Trump, US climate politics, and the evolving pattern of global climate governance

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that the Trump administration’s position on climate change should be understood more in terms of continuity than disjuncture. It develops this argument in four principal ways. First, it situates Trump in the US’s paradoxical relationship to the UNFCCC, as a would-be leader that struggles to commit itself to substantive action, and the evolving geopolitics within the UNFCCC. Second, the paper focuses on an on-going struggle between pro-fossil fuel interests and a ‘decarbonising’ bloc, interpreting Trump (like George W. Bush) as a pro-fossil fuel backlash. Third, it explores the pattern of climate politics within the US, where stalemate in Congress has been often offset by action at the state, city, and corporate levels. Fourth, it should be understood in relation to the emergence of a ‘global climate governance complex’, where the UNFCCC has to be understood in relation to multilevel and transnational governance initiatives on climate change.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• Trump
• US politics
• UNFCCC
• political economy

Acknowledgements

This paper arose out of a panel organised at the International Studies Association annual conference in 2018. We are grateful to David Dunn for organising that panel, and for comments from other panellists and the audience there. We are also grateful to the constructive and thoughtful comments by the anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Robert MacNeil is Lecturer in Politics at the University of Sydney. His research focuses broadly on the intersection of environmental politics and neoliberalism.

Matthew Paterson is Professor of International Politics at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on the political economy, cultural politics, and global governance of climate change.

Notes

1 Frank Jotzo, Joanna Depledge, and Harald Winkler, ‘US and International Climate Policy under President Trump’, Climate Policy 18, no. 7 (2018): 813–17; Jonathan Pickering et al., ‘The Impact of the US Retreat from the Paris Agreement: Kyoto Revisited?’, Climate Policy 18, no. 7 (2018): 818–27; Rebecca Leber, ‘Even if Trump Doesn’t “Cancel” the Paris Deal, He Could Still Ruin It’, Grist.org, June 2017, https://grist.org/article/even-if-trump-doesnt-cancel-the-paris-deal-he-could-still-ruin-it/.

2 Detlef F. Sprinz et al., ‘The Effectiveness of Climate Clubs under Donald Trump’, Climate Policy 18, no. 7 (2018): 828–38; Joe Romm, ‘Domino Effect: Turkey Won’t Ratify Paris Climate Accord, Citing Trump’s Exit’, Think Progress, June 2017, https://thinkprogress.org/turkey-follows-trump-paris-climate-accord-39fb0d573164/.

3 Johannes Urpelainen and Thijs Van de Graaf, ‘United States Non-cooperation and the Paris Agreement’, Climate Policy 18, no. 7 (2018): 839–51.

4 Luke Kemp, ‘Better Out than In’, Nature Climate Change 7 (2017): 458–60; Urpelainen and Van de Graaf, ‘United States Non-cooperation’.

5 Jan Selby, ‘The Trump Presidency, Climate Change, and the Prospect of a Disorderly Energy Transition’, Review of International Studies 45, no. 3 (2018): 471–90; Brad Plumer, ‘Trump will Officially Start Hacking Away at Obama’s Climate Policies on Tuesday’, Vox.org, June 2017, https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/3/27/15073522/trump-order-obama-climate-policies.

6 Natasha Geiling, ‘What Happens Now that Trump Pulled the US Out of the Paris Agreement?’ Grist.org, June 2017, https://thinkprogress.org/wont-always-have-paris-agreement-sad-1d718470b3de/.

7 Matthew Paterson, ‘Post-hegemonic Climate Politics?’ British Journal of Politics and International Relations 11 (2009): 140–58; see also Charles F. Parker and Christer Karlsson, ‘The UN Climate Change Negotiations and the Role of the United States: Assessing American Leadership from Copenhagen to Paris’, Environmental Politics 27, no. 3 (2018): 519–40.

8 Matthew Paterson, Global Warming and Global Politics (London: Routledge, 1996).

9 Michael Grubb, Duncan Brack, and Christiaan Vrolijk, The Kyoto Protocol: A Guide and Assessment (London: Earthscan, 1999); Alexander Ovodenko and Robert O. Keohane, ‘Institutional Diffusion in International Environmental Affairs’, International Affairs 88, no. 3 (2012): 523–41; but cf. Matthew Paterson et al., ‘The Micro Foundations of Policy Diffusion Toward Complex Global Governance An Analysis of the Transnational Carbon Emission Trading Network’, Comparative Political Studies 47, no. 3 (2014): 420–49.

