GGP: Trump dumps Paris: Now what?
The statements, opinions and data contained in the content published in Global Gas Perspectives are solely those of the individual authors and contributors and not of the publisher and the editor(s) of Natural Gas World.
This article was originally published by the Brookings Institution on June 1, 2017
The waiting is over: President Donald Trump is apparently pulling the United States out of the Paris Agreement on climate change.
The vibe at the recent G-7 summit and media speculation over Memorial Day did not bode well. Trump was sharply estranged from U.S. allies in Europe and privately told some insiders that he was planning to pull out of the United Nations climate change accord signed last November in Paris. On climate change, the G-7 declaration was really a G-6 plus G-1: part of paragraph 32 in the communique was dedicated to the U.S. position on climate change, which was at that point still evolving. This was a strong signal: if Trump was going to rededicate the country to the agreement, then he certainly would have done so while across the Atlantic, to soften some of the tensions on display during their meetings.
What the G-7 declaration might have said was that the U.S. position “will be undecided long enough for its leader to get back to his bunker and close the hatch.”
The move by the administration is not really a surprise. We heard from articles in Axios and other outlets that Trump was ready to pull the plug, and that Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt was mapping the escape route. But it was an instructive maneuver for those parsing every move of this enigmatic administration. This was an issue where the Pruitt-Bannon faction was able to beat back the efforts of the Ivanka-Jared-Gary Cohn contingent of the White House inner circle.
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The statements, opinions and data contained in the content published in Global Gas Perspectives are solely those of the individual authors and contributors and not of the publisher and the editor(s) of Natural Gas World.