The US officially withdrew from the Paris Agreement. We’ve been following the story since the accord’s inception.
Demonstrations took place in and around Place de la République in Paris on the day before the COP21 climate talks opened in 2015. (Photo by Chris Bentley/GroundTruth)
Editor’s Note: This story was updated on November 9, 2020 to reflect the outcome of the presidential election and policy announcements by the Biden-Harris transition team.
Melody Schreiber, a D.C.-based freelancer, Arctic Today reporter and former GroundTruth reporting fellow, was one of five reporters who traveled to Paris nearly five years ago to cover the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP 21, where the Paris Agreement was finalized.
On Wednesday, she tweeted, “Sometimes change is incremental and iterative. Sometimes we can feel exactly how momentous a change is. Sometimes we move back before we move forward,” following photos from the trip. That same day as her tweet, the United States became the first and only nation to officially leave the Paris Agreement. As part of our climate reporting in the last five years, GroundTruth has been covering the climate accord since its inception, as well as its immediate aftermath, like youth protests in Le Bourget and student leaders in Sèvres all fighting for better policy to combat climate change. We have traveled to Svalbard, Norway to report on how to decarbonize our energy system, and we’ve looked at the role of online activism amid the pandemic in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
Across six continents, we have also explored the impacts of a warming planet and the policy that is, or isn’t, in place to combat the rising temperatures, or even deal with its irreversible effects.
The agreement is non-binding, but its aim is to make the response to climate change a global one, increasing countries’ abilities to deal with its impacts while working to keep the planet’s temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Scientists are saying this ambition is a best-case-scenario that is slipping further out of reach. And if the planet warms by 2 degrees Celsius or more, seas could rise an average of nearly two feet, 30 million coastal communities will be flooded yearly by 2055, 37% of the population would face a severe heatwave at least every half-decade and the global per-capita GDP could fall 13% by 2100, according to an analysis of 70 peer-reviewed studies by Carbon Brief.
In response to the official quitting of the accord, #WeAreStillIn is spreading on Twitter, with its users including political leaders like Virginia Rep. Robert Cortez Scott and former Governor of California Jerry Brown, educational institutions like American University and Bard College, and businesses like Patagonia and Stonyfield Organic. A study from the Pew Research Center from June reports that 65% of Americans think the federal government is doing too little to reduce the effects of climate change. And the British Broadcasting Corporation reports that old wounds for climate diplomats have been reopened, meanwhile many Americans are facing disappointment, although not all, given that Trump made leaving the accord a key part of his 2016 election platform.
Before Trump was elected, he called the agreement a “bad deal” that would burden American households with “enormous costs.” If elected, he pledged to cancel the agreement, and on June 1, 2017, he announced the nation’s withdrawal from the treaty, which he said would only “further [the] decimation of vital American industries on which countless communities rely.” He formally notified the United Nations last year of the nation’s withdrawal, and the mandatory year long waiting period ended on Nov. 4.
President-elect Joe Biden, however, has plans to rejoin the Paris Agreement on day one of his administration as part of his climate plan, while “use[ing] every tool of American foreign policy to push the rest of the world to raise their ambitions alongside the United States.” His plan to tackle climate change is the most aggressive of any major party nominee, reported National Public Radio.
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