As soon as President Biden was sworn into office, one of his first presidential acts was signing an executive order to rejoin the Paris Agreement – a legally binding international treaty on climate change.
Adopted by 196 countries in 2015, the Paris Agreement is a landmark international accord that addresses climate change and its negative impacts. The agreement aims to substantially reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and achieve a climate neutral world by mid-century.
On June 1, 2017, former president Donald Trump announced his plan to withdraw the United States from the accord—a step that became official on November 4 of 2020, the day after the election.
Brian Murray is director of the Duke University Energy Initiative. He specializes in the design of economic policies to address a range of environmental problems, with a focus on climate change policy. Murray said Biden’s move to rejoin the Paris Agreement is a step in the right direction.
“Climate is like a global, collective action problem,” Murray said. “It’s going to require all actors to act and generate solutions that will help mitigate the problem. So, the United States is going to be welcomed back because we’re the world’s largest economy and second largest emitter, but the U.S. is going to have to re-earn trust from withdrawing from it – the only country in the world that withdrew from the Paris Agreement.”
During his term, Trump condemned the terms of the agreement, stating that it would “undermine” the U.S. economy and put the country “at a permanent disadvantage.”
“I think it’s fair to say that there was some confusion about what the Paris Agreement means for the United States,” Murray said. “I think there was a narrative being distributed that other countries were basically regulating the U.S. economy, but that’s not the way the Paris Agreement works.”
Murray said the Paris Agreement establishes a collective goal for all participating countries to limit the global temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
“It provides a platform for addressing international responsibilities, recognizing the difference in each country’s circumstances – whether it’s the level of economic development or the current energy system they have in place,” Murray said. “So, this is this notion of common but differentiated responsibilities by country.”
He said each country submits pledges for actions and outcomes every five years, called Nationally Determined Contributions or NDC’s. In their NDCs, countries communicate actions they will take to reduce their Greenhouse Gas emissions.
“An agreement like this, which is a series of pledges, is necessary but it’s not sufficient,” Murray said. “Those pledges need to be turned into domestic policies, which need to be turned into domestic action, which need to be turned into outcomes and those outcomes are emission reductions.”
Murray said Biden has made climate change and environmental policy one of the top priorities under his administration – something that previous presidents had not homed in on. The Biden Plan ensures that the U.S. achieves a 100 percent clean energy economy and reaches net-zero emissions no later than 2050.
“President Biden essentially identified four crises that he was going to be addressing at the beginning of his presidency – the pandemic, the economic recovery from the pandemic, race and social justice and climate change,” Murray said. “On his first day [in office] he issued 12 executive orders and three of those had to do with climate and energy.”
Outside of the Paris Agreement, Biden also issued executive orders revoking the Keystone Pipeline permit – an oil pipeline system in Canada and the United States – and halting oil and gas drilling in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge.
Lead photo via Evan Vucci/AP.
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