The upcoming presidential election will no doubt affect the United States’ implementation of the Paris climate change agreement, but its significance is not as great as it has been made out to be, according to Sarah Ladislaw, director of the Energy and National Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“It is always much harder to be able to remember that when you’re a presidential candidate you don’t really have a magic wand and you are put into a government that is very constraining on your ability to just do whatever you please,” she said Monday during a panel discussion at the Energy Information Administration’s annual Energy Conference in Washington, D.C.
Under the Paris Agreement, the United States has pledged to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 26-28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. The agreement, which the U.S. has already signed and aims to join formally by the end of the year, consists of a legally binding framework under which nations will pursue non-legally binding commitments.
Now that primary races in both major parties have yielded nominees, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the Democrats and real estate mogul Donald Trump for the Republicans, people have started to wonder what a Clinton or Trump presidency could mean for the Paris Agreement.
Clinton has put forth a strong climate platform, calling for massive amounts of solar power installations and an expansion to the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, carbon emissions standards for existing coal-fired power plants. Clinton also played a role in climate negotiations in Copenhagen in 2009, which failed to result in an agreement.
Trump, on the other hand, has in the past said climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese.
China is also a party to the agreement and has vowed to ratify the document by the end of the year.
“The fact [is] that you have one presidential candidate who clearly believes in climate change and was part of the international climate negotiation process for a while, and has a very robust platform … [and] a candidate that doesn’t actually believe in climate change and/or talk about it in ways that would give you confidence that [current climate] policies would be pursued, or strengthened, or even not rolled back,” Ladislaw said.
Trump has stated that if elected president he will “cancel” the Paris Agreement. Pulling the U.S. from the accord is fairly easy, for now. Until the agreement enters into force, Trump could simply back the U.S. out. However, upon entry into force, which requires that the deal be ratified by at least 55 nations representing 55 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, a clause comes into effect requiring a four-year lag period for any party to exit. If the agreement is brought into force before a potential Trump presidency, he couldn’t take the U.S. out until the end of his first term.
However, given that the pledges in the agreement are not legally binding, Trump could also risk diplomatic backlash and simply choose not to work toward the U.S. commitment.
Even in that case, however, Trump would not have the power to unilaterally halt all climate action nationwide. “A lot of energy policy, and indeed climate policy, is made at the state and local level in the United States, and so it does have a little more durability [and] stickiness than people often remember at certain times,” Ladislaw said.