10 For various interpretations of the Copenhagen COP see Joanna Depledge, ‘Crafting the Copenhagen Consensus: Some Reflections’, Review of European Community & International Environmental Law 17, no. 2 (2008): 154–65; Daniel Bodansky, ‘The Copenhagen Climate Change Conference: A Post-mortem’, The American Journal of International Law 104, no. 2 (2010): 230–40; Lavanya Rajamani, ‘The Making and Unmaking of the Copenhagen Accord’, International and Comparative Law Quarterly 59, no. 3 (2010): 824–43; Peter Christoff, ‘Cold Climate in Copenhagen: China and the United States at COP15’, Environmental Politics 19, no. 4 (2010): 637–56.

11 Parker and Karlsson, ‘The UN Climate Change Negotiations and the Role of the United States’.

12 As quoted in Alexander Ochs and Detlef Sprinz, ‘Europa Riding the Hegemon? Transatlantic Climate Policy Relations’, in Hegemony Constraint: Evasion, Modification, and Resistance to American Foreign Policy, eds. Davis B. Bobrow and William Keller (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), 151.

13 Jon Hovi, Tora Skodvin, and Steinar Andresen, ‘The Persistence of the Kyoto Protocol: Why Other Annex I Countries Move on Without the United States’, Global Environmental Politics 3, no. 4 (2003): 1–23; Miranda A. Schreurs and Yves Tiberghien, ‘Multi-level Reinforcement: Explaining European Union Leadership in Climate Change Mitigation’, Global Environmental Politics 7, no. 4 (2007): 19–46; Sebastian Oberthür and Claire Roche Kelly, ‘EU Leadership in International Climate Policy: Achievements and Challenges’, The International Spectator 43, no. 3 (2008): 35–50.

14 Pickering et al., ‘The Impact of the US Retreat from the Paris Agreement’; Jotzo, Depledge, and Winkler, ‘US and International Climate Policy’.

15 Urpelainen and Van de Graaf, ‘United States Non-cooperation’.

16 Kemp, ‘Better Out than In’; Urpelainen and Van de Graaf, ‘United States Non-cooperation’.

17 Selby, ‘The Trump Presidency’.

18 See also Michele M. Betsill, ‘Trump’s Paris Withdrawal and the Reconfiguration of Global Climate Change Governance’, Chinese Journal of Population Resources and Environment 15, no. 3 (2017): 189–91.

19 David Victor, ‘What a Trump Win Means for the Global Climate Fight’, Yale E360, November 2016, https://e360.yale.edu/features/what_donald_trump_win_means_for_global_climate_fight. See also Wanyun Shao, ‘Trump’s Decision to Withdraw from the Paris Accord Cedes Global Leadership to China’, The Conversation, June 2, 2017; Henrik Selin, ‘Trump’s Exit of Paris Climate Accord Strengthens China and Europe’, The Conversation, June 5, 2017; Zeeshan Aleem, ‘Trump Pulling Out of the Paris Climate Agreement is Great News … for China’, Vox, June 3, 2017; Kemp, ‘Better Out than In’.

20 A case can be made that this shift is broader than just the rise of China, but more of a BRICS or BASIC phenomenon. There has been a significant literature on this since the late 2000s. But we would make the case for the distinctiveness of China in this context. At both Copenhagen and Paris, US-China bilateral coordination was central to the process leading up to the conferences, and arguably central to the success at Paris (alongside various other factors). Only China has global emissions levels combined with the sort of geopolitical clout which means the US takes it seriously as a rival, which is what makes it central to how US strategy on climate has played out. See variously. Navroz K. Dubash et al., ‘India and Climate Change: Evolving Ideas and Increasing Policy Engagement’, Annual Review of Environment and Resources 43, no. 1 (2018): 395–424; Andrew Hurrell and Sandeep Sengupta, ‘Emerging Powers, North–South Relations and Global Climate Politics’, International Affairs 88, no. 3 (2012): 463–84; Karl Hallding et al., ‘Rising Powers: The Evolving Role of BASIC Countries’, Climate Policy 13, no. 5 (2013): 608–31; Hayley Stevenson, ‘India and International Norms of Climate Governance: A Constructivist Analysis of Normative Congruence Building’, Review of International Studies 37, no. 3 (2011): 997–1019.

