The great fear of Guterres and the UN is that a possible retreat by the world’s greatest economic and political power (which, let us remember, has an energy consumption of a staggering 4,099 billion kilowatt hours in 2024, set to rise to 4,128 billion kWh in 2025, and is also the world’s second-worst polluter after China, with 5,269,529,513 tonnes of CO2 emitted into the air) will lead to a de facto paralysis of the process of implementing the Paris agreements.
In short, the United States’ in-out (or dentro-fuori, as we would say in Italian…) would be repeated for a second time, after Trump already made the first eco-exit from the Treaty during his first presidency.
Guterres compared a possible US withdrawal to an organism losing a limb through a sort of self-amputation, a partial hara-kiri.
‘The Paris agreement can survive,’ the UN Secretary-General said, ‘but sometimes people can lose important organs or lose their legs and survive. But we do not want a paralysed Paris agreement. We want a real Paris agreement.’
What Guterres seems to fear most, beyond a abandonment of environmental commitments by the US, which have so far been rather lukewarm, is the domino effect that the American exit could cause, especially among the other governments with a ‘heart on the right’ among the countries party to the agreement.
In an interview with the British newspaper the ‘Guardian’ during the COP16 biodiversity summit in Cali, Colombia, Guterres reminded the United States of the fateful limit of 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, which is the number one commitment of the Paris agreements. The one that, we would add, we see slipping further away day after day and fading into a dangerously unreachable horizon.
‘It is very important that the United States adopt the kind of policies needed to keep the 1.5-degree goal realistic,’ he said.
Will the history of 2020 therefore repeat itself, when the United States became the first country in the world to formally withdraw from the Paris Agreement? Trump had announced the withdrawal as early as June 2017, but the complicated exit rules caused a three-year delay between the decision and the formal exit.
When Joe Biden became president, the US immediately rejoined the Treaty. It was a symbolic act, carried out, let us recall, on the first day of his presidency, in January 2021.
Obviously, the substance of Trump’s campaign pledges (new investment in fossil fuels, cuts to support for electric cars and renewable energy, and so on) will have to be tested against the facts, once the administration takes office and actually starts work. Without forgetting the role of the Senate, which with these elections has returned to Republican control.
Meanwhile, voices such as that of Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, are already warning that a second Trump presidency could become
‘game over for meaningful climate action this decade, and stabilising warming below 1.5°C would probably become impossible’.
We shall see.
