"I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris"

In my first post, I spoke about the Paris Conference as the inspiration behind my focus on the relationship between politics and the environment. So when the debate surrounding President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Agreement re-emerged on my BBC News app last week, it seemed too important to ignore. In June, Trump cited the threat to sovereignty, undermining of the economy and being taken advantage of as reasons to pull out. To me, Trump is portraying the Paris Agreement as an enemy attacking America, and by withdrawing he can achieve an easy ‘win’. President Trump’s famous words from that speech, “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris” have stuck with me and I offer you US Astronaut Scott Kelly’s tweet in response.




Over the course of this blog, I want to tackle four major topics. Firstly, I’d like to cast our eyes north to the Arctic, where, as I’m sure you’re all aware (especially after the first episode of Blue Planet II) ice is retreating at an alarming rate. I’ll therefore be taking a look at the political tensions arising from the Arctic’s changing environment. I then hope to examine the COPs in more details before exploring the Montreal Protocol, an extremely successful international environmental agreement. From there it would be useful to discuss different methods of environmental protection and evaluate what is more effective, large top-down measures or smaller bottom-up approaches. There’ll be other interesting posts along the way, so stay tuned and feel free to comment - see you next time!

Comments

  1. Unknown2 November 2017 at 09:34

    Hi Henry! I really like the theme of your blog (mine is kinda similar!) and looking forward to reading it.

    To what extent do you think that Trump pulling out of the Paris agreement could actually be a good thing? There are various reasons to argue in favour of that and I wrote a piece about it a few months back. This article sums alot of these arguments: http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/energy-environment/335848-in-praise-of-trump-pulling-out-of-the-paris-climate

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    Replies
    1. H14 November 2017 at 04:25

      Hi Chris - thanks for the comment!

      Well, I can understand the points put forward in that article - giving renewed impetus for action, not resting on our laurels, the weak implementation mechanisms of COP and giving us perhaps more realistic targets, but... Attempting to get all of the countries of the world, who are often at odds to each other, to sit down and actually agree to something is fairly remarkable. To then have one of the most powerful and influential countries pull out of an agreement that is hoping to help our global environment gives off a stench of selfishness and poor global leadership.

      Trump is announcing to the world that America should not provide financial support for developing countries to avoid the rampant fossil fuel use that helped the West in its rise to the top. Further, the White House has also clearly shown support for those very fuels, including in the latest round of talks - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-41859283.

      Whilst it's true that COP agreements need to have more power to enforce change (something I'll be discussing later in my blog), in my opinion Trump's decision to withdraw from the first international agreement that could actually be successful is setting a terrible precedent for the rest of the world.

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