Fast forward 2½ months, and most OGC staff “had left voluntarily after… Trump took office and moved rapidly to pull the United States out of international climate talks,” the Washington Post writes. But “nearly a dozen people who remained on staff were fired Friday, and the office will be shuttered as part of the wider downsizing of the department, the people familiar with the firings said.”
The move already has Americans who see value in their country’s role in international climate diplomacy looking ahead to what’s next. “He will eventually leave. And at that point we have an opportunity to remake, to redo, to reset,” said Dan Reifsnyder, who led OGC as its founding director from 1989 to 2006. “How can we repair the damage, and how can we set a new agenda?”
But even assuming a constructive U.S. presence in future climate talks, “the U.S. has sort of vacated the room” for the foreseeable future, veteran COP watcher Alden Meyer, a senior associate at the E3G think tank, told the Post.
“Without the office in place, there’s not a focal point for the organization of U.S. climate diplomacy, but that seems to be the point, right?” Meyer said. “To not have the U.S. engaging in climate diplomacy seems to be the policy goal of the administration.”
But that doesn’t mean Canada or other countries can walk back their climate commitments, says David Crane, former economics editor at the Toronto Star, in a post for The Hill Times.
“When the history of this era is written, it will be the Trump administration’s reckless undermining of urgent global efforts to address climate change that will stand out as one of its greatest failings,” Crane writes. At some point, “the U.S. will again become a ‘responsible stakeholder’. But in the meantime, its failure to assume responsibility is no excuse for Canada or any other country to slack off. The climate challenge cannot be put off to tomorrow. It is an urgent challenge for today.”
