The United States of America officially withdrew from the Paris Accord on Wednesday, November 4. However, our nation is currently in process of counting votes for the presidential election and if Joe Biden wins, he vows to rejoin the Paris Accord on day one of his office. With the back and forth politics behind this, why is the Paris Accord so divisive?
The Paris Accord was an agreement that the United States entered along with nearly 200 other countries. The goal is to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions in an effort to fight global warming. Under this agreement, each nation is required to submit a proposal for reducing emissions in their own country. Every five years their contributions will be reported and a new proposal shall be summitted. The only requirement is that each additional submission be more ambitious than the previous one. This allows nations to move at their own pace while seeing improvement as a whole.
Why did Trump withdraw from the Paris Accord? Trump says the United States got a bad 'deal' and it will cost the US greatly. This 'deal' he refers to was an ambitious proposal set by the Obama administration. The United States set a goal to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions 26-28% by 2025. During a 2017 speech in which Trump announced his intentions to withdraw, Trump spoke of the economic impact on the US,
'Compliance with the terms of the Paris Accord and the onerous energy restrictions it has placed on the United States could cost America as much as $2.7 million in lost jobs by 2025, according to the National Economic Research Associates. This includes 440,000 fewer manufacturing jobs – not what we need, believe me, this is not what we need, including automobile jobs and the further decimation of vital American industries on which countless communities rely,' and by the year 2040, 'The cost to the economy would be close to three trillion dollars in lost GDP and 6.5 million industrial jobs.'
The estimates Trump gives are true, however, it fails to fully consider the costs and benefits of the Paris Accord. While the US would be losing jobs in coal and manufacturing, new jobs would be created in clean energy. And the GDP lost in those sectors could be made up in other fields. In the last ten years, emissions in the US have dropped by 9% while the economy grew 10%. In fact, a new report from International Energy Agency and International Renewable Energy Agency shows meeting the goals of the Paris Accord could boost the New York Stock Exchange by 19 trillion dollars.
-Steven Brown
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