In the beginning of June Donald Trump announced that the U.S would end its participation in the 2015 Paris Agreement. His reason was that the accord would weaken the US economy and not adhere to his America First policy. In my opinion this is a flowery way of saying the economics aren’t in it for them to care about the environment and that they want to exploit resources as much as possible to generate as much money as possible.

  Recent technologies have made it in fact more feasible to choose sustainable options then non sustainable ones in many industries, as well as create new jobs, yet the current administration is trying to gut every regulation possible that would prevent such progress.

The UNFCC site explains in detail what the Paris Agreement is:

“The Paris Agreement requires all Parties to put forward their best efforts through “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs) and to strengthen these efforts in the years ahead. This includes requirements that all Parties report regularly on their emissions and on their implementation efforts. There will also be a global stocktake every 5 years to assess the collective progress towards achieving the purpose of the agreement and to inform further individual actions by Parties.”

For this agreement to work, a program was launched to develop modals, procedures and guidelines on many issues including: Long term temperature goals, climate neutrality goals, mitigation and market/non-market approaches to name a few. With the United States being the leading economy, (for now) how will real change take place if the US is not on board, especially in terms of imports and exports? Our noncompliance would affect others compliance by working with us or purchasing our goods.

            It is quite ironic that President Donald Trump believes that the Paris Agreement does not coincide with his America First policy as it is obvious this makes us America, last. As the leading power in the world, noncompliance would drag others down with us, if not at the least have a huge negative impact, globally on any progress made. The idea of nationalism is so dangerous because it makes people believe we have any choice in the matter, that we are on our own planet, when in truth we are all one race on one earth. What happens in one small city across the globe can eventually affect everyone. We see clear evidence of this with the recent pandemic. Environmental efforts as well as catastrophes affect us all in one way or another. Efforts in sustainability should be as urgent as efforts on containing global disease, yet we see America is not first on that either.

            So much is at stake this November. We will be voting for so many issues, but one major issue will be our actions on saving the planet. Many would argue, without sustaining our world, there won’t be any other issues to fight for. There are even environmental links to the rise in pandemics. We will not fight this issue in solitude, within one nation, but we will need to join in globally, with fellow nations to combat climate change.

#climatechange #parisagreement