By Professor Timmons Roberts and the Climate and Development Lab
For years, Brown University students in my “Engaged Climate Policy” course watched firsthand the negotiations to design the Paris Agreement, eventually adopted by 196 countries in 2015. Taking 15 students to the United Nations climate change negotiations across the globe since 2010, the course was unique in the U.S. The class was the center of my Climate and Development Lab, consisting of a dozen Brown undergraduates, a couple of grad students, research fellows, postdocs and myself, who conducted original policy research and spent a week at the negotiations “embedded” with top research institutes, environmental and international organizations from around the world.
Then in June, 2017, President Trump announced that he’d be withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Agreement. With a record delegation of 18 Brown students at the UN talks in Germany in 2017, we heard U.S. dignitaries like Michael Bloomberg and Jerry Brown proclaim that “We Are Still In!”-- that states, cities and corporations would pick up the slack and meet the pledge to reduce emissions our nation made in Paris. As the country most responsible for the greenhouse gases disrupting our planet’s climate, the rest of the world has always looked to us to do the heavy lifting. These local efforts are therefore crucial. To keep the effort by the international community to solve this wicked problem moving forward, national efforts matter most. We needed to get back in.
Therefore, it was time for us to change course.
Then in June, 2017, President Trump announced that he’d be withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Agreement. With a record delegation of 18 Brown students at the UN talks in Germany in 2017, we heard U.S. dignitaries like Michael Bloomberg and Jerry Brown proclaim that “We Are Still In!”-- that states, cities and corporations would pick up the slack and meet the pledge to reduce emissions our nation made in Paris. As the country most responsible for the greenhouse gases disrupting our planet’s climate, the rest of the world has always looked to us to do the heavy lifting. These local efforts are therefore crucial. To keep the effort by the international community to solve this wicked problem moving forward, national efforts matter most. We needed to get back in.
Therefore, it was time for us to change course.
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