Essay: Trump and Obama’s approach to climate change

Climate change has arisen to be a topic of concern for the past years. Like other controversial topics, some support this idea while others reject it. When it comes to this, people of higher authority may exert their power and position in order for their personal agenda and not the greater good as a whole. President Barack Obama was a firm believer in climate change and one who used his presidency in order to generate environmentally helpful movements, such as with the Paris Agreement. In contrast to President Obama’s climate responsibility presidency, Donald Trump is a climate change skeptic, and due to personal preference and domestic politics, decided to withdraw from the Paris Agreement causing issues in his public and administrative presidency.
To begin with, the Paris Agreement is a very flexible agreement. The agreement was a turning point for countries to pave the path for a future with a low-carbon economy, urging any nation to sign it to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while regularly increasing their personal ambitions. For the agreement to come into force, a total of fifty-five countries representing fifty-five percent of global emissions needed to formally join. A total of 196 nations signed the agreement. Although these countries can independently decide on how they would like to lower their emissions, every country had agreed to keep warming below two degrees Celsius, and to limit temperature increase to 1.5 degrees C. Regular progress reports would be required from every nation involved in order to provide evidence of their effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, creating a strong system of transparency. The United States was one of the first nations to sign the Paris Agreement.
In President Barack Obama’s first Inaugural Address, President Obama addressed climate change, committing the country to combating climate change for future generations. In December of 2015 in Paris, the United States adopted the Paris Agreement. In President Obama’s remarks over this advancement, he stated, “The American people can be proud because this historic agreement is a tribute to American leadership” (Remarks on the Adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Paris Agreement). He stated the agreement was ambitious, but that it provided a framework the world needed to solve the climate crisis. In response to skeptics who believed this accord would kill jobs, President Obama fired back that the economic output of the United States had been on an all-time high while reducing carbon pollution in the last two decades (Remarks on the Adoption..). The accord, although ambitious, attracted the attention of many nations, and on September 3rd, 2016, the United States, along with China, formally signed the agreement. With their formal entry, the United States and China represented about forty percent of global emissions. This agreement indicated that, “As the world’s two largest economies and two largest emitters, [the United States and China] entrance into this agreement continues the momentum of Paris and should give the rest of the world confidence—whether developed or developing countries—that a low-carbon future is where the world is heading.” (Obama: “Remarks Announcing ). After their formal entrance into the accord, other nations followed their lead. President Barack Obama had put the well-being of the planet ahead of other factors, showing that the United States was a leader.
Contrarily, President Donald Trump, since before his presidential campaign, showed the public his true opinion on climate change. He was a skeptic, often Tweeting jokes against the observation. For example, on November 6, 2012, President Trump tweeted, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive” (Trump, Twitter). From the beginning of his presidency, Donald Trump obtained ways to make a complete turn from former President Obama’s efforts against climate change; one of those being in his administration. When assigning new members, for example, there was considerable controversy when Trump nominated Kathleen Harnette White to lead the Council on Environmental Quality. She had no scientific background, and when asked by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, on the estimates of how much heat in the Earth’s atmosphere is stored in the ocean, White responded with, “I don’t have numbers like that… I believe that there are differences of opinions on that… there’s not a right answer” (NYTIMES). Unsurprisingly, this created a lot of unrest in the community, and the Trump Administration ultimately withdrew its nomination. The president and his team have famously kicked scientists off the advisory boards, and his Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, previously stated that, “Carbon dioxide… is plant food, and it doesn’t harm anybody except that it might include temperature increases” (Politico). This is alarming as his lawyers at the Justice Department possess great power over Obama’s regulations and Trump’s regulatory rollbacks. With like-minded individuals in his administration, President Trump has a higher and easier probability of influencing agendas to fulfill his personal needs. To many nations dismay, President Donald Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement on June 1, 2017, stating they would begin negotiations to reenter the Paris accord, or a new version, that was fair to the United States (Trump: “Remarks Announcing United States With). Trump argued that the Paris Agreement undermined U.S. competitive edge and impaired both employment and traditional energy industries (sciencedirect). In relation to this, many critics believe that President Trump withdrew from the accord based on a personal agenda. This is because the Trump Administration is closely tied to the fossil fuel industry, and, being an interest group, greatly define American politics. These industries, “hold clout over the administration” (sciencedirect), therefore leading to the assumption that Trump’s withdrawal from the accord was also in part to aid the industries that stand by him.
Therefore, President Donald Trump’s personal and political agenda has made a drastic impact on the future of climate change for the United States. His handling of the situation has caused issues to arise within the legislative, administrative, and public presidency. In comparison to former President Obama, who was a firm believer in finding ways to reduce climate change, President Donald Trump has made it clear that above the benefit of the planet is the well being of his interests and that of America, thus making unfavorable choices such as the withdrawal from the Paris Accord.