Why the Paris Agreement Failed
“After realizing why the Paris Agreement failed, a climate hawk promise to simply try for a third time to participate in the Paris Agreement without any new gains for the United States would be folly.”
There’s an old saying in foreign policy that “politics stops at the water’s edge.” Regardless of one’s political party, the quest for a more secure and prosperous United States relative to our foreign rivals should be a unifying concept. The nation’s leaders are expected to look out for American interests, not foreign ones. But what happens when a president carries politics beyond the water’s edge and uses an international agreement to circumvent the constraints on his own authority?
The answer is a failed international agreement, and this is what happened with the Paris Agreement (PA). The Obama and Biden administrations were so focused on how they could use the PA to foist their own agendas on the American public that they turned what should have been our most significant global climate agreement into a damp squib.
Predecessor to the Paris Agreement’s Failure: Kyoto
The Holy Grail for global climate policy is a binding international agreement that compels all parties to equitably reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and finally overcome the prisoner’s dilemma of climate change. The first such attempt, the Kyoto Protocol of the 1990s, failed because it sought to divide the world between rich and poor countries, with all climate obligations falling upon the former category. The problem was that major emitters, and the United States’ foreign power rivals, like China, were exempted from any commitment, and as such, the United States wisely refused to undertake burdens that would not be reciprocated.
Paris Agreement’s Failure #1: Overcoming the Spoiler Problem
The PA was the second major attempt, and it sought to succeed where the Kyoto Protocol failed by adopting a voluntary approach. Instead of the international community selectively forcing climate obligations, each country would volunteer its own contributions. The PA’s real potential was to overcome the “spoiler problem” of negotiations, where unsatisfied parties can sink deals that they find unfavorable.
Under the PA approach, if the United States wanted to engage in a bilateral climate agreement with China or another major emitter, it could do so by mutually agreeing to alter its voluntary contributions and utilize the PA as a verifying mechanism. There would have been no opportunity for unsatisfied third parties to object to such deal-making. The PA could have enabled exactly the sort of negotiation tactics that President Trump is so fond of.
Paris Agreement’s Failure #2: Circumventing Congress
Instead, the Obama administration saw an opportunity in the PA to circumvent Congress’ traditional role in foreign policy. Obama reasoned that the then-Republican-controlled Senate would not ratify the PA—which is certainly true, since they had been iced out of the negotiation process—but if the PA’s commitments were merely voluntary and did not require changes to the law, the president could adopt it on his own authority as a nonbinding treaty.
Obama’s sleight of hand in negotiating the PA to circumvent Congress was further worsened by the fact that many regulatory luminaries reasoned that despite the agreement’s lack of ratification as domestic law by the Senate, the president could still regulate as if it was domestic law under a little-known section of the Clean Air Act that permits regulation to enforce treaties.
In other words, the Obama administration didn’t want a global climate agreement that compelled other countries to abate greenhouse gas emissions. Rather, what it wanted was a legal pathway to expand domestic climate regulation.
While that claim may seem speculative, it is bolstered by an analysis of what Obama promised under the PA, which was a far larger commitment than other nations when measured against projected future emissions. Other major emitters committed little, and the world’s largest emitter, China, merely promised to peak emissions by 2030. In other words, China’s commitment was to increase emissions.
The Obama administration did not seem to use the PA to secure climate concessions from foreign emitters, and unsurprisingly, a deal that put most of the burdens on the United States was quickly abandoned during Trump’s first term.
As expected, the Biden administration quickly reentered the PA, but it again refused to utilize it to secure any emission abatement concessions from other countries. In fact, an analysis of the updated pledges under the PA during the Biden administration found that 71 percent of the additional global emission abatement would come from the United States alone. This perhaps helps explain why Biden finalized a whopping $1.9 trillion worth of regulations in only four short years (nearly four times what President Obama did in any single term). And, to the surprise of nobody, Trump has once again immediately withdrawn from the PA and adopted a deregulatory agenda.
Conclusion
While climate hawks are quick to cast blame at Trump for his actions, a sober look at history shows that the blame should lie at the feet of those who viewed the PA as an opportunity to push a partisan agenda, rather than advance U.S. interests. Republicans have always been amenable to the concept of burden sharing in international agreements and likely would have been open to ratifying an agreement that would have strengthened the United States’ global position, even if it entailed some measure of climate commitment. But the Obama administration’s refusal to engage in such negotiations, and Biden’s subsequent repetition of that refusal, has transformed the PA into a milquetoast aspiration that now mainly serves as a symbol of climate inaction rather than progress.
A lesson for any future administration that seeks to pursue an international agreement on climate change is that a path to durability cannot be one that is predicated on a top-down authoritarian imposition of burdens on the U.S. public while other major emitters commit to nothing. As American voters can and do reject such an elitist approach to policy-making, the PA was essentially doomed from the start.
Climate hawks should not mourn Trump’s withdrawal from the PA. Rather, their efforts should be focused on asking what it would take for China and other major emitters to get President Trump to be willing to rejoin the PA, and how to craft a deal that is acceptable to the U.S. public. By contrast, a climate hawk promise to simply try for a third time to participate in the Paris Agreement without any new gains for the United States would be folly.
Philip Rossetti is a resident senior fellow at the R Street Institute, where he focuses on energy, climate, and environmental policy.
Image: NicoElNino/ Shutterstock.com.