The United States and the Paris Agreement: historical facts from the negotiations to the

According to Dimitrov (2016) the Paris Agreement can be considered as a political success in terms of climate negotiations and state diplomacy. It has been lauded by all negotiators and its success derived from its ability after decades of debates, to convince countries with historically irreconcilable differences to create a new balanced product. The US defined the Paris Agreement as a ‘tremendous victory for the planet’ able to restore the international faith in the US, as an actor able to accomplish things in a multilateral way (UNFCCC, 2015a). However, it also entails weaknesses in terms of effectiveness (Dimitrov, 2016). Expectations from the international community were high and there was a great hope to produce an instrument with a different destiny from the Kyoto Protocol.

Putting the spotlights on the US, its central role in the negotiations of the Agreement is worth noting. The approach was very different from the past in which the US basically refused to join any agreement not containing equal obligations for developing countries (Kienast, 2015).

However, a little spot of unilateralism emerged, especially for the US hard work to avoid the impositions of absolute legally binding emission reduction targets and new financial commitments. This move was actually studied by the Obama administration in order to avoid consultations with the Congress: this means that the President seriously considered it as a real obstacle and acted in order to bypass it and to pave the way for the signature and ratification of

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the Agreement (Kienast, 2015). This move demonstrates a clear intention of the Obama administration. There was a serious intention of fulfilling and creating a green tool, no matter what the Congress was thinking.

As Urpelainen and Van de Graaf (2018) pointed out:

‘There has always been a strong undercurrent against progressive climate policies in the US. This is probably the reason why the Obama administration pushed so hard during the negotiations to design the Paris Agreement in a way that would allow it to bypass Senate ratification and simply ‘accept’ the accord through an Executive Order’ (p. 846).

Keeping in mind this important element, we need to start from the negotiation phase of the Agreement, which entails some curious elements. First of all, Dimitrov (2016) defined it as a non-easy situation for President Obama. Since the beginning the US delegation had a very small win-set of possible positive outcomes and it arrived at the negotiations with a highly divided national situation (actually again, similar to the Clinton administration). The US resulted to play a double strategy: on the one hand, publicly, it tried to be constructive avoiding oppositions. On the other hand, in private bilateral consultation it was well against legally binding mitigation and finance. Moreover, in the last minute, US negotiators asked to change a single word (they asked to use should rather than shall) in the official text. As Dimitrov (2016) reports, the final version ended up containing a modification in which ‘developed countries should rather than shall undertake economy-wide quantified emission reductions’ (p.3) (Kienast, 2015) (Durney, 2017). EU and G77 accepted it, fearing the same outcome as past agreements, and also recognizing the international weight of the US in the environmental field (Dimitrov, 2016). This change in the text implied less legally bindingness and was never publicly discussed (Dimitrov, 2016). Another example that saw negotiators divided was the decision of long-term goals: the EU opted for 80%-95% reduction of emissions by 2050. The US, instead, opposed quantification and opted for the general term ‘decarbonization this century’ avoiding in this way to set a precise deadline (Dimitrov, 2016). Moreover, 106 states asked to prevent a temperature rise of 1.5°C, while US proposed to have 2°C only in the preamble and not in the sections of the treaty (Dimitrov, 2016).

President Obama’s approach resulted to be unilateral, however, understanding his line of action, it is clearer why he acted in such a controversial way. The Obama administration’s attempt to keep a lower grade of goals can be explained by the fact that there was the intention to finally

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change the US historical non-green reputation demonstrating to the world the ability to achieve them.

An important aspect of the Obama administration is how it decided to consider the Agreement:

negotiations in Paris had to be crafted in order to avoid the need of the US Congress approval, even if this would have meant going against the explicit will of the legislative branch. Due to the difficulties encountered during the history and also with Article 2 of the US Constitution, for President Obama seemed clear to use the strategy of finding a new climate instrument: an executive agreement where the Senate ratification or consultation would result to be unnecessary in order to adopt the Agreement (Kienast, 2015). As previously noted, the Paris Agreement does not impose any mandatory financial commitment, nor budget requirements (and this is another important element because normally, fiscal policy and economic regulations can only be approved by the US Congress) (Kienast, 2015).