21 Sikina Jinnah, ‘Makers, Takers, Shakers, Shapers: Emerging Economies and Normative Engagement in Climate Governance’, Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations 23, no. 2 (2017): 285–306.

22 Joanna I. Lewis, ‘The Evolving Role of Carbon Finance in Promoting Renewable Energy Development in China’, Energy Policy 38, no. 6 (2010): 2875–86.

23 See the CDM pipeline at: http://www.cdmpipeline.org/cdm-projects- region.htm.

24 Jim Watson et al., ‘Lessons from China: Building Technological Capabilities for Low Carbon Technology Transfer and Development’, Climatic Change 131, no. 3 (2015): 387–99.

25 See notably John Mathews, Greening of Capitalism: How Asia Is Driving the Next Great Transformation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014); Watson et al., ‘Lessons from China’.

26 Erick Lachapelle, Robert MacNeil, and Matthew Paterson, ‘The Political Economy of Decarbonisation: From Green Energy “Race” to Green “Division of Labour”’, New Political Economy 22, no. 3 (2017): 317; Jonas Meckling and Llewelyn Hughes, ‘Globalizing Solar: Global Supply Chains and Trade Preferences’, International Studies Quarterly 61, no. 2 (2017): 225–35.

27 See Qiang Wang and Rongrong Li, ‘Decline in China’s Coal Consumption: An Evidence of Peak Coal or a Temporary Blip?’ Energy Policy 108 (2017): 696–701. Official Chinese figures are however notoriously unreliable.

28 IEA, Coal 2018. Analysis and Forecasts to 2023 (Paris: International Energy Agency, 2018).

29 Lachapelle, MacNeil, and Paterson, ‘The Political Economy of Decarbonisation’, 314.

30 Flynt Leverett and Wu Bingbing, ‘The New Silk Road and China’s Evolving Grand Strategy’, The China Journal 77 (2017): 110–32.

31 Chris G. Pope, ‘China Wants to Dominate the World’s Green Energy Markets – Here’s Why’, The Conversation, January 12, 2018; Liang Dong, ‘Bound to Lead? Rethinking China’s Role after Paris in UNFCCC Negotiations’, Chinese Journal of Population Resources and Environment 15, no. 1 (2017): 32–8; Urpelainen and Van de Graaf, ‘United States Non-cooperation’.

32 Jocelyn Timperley, ‘COP23: Key Outcomes Agreed at the UN Climate Talks in Bonn’, Carbon Brief, November 19, 2017.

33 Karl Mathiesen, ‘This is China’s Strongest Statement Yet on Climate Action’, Climate Home News, March 30, 2017.

34 As quoted in Daniel Boffey and Arthur Neslen, ‘China and EU Strengthen Promise to Paris Deal with US Poised to Step Away’, The Guardian, June 1, 2017. See also Aleem, ‘Trump Pulling Out’; David Stanway and Henning Gloystein, ‘No Longer “Climate Bad Boy,” China Steps Up as Trump Quits Paris Deal’, Reuters, June 2, 2017.

35 Keith Bradsher and Lisa Friedman, ‘China Unveils an Ambitious Plan to Curb Climate Change Emissions’, The New York Times, December 19, 2017.

36 Julia Conley, ‘“Morally Unacceptable”: Final Deal Out of COP24 Sorely Lacking in Urgency and Action, Climate Campaigners Say’, Common Dreams, December 15, 2018, https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/12/15/morally-unacceptable-final-deal-out-cop24-sorely-lacking-urgency-and-action-climate.

37 Lily Hartzell, ‘A Shift in Climate Strategy: China at the COP24’, China-US Focus, January 25, 2019, https://www.chinausfocus.com/energy-environment/a-shift-in-climate-strategy-china-at-the-cop-24.

38 In this context, Trump suggested that he has officially ended the ‘war on coal’, and pointed to a slight uptick in the number of US coal-mining jobs in his first year. This uptick, however, was not a result of federal policy changes, but rather an anomalous increase in metallurgical coal exports to Asia, which were the result of a cyclone that knocked out production in Northeastern Australia, thereby creating space for US exports.

