Rejoining the Paris Agreement Is the Bare Minimum on Climate Action

As results trickled in slowly the morning after Election Day, most Americans were thinking only about the Electoral College. But U.S. climate activists were commemorating another solemn occasion: November 4 is the date when the U.S. officially withdrew from the Paris Agreement.

The moment wasn’t a surprise, of course. President Trump had campaigned on a promise to withdraw from the accords, and did so quickly and publicly in a televised speech from the Rose Garden less than five months after taking office. But the United Nations' complex regulations meant that the U.S. wouldn't officially exit the agreement until, in a cruel twist of irony, the day after the 2020 election. Despite the lag, the damage has been done: The United States is now the only country sitting out the accords.

It’s been five years this month since the Paris Agreement was reached. President-elect Joe Biden, now taking over from an administration that has been openly hostile to climate progress, has vowed to make climate change a top priority in his new administration. He routinely campaigned on rejoining the agreement his first day in office, drawing Trump’s withdrawal from Paris in stark contrast.

Teen Vogue spoke with advocates who were in Paris in 2015 and are now working on climate policy about what they remember from the historic moment and what they hope to see as the Biden administration prepares to right the course on climate. It’s not enough, they say, to pick up where the Obama administration left off — there’s no time for anything except the most aggressive action.

“That commitment to ‘build back better’ — we really have to mean it,” says Sydney Welter, climate advocacy and accountability in policy director at Care About Climate.

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The road to Paris

The Paris Agreement has become a symbol of positive climate action, but there’s a complex, often frustrating history behind it. The agreement is a shorthand term for a set of nonbinding accords that nearly every country in the world agreed on for reducing emissions.

Even though the accords are largely toothless — there are no UN police that can force a country to comply with what it has promised — they were still historic for how difficult it was to hammer them out. Each year, the UN hosts the Conference of Parties (COP) in a different city, where national delegates from around the world meet to negotiate climate policy, and thousands of activists and observers join and watch the proceedings and try to sway the outcome.

If major world powers had been willing to cooperate sooner, we could be referring to another city when we talk about international climate action. In 2009, climate activists were hoping the Copenhagen talks would result in a deal, even rebranding the city as “Hopenhagen” before the conference. But talks fell apart and only a weak resolution was reached; many attributed the collapse to major world powers, including the U.S., that did not do enough.

The Obama administration’s climate legacy, which Biden brought up often on the campaign trail, is positively intertwined with President Obama's actions in Paris, but he got a rocky start in Copenhagen, where critics slammed his “lackluster” role in the talks.

“There was a lot of pressure on [the Paris] talks to deliver after years of promises and failures by world governments to take meaningful action,” recalls Anthony Torres, who went to Paris as part of a delegation with SustainUS, a youth-focused environmental and sustainability advocacy group. Torres, who had just turned 21, had been organizing on his college campus around fossil fuel divestment, but Paris marked his first experience with international climate action.

For Torres and Orion Camero, a fellow SustainUS delegate, Paris was an eye-opening experience. “I’m from the [climate] front lines of Stockton, California, and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta,” Camero, an artist and organizer, explains. “To come to [Paris] was like a completely new landscape of awareness for me.”

At the conference, Camero found solidarity with other advocates representing front-line communities around the world. For Camero, the relative success of the accords, which many say failed to adequately address climate justice or solutions for the most marginalized, was bittersweet. “I remember feeling heartbroken the day the Paris Agreement was finalized,” they say. “A lot of us ended up feeling like the dialogue just didn't get to a place of full healing.”

Torres agrees. “It was a roller coaster,” he says. “None of us were satisfied with the outcome in Paris…. At the same time, it was a new beginning. It was, ‘Okay, wow. World governments have agreed to something.’ And it also revealed to us that there were many things we actually had to go back home and do if we were ever going to achieve what we wanted in these [international] spaces.”

What comes next

Charlotte Coyle was still in high school when the Paris accords were reached, and didn’t get involved in climate activism until after Trump was elected. But she grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where increasingly severe storms and floods disrupted daily life throughout her childhood. Hurricane Harvey hit during the first semester of her first year of college in Houston, flooding her campus and forcing her to go to school online. “Even if I wanted to ignore the climate crisis, it just sort of hit me in the face,” says Coyle, now a senior at George Mason University.

The pandemic has forced the UN to postpone its annual climate conference until next year. In this vacuum, Coyle and a group of other young people from around the world participated in what they called a Mock COP, where they had the opportunity to join in two weeks of discussion and speeches on climate justice with youth “delegates” from around the world.

Coyle, who served as a U.S. delegate at the Mock COP, says she’s “nervous” about the incoming Biden administration’s ability to effectively act on climate, especially given how the center of the Democratic Party has treated the left on issues like banning fracking and the Green New Deal. “From a climate perspective, it's frustrating," Coyle says. "It's very clear what needs to be done.… There's a gap between what people see as politically feasible and what actually needs to happen.” 

Biden ran on what’s been called the most progressive climate platform in presidential history, but there’s still plenty to critique. In addition to rejoining Paris and vowing to lead other countries in committing to more aggressive emissions targets, Biden has promised to usher in a “Clean Energy Revolution” and “take action” against fossil fuel companies. Yet he’s famously said he would not ban fracking and has already selected some advisers with fossil fuel interests.

“The Paris Agreement is a starting point — it's a commitment to commit. Anything the U.S. has done in the past is insufficient,” says Care About Climate’s Welter, noting that scientists have said the world must halve emissions over the next decade. “We have to respond with much more urgency now, and there is less time…. We need to do much more than has ever been done in the history of U.S. environmental action.”

Advocates say there’s an important, positive new force at work in the U.S. that found a way to flourish under the Trump administration. “One of the things we realized [in Paris] was that we needed to prioritize building and winning political power at home and swearing in new leaders who will work with us to achieve the collective action necessary at the global level,” Torres says. 

He credits a wave of youth advocacy, including groups like the Sunrise Movement (one of its cofounders was in Paris for COP 21), with “shifting the window” nationally on the climate conversation. “We have now moved the needle so much further...to the point where our movements have made it necessary for Joe Biden to have the most progressive and most ambitious and equitable climate platform that any presidential nominee has ever had,” Torres continues. “Now, as the U.S. rejoins Paris, that's no longer the ceiling; that's the floor.”

Camero agrees — and they have hope for the future based on what they’ve seen. “I think that we're having dialogues around how systems like colonialism and capitalism are at the root of the climate crisis,” they say. “I think a lot of what gives me hope about the future is that these dialogues will continue to happen and create climate solutions that address the systemic level of oppression we’re talking about.”

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