It is official. On Monday, Donald John Trump became the 47th President of the USA. His political opponents may accuse him of a great many things, but laziness certainly is not one of them. On his very first day in office, Trump signed close to 100 executive orders on topics as diverse as it gets. Many of these decisions have grave consequences, and I would love to discuss them for hours. But I will not. Because among cabinet appointments, hiring freeze, and declaring an emergency on the US-Mexico border, one decision casts a shadow that threatens to cover not only the US but the entire globe.
The document, quite perversely, called “Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements” actually puts it out of them. By the President’s decree, the United States shall withdraw from the Paris Agreement and any other agreement, pact, accord, or similar commitment made under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This should not be a surprise for people who follow American politics. After all, this is not the first time President Trump has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement. He did it for the first time in 2017, also via an executive order, later canceled by President Biden. This time, however, is much more serious.
The history of climate change agreements is a history of failures.
Climate change is a global threat, which requires global solutions. It naturally follows that legal solutions to this problem must be concluded under the problematic structure of international law. Why is it problematic? As realists would put it, the international system is anarchic, meaning there is no supranational authority. While in political studies it is merely one of many theories of international relations, in international law it is a fact. Any international legal regime is shaped by the so-called consensual principle, stating that any international jurisdiction rests on the consent of states. In a less legal language, international law is only what the states themselves accept as law. For an international obligation to exist a state must consent to be bound by it.
This is the biggest obstacle for international plans to combat climate change. Forming an agreement that all countries in the world would be willing to join, and actually strive for a meaningful change seems like a Sisyphean task. The first attempt to reach it was marked by the conclusion of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992. This multilateral treaty quickly gained universal recognition around the world. The problem was that it contained almost no obligations to act. For this reason, it was quickly supplemented by its Kyoto Protocol, which undertook a polar opposite approach. It listed what is the maximum emission of each developed party as compared to 1990 levels. For instance, the Canadian quantified emission commitment was 94%, meaning it had an obligation to reduce its 1990 emissions level by 6%. This turned out to be unacceptable for the US, Canada, Russia, and Japan, which abandoned the agreement. In this instance, the strict contractual obligations that the UNFCCC lacked, killed the universal recognition of the Kyoto Protocol.
The Paris Agreement of 2015 aims to strike a balance between these approaches. On one hand, it gained unanimous recognition around the world. On the other, it requires the state parties to prepare and present their national plans for combating climate change, with each successive one having to be more ambitious. This time, it seemed that the perfect balance was found, and the agreement would be both meaningful and universally accepted.
And then Trump came…
The first US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement in 2017 mirrored Canadian withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol. Thankfully, no other country followed Trump’s decision, and after four years President Biden returned to the accord. The crisis has been averted. Even despite the US withdrawal, the rest of the world has preserved the international climate change law framework and improved it at each successive COP summit. Maybe consensus and international law truly can stop unilateral acts of rouge partners.
My pessimist nature forces me to disagree. There are several differences between the situation in 2017 and the current state of affairs. First of all, the fact no other country followed the US then, does not mean that they won’t do it now. The populist revolution around the Western world was still nascent during the first Trump administration. Especially in Europe, radicals opposing the rule-based international order like Front National in France or Alternative für Deutschland in Germany barely started threatening the mainstream consensus. Today, they are the leading force in many countries, with Italy and Austria being only the clearest examples. Donald Trump’s support is essential for their political projects, as Mateusz Morawiecki, the former prime minister of Poland from the populist right Law and Justice, showed us by embracing Elon Musk’s provocative slogan “Make Europe Great Again”. If we take into account the ever-closest threat of Russian aggression and Trump’s plans for a trade war with the EU, many Western countries may be willing to sacrifice international cooperation in exchange for American protection and a powerful political ally in the White House.
But even if this dark scenario does not happen, the situation is not much better. The United States will remain outside the Paris Agreement at least until 2029. The USA, as the second-largest GHG emitter in the world, is indispensable for the global fight against climate change. Without its participation, the Paris Agreement is critically weakened, and its aim of holding the increase in global average temperature to “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” is virtually impossible to achieve.
The grim conclusion is that our last legal model has failed.
The architecture of the Paris Agreement was supposed to strike a balance between the failed approach of the UNFCCC original treaty, and that of the Kyoto Protocol. The hope was that it would both be universally accepted and impose specific obligations on the parties. It seems that neither of these is the case. Multilateral climate change agreements have helped tremendously, but they are not able to stop climate change on their own. However, this does not mean that we should allow ourselves to fall into inaction. The world is becoming increasingly complicated, and so must our analysis and solutions. Trump’s decision is a critical hit, don’t let it become lethal.
Very good article!