When the US leaves the Paris climate agreement at US President Donald Trump’s command about a year from now, it would join Iran, Libya and Yemen as the only countries not part of the accord. What fine company.
It is tempting to think of ways to play down Trump’s decision to abdicate global leadership on climate: He has done this all before. The clean-energy transition is strong enough to overcome. Maybe China would save us.
When you consider just how starkly isolated the US would be from the rest of the world on this issue — along with the fact that it is history’s most prolific carbon polluter, and still the world’s biggest economy and second-largest carbon emitter after China — you can see Trump’s decision for what it is: a moral disgrace and an act of self-sabotage.
Amid a flurry of executive orders on his first day back in the White House, including several aimed at undoing former US president Joe Biden’s climate progress, Trump on Monday declared the US would leave the 2015 Paris agreement “immediately.” The last time he pulled this, in 2017, it took nearly his entire term for his declaration to take effect. This time it would take only a year.
This abandonment would do more than just demonstrate Trump’s fealty to the fossil-fuel industry, which did not even have to spend close to the US$1 billion he reportedly requested for the privilege. It would undermine the fight to prevent catastrophic climate change when global temperatures are at their highest levels in recorded history, as are sea temperatures, carbon emissions and natural-disaster losses.
Trump’s sabotage adds momentum to the growing political backlash against climate action around the world, including in the EU, which has the world’s third-largest economy and is its fourth-biggest carbon emitter. Green parties there took heavy losses in parliamentary elections last spring and climate-skeptical far-right parties are gaining power.
Mere anticipation of Trump’s Paris withdrawal helped derail the latest round of UN climate talks, along with the latest UN plastics talks and biodiversity talks. Fossil-fuel producing countries, aided by the shifting political tides, led efforts to thwart aggressive energy-transition targets and limit what polluting countries must pay developing countries to help them mitigate and adapt to a chaotic climate.
It is true that the aims of the Paris Accords are rapidly slipping away. The stretch goal of limiting heating to 1.5°C above preindustrial averages is basically a lost cause, and the headline goal of 2°C is looking harder to achieve every year.
However, the Paris Accords have helped focus the world on climate action, which has made some of the direst warming forecasts less likely. Every tick of extra heat gives the climate more destructive energy and further intensifies the heat waves, droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, floods and other disasters that are already killing people, destroying property and causing political upheaval around the world. That means every tick of extra heat we can avoid is a victory.
In the US alone, the natural disasters of the past 12 months have inflicted between US$693 billion and US$799 billion in total economic losses, according to the private weather forecaster AccuWeather. These include the recent Los Angeles wildfires, which could cause up to US$275 billion in losses, along with hurricanes Helene and Milton, which together wreaked up to US$440 billion in damage. AccuWeather’s estimates include not just the physical wreckage caused by these catastrophes, but their short and long-term effects on physical and mental health, economic productivity, tax revenue, and more. That US$799 billion amounts to nearly 3 percent of US GDP.
Not all of that damage was due to climate change. Wildfires and hurricanes happened before humans started heating up the planet, of course, but a hotter climate makes such destruction much more likely. It is also inflationary, increasing supply shortages and driving up prices for everything from home insurance to eggs. By not only ignoring global heating, but doing everything in his power to hurry it along, Trump is holding a knife to the throat of the very US economy that arguably helped get him elected. Again.
The global economic impact would be many multiples worse. The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, a UK risk-management group, and the University of Exeter warned last week that climate change could cut the global GDP in half later this century.
Trump’s abdication means that, after lighting the world on fire with its emissions, the US is turning its back and walking away. Again. Trump is right, as he noted in his order, that China has become the world’s largest polluter, but that is a nonsensical reason to end climate diplomacy. The US has still contributed more carbon to the atmosphere than any other country in history. That gives it a moral responsibility for limiting the damage, which would primarily be borne by countries that had nothing to do with creating the problem.
By shrugging and saying, in effect, “Let China handle it,” Trump is opening the door for China to do exactly that. Climate change would be the story of the coming century. The US should not let the rest of the world decide how that story is told, and the rest of the world should not let Trump have the power to hijack its future.
Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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