Trump’s Paris Withdrawal Is Grimmer This Time

The line of destructive executive action on climate was entirely predictable on President Trump’s Day 1: withdrawal from the Paris agreement, a threat to clean-energy subsidies, a promise to ban offshore wind and radically accelerate the energy permitting process (though that last one contains, potentially, some upside). It’s not yet clear how all this will net out — executive actions are memos in search of policy, and the slow decline of emissions has proved pretty stubborn lately. But it isn’t likely to be salutary, and the symbolism is undeniably grim.

Grimmest, perhaps, was the withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement — which, though it is a rerun of what he did in 2017, takes place in a very different global environment.

Eight years ago, when Trump made a show of exiting Paris while “Summertime” played in the White House Rose Garden, it helped kick off a remarkable period of worldwide solidaristic backlash — the global climate equivalent of the liberal “resistance.” We owe much of the climate progress of the last decade to that resistance — to climate protesters, sympathetic prime ministers and presidents and legislators, entrepreneurs and banks and asset managers who understood the urgency of action clearly enough to see it as a financial opportunity, too.

It is early, but there are not obvious signs of anything like that on the horizon now — no large-scale protest movements adding adherents and gaining steam, few major global leaders treating the climate crisis in existential terms or pushing policy that would make decarbonization a core goal of economic development, and a rapidly dwindling number of corporate leaders even paying lip service to climate urgency.

Instead, though money continues to flow into green energy, the global mood seems, as it does domestically, exhausted, distracted and capitulant. Only four countries in the world are now not party to the Paris agreement: Iran, Libya, Yemen and the United States. This is ugly company, but it no longer feels so exceptional that the United States has abandoned the principle of climate cooperation; other countries have taken advantage of the voluntary, enforcement-free framework to simply drag their feet. The question is whether emissions trends will continue in the absence of the old cultural and political momentum.