(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump has been clear that he plans to lead another US retreat from global climate diplomacy if he wins a second term in the White House, vowing to once again abandon the landmark Paris Agreement that he calls “horrendously unfair.”
Environmentalists, government officials and former diplomats are already bracing for the possibility and plotting ways to Trump-proof global cooperation on climate change. A series of conversations, crisis simulations and political wargaming have spanned the globe, described by people familiar with the sessions as galvanized by a desire to maximize climate progress — even with an adversarial US president.
“These discussions are an example of global leaders having learned a lesson from their first experience with Trump,” said Jake Schmidt, senior adviser to the NRDC Action Fund, an environmental group. “Other countries that are working hard on climate will not be burned again by an administration acting on behalf of fossil fuels interests.”
A US exodus — or even the post-election prospect of one — would trigger a wave of consequences, inevitably altering the nature of annual United Nations climate negotiations and rippling through the system in sometimes unpredictable ways. The departure of the world’s second-biggest greenhouse gas emitter could provide leverage and political cover for laggard countries to stall new climate action. At the same time, it could create an opening for China, the world’s top polluter, to step up and claim the mantle of climate leadership.
“It would put China even more at the center,” said David Waskow, director of the World Resources Institute’s International Climate Initiative. The US would be effectively “leaving other countries space to do more.”
With days until the global climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, worried stakeholders have been working to lock in new channels of climate diplomacy that link the US up with other institutions but don’t necessarily run through Washington, DC. Officials from Maryland and California have met with Chinese officials to discuss continued climate collaboration at the subnational level, allowing state and local governments to pick up any slack. Some state representatives were part of meetings in Beijing in September while the chief US climate negotiator, John Podesta, engaged in talks with his Chinese counterpart.
Officials also are preparing to use alternative groups to keep pursuing action, in a replay of the strategy deployed in 2017 when then-President Trump stopped hosting an established forum for leaders of major economies to discuss energy and climate. In response, countries kicked off a separate annual meeting that continues to this day.
Some climate negotiators have even conducted simulations to prepare for a potential Trump return and to game out strategies for how that would affect talks at the COP29 conference that begins six days after the US presidential election. Activists ran through a crisis communications simulation last week to ensure they were prepared for what an online notice called “the possible looming reality of a Trump election win and its impact on the COP29 climate talks.”
The preparations are meant to help avoid a repeat of the shock that hit negotiators in 2016, when news of Trump’s election victory reached ongoing UN climate talks in Morocco. Many participants were caught unprepared by Trump’s win, recalled one COP observer. No one wants to be in that situation again, the observer said, so some participants in the summit have been running through scenarios and getting ready in case history repeats itself.
During his first term, Trump promised to be beholden to Pittsburgh, not Paris. That’s how he explained his decision to begin extricating the US from the global climate accord adopted by nearly 200 nations. At the time, he stopped short of abandoning the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, a treaty that lays out a goal of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere and compels member countries to provide a yearly inventory of that planet-warming pollution.
But some conservatives are pushing exactly that idea if Trump wins election next week. The Project 2025 blueprint of policies developed by the Heritage Foundation and other groups specifically endorses the tactic, encouraging the next conservative administration to withdraw from both the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement, after arguing that “such routinely violated treaties weaken the US economy with no offsetting societal benefits.”
Advocates of that maximalist approach have also drafted language that could be tucked into an executive order to kick off the change, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named describing the work. While it’s common practice for lobbyists to ghostwrite policies in hopes of winning a White House embrace, Trump’s campaign has not committed to take the action and has disavowed Project 2025. Representatives of the campaign did not respond to requests for comment. Still, the drafts underscore the seriousness of the effort.
It’s relatively easy for a US president to walk away from the Paris Agreement, which has been considered an executive agreement that relies on existing US statutory authority, not a new treaty. US negotiators at the 2015 climate conference in Paris even worked to ensure the document referred to certain actions that “should” — not “shall” — be taken in order to ensure there’d be no need for a Senate vote to give advice and consent on the pact. The Paris Agreement “can be terminated unilaterally by the president with no constitutional questions being asked,” said David Wirth, a Boston College Law School professor and former State Department adviser.
In 2017, Trump kicked off the US exit process with a Rose Garden speech followed by a notification letter to the UN two years later. The official withdrawal took effect on Nov. 4, 2020, one day after the US presidential election won by President Joe Biden. It was a brief departure, since Biden notified the UN of the US return hours after his January inauguration. This time around, the waiting period between notification and exit would last just one year.
Conservatives argue another pullback is essential. “This thing is a huge weight around the US economy,” said Myron Ebell, chairman of the American Lands Council advocacy group and a longtime skeptic of the scientific consensus on humanity’s contribution to climate change. By participating, the US also gives credibility to an institution under which “most countries aren’t meeting their targets,” he said.
Withdrawing from the international order would effectively remove two of the biggest US climate obligations. No longer would the US be on the hook to produce “nationally determined contributions,” the plans of action by which Paris signatories commit to emission-reducing targets. The next round of NDCs, with targets for 2035, is due early next year. The US would also shed its current responsibility to drum up billions of dollars to help developing nations respond to climate change. That prospect could make it even harder for negotiators to reach agreement on a new climate finance pledge, the key task facing them at COP29.
But exiting the underlying UN framework convention might not be so simple. If a president were to take “the much more radical step of withdrawing from the UNFCCC, the second they did that, it would be litigated and it would go on for a couple of years,” said Yale Law School professor Harold Koh, a former legal adviser to the State Department. After all, the Constitution is silent on the issue: “It says the president shall make treaties, but it doesn’t say in any event who shall break treaties,” Koh said.
One reason a UNFCCC pullout has gained traction is the belief among Trump allies of its potentially long-lived consequences. For the US to become a party to the convention again, they argue that the Senate would have to give its advice and consent for ratification. And while the Senate did that unanimously in 1992, heated politics and the narrowly divided chamber suggest it would be far more difficult today. (On the other hand, other legal experts argue that a future president could simple re-accede to the accord without Senate approval.)
Another US exit would inevitably alter the shape of climate talks. But, veteran negotiators say, it wouldn’t end them. And the US could still participate as an observer — not a party — to the process. For instance, US government officials have been engaged in ongoing UN biodiversity negotiations in Colombia, even though the US hasn’t become a signatory to the underlying convention. Subnational leaders, from US lawmakers to governors and mayors, also could use observer roles to press action at annual climate negotiations.
Ultimately, the pace and scale of action would slow down, given “the role that the US plays in driving ambition,” predicted Jonathan Pershing, a veteran US climate negotiator who is now environment program director at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
But few — if any — countries would likely follow the US out the door, Pershing said. After Trump’s 2017 pronouncement, other nations didn’t follow suit, even though at the time the new Paris Agreement was in a much more precarious place.
“There was a campaign pushed by the Trump administration to say, ‘You ought to join us because this isn’t a working deal,’” Pershing said. “And the rest of the world said, ‘Actually, we’re good here, thank you so much.’”
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--With assistance from Natasha White, John Ainger and Jess Shankleman.
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