As POLITICO reported in June, some conservatives have also laid the groundwork for Trump to go even further if he chose to. One option would remove the United States from the 1992 U.N. treaty underpinning the entire framework for the annual global climate negotiations, a much more definitive step that could do lasting damage to the effort to limit the Earth’s warming.
Either way, a U.S. withdrawal could leave the country sidelined from international discussions about the expansion of clean energy, allowing China to continue out-competing America on solar panels, electric vehicles and other green technologies, said Jonathan Pershing, a special envoy for climate change during the Obama administration.
“China is the world’s largest trading partner for virtually every country in the world, so their ability to influence is not diminished,” he told reporters Thursday. “If anything, it is increased with U.S. withdrawal.”
He added: “I think we lose when the U.S. is out, and with the U.S. out, China will step up, but in a very different way.”
The U.S. was an architect of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which requires the 195 countries that signed it to submit national plans for cutting greenhouse gas emissions and provide updates about their progress toward hitting those marks. It also calls on wealthier nations to pay for climate projects, but there are no penalties for not adhering to the agreement.
In the nine years since it was established, climate pollution has continued to rise globally — though arguably at a slower rate than without it. Disasters have hit harder from Nepal to North Carolina, inflating the need for climate finance into the trillions of dollars each year.
