President Joe Biden signs an executive order to bring the U.S. back to the Paris Agreement in January. Source: yahoo.finance.com.
On January 20, 2021, just hours after his inauguration, President Joe Biden signed an executive order for the U.S. to rejoin the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Having officially withdrawn from the treaty just two months prior under former President Trump—a move that elicited widespread criticism from environmentalists, business leaders, and scientists across the world— the U.S. reaffirmed its commitment to climate change mitigation and adaptation under President Biden. Under the terms of the agreement, the U.S. promised to reduce its carbon emissions by 25 percent before 2025 compared to 2005 levels. These goals were directly at odds with the Trump administration’s anti-environment attitude, which was exemplified by his numerous rollbacks on regulations affecting polluters such as power plants, vehicles, and fossil fuels. These rollbacks, which were intended to create jobs for middle-class Americans in the coal and mining industries (because clean energy was supposedly too expensive and not economically viable), contributed to an increase in U.S. carbon emissions in the first two years of the Trump administration. Then-President Trump believed that the Paris agreement was “undermining” the U.S. economy and putting the U.S. at a “permanent disadvantage,” claims that were widely disputed by climate and economic experts. According to a study conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 69 percent of Americans were in favor of the Paris Agreement; nevertheless, President Trump still withdrew the U.S. from the agreement.
Although the decision was made in June 2017, withdrawing from the agreement actually took place over three years in accordance with Article 28 of the Paris Agreement. As a result, the U.S. ultimately was out of the agreement for only about two months, and yet the global consequences were still far-reaching. The disregard for climate action displayed by the Trump administration undermined global climate change mitigation efforts, decreasing global resolve to fulfill the promises made in the agreement. With the U.S. typically playing a leading role in global pacts such as the Paris Agreement, Former President Trump’s actions had a particularly severe impact on the strength of the accord.
The Biden administration, in a stunning reversal of course for the country, is choosing to tackle climate change head-on and make it a key component of its foreign policy plan. Moving swiftly to undo the damage done by the previous administration, Biden—on his first day in office—moved to rejoin the agreement. Also on his first day, Biden revoked the Keystone XL oil pipeline’s federal permit and promised to review a list of Trump administration deregulatory actions supporting high-emitting industries. The Keystone XL pipeline, which would have carried crude oil from the oil fields in Alberta, Canada, to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico, has long been criticized by environmentalists for its potential to increase the supply of a high-emission source of energy and to severely harm wildlife in its production. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under Biden is also expected to completely scrap Trump-era regulations in order to achieve Biden’s goal of achieving a carbon-neutral power grid by 2035. The Biden administration’s swift pro-environment actions, starting with his decision to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement, point towards a complete reversal in policy and hopefully forecast a long-lasting commitment to environmental protection by the U.S. government.