{"id":30683,"date":"2017-11-02T13:10:07","date_gmt":"2017-11-02T17:10:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/?p=30683"},"modified":"2021-02-17T16:33:32","modified_gmt":"2021-02-17T21:33:32","slug":"bth-what-now-for-u-s-global-climate-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/2017\/11\/02\/bth-what-now-for-u-s-global-climate-policy\/","title":{"rendered":"BtH: What Now for U.S. Global Climate Policy?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"BtHClimate4\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The\u00a0<\/span>Beyond the Headlines @BUPardeeSchool<\/a>, or BtH, series at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, continued on November 1, 2017 with\u00a0a panel discussion on\u00a0the future of global climate policy for the United States following promises by President Donald Trump to pull the country out of the Paris climate agreement.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The panel included Amb. David Rank,\u00a0\u00a0who stepped down as Charg\u00e9 d\u2019Affaires (Acting Ambassador) at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing following Trump’s announcement of his intention to withdraw from the Paris agreement, and\u00a0Stacy VanDeveer, Professor in the Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global Governance at UMass Boston. The panel was moderated by Henrik Selin<\/a>, Associate Professor of International Relations at the\u00a0Pardee School.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rank\u00a0discussed his decision\u00a0to step down\u00a0as\u00a0<\/span>Charg\u00e9 d\u2019Affaires (Acting Ambassador) at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing following the announcement that the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris agreement, and what he told his colleagues in the foreign service upon his departure.<\/span><\/p>\n

“My message to my colleagues was that I am allowed to quit, but you are not. A guy who has a couple of years left in his career and is in a position where my departure would send a message of some symbolic importance — there’s some value to that. Someone who is going to be around for another decade or two and will be able to help undo some of the damage that is being done in fact has an obligation to stay.”<\/p>\n

VanDeveer\u00a0said he is interested to see how U.S. officials will handle the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany following Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris agreement.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

“Even when the President or the current administration says that it wants to send a clear signal like we are going to leave the Paris agreement, they manage to completely muddle and confuse it in every direction in the weeks before and after the message is sent,”\u00a0VanDeveer said.<\/span>\u00a0“This will be an endless source of frustration both for the Americans who have to go to Bonn and for the other estates because some of what gets said by the Americans might be policy in the three or four weeks after they say it, and some won’t be. It reduces American influence even more, and it complicates the ability of others to figure out what they should be doing in the face of confused policy.”<\/p>\n

Rank said that he found the decision to withdraw from the Paris agreement particularly troubling because of the signal it sends to the rest of the world that the U.S. is willing to abdicate leadership on such a crucial issue.<\/p>\n

“One of the things that really distressed me about leaving the Paris agreement is the fact that the first thought in most capitals when they\u00a0<\/span>faced\u00a0<\/span>major issues was what is Washington doing with a particular policy, and that was an extraordinary benefit to the United States,” Rank said. “The first question on the mind of foreign leaders was what does the United States think?\u00a0<\/span>One of the things that sets Paris apart from other bad decisions is that it’s the one issue that really unites the rest of the world, and is likely to lead other countries not to think first and foremost about what Washington thinks.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Following the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris agreement,\u00a0VanDeveer said he expects that China and the European Union will step into leadership roles on global climate policy in addition to smaller island and coastal nations who want to do more to combat climate change.<\/span><\/p>\n

“Without the United States the key relationship becomes the one between China and the European Union in terms of leadership that pushes large parts of the global economy in particular directions. You also have a set of much smaller but potentially important states who want to do more than has been pledged already — smaller island states and coastal states especially. It seems to me that one of the other things that is going to be on display in Bonn over the next couple of weeks is that it’s in some of the leader countries’ interest to highlight the American cities and states who are trying to stay the course and act on climate.”<\/p>\n

Beyond the Headlines<\/a>\u00a0is a regular series at the\u00a0Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies which\u00a0seeks\u00a0<\/span>to cultivate informed conversations among experts and\u00a0practitioners\u00a0on issues that are currently in the news headlines, but to do so with a focus on intellectual analysis and on longer-range trends. Recent Beyond the Headlines discussions\u00a0have focused on topics including the economic challenges facing Puerto Rico<\/a>,\u00a0the\u00a0Jammu and Kashmir dispute<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0the current tension on the Korean peninsula<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Upcoming\u00a0Beyond the Headlines events will feature discussions on the future of\u00a0U.S. global climate policy<\/a>\u00a0and the recent\u00a0<\/span>Chinese Communist Party Congress<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Beyond the Headlines series continued with a discussion on the future of U.S. global climate policy following the country’s withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11588,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11789,8411],"tags":[9860,8466,2098,10473,8401,10475,10474],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30683"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11588"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30683"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30683\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47684,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30683\/revisions\/47684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}