39 Energy Information Administration, Annual Energy Outlook 2018, https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/.

40 Idem. For more on this, particularly its international dimensions, see Tim Boersma and Corey Johnson, U.S. Energy Diplomacy (New York: Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy 2018).

41 Energy Information Administration, Annual Energy Outlook 2018, figure 1.

42 Trump’s only plausible pitch to save the coal industry was a 2017 proposal to use federal money to prop up US power plants capable of storing a 90-day fuel supply on site (something which coal and nuclear facilities can do, but which renewables and natural gas cannot, at the moment). However, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission – stacked with Trump’s own appointees – unanimously rejected the proposal, leaving the coal industry with no remaining lifelines.

43 Christopher S. Galik, Joseph F. DeCarolis, and Harrison Fell, ‘Evaluating the US Mid-Century Strategy for Deep Decarbonization Amidst Early Century Uncertainty’, Climate Policy 17, no. 8 (2017): 1046–56.

44 Selby, ‘The Trump Presidency’.

45 Christophe McGlade and Paul Ekins, ‘The Geographical Distribution of Fossil Fuels Unused When Limiting Global Warming to 2°C’, Nature 517 (2015): 187–90; Christophe McGlade and Paul Ekins, ‘Un-burnable Oil: An Examination of Oil Resource Utilisation in a Decarbonised Energy System’, Energy Policy 64 (2014): 102–12. Nevertheless, some remain confident that natural gas can play a key role in decarbonising the US energy grid, as long as carbon capture and storage technologies decline in price sufficiently over the coming decades. See Department of Energy, Carbon Capture Opportunities for Natural Gas Fired Power Systems (US Department of Energy, 2019), https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2017/01/f34/Carbon%20Capture%20Opportunities%20for%20Natural%20Gas%20Fired%20Power%20Systems_0.pdf; R.S. Elias, M.I.M. Wahab, and L. Fang, ‘Retrofitting Carbon Capture and Storage to Natural Gas-fired Power Plants: A Real-options Approach’, Journal of Cleaner Production 192 (2018): 722–34.

46 Selby, ‘The Trump Presidency’.

47 Utility Dive, 2017 State of the Electric Utility Survey Report (2018), https://www.utilitydive.com/library/2017-state-of-the-electric-utility-survey-report/.

48 Christopher McGrory Klyza and David J. Sousa, American Environmental Policy: Beyond Gridlock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013); Robert MacNeil, ‘Alternative Climate Policy Pathways in the US’, Climate Policy 13, no. 2 (2013): 259–76.

49 Elizabeth Bomberg, ‘Environmental Politics in the Trump Era: An Early Assessment’, Environmental Politics 26, no. 5 (2017): 956–63.

50 Barry Rabe, Greenhouse Governance: Addressing Climate Change in America (Washington: Brookings Institution, 2010). Under the US federal system, state governments may regulate any industrial activities within their borders, as long as it does not interfere with interstate commerce. In this context, they can impose any number of regulatory initiatives, including taxing carbon emissions, requiring utilities to use more renewable energy, strengthening building codes, creating tougher efficiency standards for appliances and automobiles, or implementing tougher agriculture policies, among many other options.

51 Bloomberg New Energy Finance, 2018 Sustainable Energy in America Factbook, https://about.bnef.com/clean-energy-investment/. It is important to note that the US’ Paris pledge of 26% below 2005 levels by 2025 is widely considered to be insufficient to avoid runaway climate change. According to Climate Action Tracker, if all countries took on pledges similar to the US, projected warming would greatly surpass the Paris agreement’s safety threshold of 1.5°C, and would likely reach closer to 3°C. See Climate Action Tracker, Country Summary: United States (2019), https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/usa/.

52 Ten other states, which have chosen not to formally join the USCA, have reaffirmed their intention to keep emissions targets in line with the US’ Paris pledge.

53 We Are Still In, ‘We Are Still In’ Declaration (n.d.), https://www.wearestillin.com/we-are-still-declaration.

54 Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, State Climate Policy (2018), https://www.c2es.org/content/state-climate-policy/; Vicki Arroyo, ‘The Global Climate Action Summit: Increasing Ambition during Turbulent Times’, Climate Policy 18, no. 9 (2018): 1087–93.

