Speaker 1: You know that line, We'll always have Paris. Yeah, maybe not.
Speaker 1: This week on Parts Pervilion, the president's decision to leave
Speaker 1: the Paris Climate Agreement. Hello and welcome to a special
Speaker 1: breaking news edition of Parts per Billion. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: David Schultz. This is Bloomberg bna's podcast where we discuss
Speaker 1: environmental policy issues with reporters, newsmakers, and experts. This week,
Speaker 1: we're doing something a little different and bringing you a
Speaker 1: podcast on a breaking news item that literally just happened
Speaker 1: a few moments ago. After much build up and hype,
Speaker 1: President Trump finally announced that he would withdraw the US
Speaker 1: from the Paris Climate change Agreement, but he also said
Speaker 1: he was open to re entering the agreement if its
Speaker 1: terms were changed. To figure out what all of this means,
Speaker 1: we called up Eric Lyman, a Bloomberg BNA correspondent in
Speaker 1: Rome who's been covering international climate issues for years, and
Speaker 1: we started off by asking Eric, so does this mean
Speaker 1: the agreement is basically no. Other countries have said that
Speaker 1: they want to continue with the goals that they agree
Speaker 1: to as part of the Paris Agreement, but there's a
Speaker 1: worry that it will throw a wrench into the plan
Speaker 1: the predecessor to the Paris Agreement with the Kyoto Protocol
Speaker 1: from nineteen eighty seven. The US fatasy stayed out of
Speaker 1: that and as a result, that Kyoto Protocol never had
Speaker 1: the sort of traction that it was expected to have,
Speaker 1: and the big worry is that the Paris Agreement may
Speaker 1: also suffer in that kind of a way. The US
Speaker 1: is the world's second largest the minder of greenhouse gases,
Speaker 1: behind China, the world's biggest economy, the world's biggest exporter,
Speaker 1: and so having the country on the sidelines is a
Speaker 1: big deal. But the process is much more robust than
Speaker 1: it was back in two thousand and one when the
Speaker 1: United States pulls out of the Kyoto Protocol, so there
Speaker 1: are also hopes that some meaningful work will be able
Speaker 1: to go forward even without the US participating. It's also
Speaker 1: worth noting that the US, even though Donald Trump said
Speaker 1: that he wanted to withdraw right away, it will be
Speaker 1: effective right away. The rules of it say that nobody
Speaker 1: can withdraw until three years after the agreement goes into effect,
Speaker 1: which was last November, and then once they indicate that
Speaker 1: the withdrawal is only effective a year later, so that
Speaker 1: basically would put the withdrawal of the United States formally
Speaker 1: right around the presidential elections in twenty twenty. So for
Speaker 1: the time being, the US is still involved. It may
Speaker 1: not be a proactive participant, but know, the treaty is
Speaker 1: not dead, but it's taken a blow, So there's still
Speaker 1: time I guess to reconsider this between now and I
Speaker 1: guess we're twenty nineteen. If Trump has changes his mind, yes,
Speaker 1: But the problem is is that, you know, the Obama
Speaker 1: administration had put in place a lot of mechanisms to
Speaker 1: try to rotchet down emissions and so on, and so
Speaker 1: even if the US has sort of sat on its
Speaker 1: hands for a year and then change his mind, it
Speaker 1: would be almost impossible for it to reach the goals
Speaker 1: that it had put in its Nationally Determined Contribution, which
Speaker 1: was its goal. The US said it was going to
Speaker 1: reduce submissions by twenty six to twenty eight percent between
Speaker 1: twenty and five and twenty twenty five. It is more
Speaker 1: or less on pace to do that right now, but
Speaker 1: it wouldn't take long for that to become out of reach.
Speaker 1: And how do you think other countries will respond to this?
Speaker 1: And particularly I'm thinking of China and the major EU
Speaker 1: countries Germany, France, the UK countries like that. Well, it's
Speaker 1: interesting you pick those specific examples, because tomorrow there's going
Speaker 1: to be a big announcement tomorrow Friday in Brussels about
Speaker 1: a EU China climate accord. These two blocks seem, at
Speaker 1: least at first, to be as determined as effort to
Speaker 1: move things forward, and there's a lot of talk that
Speaker 1: with the US on the sideline, even before this announcement,
Speaker 1: the idea that the US is going to play a
Speaker 1: protagonist role in this process were greatly diminished after the
Speaker 1: election of President Trout last year, and that the vacuum,
Speaker 1: the power vacuum, where the influence vacuum the process would
Speaker 1: be filled by China. China is being very aggressive and
Speaker 1: trying to generate more power from green and renewable energy sources.
