In the same week, President Donald Trump began formally to withdraw the US from the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, and a second oil company said it would depart an important industry association for taking positions aligned with his. If nothing else, the divergence challenges a rigid one-sidedness twisting the politics of climate change.
Serious and honest people can disagree seriously and honestly about a complex problem. Disagreement is especially essential to solutions involving science. But climate politics won’t allow it. One side insists climate change represents a threat of certain origin so dire as to warrant energy martial law. And that side treats questions as apostasy.
Polarized discussion
Trump did the questioning side of the issue no favor when he dismissed climate change as “a hoax.” His doing so hardened polarized discussion into a fight between extremes. When, on Nov. 4, he took a second step to end US involvement in the Paris Agreement, criticism focused on him and his “denial” of climate change rather than on the agreement itself. Yet the agreement, not Trump, should be the issue.
Shell and Total both support the Paris Agreement. And both have announced—Shell in April and Total on Nov. 8—they’ll quit American Fuels and Petrochemical Manufacturers over climate change. Neither company identified specific conflicts leading to their departures, citing only misalignment between AFPM’s climate positions and theirs. Although AFPM states no public position on Paris 2015, both companies mentioned the agreement in explanations of their decisions to leave the organization.
Other companies support the Paris 2015 but haven’t quit AFPM—ExxonMobil large among them. All companies face shareholder pressure to address climate change, and they respond in their own ways. They all crave certainty of regulation. And internationally active companies have an extra compulsion: US rejection of the agreement creates diplomatic friction, which hampers global business.
Still, Trump has solid reasons to pull the US away from the agreement. Paris 2015 treats carbon dioxide as a global thermostat, asserting that cutting emissions of the gas will lower global average temperature appreciably. Without question, CO2 is a radiative gas and therefore a warming influence. But other processes at least partly offset CO2 heating. Some scientists, noting temperature rises preceding past CO2 build-ups, even argue that the gas cannot have caused observed warming.
Furthermore, temperature sensitivity to CO2 loading in the atmosphere remains uncertain. No one knows the extent to which emissions must be cut to keep Industrial Age warming well below 2ºC., the Paris 2015 goal. The agreement relies on computer modeling vexed by the climate’s complexity and demonstrably inclined to predict more warming than has occurred. Under the agreement’s necessarily speculative assumptions, emission cuts implied by country commitments won’t meet the temperature target. And most countries aren’t meeting their commitments.
Amid all this uncertainty, Paris 2015 relies heavily on governmental control of energy systems. Once empowered to raise taxes and stipulate choices about energy—and, eventually, food—in pursuit of dubious temperature goals, governments would cling to its power even if the planet cycled into a cooling period. Where governments have replaced hydrocarbon energy with costlier alternatives, moreover, consumers have rebelled.
For oil companies to prefer a futile agreement to no agreement is reasonable. One practical motivation is the prejudgment of one-sided politics that opposition to Paris 2015 indicates slack concern about the environment. Although Paris 2015 is not the only way to address climate change, support for it is the price of entry into political discussion about the subject.
Preemptive opposition
Yet for all oil companies, whatever their views about Paris 2015, a large problem remains. Lagging progress toward the agreement’s goals breeds hysterical demands for the prompt eradication of fossil energy and the stifling of oil and gas work. Those demands are harmful to a world still needing fossil energy. Groups making them, however, don’t compromise.
If Paris 2015 must mean preemptive opposition to fossil-energy projects, Trump is right to reject it.
