People said that when we pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord that this was a loss for the world. Many Trump supporters pointed out President Trump's point, which was that the PCA was an economic agreement disguised as a climate agreement. There was no legally binding aspect to the CO2 goals, but yet some parts like the USA giving money to other countries would harm us. Furthermore, the countries that actually followed the PCA would be harming their economy while the ones who didn't would be gaining economic advantages. That's a naive way to create an international agreement. But, people said without the PCA we would release CO2 like crazy. So where are we now?
Well, in President Trump's 1st year (2016), depending on what figure you use, we cut CO2 emissions from 2015 about 1.9%. In 2017, they went down about 0.8% from 2016. In 2018, people panicked because they went up around 2.7%.[1] People said, "SEE! ORANGE MAN BAD!" But what about in 2019?[2] Suddenly we're projected to be down 1.7%. And what are the projections for next year: CO2 emissions are projected to go down again.[3]
But wait a minute, we're not in the PCA. I thought that was supposed to mean we were going to pollute more. That doesn't seem to be happening. In fact, we are doing a good job reducing our carbon emissions. We now have either two options: We can continue to believe that leaving the PCA was a bad idea that will inevitably lead to more pollution or our second option is to consider that maybe President Trump was right; maybe the PCA really was an economic deal disguised as a climate deal and we can lower our emissions without being in the PCA. In fact, leaving the PCA might have actually been beneficial to us in fighting climate change.
NOTE: GHG Emissions increased 1.3% from 1990-2017, but are down 12.1% from the 2007 peak.[4]
Sources:
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/...ons-from-1999/
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/c...emissions.html
[3] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=38133
[4] https://www.c2es.org/content/u-s-emissions/