If the Trump administration withdraws the United States from the Paris Agreement, the country would face a massive global diplomatic backlash and permanently cede worldwide leadership on climate and renewable-energy issues to China, experts warn.

Withdrawing from the treaty “would be a huge mistake, even forgetting about climate change,” said Todd Stern, the former U.S. special envoy on climate change. He added that it would have “radiating bad impacts with respect to U.S. standing” on all other international issues.

…

“Those were big sources of disagreement that had caused complete deadlock at previous conferences. There was a real sense of dread and despair” around the Kyoto Protocol, said Michael Wara, a professor of environmental and international law at Stanford.

“The U.S. walks away, and then they said we need to paper over our differences and make this work,” he told me. The signatories to the Kyoto Protocol reached an agreement partly out of resentment of the United States.

…

Wara said that if the United States were to abandon the Paris Agreement, then China would likely take over global leadership on the issue.

…

“My impression from afar is that President Xi, and China more generally, see this as a strategic issue that they are investing more heavily in. It’s not even a matter of investing in climate. It’s that policies they are committing to are consistent with overall economic strategy,” he said.

…

“You are likely to get international climate policy with Chinese characteristics,” Wara told me. This would mean, in part, that China’s faulty and unreliable energy statistics would define whether it was complying with the agreement. The American strategy, led by Stern, has been to seek outside validation for other countries’ climate goals.

…

“From a clean-energy perspective in the United States, a trade war with China has the potential to do enormous harm,” Wara told me. Supply chains for American solar panels and wind turbines are so delicate, and so dependent on global trade, that a trade war could perversely allow China to race ahead on renewable technology.

Read More