Speaker 1: They're inspired in part by climate change and also just
Speaker 1: air quality issues. A lot of Chinese cities have almost
Speaker 1: unbearably bad air quality and they want to try to
Speaker 1: improve that and they're making great headways. So at least
Speaker 1: at first, it seems like these two blocks, along with
Speaker 1: India and Japan, the other major economies Canada for that matter,
Speaker 1: say they're going to stick with it. The problem is
Speaker 1: one of the one of the goals for trying to
Speaker 1: keep global temperature chain to less than two degrees celsius
Speaker 1: the centry compared to pre industrial levels was that it
Speaker 1: was going to require a lot of action before twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: That's when most terms of the parasraphema were going to
Speaker 1: come into effect. And now this is just throwing a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of uncertain team to that level into that area.
Speaker 1: And so it seems very likely that the pre twenty
Speaker 1: twenty ambition, which is the way it's referred to in
Speaker 1: the process, is not going to be nearly as strong
Speaker 1: as a lot of people would have hoped. Well, that's
Speaker 1: interesting you mentioned about the announcement in Brussels tomorrow. Is
Speaker 1: that is the timing on that coincidental or maybe not
Speaker 1: so coincidental. I haven't heard any official link about that.
Speaker 1: I know that the EU China cord was announced before
Speaker 1: President Trump said that he was going to speak today.
Speaker 1: Is that that decision to speak on June first just
Speaker 1: came out a few days ago when he was at
Speaker 1: the Group of Seventh summit here in Italy. The Brussels
Speaker 1: thing was on the agenda before that. But people knew
Speaker 1: that the US announcement was going to come out around
Speaker 1: the G seven, So the fact that they ended up
Speaker 1: being around the same spot in the calendar is probably intentional.
Speaker 1: The fact that one follows the other by day is
Speaker 1: probably a coincidence. Well, and then finally, I wanted to
Speaker 1: ask you kind of to take a step back and
Speaker 1: think about what impact this will have on the overall
Speaker 1: climate in general. You know, I think in his announcement,
Speaker 1: President Trump said that this actually really won't have an
Speaker 1: impact that the US was trying from the Paris Accords,
Speaker 1: will will not affect, you know, the progression of climate
Speaker 1: change in any way. What do you think about that? Well,
Speaker 1: from a scientific basis, if the only thing to change
Speaker 1: between two scenarios is one is everybody was doing it,
Speaker 1: and then the other one is everybody with the United
Speaker 1: States was doing it, the truth is the difference is
Speaker 1: probably fairly small. I don't think it's as small as
Speaker 1: what the President said, which was two tens of one
Speaker 1: degree by the end of the tree. I think that
Speaker 1: he was doing some liberal rounding off to come up
Speaker 1: with that figure. But his larger point is probably not
Speaker 1: that inaccurate. That the difference of the world including the US,
Speaker 1: and the world excluding the US, probably not a great difference.
Speaker 1: Is what is problematic is that it can have a
Speaker 1: ripple effect. And so, like I said, other countries will
Speaker 1: do less before twenty twenty because there's uncertainty. You know,
Speaker 1: people in corporation say the thing that they want most
Speaker 1: is to be able to predict what they're going to
Speaker 1: be required to do in two, five, ten, twenty years
Speaker 1: and so on. This makes a lot of that hard
Speaker 1: to do. And then there is a possibility that some
Speaker 1: companies in some countries may decide to try to backslide.
Speaker 1: Maybe not right away, but let's say that they see
Speaker 1: that their US competitors are not needing to follow these
Speaker 1: rules and as a result, they're making products cheaper or faster,
Speaker 1: they're shipping them easier. Thing like that. They might start
Speaker 1: to pressure their governments and doing something similar. And so
Speaker 1: if it happened in a vacuum, the changes are not
Speaker 1: that great. But as it's not happening in a vacuum,
Speaker 1: and so we don't know what the ripple sust you're
Speaker 1: going to be. It's impossible to forecast, but there's no
Speaker 1: doubt that a few years down the line, we'll look
Speaker 1: back and we'll see this as a turning point. That's
Speaker 1: international climate reporter Eric Lyman talking about the Paris Climate Agreement.
Speaker 1: For more of our reporting on climate change, visit our
Speaker 1: website at BNA dot com. This episode of Parts for
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