Obama and his predecessors are equally to blame for Trump’s Paris pullout

US President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate deal has met with predictable angst and disappointment from across the world. Several political leaders from both outside and inside America have denounced it. The general sentiment was best summarised by a German tabloid, whose headline read: “Earth to Trump: Fuck You!”

Trump’s decision is without doubt a disaster for everyone, including the country he leads. In a single day we’ve leaped closer to the horrors of unpredictable storms and droughts, and the unsightly drowning of all our sea-side cities and villages.

But when historians look back at this moment, will they also utter the German tabloid’s words? The truth is that they are not going to blame just Trump, because he has – at least in this case – acted not as an outsider but carried forward a two-decade legacy of progressively weakening climate actions, including under President Barack Obama.

The purpose of deals, such as the one Trump has pulled out of, was to solve the problem of global warming. The industrial revolution brought in prosperity to some nations by providing 24-hour supply of energy from fossil fuels, unlike from agriculture and water- and wind-driven mills that relied on natural cycles. The greenhouse gases emitted by these fossil fuels remained in the air, and heated up the earth. It is now our effort to cut down these emissions.

The implied compromise with prosperity meant that each country couldn’t bear the same burden. Those which historically emitted the most greenhouse gases – and hence more responsible for the problem but also more prosperous – were to take the bigger burden. This is the most accepted principle of equity.

The United States fell squarely in this category: the world’s largest historic emitter, which reaped major economic benefits.

But over the years, it has failed to provide the leadership, or responsibility, that measured up to its role in creating the problem. In fact, Trump’s pullout brings a sense of deja vu from 1997 when Kyoto Protocol was the world’s first climate deal, and was signed. It came about just five years after global efforts to make such deals had just begun with the signing of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The protocol finalised at Kyoto was firmly based on the idea of equity. It formally named all industrialised countries that needed to take a bigger role, and allocated their shares of cut-downs.

Much like Trump, the American administration under President Bill Clinton famously refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol (and with Australia was the only other country in the world to do so).

In the two decades of climate negotiations since – which took place every year under the UNFCCC banner – the idea of equity has steadily deteriorated, and the Americans have worked more towards breaking than building consensus.

In 2009, at the annual meet in Copenhagen, countries were tantalisingly close to signing a binding climate deal on the lines of the Kyoto Protocol. It failed at the last moment after the final document was modified in closed-door meetings hosted by the US delegates. The summit ended with a last-minute watered-down deal that President Obama negotiated with leaders from China, India and other BRICS nations. Later, Edward Snowden’s revelations showed that the US was spying on officials of other countries at the summit.

The end of the equity principle came in 2013 at the summit in Warsaw, Poland, where it was decided to replace the principles imbibed in the Kyoto accord with a system where countries would decide their emission cuts for themselves. These promises, called Intended Nationally Determined Contributions or INDCs, would then form the basis for the Paris Agreement.

Again, the United States played the role of a spoilsport. Far from giving an ambitious plan to cut down emissions, its promises were among the weakest.

The US INDC – which included Obama’s Clean Power Plan – promised to cut emissions such that in 2025 they would be 26-28% lower than in 2005.

As the Centre for Science and Environment concluded after crunching these numbers, this actually entailed a 20% rise in the use of fossil fuels by 2030. The US INDC was “neither ambitious nor equitable,” CSE chief Sunita Narain said in a statement in 2015. “Our analysis shows that the key economic sectors of the US economy – energy, transport, industry etc – are operating and would continue to operate till 2030 in a business-as-usual way, even as the rest of the world gears up to fight climate change.”

Even when the Paris deal was finalised, and the the moment came to signing on the agreement text, the US administration bickered at the last moment over the use of “shall” in the obligations of developed countries. Legally, this made it binding on them to follow their promises. while “should” merely urges them to do so.

As Gurdial Singh Nijar, a spokesperson for Malaysia at the Paris summit recounted, the United States practically bullied France and EU nations into saying that “shall” was a typing error for “should”, which is a legally weaker term implying only an intention. “We said that we have done so many things to get the US on board and they were diluting everything,” Nijar said of the change in word, which was eventually termed as a “technical correction”.

The agreement also excluded any reference to payments from industrialised countries to poorer ones to better cope with climate change and invest in technologies. The only route for this is a Green Climate Fund, a $100 billion donation box with some pledged donations. (The US’s paltry $3 billion promised contribution would now be pulled out.)

As climate change journalist Naomi Klein recently wrote, the Paris Agreement that Trump has dramatically withdrawn from was always a deal weakened by decades of lobbying by the US, even as its leaders, including Obama, kept up the image of finding a solution.

In this tragedy Donald Trump, whose 2012 tweet that climate change is “a concept… created by and for the Chinese” is still available, but whose existence he denies, is perhaps a mere jester.

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