US withdrawal from Paris climate accord won’t hurt clean energy

The United States wants to renegotiate its role in climate change while the rest of the world looks to new clean-energy leadership.

The US president, Donald Trump, in a televised address to the nation last week, said the US would “begin renegotiations to re-enter either the Paris accord or an entirely new transaction” for terms that were more favourable to American businesses and workers.

“The Paris climate accord is simply the latest example of Washington entering an agreement that disadvantages the US, leaving American workers – who I love – and taxpayers who absorb the cost in terms of lost jobs and lower wages and vastly diminished economic production,” Mr Trump said.

Increasingly the world is recognising that Mr Trump’s America is no longer a benchmark of excellence, especially in the clean energy sector, said Vahid Fotuhi, the founder of the Middle East Solar Industry Association. “The fact that the US president is turning his back on clean energy will simply catalyse the rest of the world to come together and fill the void created by Mr Trump,” he said.

More than 8 million people globally worked in the renewable energy sector last year (excluding hydropower), according to figures from the Abu Dhabi-based International Renewable Energy Agency.

And in the US, 43 per cent of America’s electric power generation workforce works in solar alone.

The solar industry employs about 374,000 people in the country, according to the US department of energy. This is double that of the 187,000 workers across coal, oil and natural gas generation technologies.

The views of the current US administration seem to be based on the idea that technologies that have no carbon emissions are expensive and therefore slow economic growth. But as Mr Trump looks to bring more jobs to the domestic market to “Make America great again”, the solar sector has done just that by adding one out of every 50 new jobs in the US last year, representing 2 per cent of all new positions.

It isn’t just solar. Americans working in wind make up more than 100,000 while geothermal sector employees number just under 6,000 people.

Mr Fotuhi said: “It’s a booming sector for job creation. So by not embracing renewables, Trump is shooting himself in the foot – again.”

But the US pulling out of the Paris Agreement, which seeks to prevent global temperatures from rising by more than 2°C by reducing carbon emissions, may actually be a better move for the global industry.

“It’s a matter of the United States possibly ceding leadership to other countries like China, who recognise the importance of climate change,” said Ridah Sabouni, the Middle East and North Africa managing director of the US consultancy Energetics.

Yet one of the obstacles to the Paris Agreement is weak enforceability, partly because of US politics. “The rest of the world won’t have to water down the climate agreements anymore – the US may actually be doing the world a favour,” said one energy economist who asked not to be named.

He added: “The interesting thing will be when a future US administration wants to come back into the agreement because American voters decided they didn’t actually like the effects of global isolation.”

But in reality, the decision taken by the US has no hold on the drive for clean energy.

Mr Trump’s announcement landed as one of the world’s largest solar conferences was ending in Germany. Participants at Intersolar Europe, which totalled more than 250 companies, brushed off the president’s decision. While most preferred that the US stay in, many breathed a sigh of relief that the country is out.

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