After Paris

Résumé du livre

"The dust is now settling on President Donald Trump's controversial decision to withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. This decision was a foreign policy mistake. It will make sustaining American credibility more difficult in other multilateral institutions and settings. It will exacerbate anti-American sentiment in Europe, making trans-Atlantic leadership collaboration more difficult well beyond climate policy. On climate, it threatens to undermine the balance achieved in Paris between the centralized and top-down approach favored by the Europeans and the more decentralized and market-friendly approach of the United States, which was supported by China. As a result, it also could lead to the creation of an uneven playing field for U.S. businesses. While there is a need for the United States to deal with the geopolitical fallout from dropping out of the Paris Agreement, that is not the topic of this report. Rather, the report focuses more narrowly on climate policy issues facing the United States -- both international and domestic -- in the aftermath of leaving Paris. At this time, the starting point for effective policy should be to do what is principled yet practical. The strategic implication of this is to focus on clean energy, which is a concept that carries much broader support than other proposed solutions, given the unfortunate polarization of public opinion and, especially, U.S. elite-level politics concerning climate change. In this report, the authors seek to outline what such a politically viable agenda would look like"--Publisher's web site