55 Energy Information Administration, Annual Energy Outlook 2018.

56 EPA, US Greenhouse Gas Emissions Sources (Washington, DC: US Environmental Protection Agency, 2018), https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions.

57 Harriet Bulkeley, ‘Cities and Subnational Governments’, in The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society, eds. David Schlosberg and Richard Norgaard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 464–78; Robert MacNeil, ‘Death and Environmental Taxes: Why Market Environmentalism Fails in Liberal Market Economies’, Global Environmental Politics 16, no. 1: 21–37.

58 Rhodium Group, Taking Stock 2017: Adjusting Expectations for US GHG Emissions (2017), http://rhg.com/reports/taking-stock-2017-adjusting-expectations-for-us-ghg-emissions.

59 See, respectively, Robert O. Keohane and David G. Victor, ‘The Regime Complex for Climate Change’, Perspectives on Politics 9, no. 1 (2011): 7–23; Michele Betsill et al., , ‘Building Productive Links between the UNFCCC and the Broader Global Climate Governance Landscape’, Global Environmental Politics 15, no. 2 (2015): 1–10; Harriet Bulkeley et al., Transnational Climate Change Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

60 Matthew Hoffmann, Climate Governance at the Crossroads: Experimenting with a Global Response after Kyoto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

61 Jessica F. Green, ‘Order out of Chaos: Public and Private Rules for Managing Carbon’, Global Environmental Politics 13, no. 2 (2013): 1–25.

62 Thomas Hale and Charles Roger, ‘Orchestration and Transnational Climate Governance’, Review of International Organizations 9, no. 1 (2014): 59–82.

63 UNFCCC, ‘Global Climate Action’, (n.d.), http://climateaction.unfccc.int/.

64 UNFCCC, ‘California and China Sign Agreement on Climate and Cleantech’, (n.d.), https://unfccc.int/news/california-and-china-sign-agreement-on-climate-and-cleantech.

65 Bulkeley et al., Transnational Climate Change Governance.

66 Jennifer Hadden, Networks in Contention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Harriet Bulkeley et al., ‘Transnational Climate Change Governance: Charting New Directions Post-Paris’, in Governing Climate Change: Polycentricity in Action?, eds. Andrew Jordan et al., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 63–80.

67 David Roberts, ‘There’s Now an Official Green New Deal. Here’s What’s In It’, Vox, February 7, 2019, https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/2/7/18211709/green-new-deal-resolution-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-markey.

68 Damian Carrington, ‘“Tobacco at a Cancer Summit”: Trump Coal Push Savaged at Climate Conference’, The Guardian, November 13, 2017, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/nov/13/bonn-climate-summit-trump-fossil-fuels-protest.

69 Arroyo, ‘The Global Climate Action Summit’; Urpelainen and Van de Graaf, ‘United States Non-cooperation’.

70 Cara Daggett, ‘Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire’, Millennium 47, no. 1 (2018): 25–44.

71 Fred Block, ‘Swimming Against the Current: The Rise of a Hidden Developmental State in the United States’, Politics & Society 36, no. 2 (2008): 169–206; Linda Weiss, America Inc.?: Innovation and Enterprise in the National Security State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014); Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public Vs. Private Sector Myths (London, November 2015).

72 See Robert MacNeil, ‘Seeding an Energy Technology Revolution in the United States: Re-conceptualising the Nature of Innovation in “Liberal-market Economies”’, New Political Economy 18, no. 1 (2013): 64–88; Robert MacNeil, Neoliberalism and Climate Policy in the United States: From Market Fetishism to the Developmental State (London: Routledge, 2017).

73 A further key aspect of continuity can be found in the US’ continued involvement in a series of multilateral low-carbon R&D forums and programmes, including Mission Innovation, the APEC Energy Working Group, the Clean Energy Ministerial, the International Energy Agency, the International Renewable Energy Agency, the International Partnership for Energy Efficiency Cooperation, and the G20.

74 See Brad Plumber, ‘California is about to Find Out What a Truly Radical Climate Policy Looks Like’, Vox Online, August 29, 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/8/29/12650488/california-climate-law-sb-32.