Trump pulls out of Paris... or does he?

So, President Trump is pulling out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, but is prepared to renegotiate to go back in on terms more favourable to the United States.

Is that all clear?

Er… well, no. Clear as mud, actually. I’m not even sure that what the President announced last night can really be described as a ‘withdrawal’.

There’s been no official word on how and when the President plans to leave. And that's important: as I wrote earlier in the week, there’s a world of difference between following the formal exit process laid down within the Agreement, vs just walking out.

In fact, Mr Trump’s language was more reminiscent of a business deal than a diplomatic process – ‘Nah, I’m not going to buy at that price, we need to look again, but let’s keep talking and if you can meet me halfway, we might have a deal’.

But that's not the way international diplomatic agreements work. It doesn't tell us the hows, the whys and the whens - and we can't be totally sure about the big if.

Four years to stew

If the President is serious about wanting to renegotiate, then he has, really, to leave by the formally agreed process (and indeed US journalists have had White House steers to that effect) - because there’s no way that there’ll be any renegotiating once the US is outslde.

So, let’s assume for a moment that the White House writes a letter to the UN climate convention next week declaring its intention to pull out of the Agreement, but says that before it takes its Stetson and goes home entirely it’s prepared to enter into meaningful negotiations with other countries about getting a ‘fairer deal’.

Under the Agreement, the letter wouldn’t count as a formal notice of withdrawal because the earliest a country can lodge such a notice is three years after the Agreement came into force. That means November 2019.

So, while other countries would take such a US letter seriously, they could also argue that it changes nothing within the Agreement until November 2019. There will be a US seat at the table this year’s UN climate summit in Bonn in November, and for subsequent conferences – plus US involvement in all the formal and informal discussions that take place between meetings.

At next year's UN climate summit, countries are due to have what’s termed a ‘facilitative dialogue’ – a kind of stocktake (which can’t, for unbelievably arcane political reasons, be called a stocktake) of where they’re all at. Thereafter, the US would be due to begin work on an amended pledge for cutting its carbon emissions, and the clear intention of the Paris Agreement is that this would be tougher than the one it has already.

That doesn’t sound like a goer. So would the US delegation decline to take part in the facilitative dialogue – or heckle from the sidelines?

Or, will the White House opt to leave its seat at the table vacant, and instead hold talks with other countries designed to build momentum for the famous ‘renegotiation’? Might that involve setting up some kind of alternative forum, as the US did under President George W Bush with the late, unlamented Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate?

Legacy of leave?

Fast-forward then to November 2019, by which time campaigning for the next US Presidential Election will be well underway. The set of contenders to be the Republican candidate will presumably include one or two who would repudiate Mr Trump’s stance – and one can pretty much assume that all the Democrats will be pro-Paris Agreement.