Therefore, the history repeated itself with technically no submission of the agreement to the Senate…but in this case, due to a different reason. This time President Obama demonstrated to have learnt the lesson from the Kyoto Protocol. (Of course, the purpose of this case study is not to judge or check on the legal correctness of the Obama administration’s action).

On September 3, 2016, the US ratified the Paris Agreement and its INDC (Intended Nationally Determined Contribution) became its NDC (Urpelainen & Van de Graaf, 2018).

Of course, this decision was not free of critics and Republican Senator Blunt defined President Obama as not respecting the interests of the American people and to be only able to defend his environmental policies (Durney, 2017). However, even if the ratification was achieved, a new obstacle was getting closer: the issue of non-compliance.

The Obama era came to an end and President Trump won the elections (tenure 2017-2021), the candidate who already during the 2016-presidential campaign, vowed to pull out from the Agreement once he was elected (Zhang et. al, 2017). Said and done. As soon as possible, the Trump administration withdrew from the Paris Agreement: it was June 1, 2017⁸. A déjà-vu

8 There are some important legal aspects that need to be considered. Article 28 of the Paris Agreement states that:

(1) ‘At any time after three years from the date on which this Agreement has entered into force for a Party, that Party may withdraw from this Agreement by giving written notification to the Depositary’.

(2) ‘Any such withdrawal shall take effect upon expiry of one year from the date of receipt by the Depositary of the notification of withdrawal, or on such later date as may be specified in the notification of withdrawal’ (Paris Agreement Art. 28, 2015).

Moreover, under the terms of the Paris Agreement (which mandates a three-year notice period) the US NDC

‘legally remains in place at least until the end of 2019, although the US intends to withdraw it at that time unless

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specter appeared: ‘The United States dominated the negotiations of the terms of the agreement, and it announced its withdrawal once the ink of the signatures was dry’ (Milkoreit, 2019:

p.1031). That move triggered several reactions and globally resounded the message that

‘without the US … the Paris deal was dead’ (Bomberg, 2017: p. 5).

As an important and technical detail, it has to be noted that President Trump’s decision of withdrawal had the chance to take place so easily because of the nature of the agreement. As previously pointed out the Paris Agreement was created as a Presidential Executive Order.

Therefore, the same facility which characterized its creation, also characterized its death.

The withdrawal from the Agreement can be considered as the environmental political action with most momentum for the Trump administration. President Trump gave the following explanations to his decision: (1) there is no certainty about the existence of CC; (2) the human causal link is not sure; (3) the Paris Agreement can threaten the US competitiveness (Milkoreit, 2019).

Among President Trump’s first actions for environmental policy there was the dismantlement of ex-President Obama’s policies (like the Clean Power Plan (CPP)), the removal of moratorium on coal leases and restrictions for pipelines construction, and cuts for funds addressed to science/weather agencies like EPA and NASA (Bomberg, 2017). The administration has also instructed government agencies to change their climate science methodology (Climate Action Tracker, 2019). Already in March 2017, President Trump rescinded the Obama Administration’s Climate Action Plan (which was actually never fully implemented) and was critical towards the US INDC (Climate Action Tracker, 2017).

The election of Republican majorities in both Houses of Congress put environmentalists and the international audience in a serious status of concern (Bomberg, 2017). Once at power, almost immediately, President Trump began creating a series of Executive Orders (especially

it has found suitable terms for reengagement, and the Trump Administration has already stopped implementation’

(Climate Action Tracker, 2018). As such, the US cannot begin its process of withdrawal before November 3, 2019 (the one-year notice period will start from that day) (Milkoreit, 2019).

November 3, 2020 was the earliest date the US could actually withdraw from the Paris Agreement (Purvis, 2017) (Milkoreit, 2019) (which was more or less the same time of the presidential elections and the arrival of President Biden).

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for environmental policy) in order to fulfill some of his promises made during the electoral campaign and to show an image of a decisive and efficient administration (Britannica, 2021).

3.3 US non-compliance with the Paris Agreement: analysis of independent variables