Well, it’s not even a full business week into the start of Donald Trump’s second term as president and he’s already ordered the United States’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. For those who are unaware, the Paris Agreement — which is also called the Paris Accords or Paris Climate Accords — is an international climate change treaty that includes terms on climate change mitigation, adapting to climate change impacts, and financial support for these actions, originally signed in 2016. The long-term goal of the treaty is to keep the rise of global surface temperature below 2 degrees Celsius (or about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, for my fellow Americans) by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, eventually getting the globe to net zero. Trump is vehemently against having the U.S. involved in it.
If this is all feeling a bit like déjà vu, that’s probably because this is the second time Trump has issued an executive order removing the U.S. from the Paris Agreement. On June 1, 2017, Trump — then in his first term as president — announced that the United States would cease involvement in the Paris Agreement. His reasoning, at the time, was that the agreement undermined the U.S. economy. Former President Joe Biden formally reversed this action during his term on Feb. 19, 2021, saying “We can no longer delay or do the bare minimum to address climate change. This is a global, existential crisis. And we’ll all suffer the consequences if we fail.”
But now that Trump is back in office, he has returned to his old rhetoric. “In recent years, the United States has purported to join international agreements and initiatives that do not reflect our country’s values or our contributions to the pursuit of economic and environmental objectives,” Trump wrote in his Jan. 21 executive order. “Moreover, these agreements steer American taxpayer dollars to countries that do not require, or merit, financial assistance in the interests of the American people.” With this second withdrawal, the United States joins three other countries — Iran, Libya, and Yemen — as the only countries in the world that are not party to the agreement.
Understandably, this is frightening for those who are already scared for the future of the environment. With the U.S. as a world superpower, some have expressed concern that the U.S. leaving the Paris Agreement could serve as encouragement for other countries to leave the accord as well, thus overall decreasing the collective efforts to work toward a more sustainable environmental future. However, it’s worth noting that no countries followed the United States’s lead by leaving the agreement the first time around, and as of Jan. 24, it doesn’t seem like they’re going to now, either.
Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, confirmed the European Union will remain in the Paris Agreement. “The Paris Agreement continues to be the best hope for all humanity,” she said in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Jan. 21. “So Europe will stay the course, and keep working with all nations that want to protect nature and stop global warming.”
According to The Guardian, reps for the United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, China, and the African Group of Negotiators have signaled plans to stay in the accord as well.
With Trump rapidly overhauling the country’s approach to climate change and energy — including his national energy energy declaration which will bring even more focus to fossil fuels and his signing of an executive order to eliminate a Biden-era policy incentivizing the shift to electric vehicles — knowing that the Paris Agreement is still on track to remain largely intact may bring only a small sense of relief for climate-concerned Americans. But it’s not nothing.