change, there will certainly be winners and losers. It might be a bad time to work in the coal mining sector - so let’s retool and retrain, because it would be a good time to work in the sector of carbon capture technology, or solar or wind power. What is incredibly frustrating is that other countries are now extending their leadership position in this technology, and profiting from it’s export, whilst the US, the world’s technological leader, is falling behind. The world’s shift away from fossil fuels could be a huge economic opportunity for the US, if we would stop resisting it. Indeed, this is the one area I agree with Nicki Haley, when she said “it doesn’t have to be either/or [jobs or the environment]”. Absolutely agree - so why stop the action on climate change?
So in summary on the Paris Agreement: Given the entire nature of the agreement, and the problem it is addressing, I believe it to be a terrible mistake to leave it. The next step in the agreement is that in Nov 2020 (coincidentally, and ironically, right around the US election ) the world will meet in Glasgow to assess the progress towards targets, and the modified target of each country to reflect the latest troubling data on the global climate. The EU is already discussing the more ambitious targets that they will be setting for themselves. By withdrawing, the US has:
- Lost it’s seat at the table: meaning that if we feel that other nations must be doing more, we have lost credible leverage over them;
- Undermined the collective will of the other nations of the world, who will rightly question why they should continue to act when the US has adjudicated responsibility. I fear that at best this will slow the rate of progress of other countries, possibly disastrously. Ironically, in this “America First” philosophy, it means that a key part of America’s future now lies solely in the hands of the other countries of the world!
Possibly this administration actions are a masterful tactic, betting that the other nations of the world don’t collectively throw themselves off a cliff just so America doesn’t get a short term advantage over them? Well, it seems an extremely risky game of chicken to play, particularly as the rate of emissions from the US are sufficiently large, and recently growing, that we could single-handedly undo the good actions of other countries.