Trump's Dilemma: To Please His Friends by Trashing the Paris Climate Deal, or Not?

By Bill McKibben, Guardian UK

19 November 16

If the president-elect sabotages last year’s agreement, he will own every disaster – every hurricane a Hurricane Donald, every drought a moment for mockery

t seems likely that the Paris climate accords will offer one of the first real tests of just how nuts Donald Trump actually is. For a waiting world it’s a public exam, his chance to demonstrate either that he’s been blowing smoke or deeply inhaling.

Think, if you will, of the Paris agreement as a toy painstakingly assembled over 25 years by many of the world’s leading lights. It has now been handed, as a gift, to the new child-emperor, and everyone is waiting to see what he’ll do.

His buddies – the far-right, climate-denying, UN-hating renegades who formed his campaign brains trust – are egging him on to simply break it, to smash it on the floor for a good laugh. In fact, they’re doing their best to give him no way out. “President-elect Trump’s oft-repeated promises in the campaign are fairly black-and-white,” said Myron Ebell, head of his Environmental Protection Agency transition team, last week. (Ebell believes that the Paris deal is an attempt to “turn the world’s economy upside-down and consign poor people to perpetual poverty” – and that climate science is done by “third-rate, fourth-rate and fifth-rate scientists”.)

On the other side are the world’s business leaders, 365 of whom just signed a letter asking Trump to keep America engaged in the Paris process to provide “long-term direction”. These are not people who have spent their lives in obscure rightwing thinktanks. They run stuff – like DuPont, General Mills, Hewlett-Packard, Hilton, Kellogg, Levi Strauss, Nike and Unilever. And it’s hard to run stuff if the rules keep changing.

There’s also a gang of Americans who care what the rest of the world thinks. A group of former military leaders this week sent Trump’s transition team a briefing book arguing that climate change presents a “significant and direct risk to US military readiness, operations and strategy”. Ben Cardin, a Delaware senator and the top Democrat on the Senate foreign affairs committee, said withdrawing from the Paris deal would damage “our credibility on other issues”.

And then there’s the rest of the world. Other nations can’t be “weak” or “naive”, said France’s former (and perhaps future) president Nicolas Sarkozy. If Trump pulls the US out of Paris, Sarkozy proposes a carbon tariff on US goods. That won’t happen, but diplomats at the current climate talks in Marrakech have made it clear that leadership on the 21st century’s most important issue would pass from Washington to Beijing.

So Trump faces a dilemma. Does he please his most extreme friends? If so, he will own every climate disaster in the next four years: every hurricane that smashes into the Gulf of Mexico will be Hurricane Donald, every drought that bakes the heartland will be a moment to mock his foolishness. That’s how that works.

Or does he back down? It’s clear he won’t do anything to enforce the Paris accords anyway – to all intents and purposes Obama’s clean power plan expires at noon on 20 January, and Trump’s guys will give the green light to any pipeline anyone proposes. But if he doesn’t actually smash the global architecture of the Paris accords, he’ll win points from responsible people. That’s how that works.

It’s entirely possible he’ll decide to do neither, and send the Paris accords to the Senate for some kind of show vote, letting the entire Republican party take the heat for its climate-denying views. This would demonstrate weakness of a particularly childish sort – the coat-holding boy who goads everyone else into a fight and steps back to watch.

The irony here is that the Paris accords aren’t even very strong. They represent a lowest-common-denominator effort, one that will allow the world’s temperature to keep climbing dangerously. They were passed in no small part to allow the world’s leaders to strenuously pat themselves on the back for having done something. But at least the pact keeps the process moving – and there are mechanisms that might allow the world to ratchet up its efforts as the temperature climbs. It’s a tissue of compromise and gesture, a flimsy bulwark against the climbing mercury and rising sea. But wrecking it would be an act of political vandalism, one that would define Trump’s legacy before he has even taken office.

So we’ll see.