The Involvement of Domestic Lobbying Groups and the Congress behind the US Withdrawal from the Paris Agreement

Abstract

Climate change is a dubious matter of concern worldwide. There had been drafted vast numbers of climate change agreements since 1990 in climate governance fora, yet these agreements were unsuccessful in trapping the global warming and other associated environmental effects. Paris Agreement on Climate change is the biggest agreement on climate governance that has been drafted so far given its universal membership. Though the United States of America under Obama’s leadership ratified the treaty, the incumbent president Donald Trump in June, 2017 announced that the USA wishes to withdraw from the agreement. The reasons for this withdrawal do not stem solely from the administrative decisions of Congress, but there are internal influences signaling America’s leadership not to sign any global climate treaty that urges America to pay compensations to the rest of the world for its historic emissions. This phenomenon covers the central problem addressed in this research so as to determine the domestic influences behind the US withdrawal from the Paris agreement. Going in line with this research problem the influence of the domestic lobbying groups and the Congress behind this decision are scrutinized. The objectives of this research are to analyze the influences of lobbying groups and the Congress behind this withdrawal. This research uses qualitative secondary data and the content analysis is used as the methodology. The research findings signify that the same coal and oil industries which urged the federal government not to sign the historic climate treaties had been influencing president Trump to withdraw from this agreement. This historic pattern which had been practicing since 1990s, by and large, correlates with the party from which each president has come into power – almost every Republican Party president was adhering to these calls of domestic influential groups in its foreign climate policies while Democrats were rather adhering to the calls from the global community. In concluding remarks, this research predicts that the above same pattern would be carried out in American political system as long as the bicameral procedure is applied in federal decision making