Springtime Out of Paris Staying in Obama’s climate accord risks Trump’s energy plans.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/springtime-out-of-paris-1493246903
President Trump and his advisers are debating whether to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accords, and the issue is coming to a head. If he doesn’t want to topple his own economic agenda, Mr. Trump’s wisest course is to walk away from a pact that President Obama never put before the U.S. Senate.
Mr. Trump wants to revive growth and lift wages (see above), and a large part of that project is a bet on liberating U.S. energy production, notably natural gas and oil. Toward this end Mr. Trump issued an executive order in late March asking the Environmental Protection Agency to unwind Mr. Obama’s Clean Power Plan.
The Obama team finalized CPP in late 2015, and the rule was immediately challenged in court by 28 states. Notable among the Obama Administration’s legal defenses is that CPP is essential to fulfill the U.S. commitments to reduce carbon emissions under Paris. By the end the White House cited Paris as the legal justification for all its climate policies.
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is moving to repeal CPP and other Obama climate rules. Environmental groups will inevitably sue. If the U.S. remains in Paris, Mr. Pruitt will have to explain to the many Obama appointees on the federal bench that gutting CPP is a reasonable exercise of administrative power in light of the Administration’s continued fealty to Paris carbon reductions. This is the sort of logical inconsistency that a creative judge might seize on to justify blocking Mr. Trump’s EPA rules. By staying in Paris Mr. Trump may hand opponents a sword to kill his agenda.
The left is also pointing to Section 115 of the Clean Air Act, which gives EPA a mandate to regulate emissions that “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare in a foreign country.” The catch is that EPA can only act if there is regulatory “reciprocity” among the nations involved. Such as the Paris accords.
Mr. Obama knew he was setting these carbon political traps as he rushed to commit the U.S. to Paris. His bet was that even a future GOP President would be reluctant to endure the international criticism that would follow withdrawal. And sure enough, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and National Economic Council director Gary Cohn are making precisely this argument for staying in Paris.
Then again, Candidate Trump promised to withdraw, and he can’t possibly be vilified for Paris more than he already has for everything else. His advisers have presented a way to short-circuit the supposed four-year process for withdrawing, which involves U.S. resignation from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.
This isn’t a question of science or diplomacy. For Mr. Trump, the question is whether he wants to put his economic agenda at the mercy of anticarbon warriors and federal judges.
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