No one was surprised when the United States withdrew from the Paris Agreement for a second time earlier this year. What shocked the international community were the vicious attacks on federal climate scientists and diplomats negotiating in multilateral climate fora, paired with the swift dismantling of domestic clean energy investments in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) – especially as most of the investments benefit workers and communities in red states. As former U.S. climate diplomats negotiating in multilateral climate fora such as the annual Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), highlighting America’s domestic commitment to clean energy was essential to our international credibility. That required some level of assurance that U.S. domestic climate commitments would endure through changes across administrations. We touted the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) because we believed that its benefits for red states would make it politically durable. We championed the Paris Agreement because we thought the flexibility of its emission reduction targets (“Nationally Determined Contributions,” or NDCs) would be resilient to changes in political leadership. We also believed that competition with China would drive U.S. investment in clean energy technologies, not discourage it. But as we have seen over the past six months, these beliefs have not held true. To the world, this isn’t just a policy blip. It’s a signal that American climate leadership is inherently unstable, too dependent on who controls the White House and thus easily reversed every four years. In the climate arena, which depends inherently on long-term coordination and trust, this volatility is not a partisan liability. It’s a national liability with global impacts.
America’s Climate Diplomacy Challenge and the Path to Rebuilding Credibility (Catherine Goldberg and Milan Vivanco – Just Security)
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