Trump’s announcement yesterday that the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris climate agreement (although technically not for another three years or so) was a big victory for his die-hard political supporters. A significant percentage of Republican voters simply discount climate science and hate the idea of global cooperation to address it.
Why do they feel that way? There’s been a fair amount of research on the question, but the bottom line is that they must feel like climate policies and programs will have no benefit for them — and may instead drive up their costs and undermine their employment opportunities.
At the same time, the U.S. economy has experienced an uneven recovery since the last recession, which has essentially only benefited the urban, knowledge-based parts of the country while almost completely leaving behind the rest with stagnant or declining wages. And that’s where these Trump voters made their stand and determined the election last year.
The irony though is that climate policies and related investments have a huge potential to benefit these rural areas and compensate for the tectonic economic changes that have left them behind. Just take California’s San Joaquin Valley, a poor and economically challenged part of the state. Our recent Berkeley Law report with Next 10 and UC Berkeley’s Labor Center showed that California’s three major climate programs — cap-and-trade, renewable energy, and energy efficiency — boosted the San Joaquin Valley’s economy by more than $13 billion and created thousands of new jobs to date.
Or take high speed rail, which is a long-term effort to move people around the state on low-carbon electricity rather than petroleum-guzzling cars and airplanes. The Sacramento Bee editorial writers argued in support of the project precisely for its economic benefit to the San Joaquin Valley:
The $20 billion Central Valley to Silicon Valley leg won’t carry commuters until 2025, give or take. But once it does, the forgotten part of California that coastal residents fly over or zip past en route to Yosemite will become connected to the rest of the state and gain their share of California’s bounty. That’s not a boondoggle. That’s fair.
Nationally, a “deep decarbonization” strategy for the entire U.S., with its attendant investments in the electricity grid and vehicle electrification, could generate up to 2 million jobs by 2050, according to ICF International. Many of those jobs would happen in the economically challenged parts of the country that supported Trump and his decision yesterday.
So the solution to building more political support for climate change policies therefore rests within the solutions to combat climate change in the first place. But given recent events, that message is simply not coming across to the parts of the country that need to hear it.
If it’s true, as reported, that Trump will withdraw the United States from the international climate change accord negotiated in Paris in 2015, it will be a symbolic abdication of U.S. leadership on clean technology and climate. And if the U.S. does not get a more climate-friendly president in January 2021 (or sooner), or somehow get a change of heart from this current one, it could have serious environmental consequences for the planet.
It’s important to note that the agreement itself was essentially symbolic, although it provides an important structure for global cooperation on greenhouse gas emissions reduction and can be strengthened over time. The agreement isn’t binding, and the U.S. contributions to the global emissions reduction effort are predicated on domestic policies like the Clean Power Plan, which the Trump administration is now trying to roll back anyway.
As my UCLA Law colleague Ann Carlson notes, staying in the agreement would mean masking the administration’s full-scale attack on domestic climate change programs. So in some ways, the agreement itself is a distraction from the administration’s policies on everything from expanded oil-and-gas exploration on public lands, rollback of vehicle fuel economy standards, and efforts to undermine renewable energy and public transit, among others.
In terms of actual emissions reductions though, the Paris agreement — and the policies supporting it like the aforementioned Clean Power Plan — weren’t really meant to start immediate changes to our energy system. The real action for most of these efforts begins in the 2020s. So the good news is that substantively, there’s still some time to make progress on climate, even with a four-year (or less) pause in federal climate action.
But the bad news of course is that we lose these years of taking action, with no guarantee that the U.S. will change course politically anytime soon. And time is already running out to avert the worst impacts of climate change.
But one other silver lining to the administration’s anti-climate actions: it has motivated states like California and cities across the country to do more to reduce emissions, while also emboldening the European Union and China to step in and become economic leaders in the effort to transition to low-carbon technologies. While that’s a political loss for the U.S. as a whole, it points to the potential for much more decentralized, global action on climate.
