We’ll Always Have Pittsburgh

I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.

— President Donald J. Trump on 1 June 2017

As most of you know, President Trump announced his intention to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord during a speech in the Rose Garden at the White House.  This announcement fulfills a campaign promise that he continually made in the run-up to the November election.  His base, and several close advisers clearly think that putting the United States in the same company as Syria and Nicaragua (the only other nations not in the agreement), instead of in the company of the other 195 nations that agreed to the Accord in December 2015, is a positive development.  Other advisers, including Secretary of State (and former Exxon-Mobil CEO) Rex Tillerson reportedly did not and advised the president to stay within the boundaries of the agreement. As a consequence, many misstatements were made about what was or was not in the Accord.  Somehow, it got caught up in an argument over whether or not climate change is a hoax, as the president continually claimed on the campaign trail, or is it backed up by a preponderance of evidence that human beings are contributing to the changing climate on Earth.

The main effort of the Accord was to reduce green house gas emissions.  These emissions are the root cause of rising global temperatures, which in turn are melting the polar ice cap, shrinking the ice shelves in Antarctica, and eliminating glaciers around the world.  As the world’s ice melts, sea levels increase putting coastal land, and many island nations, in danger of being covered by water. Will this happen tomorrow or even next year?  No.  However, 196 nations (until the U.S. announced its withdrawal) agreed that it was a real and present danger to life as we know it on this planet. Long-term problems need long-term solutions, and that was the aim of the Accord.

In my view we can restate it another way.  Forget about arguments for or against climate change. Put it in terms of being pro or anti pollution.  Who is for more pollution?  Apparently, the president and his key advisers such as the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Edward Scott Pruitt and White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon who reportedly convinced President Trump to leave the Accord.

Rather than looking at the Accord as a positive thing for the citizens of the United States and all living things around the world, the president put his opposition to the agreement in economic terms.  To me, this is a short-sighted vision that provides misleading hope for the future for those struggling in the economy with mining and manufacturing jobs that are disappearing whether or not the U.S. remains in the Paris Accord.  The president also claims his decision is a matter of sovereignty and a chance to keep “others” from telling us what to do in our own country.  Or as the president said, “As of today, the United States will cease all implementation of the non-binding Paris Accord and the draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country.”  Apparently no one told him what “non-binding” means and also forgot to inform him that the agreement does not set any burdens on any country outside those that the individual countries voluntarily agree to for themselves.

This is what makes the president’s announcement extremely puzzling.  Under the Accord, each country sets its own commitments with the common goal of “holding the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels” which is intended to begin to reduce the long-term warming trend rather than stop it, but more on that in a minute.  The point is that if President Trump did not agree with the goals laid out by the Obama administration, under the terms of the Accord, he could change them.  He did not have to leave the agreement.  This makes his statement that “we’re getting out, but we will start to negotiate, and we will see if we can make a deal that’s fair” even more preposterous.  He is not going to get 195 nations to renegotiate.  And it isn’t necessary, just adjust the commitment under the terms of the existing agreement.  I cannot decide if he is being purposely misleading or if he does not understand what he is talking about.

This is a central point for understanding why it is bad policy for the United States to withdraw and makes me believe that the move was intended as an “in your face” insult to the Europeans (thus the reference to the citizens of Paris) and a purely political decision to appeal to the hard-core base that voted for him in 2016, rather than truly thinking about the long-term needs and welfare of our citizens.

This is also reflected in his claim that the United States could not build new coal plants but China and India can, and will, thus somehow depriving the U.S. of the coal-burning market.  Wrong again.  As has been repeated,  the agreement is non-binding, and also has nothing in it that prohibits the United States from building coal-burning plants and it has nothing in it that “allows” China and India to do so. To so state is purely political demagoguery, or ignorance.  In the United States, coal plants are being replaced not because of EPA regulations or because of the Paris Accord, but because of market forces — mainly, because of the abundance of natural gas at cheaper prices.

Coal jobs currently number about 50,000 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  Nearly universally, economic analysts say that the combination of natural gas and technological advances in mining mean that number will not grow, and is likely to decrease.  As pointed out in an article by Christopher Ingraham that number of coal miners compares to about 80,000 employees at Arby’s restaurants or the approximately 150,00 employed in the car wash industry. 50,000 is a drop in the bucket for our entire economy and not at all near the catastrophic impact that the president implies.

Clearly coal mining jobs are important to the 50,000 so employed, but dropping out of the Paris Accord is not going to help them in the future.  When the Pony Express went out of business because of the telegraph and railroads, those people found new jobs.  And so it goes throughout history — innovation and technological progress cause people to lose jobs, but new jobs are created.  For example, the energy efficiency industry had about 2,700,000 jobs in 2016 of which about 677,000 jobs were in the renewable energy sector (solar, wind, hydro, etc.).  President Trump should be putting effort into retraining and educating miners and others in dying industries to allow them to help themselves and the economy in the future rather than promising them a past in which they cannot long survive.

At the same time, those that find environmental issues important, and a threat to our survival, need to do a much better job at making the case.  When asked to choose between the environment and jobs as our president states it, many Americans will choose jobs every time.  It is important to educate voters and all our citizens about the importance of working towards improving our environment.  It is also important to explain and educate voters that a clean environment and jobs are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, environmentally related jobs are a growth industry and go a long way in reducing unemployment.  Railing and ranting will not convince others.  Education and reasoned arguments as to why we are better off under an agreement such as this one, including how it creates jobs (and not in the government bureaucracy), is important to our long-term goals and well-being.  Use this as a wake up call.

Without going through every portion of President Trump’s speech on departing from the agreement and comparing it with the actual Accord, there is one thing he got right — sort of — although it did not appear that he understood what he was saying.  He said, “Even if the Paris Agreement were implemented in full, with total compliance from all nations, it is estimated it would only produce a 2/10 of one degree – think of that. This much [held his fingers nearly close together] Celsius reduction in global temperature by the year 2100. Tiny tiny amount.”  The size of the reduction is unknown and several experts contend that it will be more significant than the president intimated.  But here’s the point, the signatories of the Accord acknowledge that the limits pledged thus far will not meet the 2 degrees Celsius goal, but the efforts to reach that goal will be better than just letting the pollution continue and allow temperatures to continue to rise unabated.  In other words, the signatories were working on the premise that something is better than nothing and that as technology and developments continue evolving in the coming years, new ways of reaching those goals will become apparent. Time will not stand still and the world and its technology will not always be the same as it was in 2015 or now.  The president seems to miss that point.  He seems to think that the world won’t reach the goal anyway so screw it.

Since the president’s speech really did not discuss the issue of global climate change, how to deal with it best, or point out misguided practices, it can only be seen in this light.  It was instead one more example of his belief that some kind of conspiracy — primarily by our closest and most important allies — is holding the United States back and dictating what we do or cannot do.  His belief appears to be that by putting “America First” that he can do, or not do, whatever he feels like, the rest of the world be damned. This is extremely dangerous to the future of the United States and its place on the world stage.